Tales from the Inner City (2018), a sister volume to the anthology Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) is a collection of 25 illustrated stories about relationships between humans and animals. The basic premise I set for myself was quite simple: think about an animal in a city. Why is it there? How do people react to it? What meaning does it suggest?

The first story I wrote concerned crocodiles living across the entire upper floor of a skyscraper, and this more or less triggered a flow of similar daydreams. Much of my work, from The Rabbits through to The Lost Thing and Tales from Outer Suburbia deals with the separation or tension between natural and artificial worlds, provoking a sense of longing for something lost, or something that can’t be fully remembered. Our current way of life is, historically speaking, very strange, both in a wonderful and troubling way, a kind of glitch in geological time marked by great separations and abstractions. I’ve often felt that many material and spiritual problems suffered by myself and others may have something to do with this distance from nature in a post-colonial and post-industrial world, especially within urban centres. Thinking about other animals is a useful way of appreciating this, stepping back from a rather narrow anthropocentric mindset, trapped as it is in contemporary human concerns and self-obsession.

Importantly, my animals never really speak, and their natures remain inscrutable. They are beings that move in and out of each story as if trying to tell us something about our own successes and failures as a species, the meaning of our imagination and our true place in the world, albeit unclearly. In that sense, these fictional creatures have some parallels with real ones; animals whose day-to-day presence might illustrate principles of life we are least inclined to see, either due to cultural distraction, physical distance or the barriers of language. We are just so busy being humans all the time, while other mammals, insects, fish and birds endure beside us like forgotten kin. And while we may never understand the lives of these other animals – it would be foolish to assume otherwise – by writing and painting stories about them we might at least stretch our imagination, and come to understand a little more of our human selves.

First publication date: September 26, 2018 (Australia & UK)

Winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal, UK, 2020

Further comments on this book and its stories, including some early sketches

Publishers:

Australia: Allen & Unwin

UK: Walker Books

USA: Arthur A Levine Books

Canada: Tundra / Random House

Germany: Aladin Verlag

Spain: Barbara Fiore Editora

Italy: Tunue

Poland: Kultura

Sweden: Lilla piratförlaget

Taiwan: Grimm Press

Japan: Kawade Shobo Shinsha

Netherlands: Querido

Denmark: ABC Forlag

Norway: Cappelen Damm

French rights available, contact Sophie Byrne, sophie@passion-pictures.com.au