Book excerpt: 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.