Strange Objects collected in Messenger's scrapbook. Steven Messenger has several psychotic episodes and eventually kills Charlie Sunrise and a lizard in Strange Objects. The book was partly a response to Australia's Bicentenary, which occurred in 1988. This event caused a revival of interest in Australian history, particularly in the "discovery" of the land. The bicentenary celebrated the landing of the "First Fleet" in 1788, and the beginning of permanent European settlement in Australia. James Cook charted the east coast of Australia in 1770, however there were a number of sightings and landings prior to this. In "Strange Objects", Gary Crew takes the
Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna painting, quite reminding one of a Paul Veronese, so bright and full of light. Albert was enchanted with it—so much so that he made me buy it." The English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote that the work proved Leighton's "great power of rich arrangement." His brother, the art critic and writer William Rossetti, was not as enchanted: "His picture has largeness, but not greatness; style, but not intensity; design rather than thought; arrangement rather than conception: it is individual, not specially original." Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna, originally called Cimabue's [Celebrated] Madonna [is] Carried in Procession through the Streets