Dear Humanity,

How are you? I am a great fan of your capacity for compassion and hope that you will be able to extend it toward beings of a different species to your selves on this occaision. I am writing to you about the Melbourne Aquarium. On Sunday the 29th of January, I visited the Melbourne Aquarium. I had bought the tickets for a nostalgic lark, when offered half price, through a "social club" organised by employees within the space/time into dollars multinational entity I attend five days a week. If you weren't aware, it was a stiflingly hot Sunday in Melbourne and being otherwise broke, I thought it would be pleasant to go somewhere both air-conditioned and where my fellow Melbournites might be required to keep their shirts on. So I went to the aquarium; dark, cool, watery, what could be better?

While it was good to get out of the scorching heat and to view the many and varied "exhibits" at the aquarium; the entire afternoon was palpably soured by the very first exhibit I came to. There, right past the first "souvenir" photo checkpoint, right past the ticket desk where the desperate masses of hastily bonding young families are beginning their day's interminable queuing, right past the first sketchy, embarrassed little plaque, its poor sunny face scraped over with glib, anecdotal information about something or other, I mean practically in the foyer, are the Penguins.

You walk in and there they are in a narrow, L shaped enclosure that is flooded with florescent light, thick with their faeces and encompasses a small joke of a pool that a reasonably snobby homeowner would sniff at, let alone stand as a replacement for an ocean of freedom. It is into this pool which the warders of this jaunty joliet throw deceased and dismembered fish parts for these skilful fishers, who might otherwise dive up to 500 meters below the surface to chase and catch fish, krill and Cephalopoda of variety. People gawk and marvel, dazzled by the reflection of their own flash photography, as the Penguins bob and cluster about their puddle like the grubby rubber ducks at a fun fair's game of cheap chance.

Stickers on the thick acrylic kindly anthropamorphise the Penguins for us. The Gentoos are cheeky and fun, the King Penguins are regal and majestic (words beyond most of the five to ten year olds there, not to mention a good few of their guardians when probed by their broods). Well I can certainly see where the Aquariums PR team are coming from, the King Pengiuns do appear a lot more sedate when they swim and seem to spend their confined days simply sitting and shitting (like many regal humans, yes I see), whittling away the time staring at the wall. The Gentoos on the other hand did seem to walk about a bit more and peer at the cycling, fibre glass tapping, screaming crowds; they also seemed to get in trouble more and were the sole occupants of what I can only call solitary confinement; a clear plastic box within a clear plastic box, into which the screws placed unruly birds while they piped in more frozen liquid and whose fellows would then cluster around to visit. For such social birds, there seems to be little fraternisation and what there is, is interuptted by feeding time for kids or the great technicians snake that slews around, toppling Penguins and spewing ice, lest the inmates drown in their own feculence. What is there to talk about, what is there to do, when your whole world is a box?

I read back over this and there is a levity in the tone of my composition which, I fear, may be belying what I really did think and feel when confronted which that spectacle, the vision of twenty odd Penguins jammed together in a little box, with dead fish, fake ice, no air, no privacy, no lives, no liberty. I am serious. These Penguins are in prison, a state of captivity and a cruel one at that. These, after all are creatures who swim and walk for hundreds of kilometres to feed and to mate, who live in large and complex, extremely social groups. Its true that Penguins do live close together but in the wild, in the most open environment of any on the planet, Antarctic beach and tundra, sea and pack ice; not some stuffy little see through fridge in the heart of Melbourne.

One might argue that such measures are understandable in view of their conservation but my, brief, researches inform me that neither species is in particular danger of extinction (in fact the King Penguins are of "least concern"). If they were, it might be acceptable to so imprison some of their number to ensure the survival of the species but this isn't the case. Is it the case then that these creatures are so interned to enlighten and educate the masses and prompt them by a deft display of sentimentalised and utterly warped difference, to give a hoot about conservation? If this is the case, then the aquarium hides it very well behind and a near impenetrable force field of cafes, vending machines (the children's "play area" is in fact a specific part of the great corridor that is the aquarium with a higher concentration of toy and drink vending machines), gum ball machines, gift shops, expensive guided tours and planned experiences, merchandise, wildly exorbitant ticket prices, gift shops, and the tacky, soulless hokum that such a field requires to convince people that by consuming they will make their children's visit (and in turn theirs) more worthwhile than if they really interacted with the children they are chaperoning.

