Christine's Ark: the extraordinary story of Christine
Townend and an Indian animal shelter, by John Little.
Sidney: Pan Macmillan, 2006, ISBN 1405037296, A$32.95.
John Little, a Sydney-based author, chose to write about his friend Christine
because ‘her story is about one woman’s extraordinary devotion to the world’s
suffering creatures. Furthermore, it is also about self-belief, determination,
spiritual search, hope, optimism, and love … such an epic tale.’
Christine Woolcott was a wartime baby, born into a household where there was
always a variety of animals. As she grew, she ‘was keen to do anything with
animals’. She was a ‘shy, dreamy student… living in her own internal world’.
I met Christine in the early 1980s when she came to Adelaide to help with the
founding of our local animal liberation group. She had founded the first such
group in Sydney in 1976 and had already appeared on radio, TV and in journals as
a voice against factory farming. In Adelaide she helped us implement policies
for handling politicians, and with our first-ever protest against the live sheep
trade, then in its infancy. My impressions were of a compassionate, pragmatic,
competent and clear-minded woman. She showed remarkable patience on TV, pleading
with scientists and farmers to stop experimentation, factory farming, face
branding, mulesing [the surgical removal of strips of wool-bearing skin from
around the tail of a sheep to prevent flystrike, expected to be phased out by
2010], and winter shearing. I felt an affinity with the way she sought out a
spiritual approach in her arguments for the animals and with her desire to
connect with a source of compassion within every animal abuser.
Christine’s gentleness did not always win the approval of other animal
libbers who desired a more aggressive approach. Also a meeting with CWA [Country
Women’s Association] representatives shocked her into understanding that there
are women unable to tune into a capacity for compassion for their farm animals
locked away in stalls in sheds.
While Christine presented herself to the public with gentle self-control,
privately she was in turmoil. A comfortable marriage to a successful Sydney
lawyer, the birth of two healthy sons, the successful publication of a novel,
Travels with Myself, had not answered her need for a meaning in life beyond what
Australians saw as normal. She could not understand why people were reluctant to
share her hurt at the habit of eating nonhuman animals. In 1980 she published
her treatise In Defence of Living Things, an examination of the treatment of
animals in Australian farms, rodeos, circuses, zoos and experimental
laboratories. The simple description of the shame she felt as she bent over a
cat being dismembered on a table, her breath intermingling with that of the
animal, I shall never forget. It is a strong affirmation of the oneness of life.
She also published a well-researched book Pulling the Wool: a new look at the
Australian wool industry, (1985, Hale and Ironmonger) exposing the cruelty of
our wool industry whereby at least seven million lambs are casually left to die
of neglect.
She could have stayed in her comfortable North Sydney home, having helped
Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, to unite a collection of animal
welfare societies into AFAS, later becoming ANZFAS, the Australia and New
Zealand Federation of Animal Societies. But Christine’s inner needs were to be
satisfied elsewhere.
It was at an ANZFAS meeting in 1984 that I introduced Christine to the work
of Professor Ramaswami who had come to Adelaide to visit a friend of my sister.
His special concern was to design an Indian bullock cart to make it easier for
the bullocks to pull, but his intense desire was to improve the horrific cattle
slaughter sheds in three Indian states. He had pleaded with me to help stop it,
but I was immersed at the time in local cruelty issues. Later, when I showed
Christine his photographs and told her of his work, she was keen to make contact
with him as she was about to visit India.
