Cafe Life in the Antipodes by Ruth Skilbeck (which is published in another edition as Sayonara Baby in Ruth Skilbeck’s Australian Fugue series) is a novel about Roxanne (Roxy) Bergson’s life and experiences with one of Adelaide’s notorious Art Scandals, a neo-Dadaist activist group of artists, when she moved to a city in the hidden grip of serial killers.

She documents her relationship with Raymond and friends in stories, diary entries and letters, set in several places as they travel to various cities and the rainforest and her family’s shack in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains.

It is perhaps the first novel on the ways of life of young artists and writers in Australia in the 1980s context of the ‘hitchhiker murders,’ the ‘Family murders’ and the widespread concealed abuse of young men by church institutions.

First published in 2018.

ISBN: 9780648299868 - paperback. This edition has very minor revisions.

Author: Ruth Skilbeck

Publisher: Borderstream Books

Dimensions: 5.500” x 8.500” (216 mm x 140 mm) Spine width: 0.68750” (17.46 mm)

Cafe Life in the Antipodes is a novel by Ruth Skilbeck set in the experimental mayhem of the early 1980s art scene in Adelaide, at a time of terrifying serial killings of young people. Roxy arrived there to study at university and moves into a share house of art students.