Our staff share their favourite pets from fiction – that they wish they could’ve owned themselves!

Lian Hingee especially loves imaginary animals

I read Phoebe and Her Unicorn this year and I’m totally with Phoebe here, if I rescued a unicorn and was granted a wish I would definitely also wish for the unicorn – one Marigold Heavenly Nostrils – to be my best friend/pet. Marigold isn’t just a talking magic unicorn, she’s a talking magic Unicorn with attitude and if reading about her brings me so much joy I can only image how amazing my world would be if we could hang out all the time and be buddies.

I’m one of those people who anthropomorphise everything (my cars have all had names, and I feel bad throwing out old toothbrushes because they’ve done me such good service) so it’s no great surprise that The Luggage from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is one of my favourite literary pets. The Luggage is a sentient trunk that perambulates around on hundreds of little legs and is fiercely protective of its owner. In my head it’s part Samsonite, part Dachshund.

Holly Harper has picked some literary pets that are the cat’s (and dog’s) pyjamas

Manchee. Oh, Manchee. The talking dog from Patrick Ness’s unforgettable Knife of Never Letting Go is the absolute heart of this book. He might not be the best conversationalist (most of his thoughts seem to centre around needing to poo), but he’s the loyal, loving canine companion that I wish I could own.

And on the other end of the loyal and loving spectrum sits Mogget. Cats are renowned for being aloof and surly, but the white cat from Garth Nix’s Sabriel really turns snarkiness into an art. He is unfriendly, he is sarcastic and he is devious… and I’d really like to have him as my very own pet, if only to see how far his patience would be tested in the face of Manchee’s prevailing affability.

Stella Charls was impressed by George’s faithful dog in The Famous Five

The first author that I developed an unhealthy obsession with was Enid Blyton. I dressed up as Enid for a Grade 3 ‘come to school as your hero’ day. (My definition of ‘hero’ was obviously very different from the other children in my class, who came as Cathy Freeman, Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela.) I immersed myself in all of Blyton’s worlds but the world of The Famous Five series was particularly special.

There are two distinct features of this series that stand out in my memory – the description of delicious food consumed on various adventures (hard-boiled eggs, jars of potted meat, cucumber sandwiches, ‘lashings of ginger beer’), and George’s faithful dog, Timmy. Timmy is extremely clever, affectionate, and loyal to the children, protecting them on many occasions. He’s possibly the reason we first adopted a border collie who remains the pride and joy of my family to this day.

Elke Power loves them all

I have always loved animals, both real and fictional – my first word was ‘birdie’ and from early primary school onward I insisted that we keep an ‘animal rescue kit’ in the car in case we saw any injured animals. When we first discussed literary pets in the office I was thrilled but suddenly found myself unable to speak midway through explaining how wonderful Norah Linton’s beloved pony Bobs is in Mary Grant Bruce’s A Little Bush Maid. The Lintons have quite a menagerie with numerous memorable pets, but Bobs is particularly special.

Another family with a fantastic assortment of pets with whom I would love to share the world is the Merryweathers. Wrolf from The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge is always referred to as the ‘dog’, but he’s not the usual kind of canine. By the end of the book it isn’t just the other characters who adore Serena the hare, Periwinkle the pony, Zachariah the literate cat and Wiggins the greedy and vain yet somehow lovable Cavalier King Charles Spaniel!

And who wouldn’t want to be friends with darling Fubsy the wombat from Nan Chauncy’s World’s End Was Home?

Bronte Coates wanted a pet elephant

As a child I really wanted a pet elephant, preferably one similar to the elephant in Jerry Smath’s picture book But No Elephants (sadly now out of print). In this story, Grandma Tildy is adamant she won’t accept an elephant into her home – until her soft heart gets the better of her. The elephant ultimately saves Grandma Tildy and her other pets from the harsh winter (admittedly after he’s eaten all the food in the house), transporting them to a tropical paradise. I also really loved all the magical animals in Gerald Durrell’s The Talking Parcel, though I don’t know if any were strictly ‘pets’. I liked to think about having a herd of mooncalves handy, as they were able to secrete a jellylike substance that could then be imagined into any object you chose.

Though really, the animal I’ve also wanted most as a pet (and do have today) is a dog. We always had dogs growing up and they featured in so many of my favourite picture books, such as The Ugliest Dog in the World by Bruce Whatley, and Good Dog, Carl by Alexandra Day. I was always heartbroken for days if something bad happened to a dog in a book; I remember writing a whole entry in my diary dedicated to The Tod from Isobelle Carmody’s The Gathering.

Dani Solmon tells us the pets she’s named after fictional pets

There are four literary pets I’ve wanted to own and I’ve made three of them a reality. The one I couldn’t make happen on account of it being impossible was Pantalaimon, Lyra’s daemon from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. The other three I have held and loved. The first two were turtles – Morla from The Neverending Story and The Great A’Tuin from the much loved Discworld series.

(I also had a third turtle called Magda after Magda Szubanski – who’s just released her wonderful memoir – but that’s veering off-topic…)

The third literary pet dream made real is my hero Granny Weatherwax’s cat, You, who is also from the Discworld universe. Granny clearly subscribes to Terry Pratchett’s own belief that the first name you give a cat never sticks – you may have the best intentions when you call your cat Schrodingpurr but it won’t be long until it’s shortened to a one syllable word for ease of shouting when the cat decides to use the couch as a scratching post. Granny is gifted You by Tiffany Aching and is not a natural cat person, but she eventually deigns to be owned by the all-white kitten. In Pratchett’s words: naïve people refer to this as ‘cat ownership’, which is correct, but then get the relationship of ‘owned’ and ‘owner’ wrong.

So when I decided to get a kitten of course I had You in mind – being owned by a part of Granny was too good to pass up! – but I told myself I wasn’t going to traipse around shelters all over Melbourne until I found one with pure white kittens. Luckily I didn’t have to as the first shelter I went to had a whole litter of Yous. The one I chose turned out to be deaf, which I think makes him even more suited to the name You since he’s even less likely to listen to me than a normal cat would be.