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A parody of the medieval Lives of the Saints, Ermanno Cavazzoni's Brief Lives of Idiots offers us a perfect month of portraits of idiots drawn from real life, from overly realist writers to fringe-belief obsessives, punctuated every seventh day with a litany of suicides--failed, foolish or fatal to others. This roll call extends the ridiculous to melancholic extremes, introducing us to such exemplary fools as the father and husband unable to recognize his own family, the Marxist convinced that Christ was an extraterrestrial, the would-be saint who finds a private martyrdom through the torturous confinement of a pair of ill-fitting leather oxfords and the man who failed to realize that he had spent two years in a concentration camp. This is a display of myriad idiocy, discovered and achieved by hook or by crook, be it through paranoia, misapplied methodology, religious hallucination or relentless diarrhea. But Cavazzoni engages in neither finger pointing nor celebration. If saints can be counted, idiots cannot: idiocy is ultimately the human condition.

Baron Munchausen returns with visions of mobile architecture and journeys to sausage moons, in this previously untranslated novel from Paul ScheerbartIt is 1905 and a raging stupidity is holding sway over Europe. As an 18-year-old Clarissa and her family take refuge on the icy shores of Lake Wannsee, the legendary Baron Munchausen makes an unexpected appearance at their door. Returning to German society after a century of absence at the ripe age of 180, the Baron is cajoled into presenting his impressions of the World Fair in Melbourne, Australia, to a select gathering of Berlin celebrities. Over the course of a week, the sprightly Baron arrives nightly by sleighmobile to combat the dreary days with a series of fantastical visions and theories: he discusses mobile architecture, the role of technology in the arts and the need for art to ignore nature in its quest to discover new planetary organs and senses; the new household miracles of vacuum tubes for cleaning and potato-peeling machines; the repressive function of sexuality; and the need for progressive taxation. His tales of Melbourne eventually take his audience from a restaurant in the ocean depths to the dwellings of mineral giants in mountain caverns, before culminating in a spiritual voyage to outer space among sausage moons and sun-skins. Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the “wise clownâ€? by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that would influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.

Written in the mid-1850s before any official or more orthodox history of the South Australian colony had appeared, The Kangaroo Islanders is one of the few colonial novels that represents in fleeting glimpses some of the improvisational and interactive encounters between the colonisers and the colonised on the edges of the island continent.A remarkable and colourful book, this novel represents life on Kangaroo Island in the period between 1802-1836. Rick Hosking has annotated the book extensively with absorbing historical information and fascinating details of personalities and events, making this new edition of The Kangaroo Islanders a delight for both fiction fans and history buffs. And art lovers too, for the book includes pages of many of W.A. Cawthorne's best watercolours, reproduced in colour. A book for omnivores, indeed!

For I prefer beauty always a little soured. When it comes to me as a spoonful of syrup, I spit it out. Gilbert Hand hasn't been the same since his wife died. He's moved to a dull but respectable hotel where silence seems to brood in the hall and stairway. In a secret drawer he discovers a long, thick hank of human hair, and his world narrows down to two people - himself and the murderer. The Wakefield Crime Classics series revives forgotten or neglected gems of crime and mystery fiction by Australian authors. Many of the writers have established international reputations but are little known in Australia.

The blood of Adonis, thought Sarah, remembering the church that was built like a pagan temple. Coquelicot rouge - the symbol of a dying man whose blood stained the hillside in the spring. Sarah Lane, abandoning her French lover for the brilliant Lebanese sunshine, believes that the day will belong to her alone. But when a street bomb hurls her into the arms of a dangerously handsome Syrian colonel, she finds herself trapped once again. Is this a kidnapping? A seduction? Or merely the chaos of the Middle-East? The Wakefield Crime Classics series revives forgotten or neglected gems of crime and mystery fiction by Australian authors. Many of the writers have established international reputations but are little known in Australia.

Flight to Fame, a classic adventure story, tells the hair-raising tale of the world-first flight from England to Australia, in the words of the pilot, (Sir) Ross Smith. In March 1919, Australia's prime minister announced a prize of £10,000 for the first successful flight from Great Britain to Australia in under 30 days. Late that same year, the victorious pilots, Ross and Keith Smith, landed in Darwin to international acclaim. The New York Times gushed: 'Captain Ross Smith has done a wonderful thing for the prestige of the British Empire. He must be hailed as the foremost living aviator.' Their achievement was the forerunner to the age of international air travel. During the race, Ross and his brother Keith (his co-pilot and navigator) wrote in their diaries daily, recording the journey of their four-man crew in their Vickers Vimy G-EAOU twin-engine plane, its open cockpit exposing them to snow, sleet, hail and unbearable heat. Originally published as 14,000 Miles Through the Air(1922), Ross Smith's book recounts their danger-ridden, record-breaking journey - a mere 16 years after the Wright brothers first defied gravity for just a few seconds. This richly illustrated edition, published to coincide with the flight's centenary, is introduced and edited by historian Peter Monteath.

