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In 2008, and again in 2009, I indicated that I was working on some YA historical fiction, referred to as The Cornish Boy.  I then closed it down to get on with other more urgent work, but in the past couple of weeks, I have returned to it.

This (if it works—and sells) will be a sprawling work, featuring a Cornish boy who is bright, has some medical and scientific training, but has to leave Cornwall in a hurry, with killers on his trail. With the help of friends, he eludes them, gets to Australia, and as teenagers did back then, he went out with an exploring party.  There's a great deal more in book 1, but that's all you get for now (though it won't be giving too much away if I add that he makes an enemy and several good friends.

Later books see him on the Turon River gold fields; shipping as assistant naturalist on a naval expedition to map the Gulf of Carpentaria, based on the 1850s cruise of HMS Rattlesnake; helping a group of Chinese would-be gold diggers  while they are trekking from South Australia to the Victorian goldfields.  Large numbers of Chinese did this to avoid a head tax that was imposed on Chinese landing at Melbourne.

Later, he works on a paddle steamer on the Murray, marries, they make an exciting find (yes, I am being reticent there) that draws more attention from shady characters than they need, and they settle on a farm—and a few answers are at last revealed.

The four planned books run from 1851 to about 1867 and encompass a lot of Australia's key historic points.  Eureka will only be seen off-page, so to speak, but there's a lot to say about the way Australia became a nation with independence of mind. The Bulletin only emerged in the 1880s to press a fully Australian sense of nationalism, but as I will be explaining in Curious Minds, due out on October 1, the leaders in the revolution were a bunch of foreign, mostly German, naturalists.

Now watch out: here comes the pedagogue again: there is an old saying, originating with Jerome S. Bruner, that you can present any subject to a child at any developmental level. in an intellectually honest fashion.  I won't be teaching, but if I can get a few readers to "what if Jack had done this instead of that?", I have won.

You see, as I have said before, education, teaching, training, wisdom, knowledge, learning, understanding and erudition are not the same thing, even if they are cousins. That's a key consideration for me.  I have written scraps of fiction before, but this is the first serious fiction I have completed and it's big. I have finished the second draft of Book 1, and I think it works, sort of.  It's taken me ten days to knock into shape the work I did two years ago, and right now, I will be drifting off into something far fluffier.  I need a sort of writing sorbet.

There's a bit of the educator in me coming out in this series, and that's always a risk.  The main areas I will be including are all areas where I have written before, like Australian exploration, rockets and poisons, plus an area I am currently working on, which is the Australian gold rush era.  This is a major trap for old educators, who feel, a bit like Jean Auel in Clan of the Cave Bear and spin-offs, that all that hard research needs to be crammed in.  My plan is to produce a background web site, where people can test some of the assumptions.

I have made a start on that with my database of early uses of Australian language phrases and slang, where I have evidence to justify the use of terms like billy or goanna, phrases like "having a shingle loose" or "slope off", but I think I can take this further. Rather more though, I want to introduce matters like the amazing multicultural society that was Australia in the 1850s, the (to modern eyes) hidden agenda of the Chartists who, just as they were losing the struggle in Britain, were winning it in Australia.

In short, I will be trying, without preaching, without teaching, to get my readers to wonder more about what lay behind things. It's going to be a hard road to tread, a road slung on a tightrope over a minefield of mixed metaphors.

And that's why, just now, I am busy on something fluffy, involving mad sheep (they say they are mad, but can a sheep wearing a fake Viking helmet with horns be trusted?), a jewel heist, the truth about Van Gogh's ear, virtual normality and dark matter.

Among other things.  The point is, I'm otherwise engaged for a bit.

Drawing nature

I am passably capable at drafting, but not at execution in any artistic sense, so there are no technical tips here, just some tricks and wrinkles.

In 1857, Herschel Babbage took photographic equipment out with him when he went exploring near Woomera in South Australia. Before (and even for a while after that) all explorers and biological collectors needed to be artists, or they needed to take an artist with them.

This, in fact, is part of the subject matter in my next book for the general (that's writer-code for adult or bright younger reader) market, Curious Minds. In that book, I look at the natural history collectors and the natural histoty painters who worked Australia in the 1700s and 1800s.

