On Sunday August 16, I bought an ultra-firming serum from Woollies. It contains collagen and peptides and promises noticeably smoother, wrinkle-free skin in 28 days. I have taken before photographs and commenced the countdown. I also really hate myself for buying into this ageist BS. Fuck!

But you know what? I can’t remember a time when I didn’t hate myself. For me, it has always been this way. My self-hatred defines me in ways that are hard to explain. At a base level, at the level of the body, it looks like a million self-inflicted micro-aggressions meted out daily, so minuscule they disappear into the background of a seemingly ‘normal’ life. The clearest example is how I present myself for public view: the tortuous tweezing of errant hairs, the painful clothing that bunches and pinches but also covers and minimises, the way I hide my unruly hair.

Self-hatred has seeped into my skin; it has permeated flesh and bone and perverted my DNA. My adult daughters hate themselves, too. I didn’t want this to happen, but it did. I’ve tried to fix it. I tell them that they are perfect. I think I am doing good but really, I am just inflicting more harm, and I hate myself for that. I know that the world can be a cruel and ugly place for women. And I know that it is probably too late for me; the hatred has already metastasised. I told myself that my daughters don’t live in that world. At least I tried to make a home for them somewhere else, somewhere warm and inviting, safe. But it all went wrong; they ended up in that cruel place anyway. The sorrow and grief of this is indescribable.

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I was about 13 years old when I realised that I would never be beautiful, not in the ways that mattered. I was a kid full of dreams and adolescent aspirations. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted my peers to like me, I wanted boys to want me. But I had to show up in the world in a body that did not fit, that was not fit for purpose. I was fat, or more precisely, a ‘fat bitch’. Too much of me was on show, and my body refused to perform its key function as an object of desire. I was an abomination who needed to be beaten down, made small. Words can do that and so can silence. When I shrank myself, I morph into something just as hateful. Losing weight did not grant me access to the world of desire and the desired. The door remained locked because I was still missing the accoutrements of feminine beauty. I was scrawny and shapeless. I was an ‘ugly bitch’.

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I was 18 when I realised that men would sleep with me even if they did not like me. Every man I slept with hated me in their own unique way. And all found ways to crush me and to grind me into non-existence even though with every sexual encounter, for the briefest of moments, I felt seen. At 18, I wanted a boyfriend. If I could get a boy to love me and want me in ways that made me whole, then I could claim success in a world that valued heterosexual love above all else.

At 23, I got what I wanted. I also fell pregnant. My body grew and ruptured. The skin on my stomach and hips tore forming silver rivulets across a swollen landscape. My face, hands and feet grew large, and monstrous. When the time came, I laboured through the day and into the night, my baby wrenched from me, her bird-like bones broken. When she was placed on my chest, she chewed hungrily at my breast. Over time my nipples cracked and bled, the heat radiating from them like a red-hot beacon of pain and failure.

As I drew bottles and teats from sterilised water, my hands chaffed and blistered.

Two years later, I did it all over again. Same failures, same chaffing, same pain.

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As my babies grew into scrappy adolescents, I enrolled in university. At university, I joined a feminist reading circle. We devoured Butler, Crenshaw and Ahmed and spoke about our desire to free ourselves from our bodies. We all longed to live in a world where the shape and size of our bodies didn’t matter, where changing bodies went unnoticed. We spoke about body neutrality, of escaping the prison of performative femininity, of having to get up every day and perform our gender to a world that hated us for it. University was a world of escape for me, an ideological refuge from the reality of my existence as a suburban mum who wanted anything but to be where she was. At home, I lifted heavy weights, I ran kilometres in the heat and rain, I skipped lunch. I drank copious cups of coffee with just a dash of milk. I smiled as I slid into a pair of size-eight low-slung jeans. I bought a tape measure.

For a brief window of time, I was made visible. Women applauded me, and men wanted me. I enjoyed being seen. I wanted to be watched and admired. I looked at the bodies of noughties celebrities as I drew the tape measure around my waist. I had finally measured up.

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In front of my teenage children, I tried to not talk about my body. I never talked about theirs. As they aged and their minds matured, I talked about diet culture and beauty standards. I told them that their bodies were the least interesting thing about them. I taught them how to think critically about the cultural products they consumed and were exposed to. We watched popular films together and pulled them apart scene by scene, uncovering the sexism and misogyny. Sitting in the lounge room with my daughters’ legs and arms draped over mine, I pulled at my waistband and prayed that I would never gain weight.

But I did

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I’m 50 now, and my body has grown heavy. My waist has thickened, my legs have dimpled, fat has amassed around my knees, at my hips. I look at myself in the mirror and think I look tired. I am tired. Some days I sleep for two hours at a stretch. I wake up with a bladder set to burst and a gnawing pain in my lower back, in my wrists and knees. There is so much pain now, and oh so much anxiety. My mind generates thoughts that churn and mutate. I think about dying, and what that will mean for my daughters. I also think about living and ageing, of growing into a better version of myself, of ‘embracing’ my grey hair, my larger body, my sagging skin. I want to, but I can’t.

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In 2018, I fell in love with a cat, and she fell in love with me. I knew it was love because she would seek me out, and I her. As the heat and light of the day retreated, we would meld our bodies together, her back against my chest, her face resting on my outstretched arm. This routine of searching, settling, and nesting would continue as both of our lives unfurled, creating a pattern of nurturance and care that would provide a steady backdrop to a life that felt fractured and broken. We were two sentient beings, two beating hearts, both in need of warmth and comfort.

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There is a quote about cats that I really love. It appears in the first five lines of Queensland writer and poet Mabel Forrest’s 1930 poem, ‘Cats’. It reads:

Cats belong in the world of dreams, to

round moons and velvet eves;

To the patter of cones from the wind-

Blown fir, song of blossom and brush

Of leaves

To Forrest, cats belonged in a world separate from our own. Cats existed in a world of softness and low light, where Fir cones ‘patter’ and leaves ‘brush’. The cat, a ‘silken thing’ ‘with a gentle purr ’, did not inhabit the harsh, cruel and canine world of servants and masters, because according to Forrest, the cat ‘is owned by nothing except itself’.

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I have been a compliant servant to my self-hatred for so many years. My injuries are vast, my wounds raw. But what if there is another world, another reality, a place of ‘round moons and velvet eves’?

The feline world that Forrest imagined is the world that my cat and I enter at night when the world is still, and when the day acquiesces to the night. It is a small bubble of time, filled with softness and warmth. It is a world where our intertwined bodies are not vessels of self-loathing but of soft caresses, of gentle admiration and of love.

My cat’s love for me, ensconced in that small bubble of time, keeps me tethered to a life I know is worth living.

My daughters are fortunate enough to share their lives with cats, too. We are surrounded by so much beauty, so much love. I could not be prouder.

May the purrs be with you, always

Jodie

When I found myself in the tepid pool of outcast casuals in 2024, I vowed to finally extricate myself from the University sector. This proved harder than I thought. My university was a place I loved deeply even though it never really loved me back. Despite the indignity of a loveless relationship, I made the decision to stay, fearful of what might happen if I left. This wasn’t an unfounded fear. I knew that if I stepped over the threshold, the door would be firmly closed behind me, and I wasn’t ready to be shut out completely. Even after all my years as a casual and the emotional and psychological injuries that I had accrued via my tenuous title, I still considered myself an academic, and I hadn’t given up on a sector that had wrapped its arms around me 19 years ago, promising to change my life. I was deeply in love with the idea of academia. 

In 2026, lots have changed. For one, hundreds of fully tenured academic staff have been turfed out of my university, handed ‘forced voluntary redundancies’ as one academic put it. And my academic colleagues were not the only ones joining the dole queue. Universities across the country dumped their academic staff to supposedly ensure the economic future of their institutions.  

On March 30, Four Corners broadcast an exposé on the state of universities in Australia with my university, UTS and the ANU in Canberra under the microscope. Four Corners publicly uncovered what many staff had known about for some time, that their institutions had been hollowed out by years of cronyism, corruption and mismanagement. 

In the past month, key staff from my university have been hauled in front of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) to defend themselves against charges of biased recruitment processes and conflicts of interest regarding the appointment of consulting firm KordaMentha. 

Throw in the failed Jobs Ready Graduates program and ‘soft’ caps on international students, and the glow that once emanated from Australian Universities as bastions of knowledge and innovation is well and truly gone. Once seen as the purveyors of social good, many universities are having to reckon with not only the harm they have caused their employees and students but the inexorable harm they have caused the nation. 

Universities are no longer shiny, happy places even if the brash marketing tells you otherwise. Academic staff are stretched thin, forced to navigate their diminishing numbers, yet another faculty restructure, and teaching and marking loads that would make public school teachers gasp. This loss of staff and their invaluable knowledge, skills and companionship have also knocked the wind out of so many left to mop up the mess. If the survivors’ guilt doesn’t knobble them, the endless clean- up will. 

Inevitably, this descent into guilt and drudgery forced on staff by a corrupt and narcissistic executive impacts students. And this is no surprise. Universities forgot about their students years ago. 

I think it is about time we bring in the cats.

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The first time I brought a cat to class was on a late May day in 2022. I was handed a dreaded afternoon class with 22 undergraduate history students who just wanted the day to be over and the tedious talk of twentieth-century warfare to end. Late afternoon classes are always a hard gig, but when you are tasked with facilitating a Zoom discussion on Giorgio Agamben’s ‘states of exception’ at 5:30pm to 22 black squares, you really start to question your life choices. 

As I wrestled with the disappointing silence and the jarring isolation of seeing zero humans, my floofy darling emerged from under the bed. Not only that, but she also promptly jumped onto my desk, perched herself beside my laptop and commenced rubbing her face frantically against mine. This sweet caress was enough to release 22 genies from their black inky bottles. For the first time in the session, I saw faces, lots of excited, smiling faces. And my students had lots of questions - what’s her name? How old is she? Where was she hiding? Is she your only cat? Where has she gone? Will we see her again? Do you want to see my cat? 

Poppy’s appearance cracked something open in that Zoom tutorial, something joyful and vital, something deeply human. That afternoon, as the light and heat of the day slowly retreated, my students and I found our mojo, one cat caress at a time. 

I learnt so much about my students that session, not only that they liked seeing and talking about my and other cats, but that their experience of being students in an Australian university was, at best, disappointing and, at worst, economically and emotionally ruinous. Nearly 95% of students worked full or part-time jobs alongside full or part-time study. Many also had carer responsibilities, either dependent children or elderly parents. So many had poor mental health, and some also had the compounding trauma of having survived the worst bushfire season in history and a global pandemic. Many felt as though they weren’t getting the experience they paid for or were promised. They had come to the end of their degree, and they were tired, oh so very tired. 

My cat had cracked a hole in the facade of a pretty murky and listless world. She had let the light shine in. It was my job to ensure that the light continued to radiate and that that catty crevasse stayed open. 

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Every new academic session, I bring not just one but a whole clowder of cats to class with me. I insert photos into worksheets; I talk about Poppy’s purring peccadillos and my life as a cat historian. I remind my students that, despite current opinions, an Arts degree can take you places you probably never dreamed possible, and that it is ok to want the extraordinary. I let them know that my cats and I are there for them, and that I understand why sometimes they are silent and why they feel worn down. I tell them each class that we will get there; we will make it to the finish line. I assure them that the cats of Australia are right here, purring beside them.

‘May the purrs be long and the cuddle deep’

Yours, Jodie

I wrote a whole book about the cats of Australia called, you guessed it, The Cats of Australia. You can purchase it online here or at all good retailers. If at all possible, please support your independent bookseller.

And don’t forget, my final launch is happening soon. Sunday August 9 at Avid Reader in Brisbane. Get your free tickets here

But the reviews didn’t exactly come thick and fast. It would be late June before the first review appeared in a mainstream publication. Yet, it wasn’t Sydney Morning Herald or Canberra Times book reviews that I was desperately seeking - although these are very nice - it was reviews from my bread-and-butter readers. These are the readers who have waited months for its release or have taken themselves to their local booksellers to pluck my book off a shelf stuffed with hundreds of other titles, and have invested their hard-earned cash to purchase it.

Of course, my early reviewers were my family, my two adult daughters Teah and Ava. When I asked Teah what she thought, she responded in her usual warm, reassuring way, ‘It’s really good, mum’, she said. Of course I knew she was protecting my feelings so I pressed for a more fulsome and critical review. ‘No’, I responded, ‘tell me what you really think!’. ‘Umm’, she said, chewing at her lip, ‘A lot of cats die. I found myself crying uncontrollably for the first two chapters. I thought it was a book about love?’

And Teah wasn’t the only one crying and asking after a love story that was promised but seemingly never delivered. A friend of mine messaged me in the wee hours of Sunday morning exclaiming, ‘my god, you are killing me! I just cried in the toilet about a cat I have never met who died a century ago! Do they all die!?’. A Goodreads reviewer added a ‘mild gripe’ to their review ‘I skipped some of the parts about death because I didn’t feel like crying in the library’, they wrote.

When I wrote The Cats of Australia I knew that I was writing an emotional history. Cats elicit big emotions, and these emotions are not just hypothetical; they are deeply visceral, real and raw, and so very complicated. I had experienced this real rawness myself. When Poppy, my soul-cat, came into my life, she split open something in me that remains gaping and fresh. Every time I pick at this aperture, I feel all the feels. With this openness, I experience joy and elation, pain and rapture, and sometimes deep, profound sadness.

When I wrote my book about the history of cats in Australia, I was also writing a history of emotions. I was propelled by a desire to understand this big, messy, monumental cat love that I was experiencing. I desperately wanted to know if others had felt this way before and what this love looked like. This quest would require that I trace the contours of love and affection as they played out in the past. I would need to closely examine how love was expressed and received between human and cat and track those acts forward to ascertain how cat love has changed over time.

This was a deeply personal search for feline love, and one that I would undertake with a burning desire to validate my own feelings. I also wanted to find stories about love that would make other cat-lovers feel good about themselves and the emotions they are often encouraged to stifle, downplay, and excuse away. In a country that demonises cats, I wanted Aussie cat lovers to know that this purveyor of cat love had their back.

What I didn’t know was that I would also make them cry and even turn away.

I knew that in locating love I would also find loss and bereavement. Grief and loss are often the price we humans pay for loving a cat. I know that when Poppy disappears from my side, that the grief of that loss will not only split me open once more but will cleave me in two. There will be my world with Poppy and the greatly altered world after.

There is feline death in the archives; its existence is unavoidable. But how do historians talk about it? And should cat history or history more broadly always make us feel good?

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At the April 2026 Sorrento Writers Festival, host Sally Warhaft asked authors, Emeritus Professor of History Mark McKenna and ex-PM and now president of the Liberal Party Tony Abbott to parse their thoughts on the notion of pride and shame in Australian history. Both authors were attending the event to spruik their latest books: McKenna, The Shortest History of Australia and Abbott, Australia: A History. Warhaft was being purposefully provocative with this opening question, knowing that each of these authors had been accused of subscribing to a particular style of history-making. As an academic historian, McKenna had spent several decades uncovering the sometimes uncomfortable truths about our nation’s settler and Aboriginal past. McKenna’s histories often focus on the violent and deadly encounters between Aboriginal people and Europeans on the frontiers of settlement. McKenna has consistently argued, drawing on extensive archival research, that British colonisation was founded on the illegal and violent seizure of Indigenous lands.

Abbott is of the understanding that Australians should be consuming histories that ‘allows’ them ‘to function as a national community’. There are ‘good and bad’ elements in a country’s history, he told Warhaft. Australians needed a history they could feel proud of. Abbott’s arguments were also backed up by extensive research and a fairly weighty bibliography. According to Abbott, a history that foregrounded the bad stuff would stop us from coming together and moving forward as a nation. It would trap us in a quagmire of shame and guilt.

This was not dissimilar to his predecessor, former PM John Howard, who, in the late 1990s, in the midst of the history wars, wanted Australians to feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’ about their nation and what it had achieved. McKenna is keen to dismantle the polarity of pride and shame that he explained to Warhaft and Abbott had been with us since the Bicentennial celebrations in 1988 when the myth of benevolent British settlement was well and truly dispelled. We need to ‘hold different histories, that are all interconnected, in moral tension at the same time in the same space’, he said.

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While researching for my PhD, I read a lot of McKenna’s work. I was particularly taken by his 2002 monograph Looking For Blackfellas Point: An Australian History of Place. In it, McKenna tells the Aboriginal and settler history of the far south coast of New South Wales from Indigenous peoples’ earliest encounters with European explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries to the present, and the thousand-strong Sydney walk for reconciliation. What most impressed me about McKenna’s historical storytelling was his ability to truly move me. This was a book I just could not put down, and when I was done, I could not stop thinking about it. What I experienced entering McKenna’s historical world was exactly what he explained twenty-four years later at a Writers Festival on the south-west coast of Victoria: a moral tension. As a settler descendant, I felt guilt and shame but also pride and deep admiration for my forebears and for Aboriginal people. To navigate this history, I had to find a way to hold all these emotions together, in the ‘one time and space’. At times I cried, at times I raged, and just like my Goodreads reviewer, there were times when I desperately wanted to look away. That I was feeling all these emotions at once was sometimes hard to bear.

When McKenna published his 2002 monograph, there was much discussion in the discipline about the role of emotions in history. This came off the back of broader discussions about the nature of historical practice and whether historians could be completely objective in their approach to the past. Or put another way- could historians write difficult and discomforting histories without their messy humanity and scrappy emotions getting in the way? Could or should they be writing dispassionate history from a distance? Besides, cold hard facts cannot and should not be communicated via the language of red hot emotions. Right!?

I am of the firm belief that objective history is an impossible dream. McKenna is very much part of the history he writes about. In Blackfella’s Point, he positions himself as the starting point for a broader history of settler-Aboriginal relations. When he bought a bush property in Towamba on the far south coast of New South Wales, he was impelled to better understand its Indigenous history. So he wrote himself into an Indigenous and settler history of the place. This was not an exercise in navel gazing. McKenna understood his audience. By placing his own story within the broader story of Aboriginal and settler relations, he was inviting other settler Australians to join him on a journey into our shared past. He was not asking readers to leave their subjectivity or emotions at the door. In positioning himself thus, he was asking settler readers to feel.

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Modern historical practice is much more than the transmission of raw facts. When historians recover artefacts from the past - the documents, photos, objects - and bring them into the present, they do so by drawing on the tools of storytellers, and inevitably bits and pieces of themselves get sewn into the narrative. When I commenced writing my history of cats, I started from my own experience. I took the small scraps of my life with cats and weaved them into a more expansive narrative tapestry. In doing so, as McKenna did, I was inviting the reader to come a little closer and to imagine the feline world of the past together. Because what better person to guide you through a story of cat-love than a cat-lover. Oh, the places we will see!

When we feel and feel deeply, we are often more impelled to act. I wanted my readers to laugh, feel joy and wonder, grief and sadness. I wanted my readers to hold all these emotions in ‘moral tension’ to better understand the human-feline relationship in Australia’s past.

Like my Goodreads reviewer wrote, ‘the reality of history isn’t always nice’. But if we hold tight together, I promise it’s worth it.

Would you like to meet me in person!? I am launching my book in Canberra on July 9 at Paperchain books and in Brisbane August 9 at Avid reader.

Oh! You can also see me at the Headland Writers Festival in October of this year (23 -25). They have put on a poster with Mark McKenna. Ha!

And if you haven’t bought my book yet, you best get a wriggle on. They are selling fast. Apparently.

May the purrs be long and the cuddles deep,

Jodie

My small seaside town is absolutely besotted with dogs. Dogs are everywhere. They are being walked along the beach, nestled at the feet of cafe-goers, riding on the back of tradies’ utes, on paddleboards, and waiting patiently for their human to return from the surf. Every street, avenue and byway has a multitude of canine residents either tucked in backyards or nestled on plush beds in loungerooms or their very own sleeping quarters.

And there are all sorts of dogs in my town. Little white fluffy ones, and sleek skinny ones, black ones, brown ones and cavoodles galore. There are dogs that bark and dogs that howl, and then there are the wildly funny ones that emit that garbled noise that is a cross between a bark and a howl.

I love that dogs are everywhere because when I am out and about, I absolutely want to pet all the dogs (with their and their human’s permission, of course). That is why my favourite dog is a Staffy (Staffordshire bull terrier), because Staffies live for pats and I am totally here for it. Also, just an aside, Staffies are the most accommodating models if you are into doggy dress-ups. And yes, I want to see your Staffy dressed as an avocado.

I love that dogs love pets from strangers, and I love that dogs bring strangers together. Dogs are the ultimate social lubricators. I have met and got to know so many of my fellow locals via their pat-seeking dogs. There is one thing that I have learned on my cat history journey: lots of people love to talk about their companion animals. And talking about dogs and cats is so much more interesting than talking about the weather or last night’s high tide.

As an extroverted introvert, I often find social situations challenging. For example, I do not have the enviable ability to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation, let alone one that will have the whole dog park enthralled. I am more likely to say something really awkward and slink away in shamed silence than expertly handle twenty minutes of small talk. But if you have a dog, I have questions. Lots of questions, and I seriously want to know all about your dog’s propensity for belly rubs and late-night snuggles. When I see that you have a dog, I know that we will soon be friends. Very good friends.

Ok, maybe I went a bit too far, and heaped on a bit too much creepy stalker. But on the whole, dog people tend to like and bond well with other dog people. The same could be said for cat people. I have met and formed wonderful relationships with cat people who were complete strangers before I started sharing stories about mine and other people’s cats. Cat people also tend to like dogs and are happy to converse about both, sometimes simultaneously. What I find when talking with cat people is that they do not feel the need to disclose their love for cats when I or anyone else brings up the topic of dogs.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with many dog-people.

When explaining my research to dog-lovers, many feel obliged to mark their territory. ‘Actually, I am more of a dog-person, they will say. Now, if I were handed a buck every time a dog-lover said this to me, I would be a millionaire by now.

Why the heck do dog-people have to affirm their dog-loving credentials when a whiff of a cat is mentioned?

Image: Luna the bulldog and Cecil the ginger cat have no idea that the cat/dog divide exists

I used to think that a disclosure of dog-loving was just a polite way of saying ‘I don’t like cats’. But after conversing with many dog-lovers, I am more inclined to think that what they are actually saying is ‘I love dogs, and I know how to love them, but I don’t understand what loving a cat looks like or how I would go about doing it’. For those who have never loved or been loved by a cat, the act of loving a cat can appear foreign and confounding.

