Classic Australian Children's and YA Novels #3: Taronga

Last year I began writing a chapter on the history of Australian children’s and young adult literature for the Cambridge History of the Australian Novel. As I worked through a list of novels that friends and colleagues loved and remembered, I soon realised that most Australian children’s literature published prior to the 1990s is now out of print. A small number of beloved books had recently been reissued in “Classics” imprints, but their cover designs suggested an intended audience of nostalgic adult readers.

I was surprised to find that Victor Kelleher’s Taronga (1986) is still in-print with Puffin. It is a book that perhaps I ought to have read in my own childhood given that I was in primary school from the mid-1980s. Yet it took me 36 years to read this fantasy of a post-apocalyptic Australia in which civilisation has entirely collapsed and survivors behave brutally towards one another. It predates the explosion of young adult dystopian fiction from the 2000s, but has a distinctly different struggle at its narrative centre to novels such as The Hunger Games and Divergent. 

 To begin with, the protagonist is a male character, Ben, who can control animals via telepathy. There is no central government presiding over limited resources or controlling the remaining population: those who survive must hunt for food and fight in gangs for their lives in competition for limited resources. Contemporary YA dystopian fiction tends to pit female characters against tyrannical governments, but in Taronga the “Last Days” occurred only two years prior and cities—and society— remain in ruins. 

Ben’s telepathic abilities prove to be a blessing and a curse during the two years in which he lives in the Bush. The ability to control animals gives Ben a life-saving advantage when hunting, but it also places him in testing situations in which animal lives are sacrificed to preserve his own. Ben’s family had lived in Sydney prior to the Last Days—a taboo topic that survivors rarely discuss—and in the opening chapters he seeks to escape the cutthroat realities of bush life by returning there. While Sydney’s iconic harbour and bridge remain in place, the city is otherwise a grim shadow of its former self. Ben gravitates towards Taronga Zoo, a place in which humans seek to maintain a life of safety among the wild animals, and in which his telepathic skills are highly valuable. 

The Taronga setting makes for something akin to a Robinsonade, in that the fenced-in zoo is a self-contained world in which Ben must learn and develop. He refers to it as “A complete world in miniature. Eden…” (92). Yet, as in the Garden of Eden, things cannot remain tranquil forever. 

Ben’s ally within Taronga is Ellie, an Aboriginal girl. While some of the references to Aboriginal people would be written differently today, Kelleher attempts to envision a future in which Aboriginal people and animals are central to the nation. Indeed, when a raiding party arrives at Taronga and “someone began singing ‘Advance Australia Fair’ in a raucous voice” (108), it almost seems to prefigure the negative associations that would develop surrounding nationalism and white Australia in incidents such as the Cronulla Riots in 2005. 

Ellie explains that Taronga is “an Aboriginal word meaning water views” (93). While a quick Google suggests the meaning of “beautiful view”, the concept of water views inspires Ben to realise that Australia as an island nation itself could be viewed as a larger version of Taronga. Following a final conflict over the zoo, Ben and Ellie set out for remote mulga country in which it will be tough for people to survive, attempting to isolate themselves for a few years as they await better times. 

As Ben reflects on their escape and the release of the zoo animals from captivity, he is drawn to remember that Ellie’s ancestors lived in Australia for thousands of years. He asks her what she thinks of their decision to release the animals, which he believes will soon breed and kill the native marsupials: “Whole species will disappear. Even the plants will alter because of the different feeding habits. From now on nothing’s ever going to be the same again” (193). 

 Ellie sees their decision in light of the context of historical change, from the Aboriginal introduction of the dingo to “the coming of the Whites, with their own plants and animals” (193). Ellie’s father, who was an Aboriginal man who lived in the Northern Territory, described animals “as equals…sharing the land together” (102). While the Australian past had been marked by domination of animals and Indigenous people, Taronga offers a vision in which the legacies of white settler colonisation have been obliterated, offering the slim hope of a utopian future.