Painting flowers in water colour was regarded as a suitable activity for young ladies, but in time, some of the women painters did what the men did, and went out into the field, studying plants and birds and painting them. In the end, though, photography took away most of the scientific side, but people still paint plants for fun.

The job of the scientific artists was to record the colours and shapes of the flowers that would often be pressed and dried beyond recognition. Often a bird or a mammal would be skinned, with only the skin and sometimes the skull going back to people who would stuff and mount the animal, using sketches done on the spot to get the shape right. Information on the colours came from paintings and notes, because specimens often discolour.

Magpie at a picnic, Reef Beach, Sydney.

My alpha publisher these days is the National Library of Australia, in large part because that gives me access to their huge art collections,  They also like doing beautiful books, which is a boost to the ego of the writer!  Some of the artists whose work may be found at the National Library of Australia: Elizabeth Gould, John Gould, Edward Gostelow, S. T. Gill, Ferdinand Bauer, Ellis Rowan, Adam Forster and Ida McComish.

This link will take you to the place to search, but you then need to spend some time getting used to the controls.

Pelican on a street light, Broken Bay.

One good trick is to use the Limit To section and specify NLA digitised material in the drop-down menu. For example, there are 83 images of Banksias (or were when I looked just now).


If you want to try to work as those experts did, take a simple and easy subject first, a common bird like a seagull, a pigeon, a sparrow or any of the other pests that will hang around if there is a free feed.

Plants, especially fruits and seeds, are easier to paint!

Rainbow lorikeet, Cremorne, Sydney.

There is no harm or shame in taking photographs to help you with your drawing: the art comes in composing the separate scraps of image into a whole. If you are looking for a theme, why not try behavioural studies, like the aggressive postures of seagulls?

Magpies will lurk near a picnic looking for food, kookaburras will fly through and steal, pelicans will watch you if you are cleaning fish, and rainbow lorikeets love to steal the little paper packets of sugar where coffee is sold.

Hooke's view of a human louse, on
a hair. Most people had  lice back  
then, but they could not see the detail. 

On the other hand, there are times when drawings are best. Scattered through most books on biological matters, there will be a number of line drawings of small animals, part of a tradition that began in 1665, when Robert Hooke published a book called Micrographia.  Some might say the tradition goes back much further, but that's where I set the start.  My blog, I get to choose!

Rich Londoners could marvel at the details of a flea without having to squint through a microscope, and a number of them could look at the flea at the same time. Best of all, the drawing could show all parts of the flea in sharp focus.

Mind you, Hooke wasn't all that good an artist, and biologists believe that many of the drawings were actually the work of Sir Christopher Wren, who famously designed St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Biological illustrators use all sorts of tricks to get their pictures just right, so it is a craft and a science, as much as an art. Do a web search on <biological illustration> to discover a whole new world!

One trick that I used to good effect in the days of 35 mm slides was to have a slide projector that I pick up for $5 at a jumble sale, mounted above my desk.  Perhaps, if you have access to a "data projector", you may be able to use that to get your images onto paper.

If you have the skill and talent (and as I said, I don't!), you will never look back.  Otherwise, be like me and use the camera.

Either way, you will be collecting nature without doing any harm.

Close-up photography

If it is possible, get a camera that can take close-up (macro) shots, and read the instructions. The technology is too variable for me to go into it here, and I also lack the expertise to give really good advice. That said, I have developed some cunning over the years, so here are some of the tricks you need to get the best possible photographs:

First and foremost, read your camera's manual.

Second, with a digital camera, there is no excuse for not taking lots of shots.  Go wild!  Experiment!

Hand-held shots are always a problem, because of camera shake. At the very least, prop your camera against a log or a rock, but if possible, use a tripod. A Joby Gorillapod is excellent (and I use one), but if money is in short supply, go to the web and search on <gorilla pod make> and follow the instructions. The bolt size you want is 1/4".

Whenever possible, I use a remote control, but my cameras (Canon Powershot G2, G11 and G12) don't do this. Luckily, most cameras also have a timer setting that allows you to press the button and let go of the camera before the shot is taken.