Much of this othering of cats stems from stereotypes that have accrued over time. Cats are viewed as aloof, solitary, and therefore completely unlovable. Cats cannot be ‘man’s best friend’ because they are actually recalcitrant little arseholes. The truth, of course, is very different because no two cats are the same. I have met some pretty friendly and chill cats, but I have also met some that would not give me the time of day. And therein lies the rub. Whether they are super-friendly leg rubbers or cantankerous snubbers, you absolutely cannot force a cat to love you.

The love a cat provides is hard won. You have to work for a cat’s affection, and this is not a one-and-done act. With a cat, the negotiation of affection and the rules of engagement are negotiated daily. When my soul-cat Poppy came into my life, it was many months of patient, slow-moving interactions before she deigned to sleep by my side. Even now, Poppy continues to lay down her ever-shifting ground rules. Just because she snuggled with me for eight solid hours yesterday does not mean that she will sleep with me tonight. Actually, she may decide that she would like to hide for 14 hours instead.

When it comes to cat love, I think that dog-lovers are equal parts fearful and confused. Some believe that if you love a dog, you cannot love a cat, like the love that humans dispense to the animal kingdom is finite. A lot of this, also, has to do with loyalty to dogs. But, hey, it’s ok, I reckon your dog will forgive you if you decide that you like cats too. In Australia, this loyalty is also inexplicably linked to the politics of national identity. Some see cat companionship as thoroughly un-Australian because of the supposed threat domestic cats pose to our beloved native species. Furthermore, dogs, particularly working dogs, have escaped the damaging label of ‘introduced species’ because of their contributions to our farming communities and our domestic and international economy. As a proud national citizen, it is much easier to champion a love of dogs as a force for nation building than to love an animal that is allegedly destroying what makes us so unique: our natural environment.

For dog lovers, I think it is the fear of the unknown and the unknowable. I mean, will we ever truly understand the felines in our midst?

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I wrote The Cats of Australia as a gift to all cat lovers and all cats. I wanted to give a voice to a phenomenon that had been left out of our nation’s history: the love between cats and humans. I want cat lovers who read the book to feel seen and know that the love we share for cats has been shared by thousands who came before us. This love has historical, cultural and social resonance. This love between humans and cats matters. You, dear cat lover and all your precious cats, matter.

I also wrote it for those who have not loved a cat before and are fearful of what embracing cat love might mean for them as individuals and as citizens of the nation. I wrote it for dyed-in-the-wool dog lovers, too. I want the dog lovers to confront their fears and better understand how loving a cat is possible. Moreover, I want dog-lovers to consider the formidable power of cat love, not as a threat to the human-dog relationship, but as a culturally contingent, historically situated phenomenon that has shaped all of us.

We have loved dogs, and we have loved cats. Both are deserving of love, kindness and care. I hope we will continue loving cats and dogs, because now more than ever, our humanity depends on it.

The Cats of Australia is released May 26 and will be available at all good booksellers.

If you want your copy signed come along to one of my book launches. Dog lovers and cat lovers make sure you bring along pictures of your dogs and cats. I absolutely want to see them.

Dulcie’s Cottage Merimbula, Saturday May 30, 2pm

To book email aculturalhistoryofcats@gmail.com

Australian National Maritime Museum, Saturday June 6, 2pm

Book tickets here

Gleebook, hosted by Inner City Strays, June 21,

Book tickets here

Brunswick Library, Brunswick, Thursday June 25 @6:30pm

Book tickets here

Canberra and Brisbane dates to come

‘May the purrs be long and the cuddles deep’

This response didn’t really surprise me or interrupt my effort to eat a whole slice of pizza in one bite. My family are a particularly insecure bunch, which manifests in a low-key desire for those around them to fail. I don’t blame them or even rage at their low expectations of me, understanding that, like millions of us, they are trapped in the swirling vortex of consumer capitalism, which is predicated on our insecurities. I was there too once, and in many ways, I still am. Consumer capitalism is a pernicious beast whose clutches are hard to escape from. I continue to wriggle and squirm within its monstrous grasp. I hope my resistance counts for something.

My mushroom-hating family member, not realising the state of Australian Universities or Universities globally, thought that my PhD would result in untold material riches that they would have to compete with. They didn’t need to worry. I crossed the finish line a whole lot fiscally poorer than I started. But in 2014, that one question set me on a path of insurmountable worry and anxiety that, to this day, has not abated. ‘What happens if I fail?’

And I know, I know. Failure can be instructive, and we need to be comfortable making mistakes and failing in order to grow as humans. But the thought of failing still provokes heart-clutching panic attacks and the desire to never extract myself from my cat’s side and my nice comfy bed.

Image: My soul-cat, Poppy likes to sleep close and is the purrfect anxiety support cat

So, imagine the state of my mental health as the days tick down to the release of my very first book. Needless to say, I have spent many days spooning my cat in my beautifully appointed double bed. My swirling miasma of worries looks a little like this:

What happens if people don’t like it? Shit, people are going to f**king hate it

I shouldn’t have signed that contract.

Stupid! Fark! I didn’t do enough research. I reckon I made heaps of mistakes

I should have quadruple checked my manuscript. I’ve totally fucked up

If I get cancelled, I might move to Tasmania. I will change my name by deed poll

I’ll buy a box dye. Reinvent myself. But I love my life here…….Wahhhh

What if this affects my kids? Will they hate me? If my kids hate me, I don’t know what I will do. Why the f**k did I choose this life?

I could be living in blissful anonymity. Stupid choices. Fark!

But as a writer, what does failure really look like?

I don’t know if any of you have been following the Lindy West controversy, but West has been chided by mean reviewers and others for failing to reach the heady heights of best-sellerdom. For those of you unaware of West’s work, she published a best-selling memoir in 2016 titled Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, which sold 69,000 copies and was later optioned for television. Hulu ran an adaptation of the hugely popular book for three seasons. The series starring Aidy Bryant was also a hit. West’s latest memoir, Adult Braces, was released on March 10 and, by late April, had sold only 3,000 copies. It was expected, given West’s fame, that she would sell a whole lot more.

Selling 69,000 copies of your first book is a big deal. Actually, selling 69k copies of any book is a big deal. To put this in perspective, of the 58,000 titles published by the big fancy publisher Penguin/Random House in 2022, half of those sold less than a dozen. Which means that 90% of titles sold fewer than 2000 copies. American author April Henry tweeted out these depressing statistics in 2022, adding that, given these metrics, she is an ‘amazing success’.

It is highly unlikely that my ‘little old cat book that could’ will sell 69k copies. I would be very pleased if I sold a couple of thousand. But what happens if it doesn’t? Does that mean I have failed? Will I have to start calling myself a Tasmanian?*

Maybe. I’ve always wanted to move to Tasmania. But I have also always wanted to write a book and given what I know now about the world of publishing, I may need to rethink what success looks like.

Just like my PhD - which I absolutely did not fail! - I undertook the task of writing a book under some pretty trying circumstances. I wanted to write an academically rigorous book on feline history in Australia without the grandiose, obtuse language of academia. Not a paid academic, I undertook my research without the resources of a big university and without the cushion of lucrative scholarships and tenured work. I also undertook the bulk of my research in regional and remote Australia, many hundreds of kilometres from state and national libraries and archives. I made a few targeted trips to brick-and-mortar libraries, but most of my research was performed on my laptop with sketchy wifi.

When I delivered my manuscript to my publisher, it felt like a massive achievement. I remember hitting the send button and thinking, even if they reject it, I’ve done this incredible thing, and on the upside, no one else will get to read it, so I won’t get cancelled, have to leave home, and change my name and my hairdo.

And also, I can tell my story to others. That a woman who began life as a clerk in a video store ( remember those) went on to write an award-winning PhD ( yep, didn’t fail) before being handed a lucrative publishing contract from one of the country’s biggest publishing houses, and she did this all while living far from the metropole with her three cats and a needy bulldog. Isn’t that great!

Luckily, I get to add ‘they accepted and published her manuscript’ to my story. Perhaps if I sell lots of copies and people don’t hate it, I can add ‘and she was a best seller’ as well. Because you know what? I am nothing if not petty, and I want to stick it to that family member of mine by saying, ‘Look (again), I didn’t fail!’

My book is available for pre-order here or at all good booksellers May 26

Please also come to one of my book launches so I am not speaking to an empty room. You can book for the June 21 Gleebooks event with Inner City Strays here and the June 6 Australian National Maritime Museum event here. If you wish to attend my Merimbula launch on May 30 email: aculturalhistoryofcats@gmail.com or just turn up.

*I actually really love Tassie and would be proud to call myself a Tasmanian

After opening my fifth rejection email, I started to think that perhaps I had written myself out of the job market. 

You see, I reckon that at least three out of the five HR teams that assessed my application looked at my current ‘role’ as an author of a soon-to-be-released book about cats and thought: what the heck is this woman doing applying for a project coordinator’s position at our waste facility? Also, cats! This cat historian woman can’t be serious, and also, we can definitely not employ this very unserious woman for our very serious position. And if you don’t think I’m being serious about not being taken seriously, you can read my very serious take on this seriously f**ed phenomenon here and here. 

I reckon the other two saw that I had been out of traditional employment for 18 months and baulked. It is a sad and frustrating truism that it is easier to get a job with a job. It is also a sad and frustrating truism that the working life of an author is misunderstood. A lot of people view writing a book as definitely not a job, more a quaint Edwardian era hobby that you might dip in and out of between jaunts around your country estate. 

For eighteen months, I turned research and writing into a job, albeit a pretty poorly paid one. In 2023, when I decided to write my book full-time, I was in a pretty good financial position. I figured I could probably afford to take a considerable pay cut to invest in a job that didn’t make me cry into my coffee every morning. But now, with my publishing advance well and truly spent and with my monthly food bill costing more than a designer handbag, I really need to get a job that pays more than 15k a year. 

A month ago, when my book was pretty much all wrapped, I thought I would just swan off and get a nice new shiny job. Now I am thinking that I may need to forego job hunting altogether.  But where does this leave me? 

Well, it leaves me feeling pretty useless, actually. 

Every day as I kiss my cat good morning and harness up my bulldog for a walk, I can’t shake the feeling that I should be making better use of my time. You see, I am infected with the capitalist productivity virus, where resting and taking long naps with your cat causes the afflicted to spiral into a flapping panic. For me, this panic incites a flurry of activity - planning projects, drafting articles, emailing contacts with project ideas, and searching, searching for funding and fellowships that I absolutely have no chance of getting. And of course, the soul-destroying, never-ending search for a job. 

Capitalism is truly f**ked because it indexes our very human value to our ability to sell our labour for a wage. We literally hand over our bodies and minds to an employer for 8-10 hours in exchange for what feels like a few pieces of small change. And we are trapped in this exploitative cycle, not being able to accumulate wealth beyond our salaried and waged existence, but beholden to our bosses because of it. 

And capitalism has the nefarious ability to convince us that we are not exploited but empowered by the work we do for someone else. Working makes us feel valued and valuable to the point where the work of selling out our labour becomes our whole identity. 

So, what is it you do? 

I sleep a lot with my cat.  

That is why day after day, I cannot shake the feeling that I need to be doing something ‘productive’; either ‘working’ or ‘working’ towards ‘working’. This whole cycle of self-flagellation is utterly exhausting. I need another lie down, with my cat.

The long and short of this convoluted tale of capitalist exhaustion is that I have decided that I need to concentrate on creating self-worth outside of the productivity paradigm. This is easier said than done because when I came to this conclusion, I promptly sat down at my computer and typed out this Substack. It felt good actually doing something that felt like ‘work’, and that didn’t involve having a day sleep. I am a work-in-progress, much like the reports I am not writing in the role I did not get as the project coordinator of a waste facility. 

But everything is ok. I am going to take a deep breath and attempt to let it all go. Because do you know what? Soon I will be planning my book tour promoting the book that I worked on for 18 months, a ‘job’ that I did not cry about once and enabled me to sleep as much as I damn well pleased.

Oh, and before I hit the festivals and bookstores in an attempt to sell my labour of love, my first ever book, The Cats of Australia, you can pre-order it here.

Yours,

Jodie Stewart

Cat Historian

‘May the purrs be long and the cuddles deep’.

Dear Antone,

I am writing to respond to your February 20 Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece, in which you said it should be made illegal to own a cat in Australia.

Firstly, people don’t own cats. Cats own people, and by some purring magnetic spell can impel their human servants to do just about anything they want. My cat routinely lies on my kitchen bench and likes nothing more than to paw at the errant onions or loose carrots that roll off the chopping block while I am preparing dinner. And you know what? I let her, because she is my beautiful baby, and I would never cuss or raise my voice to her, or god forbid, remove her from the place she has chosen via her own free will to lay.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I really should introduce myself first. My name is Jodie Stewart. I am a cat historian. I bet that made you wince!? I once told an acquaintance of mine, a lovely woman who works for an NFP environmental organisation, that I had reinvented myself as a cat historian. Before those words had a chance to be absorbed into the air between us, she let rip. But cats should be banned, she spat into my face. People sometimes politely laugh or scoff when I introduce myself, but the angry, shouting ones scare me the most. They are the ones who often really hate cats and anything cat adjacent, including people with cat companions. I am assuming my lovely environmentalist friend and I are no longer friends. You win some, you lose some.

You see, Antone. I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool dog person, the type that could not fathom why people would ever stoop so low as to bring cats into their home. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, during the time of Greenpeace and ‘Clean-Up Australia Day’, and when Bob Hawke was going to plant millions of trees and announced the ‘Decade of Landcare’. I grew up on the far south coast of New South Wales, one of the sites of Australia’s ‘forest wars’. I remember when Sting attended a forest activist blockade near Eden in 1989. Sting from the Police, right there, minutes away from my hometown, from me! You may not be familiar with Sting’s popularity, but back in 1989, Sting was cool, and so was protecting the environment.

The 1990’s was also the era of the ‘great cat debates’ where debates raged on the streets, in our parliaments and in the media about how to manage the moggies in our midst. I remember lying in bed with my dad as he watched the news on his tiny portable T.V and seeing Dr John Walmsley, legendary conservationist and proprietor of Warrawong sanctuary, fitted out in a cat skin hat, defiantly speaking out against the South Australian government and their cat management laws that forbade him from shooting cats on his newly acquired property in the Murray Mallee. I remember my dad nodding along and echoing what would become a common refrain amongst many fair-minded eco-warriors like my dad: all cats should be killed. At that moment, in my mum and dad’s bed, in a small town on the east coast of Australia that had been visited by Sting! I agreed with Dr Walmsley and my dad. Wholeheartedly and unequivocally.

In 2018, everything changed. The year 2018 was the year I fell in love, like proper love. This is the type of love that catches you by surprise, that stops you in your tracks, that takes hold and does not let go. It can confound and excite you in equal measure. Suddenly, my days felt lighter, brighter and more joyful. I bound out of bed with a spring in my step and a new life’s purpose. I was going to protect and conserve this love with every fibre of my being, because this love was real and true, and man, it felt good.

Every day, I woke up, and when I looked into the face of my love, I felt a warmth spread from my chest up through my throat and bloom across my cheeks. When she brushed her face against mine in the cool still of the morning, I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. Twee, I know. But believe me, Antone, mine was a love I wanted to scream about from the rooftops. This was such a special love, a once-in-a-lifetime, magic kinda love, a love like no other. I wanted everyone to know how truly blessed I was to experience this love, and that they could, too, because I was not in love with another human being; I was in love with a cat. Her name was Poppy.

In 2018, I was 43 years old, the mother of two teenage daughters, perimenopausal, and at the end of my PhD. For me, the new year wasn’t defined by the excitement of new opportunities, but the constant fretful bracing as life continued to kick me in the guts. I hated my life. I hated myself. Every day, I had to fight the urge to retreat back under the Donna and disappear into the rapture of an indefinite slumber. At my worst, I contemplated plunging into the Pacific and gifting my fleshy, fallible body to the fishes. But then Poppy came into my life and everything changed.

Antone, even as I write this, I struggle to articulate how the arrival of this little cat made me feel. I fear that words can not truly capture the monumental impact that this scrawny little rescue had on my life, on me, a dog-person and former cat-shooting, cat-hat-wearing champion.

I am telling you all this, Antone, not to dissuade you from your argument. I absolutely understand why you have made it. After cats were brought here, most probably on the First Fleet in 1788, it wasn’t too long before they made themselves very home among the sweeping plains and rugged mountain ranges. Ecologist Ian Abbott, who undertook an exhaustive search of the Australian documentary record - our historic newspapers, settler journals, and diaries - states that by 1820, ‘feral’ cat populations had been observed in Sydney.

Cats were the ultimate survivalists because they were also the ultimate predators. For example, colonial newspapers and later state and regional newspapers were filled with stories of heroic snake-killing cats. In 1948, the famous cat’ Patch hit the news for killing 28 snakes in one month. In 1905, A.J Campbell, famous bird-man and founding member of the Royal Ornithological Union, sounded the alarm on the ‘menace’ that was the ‘domestic cat gone wild’. Campbell proposed nothing less than a complete cat annihilation scheme. Yet while bird-man Campbell wanted them gone, farmers and homeowners like Patch’s human actually didn’t mind having a snake-killing cat or two around the place, a fatal snake bite being one of the many settler anxieties attached to the Aussie bush.

But did you know, Antone, that some of the first cats brought to Australia were actually someone’s beloved companions? The Reverend Richard Johnson sailed on the Golden Grove, the First Fleet’s store ship, with his new wife Mary, his servant Thomas Barnes and his two cats, Miss Puss and Mr Puss. The two pusses helped to fill Johnston’s days onboard, providing a much-needed distraction from his godly duties and what would have been the foul miasma of hundreds of warm bodies cooped up together for months on a smallish wooden ship. Of his cats, he wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘my little cats were very well and vastly entertaining’.

And some of our most famous Australians, the ones we craft myths and legends about, brought cats into their homes. People like Mr Cricket himself, Sir Don Bradman, our national balladeer, Henry Lawson, beloved 19th-century cartographer Matthew Flinders, and our post-war PM Robert Menzies, just to name a few. These famous Aussies did not just snuggle with their cats by the fire or on the bow of a rickety wooden ship; they wrote tributes to them, invited press photographers to photograph them, and invited the nation to mourn with them when they died. Cats shaped the lives of Bradman, Lawson, Flinders and Menzies in profound ways, in ways that defy scientific quantification.

You love them, you need them, or you want them gone. Such is our complicated relationship with cats.

Now, I am going to veer a bit off course because I want to tell you why I became a historian. I will get back to the cat stuff later. I promise.

In 2012, when one of my lecturers sat me down to encourage me to do an honours year, they plainly stated that a history honours should be the road I take. ‘You should do a history honours. It makes sense’. They never really elaborated on why travelling the history route in the final year of my undergraduate Arts degree ‘made sense’, but their forthrightness convinced me to enrol and forgo a literary analysis of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River. I had, before my conversation with said lecturer, contemplated an honours in English Literature. I was planning to write a counterargument to historians who, at the time, claimed that fiction could not do the important cultural and political work of history. It could not tell the truth.

Looking back on that lecturer’s advice, I now understand why they offered it. To them, an academic historian, history was the place where the truth of Australia’s past lay. Via rigorous inquiry and meticulous footnoting, historians unearthed the real and raw moments, events and people that made up our kaleidoscopic past. Historians peeled back the layers of myth, legend, and obfuscation laid down by centuries of propagandists and storytellers, giving us the unvarnished truth. Historians weren’t storytellers; they were truthtellers.

But some historians get it wrong: they do tell stories. Historians are storytellers. We take the detritus of the past - the stuff we left behind-and to make it recognisable to people in the present, to give it shape and meaning, we tell stories about it. Because storytelling is a medium we humans understand. It is a deeply human enterprise. And just like fictional storytellers, we make choices about the stories we tell, and these choices matter.

I was once asked what sort of contributions historians make to the world. The individual asking the question was firmly of the view that a generalist arts degree was a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money, equipping the graduate with useless skills and ‘woke’ knowledge that has zero purchase in the ‘real’ world. ‘Well, I responded. ‘I may never be a rich woman, but I know lots of cool historical facts’.

When I walked away from this exchange, I formulated a different response. As a professional who traffics in words, I can change and reshape worlds. Stories are powerful; they shape who we are as individuals and as national and global citizens. Words can create a seismic shift in our thinking, and they can compel us to act. Words and stories matter.

Antone, you are a storyteller, too and the words you use and the stories you tell have the power to influence and shape minds, to create new worlds of meaning. As I mentioned earlier, I am not writing to you to refute your arguments. I don’t believe that cats should be ‘outlawed’ in Australia, but I understand why you do. I get it.

My concern, and what keeps me up late at night, is the words that many ecologists, journos and politicians use, the emotive language of ‘outlaws’, ‘invasive predators’, ‘killers’, of ‘corpulent, slinking things’. These words are not neutral vehicles of knowledge and understanding. They tell a story, they create worlds of meaning, and they elicit big feelings. Try to not picture the most monstrous beast when you see the word ‘invasive predator’.

You see, Antone, the readers of your words are not just conjuring monstrous beasts in their minds; they are formulating ways of fighting them. Words can compel action, and sometimes these actions can have catastrophic consequences. Cruelty toward cats and other introduced species has a long and dark history in this country, a cruelty that is emboldened and justified by repeated demonisation of the animals we brought here but later decided were surplus to our needs.

But it is not just governments and conservationists doing the killing. Australia has a sordid history of cat vigilantism, too, with everyday Australians taking it upon themselves to ‘save’ Australia’s native wildlife. Elena Filipczyk, in their brilliant article for ABC Religion and Ethics, argues that via the semantics of animal cruelty perpetuated by governments and others, the social license to kill has been passed around society. ‘Not only do individuals know they can get away with killing for convenience, they believe they’re providing a beneficial service to Australia in doing so’, they wrote in 2023.

So, when a commenter on Facebook writes underneath your shared SMH opinion piece that ‘the only good cat is a dead cat’, they are not writing about an abstract thing because many cats - both beloved family members and so-called ‘ferals’ - have been killed by patriotic Facebook users. Check out the Cat Busters on Facebook if you want proof of this.

