To my publisher, Nikki Christer, for picking up something I feared was irredeemably broken and believing it could be rebuilt better, faster, stronger. To Celine for drafting a plan. To my lovely editors Catherine Hill and Tom Langshaw for your kindness, dedication, craftsmanship and perspective. You made this thing so much more than it was in my hands alone. To Alex Ross for your plucky cover design and to Mike Windle for your banter while snapping me. And thank you to all the other good people at Penguin Random House who I haven’t yet met but helped get this book out there.
Thank you to my agent, Jane Novak, for taking me on and keeping it real.
Special thanks to Louise McLeod Tabouis for booking me on a tour of the Musée des Art Forains in Paris. Riding the magnificent vélocipède changed everything. Thank you, Douglas Channing, for granting me conversations without time limits. To my colleagues over the years who’ve endured me banging on about this book and wondered if it would ever materialise – here it is! Thank you to all my dear friends for your encouragement and understanding why I was doing the hermit thing. To the real Bert and Percy, thank you for lending me your names. And to Coco for trotting into the pages as Tippi and performing your own rescue.
To everybody else in my family: George, Tanja, Xanthe, Zachary, Zoe, Angela, Che and Solomon. Thank you for the unconditional love.
Steven Berkoff’s stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis at the Nimrod Theatre blew my mind and reshaped my thinking when I was thirteen years old. And these brilliant books among many others helped me to build a world for my characters to inhabit and provided me with many missing pieces of the puzzle: Cole of the Book Arcade by Cole Turnley; Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle by Roslyn Poignant; The Showman and the Slave by Benjamin Reiss; War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black; Freak Show by Robert Bogdan; Prelude to Christopher by Eleanor Dark.
Finally, to you, dear reader, thank you for coming all this way with me. Knowing you would one day be holding this in your hands kept me going.
Bernard Gallate began his professional life in the animation industry with Hanna-Barbera, later working for Walt Disney and a multimedia agency. After studying acting, he ran climbing tours of the Sydney Harbour Bridge for six years while writing and illustrating books for younger readers. Bernard currently teaches programs on early Sydney life and archaeology at historical sites across the city. The Origin of Me is his first novel.
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First published by Vintage in 2020
Copyright © Bernard Gallate 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.
Cover design by Alex Ross © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Cover images: chicken © los_ojos_pardos/Getty; background © NataLT/Shutterstock, Alted Studio/Shutterstock, Wilqkuku/Shutterstock
Illustration here © Bernard Gallate
ISBN 9780143789635
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The Origin of Me Page 38
