Andrew Pippos

Many Paleozoic cockroaches could fly. Because they could fly, they could navigate prehistoric swamps. Because their bodies were thin, they could squeeze into narrow cracks where they might avoid predators and survive environmental hazards. They are built to scale any surface, even sheer ones. Young cockroaches can regenerate lost antennae and limbs. They can eat almost anything, including their own moulted shells, and dead animals, living plants, excreta, fingernails, wallpaper, boxes, envelopes.

‘The brothers turned the school into an Elsewhere: a place removed from the rest of the world, stuck in a different time.’

There is a peculiar practice in immigrant Sydney that I know well thanks to being born to a pair of Lebanese settlers. It is when a set of beliefs that parents hold true about other ethnicities (usually groups of people who migrated earlier than they did) are told to their children as a kind of forewarning.