In On Passion, Dorothy Porter briefly discusses her love of snakes. Coincidentally, the day I first read that passage I had been doodling in one of my notebooks and when I doodle – whether in the margins or, naughtily, over my text – snakes usually appear. Fat ones and thin ones. The thin ones are dark, resembling leeches, and they have marbles for eyes, drawn on top of their heads, whereas their fat brothers’ eyes are incorporated within the picture, to the side; buggish, like cartoons.
I haven’t mentioned before now that while we were camping over Easter the son of the friends we were camping with came within seconds of stepping on a tiger snake. This snake was happily dozing less than fifteen metres away from our tent. For the rest of the trip I walked around (or so I felt) like an astronaut on the moon, talking large, exaggerated steps – not from the lack of gravity, but from the care of where I placed my feet.
Porter also discusses humanity’s historic proclivity for violence and how reading Peter Singer changed her life. He taught her to reevaluate her perspective and behaviour towards animals – more specifically in whether one chooses to eat them or not. Her consideration of animals drew my thoughts back to another book I finished last week, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright.
Image by: Aidan Jones
Published in 1961, Wake in Fright is the nightmarish story of a man’s descent into a baking hell in the Australian outback. It is an easy read in terms of its length, but make no mistake – it is not an ‘easy’ tale. I’ve just reread Kate Jennings’ great essay about the re-release of the 1971 movie of the same name and am not surprised when she tells us what a stir the kangaroo hunt scene caused, especially if the movie is anything like the book (which it supposedly is). The relentless persecution of the animals is brutal, but what’s worse is when the men leave the vehicle to go ‘face off’ with these animals up close (and why? for bravados sake), before stabbing or hacking them to death.
Now I grew up in the country; I know the sound of gunfire as it crackles along a dry creek bed, echoing through the trees. I don’t judge a farmer’s need to regulate fox or rabbit numbers on his or her property. But what is so affecting about this scene – and it haunts the protagonist John Grant long after – is the hint of “orgy” about it; although the trip is ostensibly to go get meat to feed the working dogs, it soon goes beyond this, beyond even drunkenness and boredom, to absolute slaughter. It is the pursuit of oblivion similar to what the consumption of alcohol offers (and Jennings’ essay talks more on that point.) It is sad and repulsive. This is what I took out of it and – I guess – is what moviegoers did too. If I was to go Freudian on you, I would wonder if this is an example of the ‘Death Drive‘ theory in action.
So from that – and from Porter too – it has made me think more about what I eat and why. Which, coincidentally, is something I’ve been doing a fair bit of anyway. And if my doodles are anything to show, if I’m not consciously thinking about animals, then subconsciously I am …
Have you read either of these books? What did you think?