I don't think I need to go into much detail to explain what I mean by this kitsch but of course I will.... It is the CG and photoshop creations of penguins holding signs or ice creams, or walking down the street, of them frolicking with some family that isn't just as sweaty, exhausted and sparse on time and muscle as me, of people in incredible diving suits being carpeted and wondrously dissolved in sealife, in life, it is the lame and tired take on a pirate ghost whose floating head and dreadful, booming, rerecorded prattle, "ho ho, yeargh, sharks, woo, ho ho, sharks, watery, deep, ye'are, exit through the gift shop mates etc", which no one really listens to. Its the constant emphasis on "souvenirs" and pre-programmed, sanitised events that can be bought and taken home as some kind of memory and which are generally even more invasive to the animals which provide all the frisson of reality here (at least human prisoners don't have frothing tourists invited to “sit amoungst the gangs!” or “wonder round the yard with the murderers!”. Even the information boards are little more than bubblegum cards, with one vital statistic and one factoid a piece per creature, all oozed up with (oddly patriotic) simple adjectives to aid digestion; all so you can Look at the animal! And move! Look at the animal! And move! Through all this I can hardly see the educative or redemptive value of this exercise. Even if it were feasible to stand and read all the fact box tacked onto to every cell, what with the throng of wild, sticky fingered over/under stimulated patrons, the information one would glean is a tissue, a tissue so garbled and watered down that it often doesn't make a great deal of sense, like a Kleenex that's been left in your pocket during an econo-wash. The animals themselves, and particularly the Penguins, are so over sentimentalised, so objectified and rarefied, so relied upon to be the organic lure in a money mill's souvenir coin presser packed jaws, that they become as forgettable and as disposable their stuffed daguerreotypes in the various gift purchasing points but particularly in the gift shop at the exit. Perhaps I am overly cynical but I hardly see the conservatory potential of an institution which wastes as many resources as the aquarium producing twill, which makes the creatures it imprisons so impossible to think as independent and worthwhile beings which deserve our respect.

Is it not then right of every person, every child to be able to see a live Penguin if they want? No, I don't think it is. I think its every persons right to travel to Antarctica if they like to see a Penguin or take the short drive to Phillip Island to see Penguin or to watch a David Attenborough documentary, which from personal experience I can compare with a trip to the aquarium and say with certainty that it was; more informative, more real and more pleasantly memorable than going to the aquarium, particularly if seeing the Penguins was the main attraction. Animals can in no way consent to or protest the invasions of their privacy or the actions we humans take to control and dictate their lives. People can learn as much, if not more about the great diversity of fauna and flora we are steadily annihilating from a film crew than by turning that fauna, living beings, into museum pieces, to be desiccated and picked apart. As hungry for information (I don't think that the word inquisitive is the really the appropriate word) and visceral experience as most people are, I think it is a far better thing to view animals from a distance or from where our observation does not impact greatly on their lives. Surely this is a decency we might ask for ourselves? In fact we like to talk a lot about how its a right, we qualify the term to make it a human right but if we are to heap our values, our expressions, ourselves onto these creatures, when do they get the good part? The part where you get to alone and sort of free occasionally. At what point in their deprivation of their territory, the element which we have lost in ourselves and make up for with the subconcious which we deny to animals, does the curtailing and perversion of natural lives for commercial gain become cruel. Its true that this happens to humans all the time and that many people are voiceless in their travails and hardships but animals cannot speak. In a sense what we are doing is trying to make them do just that, to speak to us and tell us that we are not alone in the punishment and hardships we heap on ourselves and one another, that other creatures must choose security, the sub-concious and conformity over life, territory and freedom too. We want to verify, in the great binary mind of checks and balances, that human life is natural and by certifying the human in the natural, resurrect something which we killed long ago. But I digress. Of course animals have a right to privacy, it is only an ape's hubris that suggests otherwise.

The Penguins at the Melbourne Aquarium are prisoners in a cruel and distasteful system of captivity. I admit that I do not extend quite the same feelings to many of the other inmates, whose lives do not appear so curtailed, whose birthright of habitat, association and function have not so odviously been denied them (though of course they have); however I for one will not go there again and will express my opinion that this “exhibit” if not the whole Aquarium ought to be closed. If an animal is not kept in captivity to save it from extinction, if it lives in captivity to add grist to the mill then such captivity is cruel and should be stopped. Today animals (including humans) are everywhere in chains, here, in this instance they are so ridiculous, so injustly applied to a group that will never be able to express their dissatisfaction, never unionise for better conditions, never vote for the Penguin keeper, never organise to resist; that surely we can break them.

Humanity, what I am asking is for the Penguin exhibit at the Melbourne Aquarium to be closed and the Penguins there be set free and returned to their natural habitat. Let the Aquarium continue trading if it must but curtail this great crime against a noble species.