George Orwell's Elephant & Other Essays

George Orwell's Elephant & Other Essays is the latest collection from Subhash Jaireth, one of Australia's most distinctive and intellectually adventurous essayists. Born in Punjab and trained as a geologist in Soviet-era Moscow before migrating to Australia in 1986, Jaireth brings a rare double vision to his work - the precision of a scientist and the sensitivity of a poet - as he explores the layers of memory, meaning, and history embedded in landscape.

The eight essays in this collection take the reader on an extraordinary journey across continents and deep time. The title essay interrogates George Orwell's famous account of shooting an elephant in Burma, probing the ambiguities of colonialism, truth, and self-invention. Other essays traverse Uluru and the ancient stories of Anangu country, the waterways of Canberra and their Indigenous histories, the windmills of La Mancha, the grandeur of Stalin's Moscow Metro, a fateful bridge on the Punjab border, the streets of Delhi, and the deep-time story of an old banksia tree in Jaireth's own garden.

Assisted by artsACT and published by Gazebo Books, this is a work of calm erudition and quiet wonder - a meditation on what it means to read the world around us, and to be read by it in return.