Author(s): John Hughes and Marco Luccio

Gifts & Humour

Fourteen mesmerising 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. These are New World stories. Accompanied by artist Marco Luccio's darkly wry etchings, this collaboration between two artists is as unique as the stories it contains.