Postcards from the Zoo: Animal Tales from a 25-year Zoo Safari

3.5★s

Postcards from the Zoo is a memoir by Australian dancer, teacher, secretary and author, Darill Clements of her twenty-five years as Taronga Zoo's Public Relations Officer. In her foreward, she says: "For my 25 Zoo years, it was the animals that were my teachers. It was always the animals that delighted, surprised, enlightened, energised, made me laugh and, of course, sometimes saddened me. They inspired me and gave me a fund of stories I ultimately needed to write down and share … with great fondness, a fair dose of anthropomorphism and with elephant-sized gratitude to the animals, and to my wonderful former zoo colleagues and my friends in the local and international media, that I recall my days at Taronga and Western Plains Zoos."

As well as 24 glossy pages of photos (some in colour) by award-winning photographer, Rick Stevens, there are many anecdotes, arranged roughly into sections, with clever puns for chapter headings. They cover daily life in the zoos, special occasions, and publicity events. Clements covers breeding, wildlife rescue and rehabilitation for rerelease, transfer to other zoos (intrastate, interstate and international), and the constant regeneration of the zoos, the evolution of the exhibits.

Into the main text are inserted cut-in "fact" pages on various animals, informative and interesting, but also the only irritating feature of the book is that they often appear mid-sentence, then themselves end on the page mid-sentence, thus interrupting the flow of reading. Certainly an entertaining read which prompts a long-overdue visit to the zoo.