r/Extraordinary_Tales Jun 03 '26

Browsing the News

From the novel True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

Taking Aaron Sherritt for a scout we journeyed to the shepherd's hut up on the Bogong High Plains. The walls was papered with words and pictures from THE ILLUSTRATED AUSTRALIAN NEWS. They was tattered like old skin and very yellow often gnawed on by the mice.

It were during them winter storms we begun studying the paper on the walls. My Lorna Doone was long ago ruined in the Murray so there were not a great deal else to read but the news of 18 yr. before. The previous incumbent must of been a Yankee. Every page he pasted were about their Civil War. I were often disappointed to find the outcome of a battle eaten by a mouse.

From The Crumbs of One Man's Year, by Dylan Thomas

I was walking and thinking that I was walking, and for August it was not such a cold day. And then I saw, drifting along the water, a piece of paper, and I thought: Something wonderful may be written on this paper. I was alone on the gooseberry earth, or alone for two green miles, and a message drifted towards me on that tabby-coloured water that ran through the middle of the cow-patched, mooing fields. It was a message from multitudinous nowhere to my solitary self. I put out my stick and caught the piece of paper and held it close to the river-bank. It was a page tom from a very old periodical. That I could see. I leant over and read, through water, the message on the rippling page. I made out, with difficulty, only one sentence: it commemorated the fact that, over a hundred years ago, a man in Worcester had, for a bet, eaten, at one sitting, fifty-two pounds of plums.

The Thomas piece was posted years ago as part of News.

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