Insects are 'cold-blooded', which really means that their insides are at the same temperature as their surroundings. If you chill them down in a refrigerator, you can get unblurred shots more easily.

This is an Australian bull-ant, about 20 mm long, and these things have a ferocious sting in their abdomen. They grab you with the nippers, and within a second, they have doubled up and injected something nasty (formic acid??) under your skin.

If you get around in the Australian bush, shorts are best, because an ant inside jeans or trousers is hard to dislodge, but when you feel the 'nip' on bare skin, you can knock the ant off with a glancing blow.

Anyhow, even though this ant was iced, I didn't want her getting loose, I set her up on blue paper, on a plastic tray, sitting on pebbles in a dish of water.

When I am photographing wildflowers, I always carry a few pieces of wire that I can use to make hooks to attach the flower stem to a solid branch.

Even though it is "out-of-shot", the hook will slow the flower's movement in the breeze.

Of course, if the day is sunny enough, then the speed of the shutter will 'freeze' the picture in any case. I also use gaffer tape, bulldog clips and string at times.

The fourth picture shows the dandelion flower and beaker, showing the set-up that gave me the result.

Note the unusual use of a clothes peg.

You can get better shots when your subject is against a plain background. You can see an example of this is the bull ant shot above.

Carry some A4 sheets of coloured manila cardboard in a folder and hang these behind a flower (or get somebody to hold them) and you can also put them under an insect. Black and light blue are probably the best.



And here is the set-up for a shot of the angle-of-rest apparatus that I used in a blog entry on ant lions, using a cardboard background.

This way, you get a rather neater image than you would if the author's messy work bench was visible.

As I mentioned in an entry on animal tracks, you can get better shots of animal tracks by leaving a smoothed sand tray near a feeder.

Always put something down, not too far from the paw print as a scale object. Locate the object so you can crop it out if you wish.

This dingo print in dried mud was taken in the Kimberleys. The sun was high, making the shot less than ideal.

At least the 50-cent coin provides a sense of scale, but it was a bit too close, and would be hard to crop out.

This wallaby print was taken near Sydney with a more slanting light. It lacks a scale object, but note the tyre tread mark at the top.

For some wildlife photography, the best trick of all is to have a camera which is triggered by a motion sensor, but that is heavy stuff, so check the details yourself. I don't own one of those, alas!

Shadows are more of a problem when you are photographing something on a smooth surface. You can 'fill in' the shadows with a flash (a ring flash is expensive but best).

You can also use crinkled aluminium foil to reflect light from another angle. You need a helper or helpers for this, and you need to know that heat is reflected as well as light, so you may need to be quick to get a caterpillar before it takes off out of the heat.

Looking at the shadows in the first caterpillar, you can see that the sun's light on one side is filled in by a mirror, placed just out of shot on the right.

The second caterpillar was on a track beside the Swan River near North Fremantle. I squatted, used a hand-held camera and a macro setting.  I took about twenty shots to get one good one.  Remember: there is no film to waste any more!

An angled shot often leaves part of the animal out of focus, because it is too close or too far from the lens. Depending on your camera, if you can reduce the aperture, this will increase the depth of field for your shot. This helps explain why so many scientists still rely on line drawings. I will turn to that next time, but once again, I can claim no expertise.

The collector's art

In the middle 1800s, the homes of wealthy people were full of dead things. No home was complete without cases of pinned insects or stuffed birds, stuffed animals on stands, animal heads on the wall and animal skins on the floor as rugs. Most naturalists got their start collecting live things, killing them, identifying them and preserving them for sale to rich "collectors".

 Until binoculars were invented in 1859, the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, the only way to study birds up close was to shoot them or trap them in nets.

When I was young, around 1959, most natural history guides would still have been mainly about how to collect, kill, prepare, look after and store collections of dead things. Fashions change, and we try to avoid that, these days.

There is still an occasional need to kill specimens. I know from experience that a huntsman spider will never stay still long enough to be photographed.

This shot was deliberately over-exposed. Can you see why?

In fact, if you poke around in libraries, you may find a 1986 book of mine which describes a chemical killing jar, but I no longer recommend those.


