A DOLPHIN CALLED JOCK

This is a compelling, heart-warming story of how a traumatised young woman found peace through her friendship with an injured dolphin called Jock.

When Melody Horrill arrived as a student at the University of South Australia she was a troubled and lost young woman, hiding behind a carefully crafted exterior. Growing up in England and Australia she had experienced a childhood of emotional and physical trauma mainly at the hands of her violent father that was as damaging as it was brutal. When she was in her teens, he had stabbed her mother in the face and then tried to cut his own throat. He'd been jailed for the savage attack, but when he was released he continued his campaign of abuse even as his family tried to hide from him. Eventually he killed himself, leaving a note saying how much he hated Melody and her brother, and a garage full of homemade weapons, each with the name of his children and wife on them. At university Melody volunteered to help her lecturer monitor pods of river dolphins that lived in the waters of Port Adelaide. There for the first time she encountered Jock, a solitary dolphin with a maimed fin, who lived apart from the highly social pods. Melody was to form a bond with Jock that gave her the key to freeing herself from the demons of her own past, and their extraordinary friendship was the start of a long-term mission to try to save the river dolphins. Every chapter first dives into episodes with Jock on the river before turning to Melody's childhood. Often the dolphin passages mirror Melody's experiences, for example a moving description of a mother dolphin's behaviour at the death of a calf creates echoes in the ensuing account of Horrill's complicated relationship with her own mother at the time they fled her father's abuse. There are other dolphins in this book, but it's the solitary adolescent Jock who's at the centre of this tale - it's his plight that grabs Horrill's empathy, and his eventual death that strikes the deepest emotional blow. Melody Horrill is an award-winning journalist, presenter and documentary producer. She is well-known for her passionate writing and filming about the endangered wild dolphins in the Port River. Her documentary Dance with a Dolphin was broadcast across the world on CNN, with Melody presenting it from the US.