Gunflower is a collection of stories written by Laura Jean McKay. The collection includes stories written over two decades, there are short stories, short short stories, and flash-fiction-length stories. They are grouped into three sections: Birth, Life, Death, and they range from laugh-out-loud funny to truly devastating. They deal with the arbitrary relationships between humans and non-human animals, between humans and humans, and between humans and nature.

Birth. Why do we buy houses and coats for some non-human animals, and eat others? – “By the time Jeffries leaves it’s almost nine. Ed hasn’t defrosted the foxhound or fried the pony.” One story describes the ghastly lives of those condemned to a battery farm: “In the last days, the giddy, heady urge to birth slowed and then stopped and we shed hair instead.” There are stories of lost children – lost in the back of hooning cars, lost at birth: “Cara’s hair and fingernails can continue to grow in the hospital only kilometres away.”

Life. What do we deem important, what do we fight for? How do we fight when our governments take away our choices? – “Who hadn’t decided to haul-arse over three nauseatingly hot states to flag down an abortion ship?” And as governments take over control of women’s bodies, trainees are taught how to torture animals to make examining them easier: “The animal bucks against the stall. Melissa frowns at the cow. ‘I don’t know why she’s so unhappy today.’”

Death. The extinction of wild animals: “I stopped sleeping in the summer we went to the reef.” The extinction of domestic animals sinking under floods. The extinction of respect, the blurred line between the treatment of a wild boar and Sarah, a woman who goes on a boar hunt: “Ripping hooks.” The extinction of community, the Covid lockdown testing people’s willingness to protect each other. The inevitable extinction of all, yet meanwhile the exhausting cycle of trying to be on top: “When you’re in the state I’m in, the local waterhole is a good and a bad place to go.”  

Written by the author of the wonderful The Animals in That Country, Gunflower is a stunning collection of stories showing how cruel and selfish humans can be. The stories allow the reader to see familiar things in a totally different light, and to ponder that there must be a better way to proceed. Highly recommended.