Here’s wishing you the happiest World Quokka Day ever. I hope you and your loved ones enjoy a load of quokka-related activities, but don’t overdo it with all those delicious but deceptively strong quokka cocktails!
Before you check your calendars, I can assure you that partly due to an unfounded prejudice against the delightful grinning marsupials, printers almost always omit this festive occasion. There is a World Jellyfish Day (November 3), but as a result of what can only be construed as shameful speciesism, the quokka has been neglected. Can you imagine that not a single Ivy League has courses devoted to quokka studies and there are LITERALLY no literature departments teaching the works of Shakespeare or Dante through a quokkaist marxist lens! What on earth are universities for?
The erasure of the quokka from history is a matter of shame, most evident in the visual arts. There is, of course, the 25,000-year-old legendary "Quokka of Willendorf," known only from drawings in Josef Szombathy's archaeological notebooks. Then there is the famous Cerne Abbas Quokka, dating from the late iron age and the putative quokka in the Book of Kells (c. AD 800). However, one scours the works of the trecento and quattrocento in vain for images of the creature. It is only when one comes to Raphael’s celebrated Lady with Quokka that there is a belated depiction of one. The Byzantine icon featuring the noble beast, "discovered" in early 17th-century Lithuania, is commonly regarded as an amateurish forgery.
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Educate yourself! A must-read is surely Grins Turned to Anguish: A Longitudinal Marxist-Leninist/Deconstructionist Analysis of the Dis(Mis)placement of the Quokka in Western Narratives available from all good bookstores.
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