When I see articles like yours, Antone, I don’t get angry like ‘the only cat is a dead cat’ commenter. I get worried, very, very worried. I fear for the life of my beloved Poppy and of my neighbourhood cat, who paws at my door for biscuits at 5am and is the friendliest boy you will ever meet. Did I tell you about his face, his cute-as-a-button face!? And I worry for all my fellow cat parents who are probably worried too, and bracing themselves for yet another tranche in the Australia ‘cat wars’. This war is particularly dirty, where people with cats are often forced to defend their choice to love them.

You see, cat lovers are forced to explain their love time and time again. Try explaining your love - this monumental, life-changing love - to those who, over centuries of imbibing the semantics of cruelty, have positioned your love as untenable, unconscionable, unsustainable, and worst of all, un-Australian. It is like shouting into the void.

The way I see it, loving a cat makes you human; it makes you feel fully alive.

Now I am not saying that you are not a moral person if you don’t love a cat. But there is something truly special about those people - both now and in the past - who continue to love and care for cats even when their environmentalist friends shout at them to stop. I have spent a fair amount of time in the human-feline archive, and there are so many stories of people, many of them women, who dedicated their lives, often facing ridicule and abuse, to love and care for the cats that no one wanted. Hundreds of Australians still do. These are extraordinary human beings, no less heroic or Australian than the men and women fighting to save our native wildlife.

I often say that I wrote my book, The Cats of Australia - did I tell you that I wrote a book? - for all the cats and all the cat-lovers. But I wrote it for you, too, Antone. I wrote it for all Australians. I wrote this history because I wanted to tell a different story about cats in Australia, one that highlights the many ways that cats shaped us and us them. Yes, we have vilified them, and still do, but we have also loved them, obsessed over them and cried big, ugly tears when they died. And they have loved us too, obsessed over, and bonded with us in the most profound, life-changing ways. This is the story I wanted to tell, and I believe it is worth telling. Because, whether we like it or not, cats were a big part of our history, and our cat-human relationship can tell us so much about who we are and who we want to be.

I knew what I wanted to be the moment I signed up to be a historian. I wanted to be a storyteller. Because with our stories we create and re-create worlds, mine just happen to be cat-shaped.

Yours,

Jodie Stewart

Cat Historian

P.s You can pre-order my book The Cats of Australia here

Image: Poppy and me. Ours is the biggest, most monumental love. Photo credit: Peter Whiter/DoubleTake Photography

[Image: What is more Australian than feeding your pet kangaroo - and cat and dog- under your Hills Hoist?, c.1969 National Archives of Australia.]

Scrolling through social media on a lazy Thursday evening, I came across a post from one of the many Australia-themed Facebook sites. I usually scroll right on by, trying to avoid the racist drivel dressed up as benign patriotism that some of these posts contain, but something caught my eye. It was a dog. Yes, a dog. Amongst the collection of items and sentient beings amassed to represent Australia, including the thong, a koala and Vegemite, was a blue heeler.

The blue heeler’s inclusion in a digitally manufactured roll call of Australianess is really no surprise. Even though the Australian Cattle Dog is not technically listed as a ‘native species’, it has been inducted into the hallowed halls of all things Australian due to the animal’s long history of faithful service on Australian farms. The global phenomenon Bluey has also helped cement the Australian Cattle Dog as a robust, fur-shaped symbol of Australia and our unique identity, one forged in the bush but also easily transplanted to the Australian suburban home and family. ABC fan-favourite, Muster Dogs, has also given the Australian Cattle Dog and working dogs more broadly a boost, fostering a whole new generation of Australians emotionally invested in the lives of regional Australians and their hard-working dogs.

With the popularity of cartoon juggernaut Bluey and ABC ratings winner Muster Dogs, no one would argue against the inclusion of the Blue Heeler and other working dogs in the pantheon of Australian national identity. But what about cats? Will there ever come a day when the humble moggie will take pride of place on a ‘This is Australia’ AI-generated meme? Will cats ever be afforded a place in our national imaginary, in our national histories and stories? Will cats ever be embraced as uniquely ‘ours’?

[ Image: one of the many ‘Australia’ memes doing the rounds on Facebook]

—----------------------------------------------------

I love her far horizons

I love her jewelled sea

Her beauty and her terror –

The wide brown land for me!

- Dorothea Mackellar, 1908

In 1904, a homesick young writer, Dorothea Mackellar, penned the words to a poem that would come to symbolise the deep love that many Australians felt for their country. Mackellar was visiting England when she wrote these now-famous words, and the poem first appeared in the London Spectator in 1908. The poem, first titled ‘Core of My Heart’, also speaks to the strange sort of love that European transplants like her - a third-generation Scot - could feel for a place that is ancestrally distant. That does not ‘run in your veins’. In the first stanza, she writes:

The love of field and coppice

Of green and shaded lanes

Of ordered woods and gardens

Is running in your veins --

Strong love of grey-blue distance

Brown streams and soft dim skies...

I know, but cannot share it,

My love is otherwise.

For Mackellar, a love of country was located in the forests and ‘misted-mountains’ belonging to the Wonnarua peoples, an ownership that her poem hints at but never acknowledges. Generations of mainly white Australians would quote, study, and perform Mackellar’s poem and, within its now iconic verse, find a language to articulate their own strange, spectral love for the vast, terrifying, and heartbreakingly beautiful continent that would come to be called Australia by the British.

Mackellar’s poem also spoke to the country’s uniqueness at a time when the newly federated nation was attempting to construct an identity separate from its colonial forebears. The mountains, sea, and vast brown lands, once perceived as an impenetrable wall of savagery and hidden dangers by many European ‘settlers’, were now a thing to be proud of and feel a deep and profound love for. Those lands so ruthlessly taken from Indigenous peoples were so very different from the ‘ordered woods and gardens’ of mother England. Because of this, the ‘terror’ of Australia’s boom-and-bust ecology and its diverse palette of daub greens, greys, reds and browns, as well as sparkly blue, was to be embraced and celebrated.

***

‘I have never been without a cat…She and I have been friends for many years but always on the understanding of complete equality - truly Australian’. - Tom Hudson, ABC Weekly, 1949

Forty-one years after Mackellar wrote the poem that would come to symbolise white Australia’s spectral love of country, Tom Hudson, writing for the ABC Weekly magazine, wrote about the unconquerable qualities of the domestic cat, waxing lyrical about this supposedly cantankerous feline predilection, stating that it was ‘truly Australian’. Of his ‘feline aristocrat’ Persian ‘Tina of Tain’, he states that ‘she understands me perfectly, yet on many occasions, when I have been desirous of showing her off, she flatly refuses to humour me’. There was no possible way that Tom could bend Tina of Tain to his will; instead, they entered into a relationship of carefully negotiated boundaries. There is no master/servant dynamic when you live with a cat, at least the human will never be master. In a ‘new’ land where democracy and the fair go reigned, the ‘unconquerable’ qualities of the humble domestic cat appeared closer to the tenets of Australian egalitarianism than the blind love and unwavering fealty offered by dogs.

In 1949, it would not have been an outlandish proposition to suppose that the relationship between a man and a cat resembled something close to good old Aussie mateship. In 1949, we were yet to enter the age of full-throttle war on Australia’s cats, and it was not uncommon to see lots of quaint news articles about free-roaming cats doing quirky and cute things, without the caveat that those cats were also killers. But something changed as the nation moved toward a new century and a new understanding of the precarity of the continent’s fragile ecosystems that stretch across its wide brown land.

***

‘To encourage cats is to discourage Australia’ - Eric Rolls, Sun-Herald, 23 January 1994.

In 1992, ‘feral cats’ were included on the threatening species list as a key threatening process under the Federal government’s Endangered Species Protection Act (1992). The honour of being a threatening species included having a target placed firmly on your back, with your status as ‘threatening process’ triggering a plan of action called a Threat Abatement Plan (TAP).

In the 90s, politicians across all levels of government would also aim their rifle sights at the domestic cat, igniting what some would come to call the ‘great cat debate’ that raged across the mainstream print media, television, schools and even within the pages of our young adult fiction. As Elizabeth Hutchins stated of her 1994 children’s novel Matter of Cats, it was a success ‘perhaps because the cat problem was the flavour of the month at the time’. These debates would pit ‘cat owners’ against ‘conservationists’ in a so-called ‘war’ that would divide communities and impact the lives of scores of innocent cats.

At this time, the humble moggie emerged as a thoroughly un-Australian evil that once unleashed on MacKellar’s wide brown land and far horizons gobbled up everything in its wake. Conservationists also emerged as noble but sometimes beleaguered heroes in the race to save Australia’s native species, the very creatures that filled up our national pantheon and who we could claim as wholly ours. In 1992, a writer to the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that conservationist and proprietor of Warrawong sanctuary, John Wamsley, be elected president of the new republic. Walmsley would infamously wear a cat skin hat to the South Australian tourism awards to protest against state laws that forbid him from shooting ‘feral cats’ on his property in the Murray Mallee. In response to the issue of cat management, he stated that it wasn’t his job to ‘teach Australians how to be Australian’.

Oh yeah, the 1990s also featured pretty heated discussions about Australia severing ties with the British Monarchy and becoming an independent Republic. These debates played out in the lead-up to a national referendum in which Australians were asked to vote on two proposed changes to the constitution: whether Australia should become a Republic and whether the constitution should be altered to include a Preamble.

In 2003, Historian Mark McKenna critically examined the many draft preambles crafted in the lead-up to the republican referendum. Many, written by some of Australia’s foremost literary figures, waxed lyrical about the land and our unerring love for it.

He noted that Australia was the only nation that had sought to explain its love of country through constitutional language. But this love was a tenuous one, founded as it was on the illegal and immoral seizure of Indigenous lands. As McKenna argued, the preamble became a ‘moral charter’ ‘grounded in a sense of place’. The only problem was that this place that scores of Australians had grown to love and even die for was the ‘site of the greatest moral dilemma in Australian history - the land that was taken without negotiation, treaty or consent from Aboriginal people’.

At this time, there was also a growing appreciation of Indigenous histories and cultures, and of Indigenous knowledge systems that spanned the length and breadth of the vast continent and stretched deep into its millennial strata. The 200-odd years of British and European history on the continent started to look more and more fragile in the face of 60,000 years of Indigenous occupation.

In the 90s in Australia, the settler nation was once again grappling with its identity as a country founded on the theft of Indigenous land and the attempted erasure of its first peoples. How to belong was a perennial question ‘grounded’ in Indigenous and settler conceptions of land. In many ways, older settler anxieties prevailed, with many setting their sights on ‘Asian immigration’, on resisting historical revision and Indigenous claims to sovereignty. The delineation between who could make legitimate claims to national belonging and who could not was once again violently reasserted.

So, how do you love a country that was so cruelly and unjustly taken from its first peoples? How do you love a place that is not ancestrally yours, that does not run in your veins?

For settler nations like Australia, the answer is simple: you disappear evidence of prior occupation, you silence its first peoples. You manufacture belonging by proclaiming and then expelling what does not belong. In Australia, we define and police what is considered Australian and what is not. This process of deciding who can and cannot belong is not a benign operation but an expression of biopower, as French historian Michel Foucault put it. Modern biopower differs from the outward violence of the pre-modern state, being exercised in more subtle ways through forms of governmentality such as modern laws and policies, and through our healthcare and justice systems. Yet the outcome is the same. As Foucault put it, ‘to make live and let die’. Put simply, those who police the borders of the modern nation-state can make some populations thrive, while others wither.

The biopolitics of cat management is underpinned by the same nationalist ideologies but manifests with more overt forms of violence and control. Cats are ‘feral’ invaders, so they must be violently expelled. Trap ‘em, shoot’em, poison ‘em. Moreover, those who love them and seek to care for and advocate for them are deemed thoroughly un-Australian. As an environmentalist and historian, Eric Rolls stated in 1994, at the height of the ‘great cat debates’. ‘To encourage cats is to discourage Australia’.

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‘Even as a child I remember having a cat…all my life I’ve known them, and I consider them as much a part of Australian life as anything else’ - Caroline Burns, Submission, Inquiry Into The Management of Cat Populations in New South Wales, October 2024.

Caroline Burns’ response to the 2024 inquiry into cat management in New South Wales is striking in its simplicity. Cats have always been a part of her life, even as a child. The experience of cat companionship is interspersed between other life experiences, so much so that they are indistinguishable from what she views as ‘Australian life’. Burns writes, ‘ I consider them as much a part of Australian life as anything else.. football, cricket, little aths, school, the old lab and the clever old cat’.

The short submissions to the inquiry, 740 of them, are filled with expressions of love and compassion for cats. Cats are spoken of as ‘beloved pets’ and companions and as providing invaluable support to the state’s most vulnerable. Moreover, compassion is viewed as a defining characteristic of modern ‘western’ states, and its absence is an affront to our status as a nation. As an anonymous respondent put it, ‘Animal cruelty has no place in a country like Australia’.

Australia, as a modern nation-state, was founded on the perpetuation of abject cruelty. One could argue that cruelty is the defining feature of the contemporary nation. In Australia, this very modern cruelty impacted the lives of many, including Indigenous people, women, non-European migrants, LGBTQI+ folks, people with disabilities and animals. Native and non-native animals were killed en masse, including what we now cherish as beloved symbols of the nation, animals like the platypus, koala and kangaroo. Many non-native species were considered ‘surfeit’, invasive’, and a ‘pest’ and were dispensed with in sometimes violent and inhumane ways. Cats were thrown into hessian bags and drowned, and kittens were placed in biscuit boxes with tissues infused with chloroform. When a dog misbehaved, it was taken out the back and shot. The kids were told it simply ‘ran away’.

Unfortunately, this violence is not a thing of the past. Cats are still killed en masse, but not in biscuit tins or hessian sacks, but in council pounds and in the country’s remote areas, and on our islands where to be feral is to have a target on your back.

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‘I can’t stand by while Australia loses what makes it unique’ - anonymous submission, Inquiry Into The Management of Cat Populations in New South Wales, October 2024.

Compassion is not unique to Australia, but at times it feels in short supply. Moreover, globally, empathy feels like it is drying up faster than an Australian dam in summer. In the absence of compassion and kindness, hate and violence proliferate.

We are told that to overcome hate, you need to counteract its destructive force with hate’s opposite, love. And we have seen incredible displays of love and compassion in the wake of overwhelming state-sanctioned authoritarian violence. Love, although, is not an all-encompassing thing. We can say we love our diverse communities whilst demanding an end to ‘mass migration’. We can say we love and respect women whilst ignoring and refusing to advocate for an end to male violence. We can consider ourselves a compassionate nation whilst denying entry to thousands seeking asylum. As the PM John Howard said in 2001, ‘We are a generous, open-hearted country…but we will decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come’

We can also say we love animals while advocating for the cruel slaughter of non-native species. As Kellie Kanaar asked in her inquiry submission, ‘How can we spend hours enjoying their antics online and then turn around and say murdering them is OK??’

We can say all of these things because this is how nations and nationalism works. Violence and hate sit at the core of who we are as a modern nation. We police our borders by expelling what we perceive as ‘foreign’ and ‘other’. We can justify this exercise of biopower by positioning the ‘other’ as ‘wrong’, ‘evil’ and a threat to ‘our way of life’ and to the nation. ‘Australia is at risk of being swamped by Asians’, ‘Native title holders are coming for your beach-side bungalow’, ‘cats are evil’, ‘cats are a scourge’.

But it doesn’t need to be this way. We can conceptualise what it means to be Australian in a different way. We can start thinking and acting with care. We can build communities of care and respect and truly rebrand ourselves as a compassionate nation. This would mean valuing the lives of every sentient being that populates this wide brown land, not just because they are our companions, our neighbours or our friends, but because they have contributed to this country we love and continue to do so in a myriad of ways that add richness and depth to our lives and the lives of millions of others. We do not exist in a hermetically sealed bubble of our own making; we are part of a wide and profoundly rich web of connections to people, places and animals. We exist not because of ‘others’ but in relation and communion with them.

I cannot think of a better way to express my Australianess than hugging my cat. My profound love for her, my compassion and humanity are what make me who I am. She and I are connected in ways that transcend narrow conceptions of nations and nationalism. When I love her, my world expands, and I can imagine what my world and the place I call home might look like. This home, my home, would not exist without cats in it. And this, to me, is Australia.

May the purrs be long and the cuddles deep,

Yours,

Jodie Stewart

Cat Historian

Dr. Rowan Cahill has written extensively on radical left activism in Australia and has been an active participate in some of Australia’s foremost social justice movements. If you want to read Dr Rowan Cahill’s very awesome work you can visit his website.

Two weeks ago, I submitted my manuscript, almost eighteen months after I made that cat-filled decision to write a book. It has been a hell of a journey, and most of it has been spent in my tracky dacks (tracksuit/sweatpants for those outside of Oz).

Writing makes you feel all the feels, and today I am feeling a bit retrospective. So here is what I have learned from my many months writing about cats in Australia's past.

Writing is not for everyone because the world is a shitty dumpster fire.

Being afforded the opportunity to research and write while my partner took care of the breadwinning was a privilege, and one seldom afforded to others. The opportunity to take almost eighteen months off paid work* to dick around with cats is an opportunity many would have to forgo. I was fortunate not to have to work and write, as my partner earns a wage that comfortably supports both of us. I remember and check my privilege every day.

Writing is equal parts exhilarating and f**king painful.

When you are in the zone, that glorious space where words flow effortlessly, and where the backdrop to your life is the satisfying click of keys; writing feels like a warm hug from your lavender-soap-smelling grandmother. But when the words do not come, and you are faced with an eerie silence, it can feel like the sludgy depths of hell. Writer's block feels like your innards are being squeezed in a vice by one of the devil's minions who is also shouting, 'you suck, and you are really stupid' directly into your face.

Some days, I wrote a thousand perfectly placed words that, once re-read, jumped off the page and danced before me. Other days, I wrote and re-wrote the same scrappy, ill-conceived fifty words, over and over again. I had more scrappy fifty-word-a-day days than melodious thousand-a-day ones.

Writing can be really bloody lonely, but it doesn't have to be

Choosing writing as a vocation can be an introvert's dream, and after spending most of my working life avoiding the water cooler - I mean, why are workplaces so peoply - the opportunity to spend several months alone with my cat felt like I had won the lottery. But after several months with only my feline colleague for company, I started to feel pretty isolated. It also dawned on me that I actually don't like being alone with my thoughts. I mean, Poppy is a great work colleague, don't get me wrong, but she spent an inordinate amount of time sleeping, which meant I had no one to actively listen to my workplace woes.

When an ex-colleague reached out and offered to mentor me, I jumped at the chance. This ex-colleague is a prolific writer and dead-set legend - he was once deemed an enemy of the state for refusing to sign up to America's war in Vietnam. He fought for his own right to not be reduced to cannon fodder, and the rights of hundreds of others also. Dead-set legend. Rowan and I spoke every week over FaceTime, sometimes twice a week and messaged and emailed regularly. We would chat about my work and his, but also other stuff like where to find the very best pie and the joys of a good counter-meal at the local club.

Every writer needs a Rowan Cahill in their life; without him, I would still be stewing in my own illogical thoughts of failure and would not have been introduced to the joy of culinary conversations.

My feline work colleague slept most of the day. So too did WWII camp cat, Troppo pictured above [State Library of Victoria, ca.1943]

Writing makes you feel gloriously alive but also dead inside.

The mind expansion that comes from learning new things is a feeling like no other. I remember my years as an undergraduate, moving through the world with a new, fancy vocabulary and an expansive body of knowledge. I knew things, big important things and it felt bloody good. The world that I had inhabited for thirty-odd years started to make sense. In university classrooms, all those marbles that had been rattling around my brain just fell into place. I remember sitting in a modern European history lecture thinking, ' Ah, that is why the world is so f**ked'.

Writing is also a mind-expanding exercise, each key stroke bringing you closer to God. Well, the vocabulary/knowledge gods. Writing is also exhausting, and after days of writing and re-writing the same fifty words, you can feel hollowed out and totally spent. I would often alight from my office chair and wander aimlessly from room to room, wondering what I had done with my life. I knew that if I didn't get the words I needed on the page, then I had failed. I would be a middle-aged woman with no job and no prospects. Too old to hire and too young to retire. Writing can engender catastrophic thinking. They should put this warning on the tin.

Writing is knowing that your work will always be a little bit shit.

I took WAY too long to write my PhD solely because I could not bring myself to hit the submit button. I harboured the belief that every word I wrote was utter crap, and that my examiners would be compelled to email my supervisor and inquire about who gave this woman entry to a higher degree. I felt that I hadn't done enough. My research was flawed, my writing was immature, and I needed more time to add extra scholarship, double-check my arguments and assertions, and polish my writing.

I finally let go, five years after enrolling and after much counselling from an actual counsellor and my very patient supervisor. I passed without amendments and an examiner's commendation. My PhD won the faculty prize. I still think it's pretty shit.

The very excellent John Birmingham states that the state of 'not letting go' is a common affliction for 'baby writers' like me. The fear is very, very real, particularly in the age of social media, when a thousand strangers, tucked behind the safety of their computer screens, feel emboldened to heap hate and scorn on those with whom they disagree or even find mildly annoying. Moreover, the hordes of judgey strangers are way more menacing if you are a member of a marginalised community. Social media is a dangerous place for many.

I still think much of my writing is pretty shit, but I have learned to live with this voice in my head, and my excellent counsellor worked with me to develop strategies to turn the volume down just enough to keep me from plummeting into the depths of despair. Oh, and to also hit the submit button. As John Birmingham so eloquently states, 'you don't have to finish with the work in the metaphysical sense. You just have to finish with the motherfucker'.

Writing is better with a cat

I get to spend every day doing something I love and focusing on a subject I'm passionate about. And I was able to perform this passion project with a cat by my side. What a gift. We should all be given the opportunity to do what we love and to be supported - financially, emotionally, metaphysically - to do it. How many of us travel to a place we hate to perform a job we despise, only to have to get up the next day and do it all again, wash and repeat until they usher us out the door with old age and hopefully a decent retirement party. If we are lucky, we might land a job a bit less shit, but we'll still inevitably find ourselves crying in our car as the minutes tick down to 9am and clock-on time. Or maybe that was just me….

I knew that I had landed on a job I loved because I met every new day with a feeling of hope and purpose, and a bloody big smile on my face. I found the act of writing hard, but I was writing about something I truly cared about, which motivated me to move forward every day. As a wise woman once told me, 'Do something that lights a fire in you. Because how else are you going to blaze a trail?'.

