Animals

As Carol Freeman notes in a footnote to her chapter in Animal Death, ‘what the term “animal studies” defines is still being debated’. The seventeen chapters of this edited volume range across historical, scientific, cultural, and artistic animal-related subjects. They reflect a self-conscious commitment on the part of editors Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey to the transdisciplinary nature of this inchoate field of scholarship. Although the title and unifying theme of Animal Death might seem to betoken a narrow focus on confrontational questions surrounding the killing of animals by humans – which are at times addressed unflinchingly – in actuality the book’s compass is far wider. It is a text that will be of great value to novices and experienced animal studies scholars alike: the kind of book a reader should be wary of opening with a pencil in hand, lest she find herself underlining the whole thing.

One of the animal narrators in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals, a dolphin named Sprout who is writing to Sylvia Plath, quotes Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti: ‘whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.’ The ten animal souls whose thematically interwoven stories Dovey recounts do not simply ‘make fun’ of humans (far from it), but Canetti’s image of the ‘human sitting inside’ nevertheless provides an apposite introduction to Dovey’s project as a whole. Here each animal protagonist is an unashamedly literary, anthropomorphised invention, with physical and behavioural characteristics of its species grafted on in service to its creator’s startlingly original and imaginative design.

In an age of YouTube piglets and puppies, when animals are images and those images are everywhere, the interior lives of animals have scant authority. The triumph of the animal welfare lobby has been to widen, in the public imagination, our definition of what types of bodies can suffer. But who can guess what goes on inside animals’ heads? Only poets are petitioned on that subject. Meanwhile, animals cast inscrutable glances to the camera, engaged in the pratfalls, serendipitous encounters, and twee feats that so fascinate a digital audience. What animals know is not for us to wonder. Watch now, what the animals do.

‘As cats are often associated with bookshops, dogs are similarly attracted to art galleries’, according to Steven Miller, head of the research library and archive of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and author of Dogs in Australian Art: A New History in Antipodean Creativity. The beagle on the cover sits attentively, head slightly cocked, as if contemplating art. It is not until you turn the book over that you see what the dog is really looking at. David Welch’s wry painting sets the tone for this quirky and intriguing book.

Rich in achievement, the artist and naturalist John William Lewin died in Sydney on 27 August 1819; he was forty-nine. With public funds, a stone was erected over his grave in the city’s new cemetery in Devonshire Street. While the inscription referred to Lewin’s official status as the town coroner, its discursive text lamented the loss ‘to this country of an Eminent Artist in his line of Natural History Painting in which he excelled’. Two years previously, in an official dispatch commending several fine drawings to the secretary of colonies in London, Governor Lachlan Macquarie – the last but most significant of a succession of vice-regal admirers and patrons – had praised ‘the Masterly Hand of Mr Lewin’. Schooled in England in a tradition of generic natural history illustration in which specimens were placed at the centre of a page devoid of all context, in Australia Lewin’s work was transformed by precise observations and an innovative approach to the illustration of natural history that was unprecedented. For him, New South Wales – its landscape, flora, and fauna, its Indigenous inhabitants, its own growth to a settled colony – was literally inspiring.

As is often the case with brilliant writers, an Eliot Weinberger sentence cannot be mistaken for that of anyone else. There is his insistence upon concrete details: ‘It was recorded in the 12^th century, in the Collected Stories of Anomalies, that Chang T’ien-hsi dreamed that a green dog with a long body came from the south and tried to bite him.’ Even when entering the realm of the absurd, he avoids abstraction: ‘Each year, in the village of Pullipudupet, in southern India, a very young girl is selected to marry a frog.’ His adjectives and nouns have a rhythmic weight: ‘Camels’ feet leave lotus-pad prints in the sand.’ His conjunctions attest to the peculiarity of the world: ‘Naked mole-rats have no fur, but their lips are hairy.’

Fernando Nottebohm has been interested in birdsong since early childhood. By 2001 he had spent thirty years at Rockefeller University in New York studying how birds learn to sing, concentrating on canaries who are capable of learning new songs each year. His interest has been to study birdsong as ‘a model for the brain’. He studied the brains of caged birds and birds in the wild. The birds that needed to forage and escape predators produced more neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is essential to memory.

Whether the focus is on Japanese whaling or the slaughter of livestock in Indonesia, the Australian public has strong views on how animals should be treated abroad – less so when the problem is closer to home. Anna Krien’s Quarterly Essay is an incisive narrative account of our ‘nuanced and often contradictory relationship’ with animals: ranging from the live cattle trade to our use of primates in science, to our attempts to control native wildlife populations through cyclical breeding and culling.

When the first specimen of the Platypus reached Europe in 1798, it was received with incredulity by zoologists. With anatomical and morphological characteristics seemingly belonging to reptiles, birds, and mammals, it simply did not fit into the existing classifications. Further, it appeared to lack mammary glands and therefore could not be classed as a mammal, yet it had obvious mammalian characteristics such as fur and a single bone comprising the lower jaw. It was also noted that there was only one external body opening, the cloaca, into which the uteri, the gut, and the kidneys empty. Hence the name Monotreme (having one hole) applied by English anatomist Sir Everard Home in 1802. Put simply, the Platypus created more than its share of headaches for taxonomists.

The koala is one of the most recognised animals in the world. Its beguiling, teddy-bear appearance, inoffensive nature and seeming indifference to the world around it have endeared it to adults and children worldwide. In Australia it is considered a national icon, due in no small part to two characters from popular children’s books: Bunyip Bluegum in Norman Lindsay’s evergreen The Magic Pudding, published in 1918 and never out of print since, and Blinky Bill from Dorothy Wall’s series of the same name, the first of which was published in 1933.