The best way to slow down an invertebrate is to put it in the refrigerator, and the best way to kill an invertebrate is to put it in the freezer. This is gentle and painless, but remember to put the spider in a jar first, or great-aunt Ermyntrude may get a nasty shock!

After an hour or so, the animal will have lost consciousness and died, but it will also be contorted and twisted out of shape.

A dead huntsman spider, pinned out to dry in a selected pose.

The same applies to most animals that you find already dead, as was the case with the spider in the shots shown here.

Another view.

In either case, this is when you need to put the animal in a high humidity relaxing jar for a few hours. This softens the animal up so you can arrange it in a more lifelike pose, using pins to hold it in place while it dries.

(The details of how to make a high himidity jar are on pages 192-193 of Australian Backyard Naturalist, and if you look at the sample pages from the book on Google Books, you can see page 193 for free.



I use entomology pins because they are long and easy to use, but I don't push them through the animal. Instead, I use them to make a scaffolding that holds each part in place while it dries, pinning the spider onto a piece of foam sheeting.

After that, you are ready to take pictures like the ones at the top.

Rainy day spiders

Sometimes I need a post that basically says "I aitn't dead yet".  This is one of those, because I'm busy on other stuff.  There's a radio talk to clean up, there's a book to start, there are two in progress that need a shove, because they stopped progressing

There is hardly anything in Australian Backyard Naturalist about leaf-curling spiders, trapdoor spiders, spiders that live under water, net-casting spiders, spiders that use lassos or spitting spiders. The reason is simple: it wasn't a book about spiders, but the other arachnids are also fun.  Go and burrow!

A photographic challenge for you: try photographing a flower spider (also called a crab spider) in different flowers or against backgrounds of different colours and see if you can catch it changing colour. Some books say American species like Misumena vatia can change colour, but I've never seen any Diaea in Australia change colour.

The arachnids get their name from the old Greek legend of Arachne. Track this story down, and on a wet day, retell it in your own words, with a uniquely Australian flavour. We are allowed to play with science, you know!

I may come back when I am less busy, and stick a couple of spider pictures in.  Now, it's head down, back to the wall, shoulder to the wheel and nose to the grindstone!

Floating filamentous algae

One dish in two different roles, but
here comes a third way to use it:

In the last entry, I described a method for pressing specimens of land plants.

It is also possible to dry and preserve algae and seaweeds, though some of the thick plants like kelp can be a bit of a challenge. Some thick seaweeds can be pressed if they are soaked in hot water first, but you need to use hot sea water, because many of them just collapse in hot fresh water.

The one thing you must have is a shallow dish.  Mine is a bit of an antique: once it would have been used in the kitchen, but for me, it is everything from an algal culture receptacle to an ant lion home, and as I will explain, one of these days, even as a device for gauging rates of evaporation.

You can't just put the thin seaweeds in newspaper, because most of the algae will just bunch up into a dark clump. You need to 'float' them onto paper, so the parts spread out, and the second picture shows you how to do it.

Like the plant press in the last entry, it comes from my 1986 book, Exploring the Environment. I own the copyright and explicitly release this image into the public domain.

Get a fair sample of an alga into a shallow dish in water. Then slip a sheet of reasonably stiff card or heavy drawing paper underneath the plant. Once you have the alga positioned, slide the sheet out of the water, picking up the strands of the alga as you do, using a small artist's brush. Leave the sheet of paper to dry for a while on thick newspaper and then press it in the usual way.

You can improve on this method.  The one thing you can't leave out is the use of the brush to move the alga in the water. Using a backing board of some sort behind the paper may help. You may need to experiment with covering the more filamentous algae with plastic (on one side only!) when you put it into its first wrap of newspaper. With the back of the sheet uncovered, water will still escape.

The main thing is to know that seaweeds can be floated onto a flat surface.  After that, you are ready to go!

Collecting and pressing plants

If you are going to collect plants in a scientific way, you should use a proper plant press. The drawing on the right shows a good design for one of the two identical frames that you need.

(It is, by the way, scanned-in from my well and truly out of print Exploring the Environment. The copyright is mine, and I hereby place this image in the public domain.)

The best material is 19 x 6 mm softwood, held together with small nails (I called them "panel pins" in 1985 when I did this pic, but going on more recent experience, I recommend using 1" flatheads).

