A Dolphin Called Jock Lib/E: An Injured Dolphin, a Lost Young Woman, a Story of Hope

The compelling, heart-warming story of how a traumatized 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. 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. One day Melody volunteered to help her university 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. Beautifully written and filled with insight and compassion, Melody's memoir details her life-changing relationship with the river dolphins, and how Jock helped her to heal.

About the Author :
Melody Horrill is an award-winning Australian journalist, television presenter, and documentary producer with more than twenty years' experience in broadcast media both in Australia and overseas. Melody also cofounded a not-for-profit to raise public awareness about South Australia's Port River Dolphins and their environment. This helped lead to the creation of Australia's first Dolphin Sanctuary in the mid-2000s. Melody is well known in Southern Australia for her passionate writing and filming about the wild dolphins in South Australia's polluted Port River. One of her many documentaries-A Dance with a Dolphin-was broadcast nationally and then the across the world on CNN, with Melody presenting it from the US. As a broadcast journalist, Melody specialized in writing and presenting environment and science feature stories for many Australian TV news networks. She was also the South Australian Correspondent for CNN's International World Report. She is an honorary member of CNN's International Professional Program. Melody also presented the weekday weather reports on two television networks for well over a decade and won the Better Hearing Australia Award for Best Presenter along with the Archbishop's Citation for Outstanding Journalism. She was also a finalist in Australia's Voiceless Awards. Melody has since relocated to Melbourne and left the media but has continued campaigning for the dolphins. For the past six years she worked as a media and communications manager for the Australian government, where she won an Australia Day Merit Award for her work during the devastating 2019-2020 Bushfires. In June 2021, concerned about the plight of her beloved dolphins, she wrote a feature story for the Australia's national newspaper-The Australian, where she opened up about how the dolphins helped her heal from personal trauma. The success of the article led to her penning A dolphin called Jock. Melody has authored the book to encourage those who have experienced domestic violence not to give up hope. Her own biggest hope is that we can learn how creatures like dolphins live in harmony with their environment-and that we as humans can follow suit. Cat Gould grew up in Sydney, Australia, and after extensive travel moved to the United States in 1990. She is a classically trained actress with a BFA from Southern Oregon University and has performed in many regional productions. Her passion for storytelling, communication, and language is matched well with her dexterity with characters and dialect. She can communicate in French, Spanish, and Italian, and is a voracious reader of fiction, philosophy, and psychology to deepen her understanding and ability to express the human condition.