Laura Jean McKay

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks. Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin. Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.

An ecopoem written as a creative response to Val Plumwood's works 'Being Prey' (2012) and Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993).

(2012) The Eye of the Crocodile, edited by Lorraine Shannon. Canberra: Australian National University E Press.
(1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge.

Jane Goodall first observed chimpanzees in Tanzania in 1960, where she saw them fashioning tools from the stems of leaves and using these stems to fish termites from a mound. Goodall sent her findings to archaeologist and palaeontologist Louis Leakey. He replied, ‘Now we must redefine “tool”, redefine “man” or accept chimpanzees as humans’ (Goodall, ‘Must We Redefine’). Despite Goodall’s discovery, the commonality between humans and other primates continues to be met with both resistance and exploitation. This paper explores the notion of human/nonhuman animal binary or ‘the species boundary’, which, in scientific terms, refers to ‘species differentiation’ (Huggan and Tiffin 139), while in philosophy it refers to ‘ontological difference’ (Wolf, Zoontologies 4-5). I explore how Benjamin Hale’s 2011 novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore offers avenues into perceiving, understanding and experiencing the species divide. Hale uses anthropomorphism in his novel as a tool in his portrayal of his nonhuman protagonist, Bruno, and in so doing shines a stark light on human/nonhuman animal binary. I suggest that there are limitations to this portrayal. The novel ultimately pushes anthropomorphism so far that the nonhuman animal character becomes unintentional parody. Despite this, I argue that if anthropomorphism can be used as a tool of characterisation, the recital of anthropocentrism could also offer a useful way to shine a light on issues of species binary in the hands of a nonhuman animal narrator.

McKay, Laura. 'A "very important chimp". Antithesis 'Binary': 28, 2018.

A creative nonfiction piece about the research and writing process in literary animal studies and fiction writing about nonhuman animals.

Published in WQ (Queensland Writers Centre magazine), issue 258, September-November 2017 http://qldwriters.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/WQ-258.pdf

This article is an exploration of the representation of animal otherness in Colin McAdam’s novel A Beautiful Truth (2013), in which a young chimpanzee is purchased and brought into the home of a human family. Otherness is discussed in this essay through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of territorialisation and also through the animal studies interpretations of the human/nonhuman divide as theorised by Margot Norris, Donna Haraway and Val Plumwood. Through this
discussion, I explore the ways in which a constructed environment, such as a work of fiction, might navigate unfathomable otherness in human/nonhuman animal relationships.

'That summer stretched yearlong and we were always giving birth. We tried to make a game of it at first — taking turns in the narrow cells and pitching our cries like songs but towards the end we were either just fat or skin.'
A short story set in a factory farm, where battery hens live their lives in a cycle of production, waiting and death. Written as part of the creative component of my PhD on nonhuman representation in fiction.

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.

As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin.

Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.

Written as the creative component of an MA in Creative Writing, focusing on post colonial short stories.

Beyond the killing fields and the temples of Angkor is Cambodia: a country with a genocidal past and a wide, open smile. A frontier land where anything is possible – at least for the tourists.

In Holiday in Cambodia Laura Jean McKay explores the electric zone where local and foreign lives meet. There are tender, funny moments of tentative understanding, as well as devastating re-imaginings of a troubled history.

Three backpackers board a train, ignoring the danger signs – and find themselves in the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

Elderly sisters are visited by their vampire niece from Australia and set out to cure her.

A singer creates a sensation in swinging 1969, on the eve of an American bombing campaign.

These are bold and haunting stories by a remarkable new talent.

BUSHLAWYER, 2022. Laura Jean Mckay reviews
Sedition and Surrender by Anahera Maire Gildea and Michaela Keeble. Sedition and Surrender are the work of publishing collective Taraheke | Bushlawyer, where Indigenous women and allies ‘protect story sovereignty from the appropriative juggernaut of the book industry’, using the banner ‘landback through literature’ (Taraheke). At once a joyous soar through language and style, both collections bare the weight of entanglement and estrangement with the more-than-human world, at once unique, while also in dialogue as poets in Aotearoa.