Classic Australian Children's and YA Novels #5: The Midnight Zoo

Recently I was reading an essay by Clare Bradford on the American Printz Award for young adult fiction. Bradford writes that “the Australian texts that have succeeded in the Printz are Australian but not too Australian”.

This statement makes sense in terms of the media coverage of iconic Australian animated series Bluey being adapted for the American market on Disney+. Changes made include the removal of an episode featuring farting and the deletion of scenes that refer to a vasectomy and which depict a dog sitting on a toilet. There are some aspects of Australian life, language, and culture that are too unfamiliar, or which conflict with the sanitised norms of life as it is depicted on American children’s television.

Many of the Australian children’s and YA authors who have succeeded at the highest levels internationally are authors of fantasy, perhaps for this reason. Some of the most recognised works of Australian children’s literature derive from fantasies set in the bush such as May Gibbs’ Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill, and Ethel Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo. Nevertheless, in fantasy worlds, the notion of Australian-ness can be almost entirely absent. My post is about one such novel, Sonya Hartnett’s The Midnight Zoo (2010), which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

Romani brothers Andrej (12) and Tomas (8) care for their baby sister, Wilma, as they wander the countryside after their family have been killed by soldiers. The setting seems to be Czechoslovakia during World War II, although the novel’s dreamy tone and fabulist elements mean the “true” details are never entirely clear and are largely unimportant. The boys come upon a bombed-out town containing an abandoned zoo, and it is here that both child and animal victims of the war can converse and discuss their respective possibilities of finding freedom.

Animals are depicted in ways that collapse the human-animal divide in The Midnight Zoo. As orphaned refugees, the brothers must adopt wild ways to survive by scavenging and foraging. The boys’ Uncle Marin once compared the Romany to “wildcat people”: “There are housecats who sleep on doormats and sip milk from bowls. There are wildcats who live in forests, cats who can never be tamed” (8).

The brothers doubly embody this connection to wildcats not only because of their ethnic and cultural identity but also because they are children—who, especially since the Romantic period, have long been associated with the natural world. At night-time, when they are less fearful of the threat posed by adults, the boys delight in running “the perilous streets like two deer across a meadow though they had only thin starlight to guide them, dodging potholes and flagpoles and crumpling brick walls” (8).

In a different way to the imprisoned zoo animals—who remained trapped because the keys to their cages are missing—Andrej and Tomas understand what it is to be separated from their “kind” and to have their spirit contained. (Indeed, scholars have made this comparison explicit in terms of the similarities between zoos and concentration camps.)

The blurring of the boundaries between human and animal, and reality and fantasy provide a way for the boys—and the reader—to transcend the evils enacted by adults on the grounds of difference, whether that of species, or race or ethnicity.

Andrej and Tomas are the frequent victims of racist abuse, for example. When an old woman tries to steal Wilma and meets with the boys’ resistance, she unleashes a verbal tirade in which she calls them “vermin” and speaks positively of ethnic cleansing. Tomas makes an active choice to frame the woman as “Baba Jaga, the legendary witch who stole children, and occasionally ate them” (135, 136).

While the younger brother takes refuge in imagination, Andrej finds answers in nature itself, concluding that the invaders would never win the war as nature would always “right itself, as it always must and will” (96).

The only trace of Australia evident in Hartnett’s novel is via the kangaroo (or Klokan) who lives among the caged animals. Both boys had never heard of the kangaroo before their encounter and in the European context, the marsupial becomes almost mythical. Tomas remarks that, although it wasn’t a dragon, “it was pleasingly peculiar, and, for all that [he] knew, might indeed be capable of breathing fire” (31).

The Midnight Zoo then is not very “Australian” at all, unlike many award-winning Australian realist titles. While international readers in the twentieth century often sought distinctly Australian landscapes and characters in fiction for young people, contemporary Australian YA fantasy is often most successful when it is set in another place, whether entirely imagined or linked with the history of other parts of the world.