Monsters brought to life in book of brutes

You've heard about Godzilla, Dracula and Bigfoot, but what about Cacus, the original highway man from hell, the child-chomping Pangkarlangu from Indigenous Australia and Fiji's ghosts of climate change?. Equally terrifying as their famous counterparts, these three are just a few of the lesser known monsters reintroduced to the world in a new book from The Australian National University (ANU). The book, edited by anthropologist Dr Yasmine Musharbash, features monsters from the ancient world, modern times and Indigenous Australia which haven't yet been mythologised in popular culture. Dr Musharbash said monsters have always been a part of human culture and they often emerge with change and the uncertainties of life. "You might try to tell me that monsters aren't real, but all my research into the monsters in this book has shown that for the people who live with them, and know them, they are absolutely real," she said. "Stories of monsters stretch back as long as humans have been around and when you study them, you find they're bound up in peoples' fears, often about new or unknown things. "These are scary monsters and people really do understand them to be out there in the world actually doing things and people are absolutely terrified of them." One such creature described in the book is Cacus, a monster from ancient Greece, who emerged after the Roman Empire's infrastructure of roads was laid down, and for the first time people could travel between major centres.