AustLit

'Murray explicitly centred his thesis on the roots of genocide in his second verse novel Fredy Neptune, which he wrote between 1993 and 1997. The book is the first person narrative of Fredy Boettcher, beginning in 1914 when he is 19-years-old, and covering the next 35 years of his life. Fredy is an autistic Australian man with German parents, who acquires a physical impairment when he is 20 as a result of witnessing mass murder during the Armenian Genocide. The novel also features a significant minor character called Hans, an intellec-tually impaired young man whom Fredy kidnaps in 1933 from Germany and brings back to Australia, so that Hans will not be forcibly sterilised by the Nazis. This paper identifies and explores the arguments advocated in Fredy Neptune with respect to the genocide of disabled people.' (p.72)

'On 9 May 1933, the day before the Nazis burned her book as part of their action against books of ‘un-German spirit’, Helen Keller wrote an open letter to them, which was published on the front page of the New York Times. ’You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe,’ she said, ‘but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.’ Today, if Helen Keller is thought of at all, it’s as the blind and deaf girl who, through the efforts of her teacher, learned to communicate. There’s scant acknowledgement that she was even capable of having ideas, and she’s often reduced to nothing more than testament to the ideas of others. However, Keller not only spoke, but read and wrote four languages, and was a prolific poet and essayist. The ideas that led to the Nazis burning her book Out of the Dark were contained in the essay ‘Why I Became a Socialist’.' (Introduction)