On February 14th 1966, Australia got decimal currency which, despite all the fears, was smoothly and easily adopted. Although the Queen of England still got her face on one of the notes and one of the coins, it wasn’t on all of them as it had been with the old currency. The Prime Minister, that old Anglophile Bob Menzies, wanted to call the base unit The Royal, but everyone shouted him down and one more cornerstone of the Americanisation of Australia slammed into place when it was called, with almost unanimous public approval, the dollar.
    But it was all very modern too. Australia was the first country to have a complete set of polymer bank notes, which were harder to forge and lasted four times longer than the old paper money. Once we got used to them sticking together when wet, it wasn’t a problem. The trees smiled their approval, although the upper atmosphere groaned a little louder.

Jules Verne did write some short stories, or shorter novels, although they seem to be ideas for longer works that didn’t have the legs. My volume contains A Winter Amid the Ice which is a rather basic tale of a father’s search for his son trapped on the icepack for the winter and ends with a pitched battle between men and polar bears: Martin Paz in which a trusted Peruvian Indian runs off with a nobleman’s daughter who loves him, and after a short chase, they drown in each other’s arms: The Ascent of Mont Blanc, which appears to have been written by Verne’s brother Paul but published under the more famous name. And shortest but by far most interesting, A Drama in the Air, which might be the first aerial hi-jack story. A balloonist finds he has a stowaway, who raves for a time chronicling all the great balloon disasters, having decided that they will have the greatest of all, a high level crash into the middle of Paris. The hi-jacker is never identified, nor is his cause understood. They fight and the hero drops the car and hi-jacker with it, clinging to the ropes to save himself.
    And while we’re on the subject of his shorter works, Jules Verne also came up with the amusing story Doctor Ox, or Doctor Ox’s Experiment, in which a scientist lays pipes throughout a Flemish town, presumably for a water system, but is there something more sinister about it? The Flemish, apparently, are phlegmatic, non-aggressive, procrastinating, indecisive folk in a town that doesn’t quite move with the times. Suddenly, they become belligerent, aggressive, determined in their own affairs to the extent where eventually they declare war on the towns around them. But it is observed that if you climb the church steeple, the strange effects go away until you descend again. The fun is in working out the source of the terrible thing Doctor Ox has done to them—it’s much simpler and more obvious than you could possibly imagine.