The nails need to be long enough to go right through both pieces, but be sure to turn the frame over and knock the points down flat (and think about where the nail points will go when you first drive them through!). The size needs to be about that of a sheet of tabloid newspaper, because you will use a lot of newspapers to dry your specimens.

You need to know something about plants before you start collecting specimens, so do some research or ask. You need to be able to guess which species might be protected, and you need to know if you are allowed to collect or not. (If you are in a botanic gardens or a national park, the answer is "no!").

Your specimen size will depend on the mounting paper the plants will go on. Use secateurs or clippers to make a neat cut. The ideal time to take a specimen is when it has both flowers and seed on it.

Some plants may be too large for the amateur to press in the usual way.  This is a cabbage tree palm.

Unless you are carrying your press with you (not a good idea because it will be large), put each specimen in a separate plastic bag with a slip of paper noting where and when you collected it, the type of plant (herb, shrub, tree, big tree, maybe some measurements), other nearby plants and whether you are in forest, scrub or something else, and if possible, the type of soil.


Noting the soil type might seem odd, but some plant species are very fussy about where they grow, and your records might reveal this. Around Sydney, geologists used to work out where shale is exposed from aerial photographs. If they can see cabbage-tree palms, there is shale rock beneath the tree canopy.

You can also use a GPS to locate the plant if you have one, and maybe take a photo of the plant with a digital camera (ah, the marvellous toys that the younger generation have today.  Sheer looxury, that's what it is!)

When you get home, put the specimen and the finder note inside two sheets of newspaper, stack the specimens on one frame, put the other frame on top and use weights, a rope or a belt to squeeze the two frames together.

Warning:
You will probably have collected a number of insects and spiders with your plants, so try to store the press somewhere outside that is dry and warm.

You should change the newspaper every day, and don't forget to transfer the finder note over at the same time. The old paper can be put in the recycling, but don't use it for other plants, because it will be damp.

After about a week, once the plant specimens are really dry and flat, you can tape or glue them to sheets of white paper. Use PVA wood glue and apply light pressure for an hour. Glue the finder note to the same sheet and store your specimens in a box. In a proper herbarium, poisonous chemicals like camphor and naphthalene are often used to keep insect pests away: these are not hood around the domestic scene.

Now you need to name your plants. You have several choices to identify plants. You can ask an expert, you can look at a book with photos produced by an expert, or you can use a dichotomous key, a set of questions that you work through until you have only one species left. Using a key is hard, but if you are able to ask an expert, you are also able to ask an expert to help you by showing you how to use a key.

In October, my book Curious Minds will be released in Australia.  There you can read about some of the tribulations of early collectors in Australia: the ones who were inadvertently poisoned by Macrozamia seeds (de Vlamingh's party at the Swan River and Banks' party in Queensland among them), and where the type specimens of the early collectors ended up.  You can see two zamias here on the right.

The majority of the type specimens taken by early Europeans are still held at Kew, outside London, but the French collector La Billardière's specimens are now in Florence!

You will also read of Ellis Rowan, an exquisite water-colourist who did wildflowers so accurately that any botanist can spot their genus and species, but who was hopeless at naming plants, and often had to be corrected. She also won lots of awards, much to the annoyance of the mere males who failed to be as recognised, and who engaged in a long-running, vindictive and spiteful war against her.  The usually well-regarded Julian Ashton was one of the most vicious. His motivation seems to have been that she had the temerity to gain a higher award than Julian's brother George.

I'm glad botanists aren't like that.  Well, not often...

A home-made rain gauge

Once you start looking at weather, you may want a rain gauge. You can buy one, of course, but you can also make one from scrap materials.

The last thing you want with an evaporation pan (I'll come to that later) is rain water falling in it, the last thing you want in a rain gauge is evaporation, so it needs a bit of design to control for that and to stop rain splashing out.

This entry is essentially a set of partly-baked ideas, because before I got too far, I dropped this one from the book: that's why this entry is a bit deficient in photos.  Grab the idea and run with it, changing it as you go.

