captured and bound those animals as
tightly in human imagination as the bars of
their cages.
Obaysch emerges as a creature of his own
nature and from the environment created for
him, his history littered with our imperialism,
imagination and incomprehension. The
author also describes England’s first
hippopotamus since Roman times as
an agent for change in how the English-
speaking world saw and thought about
large, exotic animals; the beginning of
an enduring fascination for animals as
themselves, rather than as objects of
science, subjects of human sentiment, or
sources of violence and fear. Certainly,
many of the attitudes, mores and practices
of Victorian England are dissonant to
contemporary readers, providing some
evidence of change, even while wealthy
‘sportsmen’ continue to pay large sums to
shoot wild animals.
Animals exist outside of human
experience. All too sadly, that existence is
increasingly rare.Ohio
by Stephen MarkleyPublished by Simon & Schuster
ISBN 9781982100094
$27.00
A work of fiction, set deep in the American
heartland, exploring lives within the
generation who came of age as the Twin
Towers plummeted to earth, who fuelled the
fires in Iraq and Afghanistan, and formed
a front line to meet the realities of financial
crisis on a grand scale. They have inherited
a rust-belt world, where markets have
been let rip, society is rent, environmental
catastrophe looms, and all that was good, it
seems, has already been taken.
Four former high school classmates
converge on barely-fictionalised New
Canaan, Ohio, locked in interwoven
dialogues with their formative years.
All have moved away, seeking lives beyond
its confines, but are drawn inexorably back,Obaysch: A
Hippopotamus in
Victorian London
by John Simons
Published by Sydney University Press
ISBN 9781743325865
$35.00
Obaysch, a hippopotamus captured from
the Egyptian Nile and transported to live
out his life in a Victorian English zoo, has
been much studied and admired. His
popularity at the time demonstrated the
lingering, drawing, power of charismatic
megafauna and he has continued to
inspire portraits, studies and academic
analysis long after his death. John
Simons, recently retired from forty years
of university life in England, America and
Australia, has written a book dedicated
to drawing Obaysch out from cultural
signification and anthropomorphism,
giving him agency through his own history,
nature and species. In so doing, he re-
draws the relationship between humans
and exotic animals, decolonising them
from the discursive systems which have
BOOKS & WORDS
Autumn book reviews
by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books, Port Elliot
responding to their own cast songlines, to
the ‘faithless rendering of all sex, death,
justice, murder, prayer, greed, hope, mercy
and love’, which constitutes their collective
memory. In his ambitious debut novel, the
author has rendered the new American
tragedy, playing out across the vastness
of its plains and against the heights of its
ambitions. Echoing the fates of Jay, Daisy,
Nick and Jordan, penned by F. Scott
Fitzgerald almost a century earlier, Stephen
Markley sensitively portrays the struggles
of another generation doomed to beat on,
as boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past. Both inherited
and of their own making, it is a past which
repels as it transfixes. Amidst all the cultural
motifs and bravado, there is real anger here,
penetratingly expressed in language which
swings between youthful swagger and
ageless lyrical flight. Read this and reflect.