This remarkable true story pays tribute to a band of Aboriginal boys who grew up together in one group home - many succeeding spectacularly in later life.In 1945, Anglican priest Father Percy Smith brought six boys from their Northern Territory home to an Adelaide beach suburb. There, they became the first boys of St Francis, a place that would house 50 such boys over 11 years. Some were sent, with the blessing of their mothers, to gain an education. Others were members of the Stolen Generations.In their interviews with Ashley Mallett, many of these men recall Father Smith's kindness and care. His successors, however, were often brutal, and the boys faced prejudice in a wider world largely built to exclude Indigenous Australians. The Boys from St Francis is a multi-layered tale of triumph against the odds - using the early building blocks of education and sporting prowess. Many of them went on to become fiercely effective advocates for Aboriginal causes, achieving significant progress not just for themselves, but for Aboriginal people, changing their world for the better.Activist Charles Perkins, the first Indigenous man to receive a university degree, commenced his status as a national icon with the 1965 Freedom Rides.John Moriarty, the first Indigenous man picked for the national soccer team, designed the famous Dreaming images for five Qantas planes. Harold Thomascreated the iconic Aboriginal flag. Vince Copley played football for the Port Adelaide Magpies. George Kruger worked with Fred Hollows in remote Indigenous communities for nearly 20 years.The Boys from St Francis is a sometimes shocking, but ultimately hopeful book about black and white Australia, told through one constellation of lives, sharing one seaside address.

Silliness is to be savoured. It exposes the cracks in our reasoning, raising a gleeful two-finger salute to convention and common sense. In a world awash with stupidity and cruel politics, silliness is childish, anarchic, mischievous, rude and sometimes shocking.But it's not new. This delightful yet informative book reveals the surprisingly rich history of silliness, going all the way back to the madcap plays of Aristophanes in the fourth century BC. Medieval fools and jesters, strange 'epidemics of silliness' in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the charming nonsense of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, lead us to the often dark and nihilistic silliness of modern times, including Buster Keaton, Monty Python and 'Cats that Look Like Hitler'.

Shawn's head thumped like the paddle-wheels and the burn on his forehead throbbed painfully. The ropes were tight and cut his hands. The river slid by with a cool swish, and on the deck above the red-bearded man strolled out of the wheelhouse to the railing outside. Shawn runs away from home to join Captain Elijah on the Lazy Jane, an old river-boat trading on the River Murray in Australia at the turn of the century. But he finds that life aboard is tough and the Captain has enemies - particularly Red Morgan, the fearful red-bearded river pirate ...

She and six classmates have announced they'll be joining the nuns when they leave school at the end of the year. The apparent finality of this collective repudiation of the world, in a weird sort of way, is cool. First-born, eldest daughter, Little Mother to her siblings, Irish-Australian, brainy schoolgirl at the time the Beaumont children vanish ... will the real Carmel please stand up? When it comes time to venture into love and other alternatives, mutinous forces undermine her confidence, and malevolence turns to violence. Now she's starring in her own horror-home-movie. Room Temperature, a mosaic of subtle allusion and canny observation, is a novel about memory, time, and the struggle to break away from family pathology.

Clem Whelan's got a problem: trapped in the suburbs in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 he has to decide what to do with his life. Matriculation? He's more than able, but not remotely interested. Become a writer? His failed lawyer neighbour Peter encourages him, but maybe it's just another dead end? To make sense of the world, Clem uses his telescope to spy on his neighbours. From his wall, John Lennon gives him advice; his sister (busy with her Feres Trabilsie hairdressing apprenticeship) tells him he's a pervert; his best friend, Curtis, gets hooked on sex and Dante and, as the year progresses and the essays go unwritten, he starts to understand the excellence of it all.His Pop, facing the first dawn of dementia, determined to follow an old map into the desert in search of Lasseter's Reef. His old neighbour, Vicky, returning to Lanark Avenue - and a smile is all it takes. Followed by a series of failed driving tests; and the man at his door, claiming to be his father.It's going to be a long year, but in the end Clem emerges from the machine a different person, ready to face what he now understands about life, love, and the importance of family and neighbours.

It is relatively well known that the Palawa community of Tasmania is mostly descended from the Aboriginal Tasmanian women who sealers took to the Bass Strait Islands in the early nineteenth century. But few people know that sealers also took Tasmanian women to Kangaroo Island, establishing a cross-cultural community before the settlement of South Australia. Aboriginal Tasmanian descendants are still living on Kangaroo Island today and this book is their story. Beginning in the sealing days, it tells how they became successful farmers, but how many grew up unaware of their Aboriginal ancestry, and are still struggling to face questions of identity today.

The First World War is over and air mechanic Wally Shiers has promised to return home to his fiancée, Helena Alford. But Wally never reckoned on charismatic fighter pilot Ross Smith, and an invitation to compete in the world's most audacious air race.A £10,000 prize has been offered for the first airmen to fly from England to Australia. Smith is banking on an open-cockpit Vickers Vimy, a biplane with a fuselage that looks ominously like a coffin.And who can resist a hero? Wally writes to Helena to say he won't be home for another year - and the love of his life is left holding her hand-stitched wedding dress ...Using war diaries, letters and Churchill Fellowship research from along the race route, Long Flight Home recreates one of the most important - and largely forgotten - chapters in world aviation history.Lainie Anderson's ambitious and moving novel is told through her narrator, Wally Shiers. The tale spans the decades and crosses the globe, and at his journey's end we're left peering down from an open cockpit on two beacons of truth. There is no heroism without honour. There is no legacy without love.

The European maritime explorers who first visited the bays and beaches of Australia brought with them diverse assumptions about the inhabitants of the country, most of them based on sketchy or non-existent knowledge, contemporary theories like the idea of the noble savage, and an automatic belief in the superiority of European civilisation. Mutual misunderstanding was almost universal, whether it resulted in violence or apparently friendly transactions. Written for a general audience, "The First Wave" brings together a variety of contributions from thought-provoking writers, including both original research and creative work. Our contributors explore the dynamics of these early encounters, from Indigenous cosmological perspectives and European history of ideas, from representations in art and literature to the role of animals, food and fire in mediating first contact encounters, and Indigenous agency in exploration and shipwrecks.