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Finally, many people ask me how the Cabaret Voltaire is financed. The implication is that we are funded by oil companies or uranium mining companies. The Cabaret Voltaire is a self-supporting communal operation. We breed omnium salmon under exclusive licence. This is a fish which was genetically evolved in the laboratories of the Cabaret Voltaire to replicate the flavour known in gastronomy as ‘restaurant fish’. We grow the fish to maturity in puddles at municipal garbage dumps. As most people know, the omnium salmon grows to maturity overnight. Every morning at dawn, on a roster basis, when debate is finished for the night, the members of the Cabaret Voltaire, including docents, put on their stove pipe hats and, in their distinctive club suits, take wheelbarrows and green plastic bags emblazoned with the Cabaret Voltaire logotype and stroll as a merry band, practising our unison humming, to the municipal garbage dumps, where we hold the bags open at the puddles and let the omnium salmon jump in. We then take the fish in the wheelbarrows and sell them door-to-door and by air-delivery worldwide to all good restaurants to be sold under the name of any national fish as required.
May that end all ugly rumours and I hope that, now, together, we can go on from here to build a superior, more mysterious life, free from any fear of the Ever Beckoning Universe.
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.
Forty-Seventeen was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in The New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and ‘moral winner’ of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier’s Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.
Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
Futility and Other Animals
The Americans, Baby
The Electrical Experience
Tales of Mystery and Romance
Conference-ville
The Everlasting Secret Family and Other Secrets
Forty-Seventeen
Grand Days
Dark Palace
Cold Light
OTHER BOOKS
Room Service
Lateshows
Loose Living
The Inspector-General of Misconception
NON-FICTION
Days of Wine and Rage
Martini: A Memoir
COLLECTED WORKS
Selected Stories (also published as The Coca-Cola Kid)
FILM AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS
Between Wars (feature film)
Coca-Cola Kid (feature film)
Everlasting Secret Family (feature film)
Conference-ville (telemovie)
Time’s Raging (with Sophia Turkiewicz, telemovie)
The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (docudrama)
BOOKS EDITED BY THE AUTHOR
Coast to Coast 1973
State of the Art
Fictions 88
A Steele Rudd Selection
Prime Ministers of Australia
The Best Australian Stories 2004
The Best Australian Stories 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
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9781742746616
Copyright © Frank Moorhouse, 1990
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
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First published by Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia in 1990
This Vintage edition published in 2009
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Moorhouse, Frank, 1938–.
Lateshows.
ISBN 978 1 74051 140 7 (pbk.).
I. Title.
A823.3
Cover design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design