In this book, fourteen mesmerizing fables - and the etchings they
inspired - draw us back to our origins in a garden of sorrow and exile,
death and renewal, beauty and melancholy. John Hughes re-imagines a
series of fables in which Australian animals take on human qualities, as
thief and actor, warrior and poet, farmer and merchant. These are
reverse fables - in the way that the Antipodes reverse Northern
Hemisphere logic - that cast us back to the flux at the beginning of the
world: inchoate nature, the world in a state of formation, the garden,
and the inferno. Accompanied by artist Marco Luccio's darkly wry
etchings, this collaboration between two artists is as unique as the
stories it contains.