As I continue on into writing adolescence and eventual adulthood, I hope that the backing track to my life is the busy clacking of keys accompanied by my cat’s gentle purrs. This, my friend, would make the most exquisite music.

May the purrs be long and the cuddles deep,

Yours

Jodie Stewart

Cat Historian.

* I was paid an advance by my publisher based on how many copies of my book they predict I will sell. If I was living alone, financially supporting myself (and my cat) this would not have been enough to cover my living expenses. Publishing advances seldom do, unless you are Stephen King or Liane Moriarty whose books sell into the millions.

And when they made the announcement, besides the author, illustrator, and probably the publisher, I reckon I was the most excited of all. Do you know why? Because the NSS book for 2025 was The Truck Cat, authored by Deborah Frenkel and illustrated by Danny Snell. Yep, a book about a cat!

Image: Front cover of The Truck Cat by Deborah Frenkell and Danny Snell. Courtesy of Hardie Grant publishers

The book focuses on Tinka and his human companion, Yacoub. Yacoub is a new migrant to Australia who is spending many long and lonely hours driving his very large B-double truck across the country. Tinka is the sweet cat who shares his cabin and his experience of transience. As a truck cat, Tinka's homes are many motels, rest-stop huts, truck depots, and the cabin of Yacoub's B-double tri-axle truck. As a cat with no fixed address, Tinka's home is 'everywhere'. Yacoub is attempting to build a home in a new land while navigating a life that is constantly on the move. Yacoub is also forced to navigate life being a stranger in a strange place. The people that Yacoub encounters ‘didn't always understand…his jokes, his words. His silences'. Yacoub struggles to find a social and cultural anchor to tether himself and rebuild his sense of self. But he has Tinka by his side, a furry traveller who likes nothing more than to purr on his lap in the moonlight. At its heart, The Truck Cat is about home, belonging and identity. It is also a story about migration and the role that animals play in this often traumatic story.

This book is pretty special because cats don't usually appear in stories of migration. But they really should.

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In 2003, a Palestinian man, Aladdin Sisalem, was the last remaining asylum seeker on Manus Island. Sisalem would wait ten lonely months before being granted asylum and reaching Australian shores. The Green Left Media reported that, at the time, the then immigration minister, Philip Ruddock, told the media that there were no longer any detainees on Manus Island, in turn silencing Sisalem and his story. Sisalem reported that he suffered physical and psychological abuse during his detention.

But Sisalem was not alone. He was kept company by a Manus Island stray, a cat called Honey. Honey was Sisalem's constant companion and, as he told the Age on July 10, 2004, a reminder that 'there was still something very good in life'. In June 2004, Sisalem was released and flown to Melbourne, but was forced to leave Honey behind.

Aladdin Sisalem ended up on Manus in an Australian immigration detention centre due to what the Australian Human Rights Commission called one of the strictest immigration detention regimes in the world. The policy of offshore detention of people seeking asylum in Australia was first introduced in 2001 by the Howard government and has been supported and funded by successive governments ever since. The Pacific Solution was a series of policies that included offshore processing of asylum seekers on excised islands, including Nauru and Manus Island, mandatory and indefinite detention, and temporary protection visas. This suite of policies was a response to the Tampa Affair and the Child Overboard controversy, where Howard and his immigration ministers wrongfully accused refugees of throwing their children overboard in an attempt to coerce Australian Naval officers into rescuing them. Both these events resulted in a media storm and fear among some about so-called 'illegal immigrants'. Many argued, like Anthropologist Ghassan Hage, that mainstream media and conservative responses to these events represented a dominant culture of 'worrying' about white Australia and protecting its borders from so-called 'non-white' others.

Australia has a long history of 'worrying' about white Australia. The first Act of the newly federated government in 1901 was one designed to enshrine the notion of white Australia into law. The White Australia policy was the banner term used to describe a suite of policies enacted to restrict immigration from non-British countries and to control the lives of Indigenous peoples. The White Australia policy was not officially dismantled until the late 1970s when an official policy of Multiculturalism was introduced. The post-WWII era is often seen as a time when white Australia ever so slowly and painfully moved toward a more multicultural society. After the Second World War, chronic labour shortages and the fear of invasion, exacerbated by a relatively empty continent, resulted in significant changes to Australian immigration policies. Although the White Australia policy was still in place, the federal government implemented policies to enable passage for migrants from non-British backgrounds. The slogan 'Populate or Perish', popularised by the then immigration minister Arthur Calwell, was also used to persuade Australians, those that had grown up under the dictates of White Australia, to accept the large in-take of migrants that were coming to the country from places like Greece, Italy, Malta, Yugoslavia and Albania.

In the post-war period, close to two million migrants arrived in Australia. This influx of people fundamentally transformed Australian society. But it wasn't just people arriving by sea and sky seeking a new home; cats were there also. After the Second World War, the Australian government rolled back federal quarantine laws forbidding the entry of animals from the United Kingdom. The changes to these laws meant that if you were migrating to Australia from the UK, New Zealand, Eire or Northern Ireland, you could bring your beloved pet with you. If you were migrating from anywhere else, you were dang out of luck. The cost of transporting your pet and the quarantine fees were also prohibitive. Many migrants were forced to leave their companion animals behind. However, some were more than happy to pay for their pouch or pusses' passage. In 1951, for example, a customs officer reported that British migrants had brought over 1,100 cats and dogs, forking out more than fifty thousand pounds to get them there. This is a reassuring and hopeful story of migration and cats in post-war Australia. But not all stories are good ones. Cats were weaponized, often by the mainstream media, to tell more pernicious stories about migrants, particularly migrants from non-British backgrounds.

In 1950, the Mildura RAAF training base was set up on Melbourne University campus in regional Victoria to accommodate two thousand displaced people from Eastern Europe. In 1952, the place was reportedly overrun with cats. In April 1952, the Sunraysia Daily reported that an estimated 300 cats were wandering around the Mildura migrant centre. Moreover, according to the article, immigration authorities and police were grappling with what to do with this burgeoning feline population, with fears that if something wasn't done, people living close to the centre would 'face an invasion of cats'. According to the Sunraysia Daily, many migrants brought cats with them to the centre. These migrant cats probably provided essential companionship and may have even helped the residents feel more at home in what were foreign and alienating places for many.

On Monday, April 21, 1952, the Sunraysia Daily also reported that although the residents took their cats with them, they left behind 'many cat families' when they left the centre. In 1952, the tendency for cat numbers to proliferate was not an issue confined to migrant centres in regional Victoria. Either was cat abandonment. Kittens and cats being dumped in bushland or on the outskirts of major towns and cities were common. Cats were also often left to breed unchecked on farms and industrial areas, leading to burgeoning and allegedly troublesome populations. The primary concern for police and administrators, according to the April article, was cats wandering off and causing a 'nuisance' to nearby residents when the centre was closed. Two days later, on April 23, the Sunraysia Daily reported that a health inspector from the Mildura Shire was planning to visit the centre. Mr A Gillies stated before his visit that the cats were a 'danger to health and must be watched carefully'. RSPCA and Animal Welfare League representatives agreed that the cats should be humanely euthanised. Mrs Tratham from the Victorian Cat Protection Society was supposedly 'disgusted' to learn that the cats were left behind in the first place.

In September 1952, Mr Gillies visited the site of the migrant centre again. This time, all the migrants were gone; in their place were cadets from the Women's Royal Australian Army Corps (WRAAC). In July 1952, the cadet training school opened at the site of the previous migrant centre. In a report to the council, Mr Gillies noted that everything was satisfactory at the school except for a growing population of cats. This report by the council employee was the second report about the site; the first was to report that ‘few cats’ were sighted in the area. When the Sunraysia Daily reported on Mr Gillies' visit to the cadet school, they noted that he had also visited the site several months previously when their newspaper reported that 300 cats had been left behind by migrants. The Friday, September 5 article stated that 'Mr Gillies made an inspection of the migrant camp but stated that the 'newspaper report was exaggerated'.

Many of the European migrants who were held at the Mildura Migrant Centre from 1950 to 1952 contributed to the town's labour economy, working on local infrastructure projects and on local farms. Many migrants settled in the area, contributing to the social and cultural life of the district as well. As the Sunraysia Daily admitted, the migrant contribution to the area did not include gifting the WRAAC or the people of Mildura 300 cats. The migrant cats Mildura acquired were likely those that migrant families took with them and integrated into their homes. Migrants may have also had a role to play in caring for Mildura's 'unwanted' cats, a population of supposedly 'surfeit' felines that, given the prevalence of 'stray' cat populations, existed before the Commonwealth and Victorian state governments set up their migrant centres. Even if it was true that migrants had left 'cat families' behind, some may have had no choice but to leave them at the camp, given that many migrants moved from camps to equally cramped, segregated hostels. Moreover, the cats left behind were probably cared for by the remaining camp residents, which is indicated in the article, with authorities allegedly concerned with who would feed the cats once the camp was closed.

Almost fifty years later, 'stray' cats would enter the migrant story again. In June 2004, when Aladdin Sisalem was forced to leave his beloved Honey behind on the island of Manus, he was bereft. His obvious distress, compounded by his detainment, prompted some to campaign for the Manus Islands stray to be reunited with her human companion. One of the chief campaigners was the then leader of the Democrats, Andrew Bartlett. After Sisalem received his five-year protection visa, Bartlett argued that Sisalem had just as much right as any other Australian to bring a companion animal into the country. In July 2004, Sisalem and Honey were reunited. With Honey by his side, Sisalem could finally commence the process of adjusting to life in Australia ‘I just feel now like I am completely released from the detention centre… Now that she is with me I don't have to think about that part of my life anymore’, he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2004.

Image: Aladdin Sisalem and Honey the cat. Courtesy of Getty Images

The groundswell of support for Sisalem and his cat was unprecedented. Even people like right-wing commentator John Laws joined the chorus of supporters advocating for Honey to be reunited with Sisalem in Australia. Those on the right and left of the political divide saw the importance of cat companionship to a man who had suffered the worst indignities of Australia's punitive and harsh policy of offshore detention. A cat named Honey provided a way for many divergent groups to work together on an issue that historically divided them. That cats can provide vital companionship, love, and friendship is something we can all agree on.

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In an interview with the Guardian on May 15, author of The Truck Cat Deborah Frenkel stated that when she meets young readers, many are impelled to talk with her about the animals in their lives. ‘I'm hearing a lot [about]... the various exploits of everyone's cat and dog’, Frenkel told the Guardian. As I have discussed in a previous Substack, in children’s literature, animals are a gentle way to discuss not-so-gentle topics. In The Truck Cat, the purry exploits of a cat called Tinka provide the backdrop to a more serious story about the traumatic disruptions and dislocations of migration. This is not just a ‘migrant’ story, but it is also a thoroughly Australian one, given the nation's sordid history of racially motivated immigration policies. Yacoub’s discomfort and feelings of isolation are a product of an anxious nation that is still invested, culturally, socially, and via its legal system, in policing its borders.

Many new migrants from non-British countries that arrived in Australia post-war came up against the hard edges of white Australia that was not only enshrined in law but also enmeshed in the dominant culture. In 2025, almost fifty years after the White Australia policy was dismantled, its ghost still haunts an anxious nation, to use Hage's analogy. In 2025, with the rise of right-wing politics and authoritarian governments across the globe, the rights of non-white migrants are becoming more tenuous. Australia is no exception. If anything, The Truck Cat is an opportunity to have gentle discussions about a topic that has never been more pressing. As more and more people are forced to navigate punitive and militant immigration policies, it is vital to have discussions that centre people's humanity and their right to feel at home wherever they land. It is never too soon to start these discussions. Moreover, I believe that cats would not mind at all if they were centered in these vital conversations. All those cats, past and present, that have been loved and cared for by thousands of beautifully complex humans from a range of different backgrounds – ages, religions, sexuality, ethnicity, race – would want it to be so. I really believe that to be true.

May the purrs be long and the cuddles deep.

Yours,

Jodie Stewart

Cat Historian

'My mum hates cats.'

It was said just like that, a matter of fact, no malice, just the cold truth. I was sitting in my living room, and my daughters and niece were milling around in the kitchen, readying themselves for a swim at our local beach. It was a glorious spring day, sunny and warm. It was one of those days pregnant with promise and the smell of coming summer. On these hope-filled days, my cat would unspool from the tight tuck of her winter sleep and could be found sprawled on the edge of my bed, her body long and lean, edging away from the slither of light and heat beaming in through the bedroom's north facing window.

My mum hates cats

My eldest was talking about how she missed her sweet furry babies, which she had reluctantly left behind to spend two weeks with us, 700 km from her new home in Melbourne. 'You should really think about adopting a cat,' I said to my niece. 'They are such a joy.'

My mum hates cats, she replied. Straight forward.

'She hates them because I love them', the voice in my head railed, that old well of resentment surging forward, pushing at my throat. I thought of all those small acts of sibling violence we have perpetrated against each other, over and over, into infinitum. The rawness of those injuries. I thought of my cat sleeping on my bed, her warm body, her soft purrs. How her nose turns pink when she is warm and content. How she reaches for me when she senses I am near. How she trusts me after years of togetherness. How she has learned to sheath her claws as she reaches out to me, her body lean and taut.

My mum hates cats

My stomach lurched.

'Why?' my eldest daughter asked. Her question was genuine, her voice low and soft.

Why?

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In my twenties, I lived in Sydney with my two elder sisters and my older sister's best friend. When I moved up from my small rural town, I was a lost and lonely country girl with few skills to equip me for life in the big city. I asked many questions, some inane, like 'Why are all these people at the mall at 12pm on a Monday', some essential and potentially lifesaving, like 'Why is there a yellow line on the train platform?'. The best friend of my sister, often fed up with my incessant questions, would respond with the infuriating quip, 'Y is a crooked letter, and you can't straighten it?'. I asked once why you couldn't straighten a 'Y', which really sent my sister's friend over the edge.

When I started my undergraduate arts degree and journeyed through honours and a PhD, I discovered that answering 'why' questions was indeed a crooked proposition. One of the reasons why I loved studying in the humanities, and history in particular, was because answering 'why' questions could take you on so many often divergent paths. Chasing down the response to 'why' often prompted further questions and more delicious searching. 'Why' is also a common question asked of undergraduate Arts students - why did the British colonise half the globe? Why did Paul Keating deliver his famous Redfern speech? For some students, it can be a deceptively easy question to answer. Moreover, nowadays, you can input your 'why' question into Google and receive an AI-generated response that you can regurgitate in tutorials. But your 'why' can also quickly evaporate like so much sea fog on a 35-degree day. In history, a 'why' question is not simply a 'why' question. Y is a crooked letter, and you can't straighten it.

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I hate cats

Why?

'Because I like dogs'

'Because cats are aloof and disloyal'

'Because dogs are heroic and cats are not. A cat never delivered lifesaving medicine to a stranded hiker on a mountainside.'

'Cats carry disease.'

'Cat kill birds, and I like birds more than cats' ( an actual person said this to me)

'I have always had dogs.'

'Because cats don't belong in Australia'.

'Cats kill 2 million native species a year.'

'There are too many cats'

'The only good cat is a dead cat.'

'The best use for a cat is a hat'.

'Evil bird-killers'

'Target practice'

'Keep your cat inside!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'

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The question of why we hate is underpinned by various historical forces and processes. Hate as an emotion manifest because we have attributed specific meanings to the object of our vitriol. The process of meaning-making is historically contingent and culturally situated. In his famous collection of essays, The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darton posits that culture shapes our thinking. Darton argued that no matter how hard we try, we will always come up against 'the outer frame of meaning'. Our hatreds do not exist in and of themselves, they form within historically and culturally contingent environments. In 1988, Darton undertook an analysis of an event that occurred in 18th-century Paris; the ritual killing of cats by a group of printer’s apprentices. Part of why this made sense to the cat-killing apprentices was because of the bundle of meanings that had been attached to the ‘harmless but necessary cat’. In early modern Europe the cat had become associated with heretical women, the devil, witchcraft, magic and even sexual deviance. In 17th century France, cats had long been associated with these diabolical symbols, an association that was several centuries in the making.

Our hatred of cats has a history. We have hated them for hundreds of years, and it is vital we understand why.

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Too much of the contemporary discussions about cats in Australia operates within an ahistorical vacuum. Discussions about cat management, for example, often occur without interrogating how we got here or how we got to the point where we now consider cats a 'problem'. There is seldom any interrogation as to why we feel the way we do about cats or why, for example, it is so easy to laugh at suggestions to place a bounty on the heads of 'feral' cats ( this actually happened. See Alex Patton, 'Animals - Us and them - The cat catastrophe - pet or pest?', Big Ideas, ABC Radio National podcast). Why do many Australians applaud the wholesale slaughter of 'feral' cats and are comfortable publicly stating that the 'only good cat is a dead cat'. How the bloody hell did we get here?

The historian's crooked 'why' question is probably the most important question to ask when discussing cats in Australia. At least, it is a bloody good starting point. We need to interrogate our feelings in an intellectually rigorous way; we need to think carefully about why we feel the way we do. We need to better understand our emotions as products of our social and cultural world, not as simple trigger points for action. If you hate cats, you must ask yourself why and deeply and thoughtfully interrogate your response. Like most quests for knowledge in the humanities, you may never reach a satisfactory ending, and the road to get there may result in further questions. But, as historically produced and culturally situated beings, we must continue asking, interrogating, and probing. That 'why' may never be straightened. And that, my friend, is a good thing.

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When my daughter asked her cousin 'why’ on that hopeful spring day, my niece paused. 'I think it is because we have always had dogs', she responded haltingly. 'There are many people who don't like cats', I sighed. 'But many people haven't been loved by a cat either', I added, 'and nearly everyone changes their mind after being loved by a cat'. 'Maybe all you need is love', my youngest chimed in. Maybe.

But did I tell you that love also has a history…

Yours

Cat historian

Image: Poppy sleeping. How could you hate that face? Seriously!

The request by the Society hit the news with articles appearing in many of the big city dailies; it also inspired a tongue-in-cheek article by popular columnist Joyce Stirling. Writing for the Brisbane Telegraph, Stirling took on the persona of a misunderstood Australian Tabby Cat to request that the Brisbane council install troughs filled with milk. Writing under the feline pseudonym, (Mrs) Tabby Cat, Spurling stated that milk had become increasingly hard to come by for Brisbane's strays due to milk bottles replacing the 'old-fashioned jug' routinely left on suburban steps. The internalised misogyny was big on this one, and the female columnist adopting the persona of a cat probably wasn't lost on the Telegraph's readers. Here was a cat/woman making positively ludicrous demands, like basic human/feline rights.

In Stirling's article, the slippage between woman and Cat is telling, and we all know how that story goes. Cats are women, women are cats. Cats are duplicitous, evil, and not to be trusted. So are women. Stray cats are monstrous with their unchecked reproduction. The power of women's reproduction - as creators of human life- is a base patriarchal fear. Cats are screechy and demanding. So are women. Returning to the Melbourne city councillors, you can hear the sneering condescension in these men's words. Here is a group of dotty middle-aged women proposing to waste taxpayers' money so little kitty cats can have a drink. Preposterous!

Anyone would think that no one was taking these women's requests seriously. Seriously!

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As a woman researching cats in Australia's past, I have become accustomed to people thinking that what I do is a bit silly. I have written previously on the broad spectrum of responses that I have received when people enquire about my research. To briefly recap, responses to my status as a Cat Historian range from wildly excited to wildly aggressive and hostile because FERAL CATS!!!!!!!! Taking a stroll through the archives, I was buoyed and profoundly irritated to find that I was not alone. Many women who have loved, cared for and written about cats have been mocked, ridiculed, or ignored. Put simply, not at all taken seriously. In 2024-25, the tide is slowly turning mainly due to the activism of self-described cat ladies who have reclaimed this title to argue for the legitimacy of the human-feline relationship and how it is intertwined with the fight for women's fundamental human rights.

The legitimacy of the human-feline relationship has also been well articulated by some brilliant authors and scholars. These writers venture into territory often off-limits to cats. Marvellous publications like the Cat Lady Manifesto by Anna Go-Go, Leigh Claire La Berge's Marx for Cats and Kathryn Hughes' Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Modern World straddle history and politics, two fields traditionally equated with serious men writing about serious stuff. The popularity of the 'Pet was/is my saviour' style memoir has also been a welcome and vital addition to the broader exploration of the human-animal relationship. Titles like Cleo: the Cat who mended a family by Helen Browne and Penguin the Magpie: the odd little bird that saved a family have hit international bestseller lists. Books that examine the evolution of the cat-human relationship have also proven popular with readers; for example, Abigail Tucker's The Lion in the Living Room topped the New York Times bestseller list in 2016.

The place where cats and other animals proliferate is children's literature. Children's literature is the natural habitat of cats, dogs and all manner of cute, absurd, colourful and fantastical creatures. Real and fantastical animals have been featured in children's literature for centuries, from Aesop and the Medieval Bestiary to Mitten and her Kittens. Stories of animals have often been used as a pedagogical tool and a way to impart assumedly universal values. Some of the most adored titles for children include animals or have animals as main characters. Some of these animal tales are pretty serious, like the title chosen for this year's National Synchronised Story Time, Deborah Frenkel and Danny Snell's Truck Cat, which explores the notion of home, displacement and belonging. However, many of the animal tales that appear in contemporary children's literature are a bit silly and play on the absurd humour that animals can provoke, particularly animals doing un-animal-like things. Taking a cursory look through some of the titles in the silly animal genre, you have Piranhas eating bananas, an Alpaca named Macca, a giraffe that can't dance, and a lama in pyjamas. Animals doing un-animal-like things are playful and fun and can provoke laughter and induce pleasure. But that does not mean a fruit-eating Piranha cannot impart moral lessons. A silly, goofy, un-Piranha-like Piranha can be an unthreatening and unassuming way to deliver a more serious moral lesson. Less didactic, more playful and fun.

Australian writer and illustrator Aaron Blabey is a behemoth of the Australian Children's Literature scene and a popular author in the silly animal genre. Blabey's titles include children's picture book favourites like Pig the Pug, Don't Call Me Bear, Thelma the Unicorn, and The Bad Guys. According to Aaron Blabey's website, the author has over 30 million books in print. Seriously!? 30 million! According to Wikipedia, Blabey is an ex-actor, carrying on the controversial tradition of actor-turned-children's author. Blabey is also the co-executive producer of the Dreamworks production Bad Guys the movie and Netflix's 2024 musical Thelma the Unicorn. Blabey's work is seriously popular, and he no doubt possesses some serious coin.

