A DAY AT THE ZOO

by Robert Darroch (President, the DH Lawrence Society of Australia) rob@cybersydney.com.au

 

A BROU-HA-HA has broken out in England about Lawrence’s attitude to animals in general and zoos in particular.

It revolves around the DH Lawrence Heritage Centre at the University of Nottingham – one of the world’s main focal points of DH Lawrence studies and appreciation of Lawrence’s life and works.

The Centre is always struggling to keep its head above water, and recently it has hit upon a way of attracting visitors – particularly young visitors – to keep its turnstiles ticking over.

Some weeks ago it hosted a dog show at the Centre, with prizes for the best-looking dog and the waggiest tail.

DH Lawrence aficionados tut-tutted about this frankly down-market appeal for patronage, but bit their literary tongues. 

Yet now, according to some Lawrence purists, the Centre has ventured too far down the populist road.

The Centre recently announced that the Bugs n Bones Travelling Exotic Petting Zoo would be making an appearance at the Centre in the near future.

This, for the a senior member of the DH Lawrence Society of Great Britain, David Brock, was a bridge too far, and he summarily resigned from all his posts in the Society (newsletter editor, speaker secretary and press officer) – in protest at what he described as “an affront to all that Lawrence stood for”.

 “The centre is giving out the totally wrong message to visitors about Lawrence’s philosophy,” he said. “Lawrence would be livid at the lack of reverence for life shown by the centre in his name.  A recurring theme of Lawrence’s writing was his deep connection with nature. Lawrence believed that animals are to be respected as individuals in their own right and are not for this kind of human exploitation.”

(A “petting zoo” is a sort of children’s zoo where small children can pat and touch its docile inhabitants, and who pose no danger to the young patrons.  They are growing in popularity around the world, and are, in their mobile form, particularly popular at children’s parties.)

However, while Mr Brock may have been a pillar – and voice - of the UK Lawrence Society, he clearly had not read Lawrence’s 8th novel, Kangaroo.   For in Lawrence’s 1923 Australian novel the main character – who is clearly Lawrence himself – visits Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney, and is much taken by its inmates.

…he went over to the Zoo, on the other side of the harbour--and the warm sun shone on the rocks and the mimosa bloom, and he saw the animals, the tenderness came back. A girl he had met, a steamer-acquaintance, had given him a packet of little extra-strong peppermint sweets. The animals liked them. The grizzly bear caught them and ate them with excitement, panting after the hotness of the strong peppermint, and opening his mouth wide, wide, for more. And one golden brown old-man kangaroo, with his great earth-cleaving tail and his little hanging hands, hopped up to the fence and lifted his sensitive nose quivering, and gently nibbled the sweet between Richard's fingers.  So gently, so determinedly nibbled the sweet, but never hurting the fingers that held it. And looking up with the big, prominent Australian eyes, so aged in consciousness, with a fathomless, dark, fern-age gentleness and gloom. The female wouldn't come near to eat. She only sat up and watched, and her little one hung its tiny fawn's head and one long ear and one fore-leg out of her pouch, in the middle of her soft, big, grey body. Such a married couple! Two kangaroos. And the blood in Richard's veins all gone dark with a sort of sad tenderness. The gentle kangaroos, with their weight in heavy blood on the ground, in their great tail!  It wasn't love he felt for them, but a dark, animal tenderness, and another sort of consciousness, deeper than human.

So much for Lawrence dislike of zoos.

In fact, so taken was Lawrence with the zoo that he wrote one of his best poems about his visit there.  He called it “Kangaroo”: