Lately I’ve been thinking about dogs and dingoes and wildness. I’ve just re-read sturdy hardback library copies of Frank Dalby Davison’s Dusty, about a dingo-kelpie cross in rural Australia in the middle of the twentieth century, and Jack London’s Call of the Wild, about a sled dog in the Yukon during the Klondike goldrush in the 1890s.

I read Dusty for the first time as a child, probably after one of our cattle dogs gave birth to a litter of gorgeous, defenceless little white pups, because I was deeply affected by a scene that occurred at the beginning of the story. I thought it was one of the saddest things I’d ever read. On re-reading I discover that this scene is not on the first page, as I’d remembered, but in the second chapter: a man riding through the bush comes upon a dingo lair where there are three pups. He shoots the pups’ mother as she returns to the lair and kills two of the pups by picking them up by the hind legs and bashing their skulls against a rock. My eleven-year-old self stopped reading here and cried about all the injustice in the world.