Image: Cover of Cat on the Run: Cat of Death. Courtesy of Scholastic

The Cat on the Run series is the latest addition to Blabey's sizable literary output. Cat on the Run: Episode 1, Cat of Death is a graphic novel that centres on feline protagonist, Princess Beautiful, who also happens to be the world's number one cat video star. While filming another one of her popular and 'hilarious' typing cat videos, Princess Beautiful unwittingly activates top-secret nuclear codes sent to her by shadowy hooded villains. Having your whole life online means the world watched as Princess Beautiful activated world-destroying bombs. With the world watching, Princess Beautiful's life quickly implodes. This is most inconvenient, as Princess was looking forward to her hot date with super handsome 'enlightened billionaire heir' Catrick Cash. Also, being a cat video star means that she is not prepared to dodge police cars in hot pursuit and super-judgy media types with names like Tiffany Fluffit and Chuck Melon. Princess Beautiful will have to prove that she is more than just a cat video star to survive being a cat on the run.

Cat on the Run, episode one, is expertly illustrated in typical Blabey style. The narrative is fast-paced and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. The book explores the pitfalls of social media celebrity, including the punishment that is meted out when fallible humanity gets in the way of a carefully curated public persona. When internet stars fall from grace, the punishment can be swift and punitive. Blabey demonstrates how plummeting from the heady heights of the world's most adored star can happen at the stroke of a keyboard and can lead to chaos, injury and sometimes life-ruining consequences. But Cat on the Run is also a story of redemption. As a fugitive and the world's most hated Cat, Princess has the opportunity to reinvent herself outside of the shadow of vapid internet celebrity. Being a cat on the run allows Princess to showcase her other skills and attributes: resilience, strength and ingenuity.

In a 2023 interview, Blabey stated that Princess was modelled on a Kardashian-style internet star. The author quickly followed with the reassurance that Princess is provided with the opportunity to prove herself via the life of a fugitive. The Kardashians are some of the biggest celebrities on social media. They are also savvy business people skilled in self-promotion, leveraging social media platforms to sell their unique brand of aspirational femininity. The Kardashians are also a marketer's dream and have been employed to sell anything from skinny tea to designer handbags. The Kardashians are viewed as the doyennes of a form of vacuous internet celebrity, the 'famous for being famous' crew, that emerged in the 2010s and has informed much of internet culture ever since. The Kardashians are also women. Moreover, they are women on the internet.

I am not here to defend the Kardashians. Their brand is part of an insidious form of consumer capitalism that has been worming its way into the lives and eyeballs of millions of social media users for several decades. Criticisms of the Kardashians that condemn their peddling of internet consumer culture at the expense of the poor, the marginalised and disenfranchised, and the planet are valid and vital. Where I get shirty is when this criticism myopically diverts to their gendered identity as women on the internet. Blabey compared Princess Beautiful and the Kardashians because they supposedly share the stereotypical qualities of the female influencer. Princess is a diva yelling for her vanilla latte at the top of her lungs and flinging it back at her hapless assistant when she decides she needs green tea instead to detox for her date. Princess sulks when her internet numbers stagnate at three billion and demands that her assistant grow her numbers to four billion because 'three billion is so last year'. Princess's fame is intoxicating, and the uber-famous Cat is most excited when watching her numbers grow. Princess has also grown an empire, and it is clear that her reach extends beyond the internet. Even though the CEO of Princess Inc is obviously successful in her own right, we are led to believe that Princess is a bit of a shit; she is demanding, sulky, and fame-obsessed. Moreover, Princess acquired this fame, just like the Kardashians, by doing supposedly inane, unserious stuff. Stuff that definitely does not involve going to the UN, like her handsome beau, Catrick Cash.

Princess occupies that corner of the internet, viewed as the most frivolous and cultureless. Princess is a cat video star and a cat influencer. Princess is famous for viral videos like 'cucumber freak-out' and 'bread head'. These videos mimic extant trends, with cats reacting to cucumbers just minding their own business, one of the biggest viral trends of 2023. I prefer 'bread-head' because I believe that it does the important work of highlighting a cat's cute, squishy face. But I digress. Even though cats make and break the internet, cat-focused content is still considered a bit of unserious fun. Moreover, because of its popularity, some more serious types have been wringing their hands about its impact on more austere content. According to some particularly anxious types, cat videos are where serious journalism goes to die. A writer for Buzzfeed in 2014 stated that 'If real news dies, there's no way people will be able to intelligently discuss issues and ideas with their fellow citizens. But then, maybe they'll just talk to their cats.'

In Cat on the Run episode one, Blabey imbues a cat influencer with supposedly Kardashianesque qualities, reproducing a gendered and often hugely damaging stereotype: the vapid female influencer. This merging of a female influencer with a cat draws on the age-old trope of the screechy, demanding cat/woman. This is something we should take very seriously because behemoth Blabey has the power to influence thousands of children and young people, in a fun and playful way.

Image: Poppy-girl picture with Blabey’s Cat on the Run ep. 1&2. Poppy would absolutely not survive being a cat on the run.

Aaron Blabey's 2023 graphic novel Cat on the Run episode 1 is the first instalment in a proposed trilogy. Cat on the Run, episode 2, Cucumber Madness, was released in 2024. In this instalment, we find our screechy protagonist held captive on a mountain in Eastern Europe by a well-meaning goat. The goat announces that he is, in fact, a Scapegoat who has also been framed for crimes he did not commit. The Scapecat and Scapegoat soon join forces to find the shadowy hooded villains who framed Princess for the crime of plotting world destruction, but not before Princess teaches herself the art of the nunchucks via YouTube and a hotspotted phone. The Scapegoat, who confesses that he cannot teach martial arts, is actually a really nice guy/goat. There is a moment when Princess is feeling particularly vulnerable, and the Scapegoat gently reassures her that her work as a cat video star is meaningful 'your videos make everyone happy. You make people happy'.

In her moment of vulnerability, Princess confesses that making cat videos was not the life she envisaged for herself: 'I wanted to be useful. I wanted to change the world for the better. Like…really make a difference, you know?'. Her descent into cat video virality meant her dreams of being taken seriously disappeared. Being a viral video star who suddenly finds herself on the side of an Eastern European mountain, being pursued by shady hooded villains and hated by every human being on the planet, also means her confidence is severely eroded. 'I'm not qualified to deal with this. I make stupid videos', Princess exclaims.

In episode 2, Blabey is crafting Princess's redemption arc from a natty cat video star to a serious world-saving heroine. Princess’s admission that her previous life has hindered her ability to pull it together in a world-ending crisis is part of this story of redemption, but so too is the Scapegoat's reassurance that her work matters. Scapegoat is positioned in this episode as a calm guiding hand who can help her navigate her newfound infamy. Scapegoat is also not about to let cucumbers - the procurers of her past fame - get in the way of her magnanimous redemption story.

The release of Cat on the Run in Hidden Layers (episode three) was deferred until May. As the title suggests, this may be the instalment where Princess reveals what was hidden under the facade of her internet celebrity. I am not sure if I want this to happen. In this big, beautiful, messy world, there is room for world-saving heroines and supposedly unserious cats/women on the internet. If I were to write the end of Princess Beautiful's story, I would see that she gets to Geneva and stands in front of important world dignitaries. In the hallowed halls of the UN, Princess Beautiful would speak on the importance of cat videos and the joy and light they bring to people's lives. In this story, the President, his Excellency Dennis Francis, would shake her paw and thank her for bringing this 'serious issue' to the assembly.

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In December 1947, G.C. Clarke wrote to the Adelaide News editor inquiring why there couldn't be a group for protecting Camels and Guinea pigs if there was a cat protection association. This was not a legitimate enquiry but yet another attempt to ridicule the women who had worked tirelessly to care for Melbourne's stray cat population in the 1940s. Clarke highlighted a recurring theme in reporting about Victoria's newest association: it was a bit of a joke. Clarke pointed out that if they were to set up a camel or guinea pig protection society, they would be 'very careful of our publicity lest some people make jokes about us'. In short, ladies, stop your whining if you want to be taken seriously. In October 1947, the Australian Women's Weekly interviewed Mrs Norman Hill ( Yes.This was the 1940s), one of the founders of the Victorian Cat Protection Society. In the interview, Hill articulated the central aim of the organisation, 'to promote a better understanding of cats generally, with educational propaganda, lectures and the formation of local groups of cat welfare workers'. Hill also identified her key demographic, 'we're particularly anxious to reach normally kind but thoughtless people who are responsible for the misery of thousands of cats'. This anxiety was very real, with steadily increasing stray cat populations nearly equally matched by escalating incidences of cruelty, including soaring rates of feline neglect and abandonment, by 'normally kind but thoughtless people'.

In 2025, the serious work of the Victorian Cat Protection Society continues. After almost 79 years, the Society continues the important work of caring for Victoria's cats. The Society's bricks-and-mortar residence is located on the same site the founders worked from in the 40s when caring for cats was seen as all a bit of a joke. That the Society continues in its important mission through the work of tireless cat women and honorary cat ladies, to use Anna Go-Go's term, is no laughing matter.

If you want to get serious, you can donate to the Victorian Cat Protection Society here

Also, I am reviewing a few titles for Cat Historian's Summer Book Club this summer. You can read my previous review of Anna Go-Go's very excellent Cat Lady Manifesto here.

Acknowledgement: a big thanks to a dear friend who helped me to articulate the role of children’s books and introduced me to some fab new titles. Big ups.

Yours,

Cat Historian

Image: Tibby swimming at Watson’s Bay, c.1949. Pix Magazine, April 29, 1950. National Library of Australia, Trove

As I strolled along the waterfront near my home in late July 2023, I witnessed a remarkable sight. Gliding past me and other walkers was a woman on a paddle board, with a cat. Standing erect at the front of her board, like a gimlet-eyed midshipman, was the most majestic Bengal, wearing a lifejacket. So remarkable was this event that a gaggle of walkers had stopped to take in this most extraordinary spectacle. Most of the walkers stopped and stared, mouths agape; others took photos, and one woman grabbed her male companion's arm and exclaimed, 'It is a cat on a paddleboard!'.

For those assembled at the foreshore on that glorious July day, this may have been the very first time they had seen a cat at the beach. But cats had been there before.

In 2019, political consultant Glenn Druery was contemplating entering his Tonkinese Gus in the Scotland Island Dog race. The swim was right up Gus' alley, Tonkinese being known for their swimming skills and aquatic proclivities. The rules of the swimming race from Bells Wharf to Church Point also stated that humans could swim alongside their furry friends, enabling them to climb onto their human's shoulders should they need to take a breather. Shoulder kitties would, therefore, have a definite advantage. The race would be a dawdle for Druery, who had previously completed a 5000 km cycling event across America twice. Twice! Gus made the plunge after his human paid the entrance fee: one longneck (cold), and one extra large tin of dog food. On the day, the feline Ian Thorpe was cheered on by thousands of onlookers, who, hearing about a cat entering a dog race involving swimming!, came along to take a squizz.

As Druery and Gus emerged from the water, jubilant and to roars from the crowd, an onlooker approached. The man, spitting venom, said, 'I am going to fucking get you and shoot your cat'.

Six years later when a cat went to the beach yet again the hate filled venom would be dialled back. Nonetheless many would still get their knickers in a twist. What added some flavour to this new tranche in the nation’s war over the beach was the emergence of hundreds of striped sunshades.

On Tuesday, January 7, 2025, as hundreds of holidaymakers flocked to Australian beaches, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sat down to chat with Today Show hosts Jayne Azzorbardi and Alex Cullen. Alongside questions about an early election and state infrastructure projects, host Alex Cullen asked the question that had apparently been simmering away in the minds of all Australians: What do you think about all the twats on the beach with their Cabanas? (Note: Alex Cullen did not word his question this way, but he certainly insinuated it) Cullen drew Albanese and his viewer's attention to a viral Facebook post that included a photograph of a Sydney beach with many empty Cabanas. The Facebook post alleged that Cabana-toting beachgoers were erecting these structures to reserve their patch of beach, denying others a sandy spot to sit. The post was designed to evoke consternation and the thumping of tables over alleged infringements to the rights of every Australian: free and unfettered access to the beach.

When Cullen asked Albanese if he would give up a patch of his Kirribilli digs so he could erect his Cabana, the PM weirdly pivoted toward a conversation about the un-Australian horrors of 'fruity beer'. Because there is nothing more un-Australian than floral undertones from the finest organic hops ruining happy hour at your squillion-dollar seaside mansion. Cabanas and fruity beer were not the only issues dividing the nation in January of the New Year. On January 13, The Project shared a picture with its thousands of Facebook and Instagram followers of a couple and their leashed cat enjoying Maroubra Beach in Sydney. The post led with the provocative and clickbaity headline: 'Cat snapped at Maroubra Beach leaves Aussies divided'.

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As a historian who has looked closely at the feline archive, the ‘issue’ of cats at the beach wasn’t always a phenomenon ‘dividing’ the nation. Australia’s supposed affinity with the coast and our relationship with the beach, whether we like it or not, includes cats. Cats have always been there even if, over time, we have imagined them as existing elsewhere. Feline paw prints at the beach can tell us much about our relationship with supposedly national spaces.

On Sunday, February 20, 1949, Brisbane's Sunday Mail shared a photograph of adorable tabbies Boots and Tibby, a mother and son duo, enjoying an early morning dip at Watson's Bay. The original story appeared in the Sydney Sun on February 17, with Watson's Bay local Michael Connor stating that Boots would often follow him down to the sea baths and 'would not cringe and scratch like other cats when carried out into the water'. By 1950, Tibby and Boots had disappeared from Watson's Bay, but cat-loving pictorial magazine Pix featured a full-page image of Tibby swimming on page 29 of its April publication. The brief reflection that accompanied the photograph stated that Tibby liked nothing more than to swim under a nearby boatshed and catch seagulls and rats.

Sydney, the epicentre of Australian beach culture, featured many beach-loving cats. In 1930, Balmoral Beach was home to Australia's most famous ice-cream-eating cat, Tim. Tim was a tiny kitten who lived at Mrs Tilley's general store in Balmoral Beach. After Tim's mother died, he mourned her passing deeply, refusing Mrs Tilley's offerings of tinned salmon, kippers and mackerel. When a customer dropped an ice cream on the floor, tiny Tim quickly lapped it up. Probably desperate for Tim to eat, Mrs Tilley commenced feeding Tim an ice cream diet. It was also reported that a customer offered Tim an ice cream cone, which he quickly grabbed and licked dry with his dexterous paws.

This miraculous ice-cream eating cat would become a marketer's dream as hordes of beachgoers flocked to Mrs Tilley's store to see her incredible ice-cream slurping feline and buy her ice cream! While Tim, Tibby and Boots enjoyed life at the seaside some humans considered the astonishing phenomena of the beach-going cat. In 1955, Australian filmmaker Lyle Disher produced a 30-minute film about Topiary and Decathlons. Yes, weird, I know. The film also included a swimming cat, perhaps a feline decathlonist? The reviewer for SPC Quarterly magazine stated of the film, 'The cat wandering out of the surf is a memorable sight'.

Beachcombing cats also appeared in popular women’s magazines. In 1963, Mary Kenny wrote to the Australian Women's Weekly (AWW), sharing the story of her feline water baby 'who runs into the surf and rides the breakers at the beach'. The three-year-old Puss also loved the garden hose, refusing to drink water from any other source.

Cats at the beach were a remarkable sight, and seeing a cat striding out of the surf after nailing a triple barrel would have been incredibly memorable. People in the past felt compelled to write to magazines like the AWW because a cat at the beach was and still is a remarkable phenomenon and an event worth writing about. Similarly, the press shared stories of beach-going, summer-loving cats, probably knowing these curious stories would captivate and excite their readership.

From the turn of the century to well into the 1950s and 1960s, the Australian print media had an ongoing love affair with remarkable cats, especially those recalcitrant felines who refused to stay indoors. The cats who liked to hop on a surfboard or eat ice cream at the beach were considered a cute curiosity and in possession of un-cat-like behaviours that readers found fascinating. These uncat-like cats made excellent copy and newspapers were filled with stories of cats doing remarkable un-cat-like-things like eating ice-cream cones with their paws and swimming in ocean baths. Remarkable cats also, apparently, helped you to sell ice creams.

For several decades, from at least the 1930s, cats at the beach were a cute curiosity and an event worth writing to your editor about. Moreover, a cat at the beach was not an event that divided the nation or provoked the thumping of tables. So what went wrong? What is driving the outrage over beach-going felines? Are the PM and those Today Show hosts right? Are certain beach-going behaviours and actions ‘un-Australian?’ What is it about the beach that gets people all riled up and shouty?

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The beach and the bush are viewed as quintessential Australian spaces. These spaces are also where our identity as bronzed (fruity?) beer-swilling larrikins is thought to have originated. Our early myth-makers posited that the harsh conditions of the Australian bush produced a population of taciturn, hard-drinking proletariats. These hard-working men of the bush were the mainly white men whom dominant history would credit as being the progenitors of the new egalitarian nation.

In post-WWII Australia, the Australian beach would become the testing ground for a new form of anxious white masculinity. After the Second World War, many in the West started to contemplate the barbarity of modern conflict and, in particular, the impacts of war on the thousands of men who were led to their deaths in the trenches of Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East. The militant masculinity born in nineteenth-century Europe and forged in the crucible of WWI was becoming increasingly untenable. At the same time, many were concerned with the apparent disorder of the post-war world and the slow creep of an inherently feminised suburbia. As historian Kay Saunders argued, the discipline and order that characterised early surf-life-saving clubs - military-style drills and precision march-outs - provided the perfect outlet to cultivate a new form of post-war masculinity. As Saunders argues, ‘Sacrifice had rendered the Anzac flawed in mind and body; a new unblemished intact hero needed to be constructed’.

Going to the beach may seem like a fairly benign act, but our unique culture of beach-going is caught up in a web of ideas, fantasies, and myths about what it means to be Australian. We understand the beach and our national obsession with beach-going via the stories we tell about it. As these stories became inexplicably tied to the nation, the beach became a place where those deemed un-Australian were told they did not belong. While our PM might like to wax lyrical about the beach being 'owned' by everyone, the reality is that for many, the beach is a place 'owned' by only a few. In Australia, ownership of the beach has been granted not by legal title but by years of national storytelling, by telling stories that have positioned the white male bronzed Aussie as the quintessential Australian, as the true owner of the beach.

The belief that the beach is 'owned' by those deemed authentically Australian has had catastrophic consequences. The 2005 Cronulla riots are an apposite example of what happens when you tell young white males that they own the beach and that they have a right to defend it. In 1981, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey exposed the dark underbelly of Australian surf culture, highlighting the rampant misogyny and violent gatekeeping practised by young male surfers on Sydney's Cronulla Beach. The thousands of Australians who will flock to their local beach on 'Australia Day' will probably be blithely unaware ( or wilfully ignorant) that these same beaches were the site of ongoing settler violence. The white settler nation's origin story started on a beach, but for many Indigenous Australians, this is not a story of beginnings but many endings.

Australian beaches can be violent places, especially if you are a woman, First Nations, disabled or a person of colour. Beaches can also be violent places for animals.

In 1788, British colonists unloaded hundreds of animals onto the beaches at Sydney Cove, their forced arrival described by Animal studies scholar Fiona Probyn-Rapsey as trafficking. Bloody practices of whaling and sealing were also part of thriving ocean-based industries in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Beaches can also be violent and deadly places for cats. In 2020, the Port of Newcastle commissioned an external contractor to 'humanely cull' the stray cats that had taken up residence in the Stockton breakwall. This 'humane cull' involved shooting the cats at close range. Members of the Stray Cat Project who had been caring for the cats described the aftermath of the cull in a Facebook post; "Lily is hanging in there, she had been shot in the head…we had other cats with open wounds and grazes and all the cats were scared", Rochelle Wood wrote.

The senseless slaughter of 'stray' cats at a beach in Newcastle is part of culture of cat-killing that has been precipitated, in part, by the hardening of public and official discourse around cats and where they belong. In the 1980s and 1990s, public perception of so-called 'free roaming' and 'feral' cats shifted significantly. This shift was super-charged by the 'feral' cat’s listing as a threatening species under the Environment, Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act in 2000.

Prior to this listing, conversations and debates about 'feral' and 'free roaming' cats were playing out in the mainstream media, often accompanied by fear-invoking headlines. The media were responding to increased and increasingly heated discussions in local, state, federal parliaments about how to manage 'feral' cat populations. These discussions were informed by some in the scientific fraternity who had deemed the 'feral' cat enemy number one in the ongoing battle against native species decline. Violent language to describe cats was also common during this time and frequently deployed by journalists. The use of violent language continues with former Minister for the Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek, describing 'feral' cats' as 'walking, stalking, ruthless killers' in a 2023 press release.

As Nicholas Smith and others have argued, cats are also considered thoroughly un-Australian with the act of loving a cat tantamount to treason. This is best summed up with a statement by conservationist and former proprietor of earth sanctuaries, John Wamsley who stated that ‘You cannot love your country and keep a cat’.

The current debate over cat containment laws and controversial Trap, Neuter and Return programs represent a new front in the great Australia cat wars that have been raging for several decades. These debates have resulted in a further hardening of public opinion about cats and some hard-headed responses to cats deemed out of place. As a cat in Australia, your place is within the four walls of your human's home. If you set one paw outside that front door, you are fair game, and humans are free to hunt, debase, demonise and annihilate you. And everything, my feline friend, is your fault because you are a 'walking, stalking, ruthless killer'.

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Beaches are storied places, but the stories we tell about the beach often do not fit the lived reality of the thousands of people who regularly visit our beaches and coastal waterways. For many, the beach is a place of beauty and wonder. For some, it is a place of spiritual and cultural significance. For others, the beach is a site of leisure and entertainment. For some in can be all of these things combined. For those who reside elsewhere, the beach is an abstract entity, a geographically distant imagined landscape. Like grains of sand, the stories we could tell about the beach are infinite.

