Taronga
It's the near future. The world has fallen to some kind of apocalyptic cataclysm (most likely the result of nuclear weapons) referred to as 'Last Days'... there is no law and order, and circumstances have reduced the majority of humanity to the level of animals, or perhaps worse than animals. Ben is a fourteen-year old boy living out in the bush beyond the Blue Mountains in Australia. He has teamed up with Greg, a bullying individual who exploits Ben's ability to 'Call' animals in order to get food. Ben grows sickened by the killing of animals and his part in these deaths, and decides to leave Greg and go it alone. More articles like this you can find on the https://essayhub.com/blog/personal-essay on EssayHub blog you can find many helpful articles. But Australia has become a harsh place, no one can be trusted, people are desperate for food or whatever they can get and will not take any chances... Ben feels himself drawn back to his childhood home in Coogee, Called by something unseen but startlingly free, and so he decides to travel back towards Sydney. It's a hazardous journey and Ben doesn't even know where he's really going until he gets there. What he finds is Taronga, a place that once used to be a zoo.
It's a claustrophobic and desperate tale reminiscent of 'Z For Zachariah' and '''Tomorrow When the War Began'', both stories of young folk surviving in a changed and frightening world. Like these other novels, 'Taronga' is a surprisingly creepy read - the setting is our own world turned into a lawless wasteland, at once identifiable but alien, a world shattered by primitive violence. Increasingly it seems that Ben's situation is hopeless, and as he walks through streets littered with burnt out car shells and runs from any figure he sees it seems that there will never be a way out for him. When he finds Taronga Zoo it seems that he may have found a hidden and protected Utopia, but it soon transpires that - like everything else - it is a paradise sullied by human nature.
Aside from the scary setting, the other strong point of 'Taronga' is in Kelleher's portrayal of animals. Ben has a gift known as 'Calling' that allows him to communicate with any animal, it's never really explained but it's what the novel is pretty much about so it never really jars or feels abnormal. Ben struggles with the power and responsibility this gift allows him, and is wracked with shame and guilt at the ways he uses it to survive at the cost of animal life. So when he meets Raja, an aggressive and strong-willed tiger that the people of Taronga use to protect their boundaries from would-be invaders, he is intrigued, fascinated and repulsed by an animal mind as strong as his own. It's this struggle of wills that lies at the heart of Kelleher's tale, and Ben's coming to terms with this mirrors his own arc of growth in relation to the people around him. Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, it's a strong point of the novel because Kelleher manages to portray his animal-characters (mainly the tiger and a dog from the book's earlier chapters) without really falling prey to anthropomorthism. Raja comes across every bit as much an individual as the human characters - he's probably one of the more three-dimensional characters of the novel - yet he remains wholly and completely (and complexly) animal. It's a real achievement.
'Taronga' is a classic of inventive and moving children's fiction, and is very deserving of the praise it's gathered in the years since it's publication. The fact that it's more a study of character in hard times rather than a cautionary tale of where we're heading ensures that it hasn't really dated either.
