'Trespassers Will be Eaten'

Australian suburbs are not the place for wild animals. But in the late 1960s a circus family started a lion safari in an outer suburb. Some of the animals escaped. No one knows exactly how it happened. But not long after local boys Mike and Joe left the safari park, which they had snuck into, seven lionesses and a lion escaped. They got out of their enclosure that evening, made their way to a storm water pipe, squeezed through it and entered the suburb of Westfield. They may have caught a whiff of the boys' scent. And decided to go out for a snack. In prides, lionesses are the main hunters. And they were now loose in Westfield.

This piece of creative non-fiction tells the story of the break out in 1995 in a quiet Sydney suburb. It also traces the rise of the circus, the role that animals played in it and the movement that saw the banning of the exploitation of animals in live circus performances.