Part of the media's core business is to tell stories, but they are just one conduit for our national narratives. When The Project shared their post about a cat at Maroubra Beach, it may have been a wilful attempt to concoct a controversy where one did not exist. I fear that the issue of cats at the beach is a bit more fizzle than bang. When I indicated my intentions to respond to the January 13 Project post, some lovely followers told me stories about their surfing and swimming felines. When I asked one of my followers what their fellow beachgoers thought about sharing the beach with a cat, they said, 'They love it. The beach we go to is mostly older retirees and little kids, so it is the perfect place. Most people say they wish they could take their cat out like we can'.

Image: Puss enjoying a dip at their local beach. Photo supplied by one of my lovely followers and shared with permission

Returning to my local beach. In the seaside town where I live, the beautiful paddle-boarding Bengal is a feline celebrity. When Puss disembarks from her board, she draws a sizable crowd. Puss also appears on my local Facebook Community Noticeboards. My favourite was a post where members responded to a photo of the Paddle-boarding Puss with their favourite cat-inspired one-liners. For example, one commenter wrote, emulating the great Tweetie Bird, 'I taut I tor a puddy-tat'.

I was fortunate enough several months back to be present when Puss and her human disembarked on the beach. As is common, a crowd soon assembled to watch and perhaps garner a pat or two. Puss's human patiently and generously answered questions and watched as Puss was showered in pats by a loved-up toddler. One of the onlookers gushed 'Your cat is so lovely’. As I walked on, leaving the Bengal fan club behind, I thought, ‘This cat is very much loved by all those who are fortunate enough to encounter them, and that is just as it should be’.

Yours

Cat Historian

Image courtesy of Affirm Press

Before we get into why you should read Anna Go-Go's Cat Lady Manifesto, I need to tell you how much I hate summer. It will all make sense, I promise.

Ok, I hate summer because, for a solid three months, my cat won't sleep with me and, gee whizz, it really sucks. No, seriously, my cat won't sleep with me during the summer months, and it plunges me into a deep and bitter depression. On cooler nights, she seeks me out, nestling into my side after kneading my neck for a brief but excruciating couple of minutes. When the mercury shoots up to above 19 degrees Celsius, she avoids me like a heat-omitting plague, keeping a discrete distance at the end of my bed lest I overwhelm her with my hot, sweaty meat suit. One summer a couple of years ago, I woke up covered in sweat with Poppy pinned to my side, panting like an excited puppy. She had somehow got caught up in my rather large nightie (is there any other kind!?), and she was forced to spend the night all in a tangle with my peri-menopausal sweat raining down on her. Perhaps that is why, when summer comes, she won't sleep with me anymore.

But I am not giving up on cats even though my sweet puss won’t sleep with me during those long, hot nights. This summer will be all about cats because I will be spending most of my downtime over the Christmas and New Year period reading books about cats and writing about cats. And there will be lots of writing about cats - I am writing a book about the history of cat companionship in Australia. Have I told you this? You can read all about it here. And because I like sharing, I hope to intermittently share my thoughts about all the glorious, pawsome cat books that I have been consuming. Because I reckon if your cat won't sleep with you in summer, reading about cats that do like to cuddle is the next best thing. You're welcome! See, it all makes sense. Please read on.

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I have been amassing quite a few books about cats. It's hard to know where to start. And I promise that I won't review everything I have read about cats. I don't want to bore you senseless or, God forbid, turn cat love into a purely intellectual exercise. To know cats is to love one and be loved by one (or two or three, or all the cats), and a real flesh and blood one at that. Books about cats are the life-affirming cream on the top and where confirmation bias meets blind love. Except if you read anything about cats by the CSIRO or some Australian Young Adult Fiction novelists - more about them in later Substacks.

I want to start with the delightful Cat Lady Manifesto by Melbourne writer, and self-described 'cat lady' Anna Go-Go. Published in November 2024, Cat Lady Manifesto explores the 'crazy cat lady' trope, drawing on history, personal story, and joyous drops of 'cat wisdom'. Divided into three parts - crazy, cat and lady- the book teases out the history of women and men who have loved cats and examines how this love was shaped into a persuasive and enduring narrative that has demonised cats and oppressed women.

The book features a cast of colourful 'cat ladies', including some that are not ladies!, like Abraham Lincoln, an 'honorary cat lady of history' who welcomed the first cats into the White House ( First Cats?), fed them at the formal dinner table and claimed that they were smarter than his whole cabinet. Go-Go's inclusion of men who loved cats and her decision to bequeath them with the label of 'honorary cat lady' is an attempt to disarm a term that has harmed and continues to harm many women; it also invites the reader to consider how cats have incited the same obsessive love and ensuing emotions in men.

However, the women featured in the book are the real stars. In her manifesto, Go-Go skilfully reconstructs the revolutionary lives of women like Argentinian artist Lenore Fini, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Taylor, the British suffragettes and New York socialites turned outcasts, Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale. These women loved and were loved by cats, but they also lived gloriously rebellious lives in big and small ways. I was particularly taken by Fini's story, it stayed with me for a long time. History has done a massive disservice to female artists. Female artists seldom appear in the annals of art or national histories, even though many of these creatives were instrumental in many of the ground-breaking artistic movements. And many of these female artists were cat lovers!

Go-Go returns Lenore Fini's story to its rightful place, positioning her as an accomplished post-war artist and slayer of misogynists. Fini famously stuck it to renowned homophobe and misogynist surrealist artist Andre Breton. She also lived with 23 cats in her Parisian apartment. I mean, who hasn't wanted to yell at a misogynist before returning to your posh Parisian apartment? Goals! Go-Go also examines 'cat ladies' in popular culture, exploring Taylor Swift's world domination with cats! and an examination of 56 years of Marvel Cat Women. And yes, Michelle Pfieffer's Cat Woman was by far the best, and I will always love and adore the one and only, Eartha Kit.

Go-Go is a comedian, dancer, choreographer and Melbourne icon (In 2013, Go-Go led her dance troupe, her 'go-go Army' for the 'Thrill the World' event at Coburg Drive-In. Her go-go army danced to Thriller as the film clip played in the background. Iconic!). Go-Go puts her comedic skills and creativity to work and delivers a thoroughly readable, immensely enjoyable treatise to cat love. Go-Go is obviously a very skilled storyteller and it is her ability to adroitly weave together the personal with the more interrogative parts of the book where her skill as a writer truly shines. Here, at the level of personal story, Go-Go introduces another star of the show, herself.

Go-Go shares her personal journey through the trauma of family violence, her experience battling long covid and the more debilitating fight against medical misogyny. Go-Go also gives us insights into her relationships with men who love cats (but were also jealous of her love for cats) in a brilliant chapter title ‘Never Trust a Man Who Doesn’t like Cats’ and discusses the pain of not having children. Further, Go-Go reminds us that in a world where love is narrowly defined - romantic love, motherly love - a love of cats is legitimate, exquisite and liberating.

It was within Go-Go's descriptions of cat love that I felt truly seen. Go-Go states that the cats she has loved are her 'soul mates'. A soul mate is a term often reserved for descriptions of heterosexual love and affection but is also a term that perfectly captures how I feel about my precious puss. At night, when it is quiet and still, I tell her in hushed whispers how she is the love of my life. I have never felt love like it; it is immense, all-consuming, and beautiful.

A love of cats is a love that is often expressed silently and has remained unexplored because of the often brutal punishments that have befallen people- men and women - who loudly and publicly proclaim their love for cats. The Cat Lady Manifesto lifts that veil of silence and debilitating secrecy to reveal the joy and the freedoms that loving a cat can bring.

Go-Go demonstrates through the interweaving of personal story, history and cat wisdom that the act of loving cats and experiencing the exquisite warmth of feline love is not an isolated female phenomenon in a sea of male entitlement and achievement. The human-cat relationship is part of the broader story of our messy, infinitely complex humanity. The story of cats is the tale of a damaging and stubborn gender binary but Go-Go demonstrates that it can also be a story of courage, rebellion and hope.

My minor quibble is that the book needed a few more Australian cat ladies, and there are many: Hazel Hawke, Don Bradman, Norman Lindsay, Ruth Park, Ola Cohn, Mrs Francis Geddes and other members of the Victorian Cat Protection League, to name a few. This omission may have been strategic, given that niche books on Australian topics are often not attractive to a wide audience. Historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Florence Nightingale are known (and loved?) the world over and would be instantly recognisable to a broad and even global readership. And really, this book should be widely read. As a historian of Australian history, this is just me projecting. Let's move on.

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Last year was a big year for 'cat ladies'. Thanks to incoming US Vice President JD Vance's derisive comments about single, childless women with cats being the ruination of American society and Taylor Swift's now famous endorsement of Kamala Harris, where she signed off with the valediction 'With Love and Hope, Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady', cat ladies are having a moment. Vance's and Swift's words generated hundreds of articles, think pieces and op-eds, many of which generated vital conversations about gender, politics and the changing nature of modern families. Last year was also the year that the Labor Government announced that they would be investing 60 million dollars to eradicate 'feral cats' in Australia, opening yet another front in the thoroughly Australian anti-cat wars.

In 2024, Sherele Moody documented through her Femicide Watch project the murders of 101 Australian women, uncovering an epidemic of femicide and male violence in Australia. Cat killing and the killing of women in Australia are inexplicably linked. Felicide and femicide are linked because both are part of the violence of settler colonisation. Settler Colonisation commenced in 1788, but it is not a thing of the past. As Patrick Woolfe argued, it is a structure, not an event. The structures of settler colonisation are held together by violence, by killing.

Cat Lady Manifesto is a timely examination of the trope of the 'crazy cat lady', but it is also so much more than that. Cat Lady Manifesto is a love letter to women and a call for us to step into our power, a power that has always been there but has been historically and culturally stifled and silenced. Moreover, we have acquired this power with cats by our side, the very animals we were taught to despise and eradicate. Go-Go's manifesto highlights the link between the inherent power of women and cat love, which, when brought together, represents a formidable challenge to patriarchy.

Cat Lady Manifesto is, at its core, a book about love, but it is also a book about hope. Like Anna Go-Go, I am optimistic, even though the world is starting to resemble a simmering dumpster fire. Loving a cat is a transformative and radical act. Loving a cat fundamentally changes you; it teaches you how to love and be loved. Cats teach you how to care. To care and care deeply is a radical act, particularly in a world where hate and chaos are ascendant. Hold your cats close, and like Anna Go-Go, start living the dream.

Yours

Cat Historian

Cat Lady Manifesto is published through Affirm Press and is available at all good book sellers

You can read more about Anna Go-Go’s work, including her Go-Go academy here. You can also follow her on Instagram @gogoacademy

Image: my ‘soul mate’ Poppy-girl, fast asleep on my chest. It is a lovely cool 15 degrees outside, peak cuddle weather.

O.K, I have another question: have you ever interrogated the reasons why, like really interrogated your motives?

I have, but not for the reasons you might think.

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Every November, my two daughters and I bundle our two cats and two dogs in the car and head to our local dog groomer. It is an annual event for our family, a much-anticipated pre-Christmas ritual that has proved so popular with all of us that it has become thoroughly unmissable. In the lead-up to the event, annual leave is organised, diaries are blacked out, and flights are arranged. Santa Paws is a much-anticipated event because every year in mid-November, we squeeze our furry family members into Christmas costumes, coax them into the car and plonk them in front of Santa. The result is a lovely family photo and slightly elevated stress levels.

We love this event so much because our beloved animals are involved. There would be no chance we would sit down with Santa without them. But, hey, no shade to those adults who enjoy having their photo taken with Santa sans animals or kids. Santa is fun at any age, and it's even better if he gives you lollies. Santa Paws is also lots of fun. Santa Paws is an annual event organised by the Far South Coast Branch of the Animal Welfare League and hosted by Merimbula Coastal Grooming. Every year lots of animal parents dress up their pooch or pussy cat and bring them along to be photographed with Santa. We absolutely love dressing up our two dogs and two cats in anticipation of their audience with St Nick. We also enjoy watching the many others, mainly dogs, assemble outside Santa's makeshift studio, tails wagging and tongues lolling with absolutely no idea what awaits them.

Image: Our 2024 Santa Paws portrait featuring my daughters, Teah and Ava, Toby the Staffy, and Luna the very naughty bulldog.

This year, my annual pilgrimage to our local Santa Paws event hit differently, mainly because I was headlong into a chapter about 'photogenic cats' or our tendency to photograph the cats in our lives. Many Australian state, regional and national archives contain a treasure trove of cat photos. Cats were photographed extensively, appearing in the foreground and background of hundreds of images. Cats were the subject of professional and amateur photography, starring in photo essays for mainstream magazines, appearing in family portraits and photobombing in suburban gardens. Between 1900 and 1950, Australian city and regional newspapers entertained a journalistic love affair with cats running stories about cats doing extraordinary things, often accompanying the story with a carefully selected feline photograph. Publications like Pix magazine ran several stories showcasing their photographers' talents, many featured cats. The December 25, 1948, issue is my favourite; it includes intimate and up-close images of some of Sydney's 'alley cats' captured by Pix photographer Herman Hertford. Hertford spent two nights in Sydney's CBD armed with cameras and speedlights to capture a range of images that document the life of a Sydney 'stray'. The eight pictures in the December edition beautifully capture the agility and raw beauty of Sydney’s ‘stray’ cats at a time when the ‘stray’ cat population was viewed by many as a problem that needed fixing (ahem, extermination). The Pix photographic archive is housed at the State Library of New South Wales, and I strongly encourage you to peruse it. Full issues of Pix magazine can be accessed via the Trove digital archive. Come for the ‘personality’ column, stay for the cats.

Image: the cover of the December 25, 1948, edition of Pix Magazine. National Library of Australia, Trove.

What interested me most as I contemplated once again sitting my cats and dogs in front of the camera was the phenomena of the 'pet portrait' and what it can tell us about the human-feline relationship. Many people in the past made the conscious decision to style and photograph their cat, and even more, made the same conscious decision to sit for a family or individual portrait with their beloved feline companion. Taking professional or amateur portraits of your cat is not a new phenomenon. Historians Arnold Arluke and Lauren Rolfe argue that the popularity and accessibility of photography in America grew alongside changing attitudes and behaviours toward 'domesticated' animals like cats. In the nineteenth century, cats were still valued by many for their practical function as pest controllers, but increasingly, cats became valued as purry furry companions prized just as much for sitting all day atop a plush cushion as foraging for rats and mice in the family pantry. Much of this change was precipitated by a rapidly changing world.

Arluke and Rolfe argue that the introduction of the Kodak box brownie in 1900 brought photography to the masses just as the effects of the Industrial Revolution in the Western anglophile world irrevocably changed class structures, the composition of families and the amount of expendable income these families had to spend on luxury items including companion animals. Companion animals also became a part of an emerging class consciousness with attending cat and dog shows and 'showing' your fancy puss or pooch an expression of middle-class sensibility and increasing affluence. For example, in 1907, a white Chinchilla was exhibited at the eighteenth champion show of the National Cat Club at the Crystal Palace in London. The sweet Chinchilla, who spent the show reclining on a silk, sky-blue cushion ( to make that white coat pop), was reportedly valued at two thousand pounds. Yep, that is nearly a quarter of a million dollars in today's money. Historian Hilda Kean has documented how working-class people also started to make greater financial investments in the care of their cats, demonstrated by the increasing popularity of cat's meat sellers in urban parts of nineteenth-century England.

Cats began to migrate from the streets and the barns to people's homes (and beds!), and increasingly, cats' lives became more tightly integrated into their human companions' emotional lives and livelihoods. The changing status of cats was developing alongside a new technology that could capture and preserve images of our beloved feline companions and our evolving love and affection for them. In arguing for a historical ethnography of cat portraits in early twentieth America, Arluke and Rolfe propose that we consider cat portraits as a form of interpretation and ask 'what 'reality' the photographer and his subjects tried to capture by taking a particular image and how viewers of that photograph understood its meaning'. Like language, photographs are historically and socially contingent; they are produced in a particular time and place and are interpreted within a specific cultural and social milieu. Photographs can reflect the social mores of the time but also a staged 'reality' where social mores are performed for a perceived morally static audience. Arluke and Rolfe argue that these images are 'how photographers and their subjects want themselves, their animals, and their relationships with animals to be seen by others'.

Arluke and Rolfe also argue that even though these photographs were 'more orchestrated than accidental', this does not mean that they did not love their feline subjects. Many nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographic portraits of cats in Australia communicate a genuine affection, even adoration, for felines. One of my favourites is a picture of the Boustead family, most likely taken in the early 1900s (possibly 1910). The photographic lens is centred on the patriarch, seated on a chair; his wife is standing with her hand rested on his shoulder. The other photographic subjects, possibly his children and their children stand behind him and to his left, their bodies slightly turned toward him. That the patriarch is seated in this photo positions him as the central figure in this photographic narrative of a twentieth-century Caboolture family. Also seated is a cat. That's right, a cat. Puss is seated on a wicker chair next to the grand patriarch, who has one hand placed atop his adorably cute little head, perhaps guarding against Pusses' likely attempts at a quick getaway. Puss is looking off into the distance beyond the photographer's lens, his posture is uneasy.

Image: Boustead Family, c.1910. State Library of Queensland.

What I like about this photo is that, like the Boustead patriarch, Puss got the seat, which also places him at the centre of the photograph. The family obviously wanted Puss in the photo, given the patriarch's hovering hand. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that the Bousteads included Puss because he was considered part of the family and was valued enough by the Bousteads to be included in their family portrait. So, what kind of staged reality were the Bousteads hoping to communicate here? What did they want their audience to see? What family 'story' are they trying to convey?

David Edward Boustead was the Boustead family patriarch and a blacksmith and Ambulance Officer for the Caboolture district in southeast Queensland. Harriet was his wife. Though I know very little about the photographer and their motivations for taking this photo, this image, like many family photos, most likely would have ended up in a private photo album. Perhaps the picture was taken to share with other relatives, or maybe it was taken to capture, for the family photographed, a moment to look back on and remember. Deborah Chalmers argues that nineteenth-century British national and colonial narratives influenced the private narratives of family albums, and perhaps this is true of this image as well. Possibly, the Bousteads were attempting to recreate an image of gentile, respectability through the performance of familial unity. Citing Pierre Bourdeau, Chalmers further argues that family photographs became integral to the ideology of the modern family and acted to reinforce 'the integration of the family group’ by reasserting a sense of unity. Companion animals, like cats, had, by this time, become more integral to the modern family and were often viewed as symbolic of family life. Puss would join his family in the performance of unity, whether he liked it or not.

The intention of my reading of the Bousteads' motivations is to in no way diminish the love that they may have had for their photogenic feline. But we cannot honestly know how they felt about this cat or the other companion animals in their lives. I like to think that the cat's primary companion was David Boustead, whom he loved and was loved by. Arluke and Rolfe observed in the hundreds of photos they examined for their excellent book, The Photographed Cat: Picturing Human-Feline Ties, 1890-1940, that cats were most often photographed with women and children. If men were photographed with cats, it was within the context of their profession as seaman or army personnel, for example, or the cat appeared alongside family members, a mix of women, men and children. Men were seldom photographed with cats on their own. The ideology of the modern family is also gendered. But men loved and were loved by cats even if they did not want that love reflected in the family photo album.

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My daughters and I love our animals, like really love them. I am happy for that love to be captured in a photograph and archived for posterity, even if I am the only one who looks back and remembers. But I know that a bundle of tangled beliefs, ideas and fantasies have informed my decision to wrangle my dogs and cats into tinselled costumes and place them in front of a stranger. As a historian currently interrogating the feline photographic archive and the many family portraits with cats, I am cognisant that I should be turning that interrogation on myself and asking myself the same questions I have asked of people in the past. So, what 'reality' was I attempting to create in staging our annual 'pet portrait'? What did I hope my audience or recipients of the photograph would see?

Central to these questions is my perceived relationship with my animals, the knowledge, in my mind at least, that I am their mother, they are my children, and my family. I am immensely proud of my family and not ashamed of my love for them. I am also a middle-aged woman who understands that society will accept my public proclamation of cat and dog love, even if it is not taken seriously or sometimes weaponised against me (because women living alone with their cats is a serious threat to patriarchy). But love for animals has a history, and the historical forces of colonisation, late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism, and modern consumerism have informed and invariably infected the ways we love. On a brighter note, so have progressive movements like the animal rights movements and Animal studies scholarship. Many may not have heard of people like Peter Singer or Tom Regan. Still, their scholarship and activism, the understanding that animals have intrinsic rights and feel and suffer pain just like us, has helped shape opinion and policy globally and has and continues to trickle down to our day-to-day interactions with animals of all sorts.

In twentieth-century Australia, people like the Bousteads would have been, albeit unwittingly, influenced by various policy and legislative instruments imported from Britain that enshrined certain protections for domestic animals like cats in law. As a white family in a former British colony, the Bousteads would have also inherited ideas about the modern anglophile family, which was influenced by the confluence of industrialisation, urbanisation and class. Hilda Kean argues that support for the humane treatment of animals was not the strict purview of the middle class, but in the nineteenth century, 'the way in which people treated animals became a distinguishing feature of being humane and of membership of a new middle class and respectable working class'. A love of cats and an outward public-facing proclamation of this love could also be an expression of class and a public display of 'respectable' middle-class and working-class sensibilities.

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Returning to my self-reflexive questioning: with our love on display, were we attempting to create an image of classed respectability? Was this love performed to ensure our perceived audience that we treat our animals well, that we are humane, and therefore, morally upstanding members of our community?

Arluke and Rolfe argue that while many twentieth-century photos of cats reflected an overwhelmingly positive feline-human relationship, behind the camera and outside the photographic studio, excessive cruelty was a daily reality for many animals. In twentieth-century Australia, the lives of cats were particularly perilous, with 'stray' populations facing the hard scrabble of life on the streets or impoundment and the fiery hell of incineration. Inherited Animal protection laws that viewed animals as possessions invariably influenced how people interacted with those animals that became known as 'unowned'. These laws still exist and continue to bite hard.

This then begs the question: what is our public-facing proclamation of love hiding? While I absolutely do not abuse my animals and find the abuse of animals morally repugnant, the mistreatment of animals is rampant, from the mass slaughter of 'feral' cats to industrial farming to animals used in sport. The fight that Singer and Mead started 50 years ago continues.

