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'Since the mid-1990s, Australian writers have been shifting the form and function of animal representation to explore the material realities of the more-than-human as well as the violence implicit in the human/animal relationship. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these fictive challenges, turning to a close reading of Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). I argue that Wood’s novel operates as a taxonomic replication of some of the paradoxes and limits in contemporary, literary discourses on non-human animals. At first blush, the work’s satire of the romanticisation of animal imagery and its exposure of modernity’s entwined anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism are a challenge to the projection of human needs onto animals. Yet, the novel also deploys a symbology where animals diversely signify the female inmates and conversely pathways to freedom, a symbology that reduces the animal to a referent.'
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