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Why do humans have a horror of skeletons? Is this aversion justified? What does it signify? Such are the animating questions of this essay by G. K. Chesterton, who acts as a witty defendant for humanity’s hidden form.

It’s 1993. Beth McMaugh is eleven years old and about to start Year Six. Her best friend, Ashlee, assures Beth that it is going to be the best year ever, but then why is she sitting with the popular girls? When the new strange, nerdy kid, Jools, befriends Beth, she is swept up instead into the School Nerd Club. Behind everything is a secret from Beth’s past, a secret so terrible it stays with her, every day. Making the spirals come. And there was that day at the beach. Is that why Ashlee doesn’t want to be friends? Is that why her Mum avoids her? Has Beth ruined everything?

The Gallipoli letter is an 8000-word private report written by journalist Keith Arthur Murdoch, with the help of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, after visiting the Gallipoli peninsula in September 1915. It describes the organization and conditions of the Gallipoli campaign. It was sent to Andrew Fisher (then-Prime Minister of Australia) and Henry Herbert Asquith (then-Prime Minister of the UK). Murdoch’s twenty-eight-page letter helped to establish the idea of Gallipoli as a military disaster.

Grace Marshall is eleven years old. She’s curious and creative and dreams of becoming a magician called Grace the Amazing! Grace’s only friend is her art teacher, Pamela. When she discovers that Pamela is ill, the fragile certainties Grace relies on threaten to slip away. On her mission to find a cure for Pamela using miraculous magic, Grace asks the big questions about life, love, and friendship.

Living on a farm Millie has a lot going on. Life as a pre-teen brings big, mixed feelings, but with friends, family and the school chaplain, she just might make it through. Millie’s baby brother, Noah, was stillborn 4 years ago. She writes to him in heaven, confiding her anxieties when her parents announce they are going to have another baby. Millie is both excited and scared. What if this baby dies like Noah did? What if something happens to her mum?

Skippy Blackfeet lives behind the cemetery walls. He’s often hungry and lonely … but safe. When May finds Skippy Blackfeet and brings him home, their adventures begin. For starters, they need to win May’s dad over. Then there’s the fierce neighbourhood dog, birthday party bungles, tumultuous trips to town, fireworks and thunderstorms, and everything in between! But Skippy Blackfeet and May go together like milk and sardines, and together they can face any challenge. Three stories in one collection of a loving cat and his best friend May.

Humility gets a bad rap these days, especially when contrasted with philosophies of egoism and self-assertion. But can we see the world as it really is without losing ourselves for a moment to take up the perspective of another?

This essay is one in a series titled The Defendant, first published as a collection in 1901, after the individual essays were published in The Speaker. Here, a selection of these essays has been reissued by Voices of Today for a new generation.

This essay is from a series titled The Defendant, first published as a collection in 1901, after the individual essays were published in The Speaker. Here, a selection of these essays has been reissued by Voices of Today.