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Santa Paws is an opportunity to capture a moment in time and create a narrative of family, a staged reality that the generations can read and re-read through time and space. My 'reality' was fundamentally changed when I became the carer of several rambunctious dogs and two very loving cats. These exceptional felines came to me when my world was in turmoil, and the wider world was in freefall (Covid, bushfires, Trump). My world is a lot calmer now, thanks partly to all the purrs, bulldog snuffles, and staffy cuddles. At an intellectual level, I understand that the love I have for my animals is the product of historical and cultural forces that we are all invariably swept up in and impacted by. But at the level of feelings, I sense a little more is at play here. Santa Paws is not just a public-facing expression of love. For me, the feeling of unity, not the staged reality, makes this event remarkable: the interaction with my daughters and my beloved animals, the time spent together loving each other and being loved through shared experience, laughter and the joy of togetherness. When I pick up the photo, I see all of that unfold, and it hits me in the feels all over again. I love my animals and daughters fiercely and unequivocally, and I will continue to do that no matter what the world throws at me.

All the love and all the feels,

Cat Historian.

Oh, the cats didn't make it to Santa Paws this year, as they chose not to come. Our dogs would follow us into an active volcano, but our cats, not so much.

Image: Poppy-girl wonders if fictional writing can exist without cats.

After researching cats in Australia's past, I now see cats everywhere. Even before they manifest, all purrs and furr and cuteness, I can sense their presence- they are ever so quietly stalking at the periphery as I sift through the archives and scroll online. They are there, crouched low, preening and languidly stretching, waiting to announce themselves.

I anticipate cats when I pick up a book or peruse a document. My skin prickles and my stomach tightens; they are there; I know it, I feel it. It is my catty sense, my superpower as a cat historian. But don't worry. I haven't been inducted into the Marvel Universe, at least not yet. My superpower retreats when searching online. It is not an extraordinary feat to predict cats in a digital archive, the search engines bring them to you, and you can conjure all manner of different cats via a few strokes of the keyboard- 'ships' cats, 'pet' cats, 'stray' cats, 'feral' cats, 'station' cats, 'hospital' cats, even 'boxing' cats. Yes, boxing cats. Apparently, a shop on Elizabeth Street in Sydney was home to a feline pugilist called 'Bull'. 'Bull' liked to shadowbox with his human and absolutely hated being called 'Tiddles' by the women in the neighbouring store. 'Tiddles' was not the appropriate name for a big, brave boxing man-cat. This was 1930s Sydney. What a time. What a place.

I still get all the feels when I find a cat or many cats via a digital search engine. That twinge of excitement, the warm release of dopamine. Archival research is not just about brains; it is a whole-body experience. It is visceral. Well, for me at least. Picking up a book or an archival document cold is a little different. There has been no digital online spell cast or cataloguing trick performed by a mysterious online librarian; you must search with different navigational instruments, and to find the cat, you have to use a different kind of magic. This is not dissimilar to searching for your own sweet puss, not the one in the archive, the one at the end of your bed. When my Poppy-girl decides to hide somewhere in my tiny house, no amount of calling and cajoling will bring her to me. She demands that I wait, feign indifference and perform a non-cat cajoling task, like typing on my laptop. As I commence writing, I can feel her drawing close, ever so slowly inching toward me. The magic of insouciance works every time.

You see, cats often appear in all their splendid cat-ness when you are not looking for them at all.

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I was invited to participate in the 2024 Headland Writers’ Festival in late September. The festival is an annual event hosted by Candelo Books, an independent bookseller located in Bega, and the arts and culture organisation South East Arts. Situated on the Tathra headland (hence Headland Writers Festival), the event attracts diverse Australian authors and creatives, including some fabulously talented people and literary luminaries. Since I am yet to publish a book (yet! It's coming. On April 26. Put it in your diaries), I have been invited to participate as a panel host and facilitate a conversation between two authors - Kate Kruimink and Ruby Todd. Last year, I also participated in this event, but I also asked carefully curated questions of one author. One. A panel discussion is a new and slightly terrifying gig for me. But the lovely people organising the event have the utmost faith in me, which means a lot. I will not disappoint because I am a people-pleasing perfectionist. I will over-read and over-prepare. I can't help myself.

This might sound strange, but I don't, as a rule, read much fiction. I mainly read non-fiction. For a long time, I thought that fiction was wasting my precious time. It wasn't worth reading if I wasn't learning something from the stuff I read. I wanted argument, analysis, and informed opinion. It was evidence-based facts I was after. Delicious, brain-expanding facts, not flowery prose, thank you very much. For years, I main-lined articles in academic journals and historical monographs and avoided the general fiction section. That was until I joined a book club halfway through my five-year PhD journey. It was over red wine and cheese that I fell in love with fiction. And I didn't have to leave all those facts and insights I acquired reading academic articles at the door; I could apply all this thinking to this new pastime. I could use that academic stuff to better understand these alien but very pretty words I was consuming, and I could impress all of my fellow book club members with my understanding of Derrida - 'there is no world without the word' my friends, now who ate all of the Brie.

It was later that I discovered the visceral power of fiction. I learnt that words, expertly put together on a page, could make you feel things. After becoming blissfully unemployed in 2023, I main-lined Australian small-town crime fiction. I didn't learn any new facts, but it felt good to spend many hours a day in the worlds of these novels. Reading was a way of escaping the uncertainty of my own life that was quietly spiralling somewhere unknown. And that was enough. I didn't need to know how the East India Company conquered the globe ( Sorry, Mr Dalrymple). That would have hurt my brain. Cleaved it in two. I wanted to feel tethered, grounded. I needed to feel whole. I realised that I was chasing a feeling that only fiction could provide.

The very pleasant upside of being asked to participate in a writers’ festival is that I get to chase this feeling once more and fall in love with fiction all over again. I also get free books. Two free books: Kate Kruimink's Heartsease and Ruby Todd's Bright Objects. I approach this task as I do the other non-cat history-related tasks that I perform; I isolate the task before I get to work on it. I allocate a day to focus on it, separate from my cat history research or teaching; I make a separate room for it in my brain. After a lifetime of juggling a thousand oddly shaped balls, I now find it easier to immobilise all the different balls in their individual cognitive containers. If my frantic hands are not moving them around, I can see and negotiate them a lot better. My life is no longer a blur of oddly shaped juggling balls.

So on a Monday morning in late September, my non-cat history day, I cleared cats from my mind and cracked the spine of my first book. With a mind free of cats, I let Ruby Todd's words gush in, a pleasant flood ever so slowly and purposefully forming a narrative. It was by page 20 that I could sense something lurking. Slowly emerging with every word and sentence, I could feel its presence. Something warm and familiar, something cat-shaped. On page 28, he appeared, and his name was Lionel. We are introduced to Lionel in the home of Slyvia Knight, a recent widow and our novel's protagonist. Before then, in the book's 'divination', we are introduced to the novel's main character, the Comet St John and the facts of Sylvia's death, twice - once in a 'crumbled Toyota' and for a second time, 'inside the floral bedroom of a country house'. This foretelling illuminates the corners of the novel's rich tapestry. From here, the reader must move inward from the narrative's outer limits - its beginnings and endings - to reveal the complexity of Sylvia and comet St John's interlocking stories, their warps and wefts. The novel's timescales also unfurl from here. We get a sense of deep time and big planetary events that occur alongside the relative smallness of individual existence.

Slyvia and the townsfolk of the small regional town of Jericho are eagerly awaiting the passage of comet St John, last seen four thousand, two hundred and seven years ago. The comet's arrival in town elicits strong emotions. Sylvia ruminates on the emotional register of the town, 'the comet seemed to be revealing us all to ourselves and to each other, in our various registers of fear, hope and hubris, like clusters of divergent cells within the same host'. Slyvia experiences these communal emotions while grappling with the pain of losing her beloved Christopher, the anger and frustration of her husband's cold case, and the stirrings of a new romantic relationship with the comet's founder, American astronomer Theo St John.

Lionel appears as Sylvia is forced to grapple with the weekend. For Sylvia, reeling with the grief and loss of her husband, ‘weekends are a treacherous gulf that had to be crossed'. Sylvia attempts to fill her weekend with quotidian tasks - laundry, library, grocery shopping - but inside her home, time slows, and she is forced to move from room to room as if wading through a 'thick fog'. At home and feeling the slow pull of glacial time, she pulls Lionel close, 'feeling’ his 'warm body' against her chest. Todd's novel plays with big themes of the metaphysical and the otherworldly, as well as the cellular existence of flesh and blood human beings. At home, with time moving at a glacial pace, Sylvia can 'hear the sound of her own shallow breathing'. As the comet drew near and the 'atmosphere in the town grew taut', Sylvia could feel 'the hum of a new frequency just out of range'. Sylvia works at a Funeral home where the physicality of death butts up against the ethereal longing for eternal life.

And then there is Lionel. Lionel is a steady presence, 'serene as a sphinx', a critical observer of Sylivia's world, as she states, 'he could see through my games'. Lionel is part of the minute of domestic life, being fed and cared for. When Sylvia contemplates and plans for her departure, Lionel's care is considered alongside the boxing up of her personal belongings. Lionel also performs his thorough catness, springing onto beds and kitchen chairs. He meows and paws at his cat door. Lionel's catness produces visceral clarity. The 'vibrations' of his 'purring' create a 'terrible sharpness'. Lionel's catness is also, paradoxically, not of this world. Feeling the hopelessness and enormity of grief, Sylvia ‘stroked Lionel as he kneaded' her lap and 'fixed her' with his 'otherworldly green eyes'. Who among us cat parents have not thought, at times, that they were living with a furry alien.

Cats perfectly encapsulate the ethereal and the visceral. Over time, cats have symbolised both a benevolent and a malevolent spirituality. Cats have been worshipped as gods and venerated as portends of good luck. Cats have also been shunned as bearers of ominous tidings. Cats have been co-opted as symbols of a sleepy, gentle domesticity but have also been employed to convey the wildness and ferality that lurks at the edges of domestic life. Cats are of the home but can also perform acts of unhoming - homes can be a site of nurturance but also unerring violence. Stephen King deploys a resurrected cat in his 1983 novel Pet Sematary, an apposite example of the domestic/feral trope and our lingering fear of home manifest in a cat's body - 'There is more than one way to skin a cat', and cats' bodies have been used across time and space as literary symbols but also as physical commodities. We have sought out the warm bodies of cats alongside the quest for their non-existence. The macabre image of a dead cat has been used in Australia to symbolise the triumph of a Foucauldian form of environmentalism that chooses what will live and what will die. The bodies of cats have been used to further the project of colonisation for many years.

A cat also appears in Kate Kruimink's very excellent Heartsease and is doing not dissimilar narrative work. Sisters Charlotte (Lot) and Ellen (Nelly) reunite at a silent retreat tucked away in the Tasmanian countryside. Nelly is the first to arrive. She 'shoulders her way into the Lobby'. It was 'empty of people' but filled with the accoutrements of a ‘well-preserved homestead museum, the kind that skates over the various atrocities of the local area'. Again, we are met with the spectre of violence that nips at the edges of a porous and Janus-faced form of Western domesticity. Violence also lurks within the tourist precincts of the doggedly colonial city. Kruimink's writing lands like a gut punch. 'There is brine, coffee, red wine, whiskey, bread, soup, the yellow of old books, and an array of sensible jumpers. Only the merest traces of attempted genocide in the air, the soil'. The world outside is equally affecting with the cold 'poking its fingers' into clothing and 'tickling' the inside of your throat.

Nelly finds her room and navigates the 'busy carpet', 'russet and cream', 'looping and scrolling', and the laminated signs 'giving kindly reminders'. She also navigates the slow stream of retreat patrons - a woman with the face of a 'sealed bank vault'; a man with 'leaf-red hair…potted fern.. the ghost of a speech bubble floating from his face'. From inside the orange carpet, the cat emerges, 'All at once, a florid orange loop rose, and it stretched and strode confidently toward me. It was a cat'. Nelly 'feels an appreciative flutter', not uncommon when you have been chosen by a cat. The cat 'is the best' cat Nelly has ever seen with 'a spherical ginger body teetering above stiletto-fine white paws'.

Like Bright Objects, Heartsease lingers in the metaphysical and earthly worlds. Ghosts return to haunt the sisters. Nelly sees her dead mother as she looks out the window. She sees 'a wispier tendril of a woman, pinned at the head in the reflection… her image distilling into me, or out of me'. She imagines her dead mother crawling into bed with her. Nelly misremembers her mother's botanical gift-giving, 'she was planting them and asked me to come and look and I wouldn't, and she told me that my rudeness was probably appropriate given that it was a prickly wild rose'. We are told that this gift still stings, that the 'prickly wild rose' has been digging into Nelly's 'viscera' for many years. Lot's ghosts are not of the woo-hoo kind but are instead the ghosts of her alleged failings as a sister and surrogate mother to Nelly. The novel pitches you backwards and forward. Memories are recalled and distilled. The spectre of death is omnipresent, it looms large, silently retreats, and remerges like the new buds of spring. Kruimink teases out the interrelationship between life and death via the kaleidoscope of Lot and Nelly's memories, dreams and desires.

The cat, 'a basketball with a face', appears then disappears. Yet it is a vital part of the leering absurdity of the Silent Retreat, the absurdity of signs and forms that ask if you have 'come open-hearted', the absurdity of choosing one 'item of beauty and special significance', of seeking meaning in the meaningless, and of being silent in the face of big messy grief, when you are being haunted by very noisy ghosts. The feline emerges like Carroll's Cheshire Cat; it materialises and grows large. When Nelly pokes the 'spherical cat' with her foot, it 'seems only to grow more comfortable'. Discomfort inflates the cat; it does not retreat. The absurdity of a visually noisy, non-retreating cat at a silent retreat. Brilliant.

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The moral of this tale is that you should always trust your catty senses and expect that cats will always be there, lurking, ready to pounce or purr. I knew Lionel and Ms Spherical-cat were there; I just had to feign indifference for them to emerge in all their brilliance and literary significance. As the formidable Kath Day-Knight says, 'I could feel it in me waters'.

Moreover, cats will always come, but sometimes, when you least expect it or if they choose to, because they are cats and they will do what they like, thanks very much.

And, hey. I will be chatting with Ruby Todd and Kate Kruimink on Sunday October 20 at the Headland Writers Festival between 3pm and 4pm at the Tathra Hotel. This is a free event!!! Yes, that's right, free! You can also book tickets for the other sessions here. The festival runs from the 18th to the 20th of October.

I hope to see you there

Yours,

Cat Historian

Twenty-twenty-four has been a big year for cats in politics and the media. Hundreds of articles about 'cat ladies' have been published in just the last couple of months. Over the last week, we have been entertained by hundreds of memes depicting cats and dogs in fear of being eaten. 1980s favourite alien and fancier of cat sandwiches, Alf also made a return. Cats have entered the political scene in a big way and are being coddled by the left and the right. Just in case you may have been living in the bush in a hut with no WiFi, here is a quick recap.  

Image: one of my favs. Shared from Air-rakkah Rogers’ Facebook Page

In September 2024, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, in the first presidential debate with democratic opponent Kamala Harris, claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the residents' pet cats and dogs. Trump stated that he knew this to be true because he had heard people talking about it on T.V. This claim was later debunked by the debate's moderators. After the debate, arguably the world's most famous cat lady, Taylor Swift, publicly announced to her 284 million Insta followers that she was voting for democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Swift signed her post with the valediction 'with love and hope, Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady'. Swift was referencing Trump's running mate J.D Vance's 2021 remarks where he stated that the country was going to hell in a handbasket because it was being run by corporate oligarchs and a bunch of 'childless cat ladies' who had no real stake in it.

Swift's post was accompanied by a picture of her with her sweet ragdoll, Benjamin Button, taken by photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for Time magazine. In December 2023, Swift was named Time's Person of the Year and famously posed with Buttons on the now iconic cover. Perversely, X owner, an on-again-off-again ally of Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, told his followers on X that he would happily give Swift a child and guard her cats with his life. Trump would later petulantly claim that he 'hated Taylor Swift'. Cats and humans with cat companions had entered the chat.

Trump's claim that 'illegal aliens' were chowing down on Springfield's pets spawned hundreds of memes, reels, soundbites, and many news articles. While many memes and reels mocked Trump's remarks, some positioned him as the exalted protector of cats and ducks. On September 10, Elon Musk shared a post from the House Judiciary that included an A.I. image of Trump cuddling a cat and a duck. Taylor Swift's endorsement of Harris and riposte to Trump and Vance and Musk's creepy post have also generated media responses and will probably continue to do so for a while. The topic of 'cat ladies' was even included in celebrity speeches at the 2024 Emmy Awards.

And here I am, stepping away from my primary occupation- writing a book! - to document my thoughts on the matter. But what does all of this mean? And with all this writing, talking and memeification of cats, has anyone really thought about the cats?

Let's peek into the past for a quick recap of how cats have fared in Australia.

In 1929, Australia exported 120,000 ‘house cat’ skins to Britain. A London firm had acquired the skins that were mainly exported for use in the lining of coats, the cuffs and collars of clothing, and rugs. Cat skin rugs were popular at the time, and it was thought that several cat skin rugs adorned the halls and rooms of Buckingham Palace. In 1896, it was reported in the Perth Inquirer and Commercial News that 50,000 house cat skins were exported from America every year. In August 1925, the Australian Women's Mirror included a recipe for tanning skins including rabbit, cat and possum. In 1946, in the Sydney Smith's Weekly, under the title 'Strange but True', the author reported that Australian domestic cat skins were fetching up to seven shillings each in America. In 1934, the Animal Welfare League's chapter in Melbourne raised concerns about 'pet cats' being stolen and killed for their fur. The fur of pet cats was seen as being of better quality than the 'domestic cat gone wild' that prowled around Melbourne's bushland. Even though the League had petitioned the fur trade not to accept the pelts of the nation's beloved pets, they were informed that the trade was impossible to stop.

Image: Newspaper clipping from Trove (Weekly Times, Melbourne 1929)

In 1929, cat skins used to trim the insides of coats were seen as more acceptable than a cat skin coat. As a representative of a London Skin and Fur firm put it at the time, 'apparently there is a sentimental objection to flaunting the skins of, were once, possibly, household pets'. A rug could also be inconspicuously employed, tucked under the pedals of your motor car or laid down discreetly in a less frequented parlour or library. The ‘Strange but True’ author quickly pointed out that they were not advocating for domestic cats to be skinned and killed. Instead, they suggested that the nation should develop a trade centred around the 'domestic cat gone wild'. The author clarified their point; these 'wild' cats deserved a cull because they were 'breeding prolifically' and 'killing valuable birds and lizards'. The author also pointed out the value of domestic cats, which decreased the number of mice and rats.

In 1944, a month after the introduction of meat rationing, the Melbourne Argus published an article profiling the 'strange' diets of people like English politician Henri Labouchere. It was reported that Labouchere thoroughly enjoyed the alternate foods on offer in Paris during the siege. He stated that the best tasting dinners included ‘a ragout of cat, experto credo'. This article appeared during a time when embattled civilians and allied and enemy soldiers were reported to have eaten cats. In 1945, it was widely reported that 'hungry Parisians' were eating cats, with 200-300 missing cats reported to police daily. An Australian POW imprisoned in the Philippines stated that when food rations were cut, he stewed and ate a cat that 'tasted like fricassee rabbit'. In 1943, in Nazi-occupied Holland, it was reported that the Dutch were forced to eat cats due to Nazi commandeering of their food supply. Japanese soldiers reportedly resorted to eating cats, dogs and mules after being cut off by the Chinese in South Shansi in 1938. The eating of cats and dogs was also a feature of the First World War, with reports of retreating 'underfed' Germans' eating cats and 'making sausages of dogs' appearing in British newspapers and the Australian press in 1917. Pet cats and dogs were also euthanised en masse in London during WWII. Hilda Klein reports that this was not done out of necessity or any government orders but performed instead out of fear and changing wartime conditions.

Fast forward to 1996, and Western Australian member for Cowan, Richard Evans, announced his controversial proposition for the 'total eradication of cats in Australia'. Evans's announcement was met with consternation from some sectors, including the then CEO of the RSPCA, Charles Wright, who claimed that the number of feral cats cited as a problem by Evans was grossly exaggerated for politician gain and at the expense of the 'poor cat'. Six years earlier, in 1991, the founder of Earth Sanctuaries, John Walmsley, strode into the South Australian Tourism Award wearing a cat-skin hat. Walmsley was frustrated with the current laws in South Australia that forbid him from killing feral cats that strayed onto his property. Walmsley's cat-hatted appearance was met with a mixed response, but sales of cat-skin hats and rugs went through the roof. Walmsley would go on to sell hundreds of these items from his Warrawong sanctuary. The 1990s saw increased anti-cat sentiment and more vociferous calls for governments to control free-roaming cats.

In 2015, the then Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt, announced the Government's target to eradicate two million feral cats by 2020. Hunt would encounter a formidable opponent, French actress and passionate animal rights activist Bridget Bardot. Bardot stated that Hunt's plan was tantamount to an 'animal genocide' and was 'ridiculous and inhumane'. On October 9, 2015, the Threatened Species Commissioner, Gregory Andrews, wrote to Bardot thanking her for her concern and reiterating the Government's position and firm commitment to protect Australia's native species because 'they belong here'.

On February 7, 2023, the Albanese government released their Threat Abatement Plan for the Predation of Feral Cats (TAP) for public consultation. In a press release announcing the Government's plans, the Federal Minister for Environment and Water, Tanya Pliberseck, described the TAP as a 'battle plan' in the 'war on cats'. A description of the enemy was also included in this call to arms:

"When domesticated cats are living inside our homes, snuggled up at the end of our beds, we rightly love them. But feral cats are the opposite of adorable. They are walking, stalking, ruthless killers."

Many took umbrage at Plibersek's bellicose language, including the head of the Cat Protection Society, Kristina Vesk, who said that she found Plibersek and the Government's 'head-line grabbing language dangerous'. 'All it does is send a subliminal message that cats don't matter, they don't have moral standing in the world, they deserve what's coming to them. They've been turned into demons and monsters', Vesk told the Sydney Morning Herald in September 2023. If you want evidence of the 'they deserve what's coming to them' attitude that Vesk describes, you need only peruse the comments section of the Threatened Species Commissioner's June 21, 2023 post on Facebook. One commenter wrote, 'Time for a $5 bounty on them. Only good cat is a hat'. Clearly, the memory of Walmsley's cat-hatted debut has not been forgotten.

