To this emerging body of work we can now add Laura Jean McKay’s début novel, The Animals in That Country. By contrast, a recent flurry of ‘serious’ Australian literature – including Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy (2009) and Ceridwen Dovey’s short story collection Only the Animals (2014) – offers complex, unvarnished portraits of the inner lives of animals, and of the often fraught entanglements between them and us. What each of these examples has in common is that the animals depicted in them nevertheless remain indexed to the human realm, their otherness and agency – in a word, their animalness – elided. The habit of contemporaneous critics has been to dismiss such works as irredeemably sentimental, anthropomorphic, or merely curious, even when – as with George Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm (1945) or Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), a ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel – starkly adult concerns are operating. In a similar vein, the equine hero of Black Beauty (1877), the creation of Victorian Quaker-reformist Anna Sewell, railed against life as a taxicab horse.
The ‘it-narrative’, fashionable in eighteenth-century England and perhaps best exemplified by Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little: Or, the life and adventures of a lap-dog (1752), saw various animals expatiate their suffering at human hands. Aesop’s fables, with their anthropoid wolves, frogs, and ants, have been put to use as moral lessons for children since the Renaissance. Talking animals in fiction have, for the most part, been confined to children’s or otherwise peripheral literature.
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