How to Move a Zoo

Kate Simpson

Owen Swan

A & U Children’s, 2024

32pp., hbk., RRP $A24.99

9781761180309

Here’s a problem for your students to solve… it’s 1916 and you need to move a zoo from its old home in Moore Park, Sydney. to its new home on the other side of the harbour.  The Sydney Harbour Bridge hasn’t been built, and the road trip is long and involves crossing five different bridges.  It’s been okay for a lot of the animals because they could be put in crates and cages and loaded onto the back of trucks, but how do you move an elephant that is too large for even the largest truck of the time?

This is the fascinating story of how Jessie the Asian elephant, a hugely popular attraction at the old venue where she had lived for 30 years,  made her way along Flinders Street, through Taylor Square to the Domain to Fort Macquarie and on to her new home at Taronga Park Zoological Gardens on Bradley’s Head, a journey that would take about 20 minutes today but so much longer back then.  In the early hours of a Sunday morning in a Sydney very different from today, anyone who was up and about, like the milkman with his horse and cart, would have been startled to see a man leading an elephant through the quiet streets and as gentle and as tame as Jessie was, it was not an easy journey for the streets, sights, sounds and smells were unfamiliar to her and she could have panicked at any time.  Crossing the harbour on a ferry was an unknown but when there is a bond between animal and human as there was between Jessie and Mr Miller, who knows what’s possible. 

While the role of elephants in today’s modern zoos is so much more important than providing amusement for a penny a ride, Jessie’s story is one that is well documented both in articles and photographs, and this beautifully illustrated narrative non fiction version is the perfect starting point for not only learning about that remarkable cross-city journey, but also delving more deeply into these fascinating creatures whose future is uncertain.