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In 2017, our three-year-old Staffy went missing. After posting to our community Facebook groups, a neighbour contacted me via direct message. Her beloved cat had gone missing, and she wanted to express her sympathy. She understood the pain and grief that comes with having a much-loved pet disappear without a trace. A few weeks after I received this DM, another community member posted on a Facebook noticeboard account that quite a few cats in the area had gone missing. The theory was that someone was using council-issued cat traps to trap and kill the neighbourhood cats. Even in 2017, I was acutely aware of how theories propounded on the internet could circulate and mutate. Trump and Vance's claims that Haitian immigrants were eating the household pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio, started from a post shared to a local community Facebook group. The post's claims made it to the right-wing media. The claim then metastasized and infected the 2024 Presidential debate, spread by its vector, Donald Trump. While the theory that someone in the neighbourhood was trapping and killing peoples' pet cats may or may not have been true, the fear was real and not wholly unfounded. Scholars like Kristin Hill have examined the rise of anti-cat sentiments precipitated by provocative media reporting. An anti-cat vigilante – a community member taking it upon themselves to eradicate free-roaming cats – was not an illogical proposition.

I still live with the fear that my gorgeous Poppy girl will fall victim to anti-cat vigilantism. I believe these fears are substantive. Since cats were introduced into so-called Australia by the British, they have been variously described as 'pet', 'house cat', 'domestic cat gone wild', 'felis catis', 'pest', 'stray', 'domestic', 'killer', 'murderer', and probably many other names and labels that escaped documentation. These names and labels inevitably impact the ways in which we interact with cats outside of the worlds of social and traditional media. Moreover, we did not pluck these names and labels out of the air or off some random name tree. Particular decisions were made regarding their selection and application, and whole narratives were built up around them.

In Australia and the U.S., different categories of cats have been co-opted to furnish particular political narratives. The racist trope of the non-white 'pet' eating migrant is not only a trope deployed by the conservative right in America. In 1878, Mayor of Adelaide, Henry Scott, spoke in a meeting at the town hall about the pressing issue of rabbits. Scott stated that on his property at Kapunda, he had managed to eradicate them with cats. Scott addressed the issue of cat numbers increasing. It was reported that he said, 'In that case, they would have to import chinamen (sic) to eat the cats'. This comment was met with laughter from the floor. And remember the episode of Neighbours where the Lim family were accused of eating Jim Robinson's daughter Julie Martin's missing dog? No? Well, that was the late 1990s, a hundred-odd years after the anti-Chinese racism of pre-federation Australia.

For political leaders, the non-white, 'pet-eating' trope was and is a very effective political dog whistle employed to dehumanise and vilify people who were and are not white. The fear and opprobrium that this provokes is often used to justify punitive immigration policies. And words and policy decisions have consequences. Currently, in Springfield, Ohio, law enforcement is dealing with a series of bomb threats, with many in the Haitian community afraid to leave their homes. Trump's dehumanising of immigrants seeking asylum and citizenship in America is a key weapon in his discursive arsenal, and some would suggest a chaos-making agenda.

Even though history tells us that cat products were used by many in Australia and overseas, their consumption, particularly of cats and dogs considered 'pets' or 'domestic' was often positioned as characteristic of a particular racialised and classed immorality. If cats and dogs were eaten, particularly by white consumers, it was out of grave necessity. Moreover, eating cats and dogs was considered newsworthy because it helped to demonstrate just how dire the consumer's predicament was. It was so bad in war-torn Europe and in Australia WWII POW camps that they had to resort to eating cats and dogs. The cat skin trade, often called 'domestic cat skins' or 'house cat skins' was once a lucrative enterprise. But those employed in the trade were often quick to point out that they were not killing and skinning someone's beloved pet.

The status of cats as 'pets' is important here. In particular, we place value on particular categories of cats. The tale of the cat and dog-eating Haitian immigrants struck a chord because the dogs and cats that they were allegedly cooking up were someone's 'pet'. As Trump clarified, 'they're eating the pets of the people that live there'. These remarks by Trump were uttered at a time when the rate of 'pet' ownership among Americans is growing. An American Pet Products Association Study found that in 2024, 66% of households included a 'pet'. In 1988, it was 56% of households. Cats and dogs top the list as preferred 'pets'. Of those surveyed, 97% considered them part of their family. The same study also reported that in 2022, Americans spent 136.8 billion dollars on their 'pets'. Other scholars, like Fiona Nast, have argued that our emotional relationships with our 'pets' have changed over time, with the 1980s marking the beginning of this shift. The 1980s saw the emergence and ascendency of neo-liberal economics and policy that placed a greater onus on the individual and diminished the importance of societies as interconnected and co-dependent. As we became increasingly isolated from one another, we pulled our 'pets' even closer.

Interestingly, according to a 2024 Gallup poll, 55% per cent of Americans wanted to see immigration numbers decrease, a 10% rise from the previous year. During Trump's presidency, he introduced several hard-line immigration policies, including the highly controversial Muslim travel ban in 2017. In 2024, you can understand why the irrational fear of pet-eating migrants held purchase among some in the community. Add one or two beloved pets considered family, concoct an invasion of hungry, marauding immigrants, and you create the perfect storm of racial hatred and, inevitably, violent retribution.

And yes, I think about the dogs too. But dogs have not been vilified in quite the same way as cats have in Australia. Dogs, particularly working dogs, are considered a quintessential part of our national identity; cats are not. The 'feral cat' is often positioned as the villainous other of our beloved native species, and this positioning is also part of our national identity, what some scholars have called eco-nationalism. Nicholas Smith argues that this blending of environmentalism and patriotism actually 'simultaneously recognises and denies that the human colonisation of Australia was ( and is) a form of feral invasion'.

Cats have been used in Australian and American politics as a furry diversion, positioned just so to make us look the other way. This has had serious consequences. In Springfield, Ohio, and America more broadly, the consequences include what Guardian reporter Moira Donegan has called a pogrom incited by the American right. In Australia, we continue to point our (rifle) sights at feral cats because to look in the other direction would mean confronting what it really means to be 'feral' in settler Australia.

And what does this ferality look like? At the moment, it looks like a big pile of dead cats.

Shameless plug: this article is informed by my current research (and social media obsession) into the history of human-cat relations in Australia. I am currently writing a book! It is due for release April 2026. So, if you like what you read here, you are going to love what I have instore for you in 2026.

Yours,

Cat Historian

Wish me luck!

Today, I signed a publishing contract with ABC Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. That's right. A PUBLISHING CONTRACT with ABC books! The ABC. Yikes! The lovely people at HarperCollins decided that my little cat history project had legs and a tail. Ha! I will release my furry study into the world in April 2026. As of today, I have approximately 11 months to research and write a cultural history of cats in Australia. No biggie, I've got this.

I mean, I have undertaken a rather large research and writing project before, a PhD. OK, the PhD took me five years to complete, but in my defence, I was still actively parenting my then teenage children, holding down a couple of non-academic and academic jobs, and managing some pretty gnarly high-level anxiety. Also, does anyone finish in three years? Maybe men with wives. There were times when I thought that I might not get there, these were the times when I seriously entertained the idea of quitting the degree altogether. Everyone undertaking a PhD, even men with wives, thinks about quitting at least once. I remember once broaching the idea of quitting with my psychologist. Ever the pragmatist, she helped me to identify the pros and cons of finishing and hitting the submission button. Spoiler: the cons outweighed the pros. As she held up the A4 sheet with the long list of cons, she said, 'I think you have a way forward now'. My way forward was typing up my thesis's last five thousand words. My psych saw it coming, and at our next meeting, she patiently helped me devise strategies for managing the remaining three months of my degree.

However, writing a book through a non-academic publisher is different. I am not attempting a postgraduate thesis, and I am no longer a postgraduate student. A PhD is designed to enable students, through ongoing supervision, to acquire the skills and competencies to complete a large, self-directed research project. The thesis is assessed to gauge if you have adequately demonstrated these skills and competencies. A PhD thesis is a relatively prescriptive and formulaic piece of writing containing the standard elements of academic writing. Academic writing can be dull, 'dry as dust,' as one of my students put it. Another student exclaimed that it was designed to 'suck the life out of you', and I think that can also be true of some academic writing. Much academic writing contains language and terminology that is opaque and soul-sucking to the uninitiated. That is why many academic articles and PhD theses are only read by a handful of people. The academic paywall is also part of the reason why academic writing remains read by only a select few.

I will be doing things differently even though I can't throw off my academic robes - you can take the girl out of academia, but you can't take academia out of the girl! Like a bowerbird, I will pick off the shiny stuff of academia and leave out the bits that put you to sleep. I promise to include an evocative and gripping narrative, humour, good feline puns, rigorous research and references to Kath and Kim. My work will be completely transparent, with citations, but not the ones that take up half the page.

So, what is this purry, furry history about, and why the bloody hell would you read it?

My yet-to-be-titled book (more about this later!) is a love story, albeit a complicated one.

My book will explore our funny, fraught and fur-filled relationship with cats since they first sailed to our shores in 1788. Cats have joined us on farms, shearing sheds, naval and merchant ships, hospitals, train stations, and corner shops. Cats ate ice creams with us on Balmoral Beach, nursed soldiers back to health in WWI hospices, stood firm with their comrades on the picket lines and endured the savagery of war in the trenches. Cats inspired us to paint, write and create. They taught us how to care. My research explores the rich history of cats in Australia, how we have loved and been loved by them, and how we have grappled with the complexity of their status as champion cuddler and killers.

I am currently drafting chapters about celebrity cats, creative cats, straying cats, evil cats and pioneering cats. My work in the archive has uncovered a range of often highly emotive responses to cats in Australia. My archival searching has also uncovered a range of human and non-human actors, like the fab gents that founded the Royal Australasian Ornithological Union. Gee, those guys knew how to party.

If that hasn't whet your appetite, I will leave you with this.

On the 4th of September 2024, I received my publishing contract via email. On that same day, the Federal Minister for Environment and Water, the honourable Tanya Plibersek, announced that her government was investing sixty million dollars ‘to halt the path of destruction of feral cats’. After I read through the email with my delicious contract attached, I habitually opened Facebook for a dopamine hit, and there it was the announcement. As a classic catastrophic thinker, I tend to thread moments together until they form a uniform path straight to my inevitable destruction. When I copped eyes on the minister's post, I immediately threaded together my newly arrived contract to publish a book about the history of cats in Australia to her plan to eradicate all feral cats; this inevitably led to me theorising that every anti-cat person in Australia was going to come after me and I would be burnt alive within a fiery blaze of cancellation.

Back to my beloved psychologist, she stated, 'well, these things that you catastrophise about could come true, but they may not. A way of staying in control of the situation is to put some strategies in place if they do'. So here goes.

Here is what I might say to the anti-cat person who wishes to cancel me.

Dear anti-cat person. First, I love dogs as well. I have two, and they bring me an immense amount of joy. My staff is coming to the end of his long life, and when I think about that, I sob like a baby. I try not to think about it. I do, though, think about cats' lives ending a lot, particularly in cruel and unnecessary ways, like being 1080'ed. I also think a lot about our native species and unrelenting species extinction, which cats are inevitably a part of. I think a lot about how some people in Australia hate cats because of the ways that we have variously defined them as 'feral', 'stray' or 'domestic'. And how that hate can result in violence. Cats evoke strong emotions, but not always positive ones. I am proposing a history of cats in Australia that may help us better understand these emotions and where they came from. Understanding these emotions may help us to grapple with our feelings about cats today, but most importantly, it will help us to grapple with them in the future. If we can better understand how we got here, perhaps we can better understand how to move forward. Please don't cancel me.

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Before I go. Wish me luck! And do stick around. Unlike the PhD, I hope not to write and research alone. Please stay in touch and help me stay on track. Follow, like and share my stuff on Insta and Facebook. Read more of my ramblings here. I may even share bits of my book—little teasers. Also, email me. I will absolutely accept messages of support and encouragement. And I have strategies for anything else that comes my way :). Do share with me any interesting history cat tidbits! I will continue to share bits and pieces of my research on my FB and Instagram pages because that is what cat people do, and dog people do. Did I tell you I am also a dog person?

Yours,

Cat Historian.

Image: Me! The Cat Historian with her beloved Poppy. I am very excited to soon be a published author.

I have a question that I hope we can address together.

What's up with Trim?

On the 27 of June, I posted four photos to my Instagram account. Since I commenced sharing pictures on both Facebook and Instagram, I have become obsessed with how to generate likes and follows. I have spent way too much time thinking about what images will garner the most likes and shares. Surely the image of kittens clambering around on the shoulders of an Australian WWII warrant officer would do it? That image alone is worth 100 likes, maybe more. Right!?

Nope. Wrong.

It would be a photo of the statue of Trim, perched on the windowsill of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, which would garner the most interest from my followers online. This left me wondering why. Why was this rather uninspiring photo of a small bronze statue of a cat, taken in the rain early on a Sunday morning in July, so popular? What prompted over 600 hundred people to hit the Instagram like button ( big numbers for me!), over 6 comments ( also big numbers for me!), and many love heart and cat emojis? Why does the story of Trim and Flinders still affect so many 220 years after Trim's heartbreaking demise? What's up with Trim?

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Image: Statue of Trim, perched on the windowsill of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

On a wet Sunday morning in July, I visited the State Library of New South Wales to visit Trim's tribute. I had been writing and thinking about Trim for a while, ever since I commenced my research into the feline past in Australia. The relationship between Trim and British navigator and cartographer Matthew Flinders was the subject of the very first direct message I received via Instagram. 'Did you know about Trim? The cat that circumnavigated Australia with Matthew Flinders? my first DMer wrote. It was also the subject of the following five messages, often accompanied by photos of Trim's statues in Sydney and Port Lincoln.

As these messages arrived, I realised that for many, Trim was the touchstone for people's understanding of Australia's feline past. Moreover, Trim was often people's entry point into the life of Matthew Flinders. And this is no surprise. Whenever Flinders gets mentioned in the public domain, Trim invariably makes an appearance. In the collective historical imagination, Flinders and Trim go together like peas and carrots.

By now, we all know who Trim is, right? The sweet black and white cat who accompanied the British navigator and cartographer Matthew Flinders on his circumnavigation of the great southern continent from 1801 -1803. Trim would mysteriously disappear in 1804 on the island of Mauritius, where Flinders was imprisoned by the French. Flinders claimed that Trim had been eaten by local slaves, a claim that was never substantiated. Many statues have been erected in Trim's honour, positioned in significant locations around the globe, including Sydney, London, Donington Lincolnshire, Port Lincoln and Adelaide, South Australia. Trim's disappearance prompted Flinders to pen his charming and emotive A Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim in 1809. This slender volume is the reason why we know so much about Trim and Flinders' relationship and why several books have been written about them. Thanks to Flinders' heartfelt tribute, successive generations get to delight in the story of their companionship, the pairing of a very famous nineteenth-century British navigator with a cat.

In Australia, many of our public commemorative practices ensure that we never forget the mostly white men who mapped, lapped and inwardly traversed the continent that Flinders would name 'Australia'. Flinders alone has several statues erected in his honour and many streets and institutions named after him. Flinders memory and his achievements as a skilled navigator and cartographer have been immortalised via settler practices of naming and memorialisation. Early settlers liked nothing more than to slap their names on places and spaces, wilfully ignoring the many hundreds of Indigenous languages - words for country- that had been spoken and curated by Indigenous peoples on the continent for thousands of years. They also liked a good monument, especially if it memorialised a British explorer or colonial governor. These practices have not gone uncontested and have often been the topic of heated debate and ongoing calls for more honest representations of Australia's shared past.

Statues of Trim have also been the topic of debate. In a February 2020 article for the Guardian, journalist Paul Daley asked, 'If Flinders and his cat gets a statue, why not the Aboriginal man that sailed with them?'.* Daley asked this question on the 250th anniversary of Cook's voyage of discovery when the Australian federal government under Scott Morrison had pledged 50 million dollars toward commemorating the anniversary of Cook's voyage to the east coast of Australia in 1770. The Aboriginal man in question is Bungaree, a Kuringai man who accompanied Trim and Flinders on their circumnavigation of the continent. Bungaree was a skilled diplomat and vital to Flinders' voyage's success. Flinders embarked on several onshore expeditions where Bungaree was instrumental in negotiating safe passage for Flinders and his men.

Bungaree was also one of Trim's firm favourites. According to Flinders, Trim and Bungaree formed an 'intimate acquaintance'. Bungaree showed Trim kindness and was a 'great resource' to a ship's cat who was forever on the hunt for treats. Flinders wrote of Bungaree’s attentiveness:

If he had the occasion to drink, he mewed to Bongaree and leaped up to the water cask; if to eat he called him down below and went straight to his kid, where there was generally a remnant of black swan.

Trim also repaid this kindness with 'caresses'. Anyone who has experienced the caresses of a cat knows how sweet and hard-won they are, but also, being hard-won, how thoroughly genuine this show of love is. You will be loved in return if you love a cat and treat them with kindness and respect. Over the years after Flinders' expeditions, Bungaree did not receive much love or genuine respect from many in the colonies, who would benefit from his efforts. No statues were erected in his honour or histories written about him; like many of his fellow countrymen and women, he was relegated to a footnote in the dominant history of the country.

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I want to pause now with a rather shameful admission. I find the history of colonial Australia a wee bit boring. I say this as a historian of Australian history who has spent some time through my teaching and research looking closely at the settler and Aboriginal history of so-called 'Australia', including its history as a penal outpost and later a collection of British colonies. I think my lack of enthusiasm is partly because of the way this history has been communicated to me. As a child of the 80s and 90s, Australian history was a roll call of gallant male explorers and downtrodden but resilient 'currency lads'. The 'currency lads' and 'lasses' were the ones we were most encouraged to empathise with, those men and women, the children of convicts, who, through their resilience, swagger and hard work, blazed a trail for generations after to emulate and aspire to.

My earliest memory of being taught Australian history in school was via my star turn as a swaggie. In grade four, I was selected to sing the old bush ballad, The Old Bark Hut, as part of an outdoor concert performed in our town centre. I beat out one of the boys in our class to get the role, a selection that shocked everyone, most of all me. Our teacher at the time was a rather progressive chap who would line us up every morning before class and lead us in a rendition of Buddy Holly's, Peggy Sue. We would sing along at the top of our lungs while he strummed along on his guitar. I think he saw the emerging thespian in me*, or perhaps I was giving major 'theatre kid' vibes; either way, he chose me, and I was chuffed.

My dad was also chuffed. He spent hours after work pulling together an authentic swag to add to my costume. In the flurry of excitement, I left the swag at school. One of the teachers who had accompanied us to the town centre for the concert rode back to school on her horse to retrieve it. Yes, a horse! Unfortunately, she could not locate the all-important item my dad had lovingly curated and rode back empty-handed. Yes, rode back. On a horse! So, there I stood in the town centre, sans swag but wearing an authentic Fosseys*flannelette shirt and oversized jeans fixed in place with a hessian rope - because that is what swaggies wore, right? - belting out the lyrics to The Old Bark Hut. Here are a few choice quotes for your viewing (singing) pleasure:

Oh, my name is Bob the Swagman; before you all I stand

And I've had many ups and downs while travelling through the land

I was once well to do my boys, and now I'm all stumped up

And I'm forced to go on rations in an old bark hut

In an old bark hut, in an old bark hut. For that is one of the great misfortunes in an old bark hut.*

Fast forward to 2007, and I am in a university classroom with the most amazing historian, a PhD candidate at the time, who introduced me to parts of Australian history that I never knew were there or ever thought to explore. There was also something about her enthusiasm, her casual efficiency and gargantuan intellect. In her classroom, history became animated; it had depth, colour, light, and gravitas. History was more than just bush ballads and 'currency lads' with ropes holding their duds up. History was all around and everywhere, and we were part of it. History could be the small things, the finite details, the mundane and the everyday. History was on a foreign battlefield and on wooden boats carrying the flotsam and jettison of Britain's 'criminal class', but it was also at the beach, in the supermarket, in the deep time of Indigenous lifeways, in the town centre, at our kitchen table, and evidently, purring on our lap.

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So where do Trim and Matthew Flinders sit within this story of brilliant historians, misplaced swags and an 11-year-old balladeer? Is the story of Flinders and Trim one of those big histories that casts an impenetrable shadow over Australia's allegedly smaller moments. Or is it a smaller history, an intimate detail in the broader story of the continent that many of us have come to call home? Perhaps their story is both, which is why many of us are so inexplicably drawn to it.

My learned friend and fellow wandering scholar, Rowan Cahill, reminded me that Flinders was a complex and extraordinary individual. He was not born into wealth or privilege, yet he reached exalted heights in his career. Born into a community of farmers, Flinders chose the sea. He was an immensely talented cartographer and mariner. His innovations revolutionised sea travel, and they stood the test of time. As he set off on his voyage to circumnavigate the continent, he left his wife behind, Anne Chappelle, who was also one of his best friends. He would not see his wife for another nine years. He loved a cat.

In 1941, Ernestine Hill published her bestseller, My Love Must Wait. Hill tells the story of Chappelle and Flinders, their romance and heartbreaking separation. At its core, it's a story of love and deep devotion. It is Flinders' relationships with others, human and animal, where the contours and the intimate details of early Australian history emerge from the shadows. Flinders has been elevated in dominant retellings of Australian history as one of our great explorers. He was also a son, a husband, a best friend, a flute player, and a cat lover.

A cat-lover. A lover of cats.

I have argued elsewhere that it is our love for non-human animals that renders us most vulnerable, where the contours of our humanity can truly be seen. Flinders' love for a cat, but also his propensity to love more broadly, brings the smaller story of his life out of the shadows.

The smaller things, the intimate moments, excite me most about Australia's colonial history. The smaller things can help illuminate the intimate details that add colour and light to a past that is so often swamped in shadow.

But, also, sometimes we need big things, and it is high time Bungaree got his statue.

Yours,

Cat Historian

References

*Paul Daley, ‘Flinders ( and his cat) get statues - so why not the Aboriginal man that sailed with them?’, Guardian online, 6 February 2020, (Flinders (and his cat) get statues – so why not the Aboriginal man who sailed with them? )

* In high school I pursued a career in the dramatic arts even landing a much-coveted position at the NSW state drama camp. I wanted to go to NIDA, but I didn't get there. I still have a quiet ambition to tread the boards.

* Fosseys was the precursor to Target, a bit like Kmart or Big W but with a lot more towels. Or that is the way I remember it.

* Find the full lyrics and sheet music here: Vol. 76 No. 3927 (18 May 1955) (nla.gov.au)

You’re welcome!