For my model, I decided to take a 1-litre milk bottle and lop the top off to make a funnel that would catch the rain and lead it in, and at the same time, stop too much loss by evaporation.

To make the base more stable and also to make the bottom level, I filled the bottom with water, added plaster.

Note well: you need to put down newspaper to work on before you use plaster, and you should clean up any spilled plaster with a vacuum cleaner.

If you have excess water in a container, the plaster powder settles down to a nice flat surface and it still sets, so use a spatula to add plaster powder to an excess of water.  Bounce the container up and down to flatten the plaster.

Then let the plaster set for an hour (20 minutes is enough, but it does no harm to be patient) and pour off the excess water.

On testing, I found that a bit of the water soaked into the plaster, so if I do this again, I will add water-based paint to seal the plaster. Also, if I did this again, I might use cement.

My first tests revealed that the rain gauge still blew over, so I made a stand for it from scrap timber. The second and third pictures show the basic design, near enough for you to make your own.

The wire came from a coat hanger, but note the spiral on the dowel. This is a special feature, because when you hold it, the spiral will slide up and down the dowel stick easily enough.

When you let go and it is hanging under its own weight, it clings.  You can see this in the second photograph.

I used this design feature later when I was rigging home-made stands for lights than I use for close-up and micro-photography—I'll talk about those some other time.

To finish it off, I suggest adding a scale up the side.

Tree rings and climate measures

This was a puzzler box that I planned to include in one of the plants chapters in Australian Backyard Explorer, before we decided to drop the whole plants side. Oh well, here it is in the blog instead.

By the way, you can now have a good look at the book for free, courtesy of Google Books.

Part of one of the earliest descriptions of tracking

old weather by looking at tree rings, from Scientific

American, 10 September, 1859, page 178. You can

click on the image to enlarge it a bit (or use the link

below to view it online).

You can measure the age of trees by looking at the growth rings laid down each year. Tree rings form because the cells of wood formed in winter are smaller, which makes the wood look darker. In a bad season, the ring will not be as wide.

Professional scientists have tools that drill into trees to take core samples, but making holes isn't good for the tree, so you need to find a tree stump or a section of a log that you can cut. You may need to sand or smooth the surface with a plane or a sander, and the rings are clearer if you varnish the wood or rub grease into it.

Count the rings carefully, from the outside in. How old is the tree, if there is one ring each year? If you can get a second log from another tree, cut a few years earlier, see if you can match up the patterns of rings between the two trees. Matching rings is the basis of a clever branch of science called dendrochronology. Look it up, one rainy day.

As you can see from the article above, the idea isn't new. Here is a link to the complete article in Scientific American. The interface isn't the easiest I have ever used, and one of my friends even calls it user-ferocious, but I recommend it as one that is well worth persevering with.

A neat use of tree rings.
When a new painting by a famous painter suddenly appears from nowhere, everybody wonders if it might be a forgery, so the tests begin. Are the clothing fashions in the painting correct for the period, do the brush strokes go the right way for that artist? If they are correct, is the paint what it should be, or are there modern pigments? Is the canvas or wood under the paint right for the date of the picture? What do X-rays show us about how the layers were put in place?

A few years ago, a major problem arose with early English and Dutch paintings on panels of oak wood. Using what we know about tree rings, the wood in many well-documented Rembrandt works did not match the standard patterns of oak trees in western Europe, but the paintings were definitely Rembrandts, known and recorded since his time.

We now know that timber merchants in the Netherlands imported oak from somewhere around Poland or Lithuania, where the annual climate patterns were different, so the tree ring patterns were different as well.

If you plan to forge Rembrandts, you have to get oak from the right place and it has to be the right age. Then you must make up the right pigments, learn how to do the brush strokes, learn how to do the base coats, know about styles of dress from those times, and quite a lot more. It might pay less, but how about digging ditches as a career? It would certainly be easier!

There is an Australian aspect to this story as well.

The Dutch ship Batavia was wrecked off the West Australian coast in 1629, and some of the oak planks from the wreck have been tested by scientists from the Netherlands. The patterns show that these planks also came from Poland from oak trees that were acorns in about 1325!

But can you do some detective work like that in your garden?

A footnote added  May 17: I came across a mention today of alleged Stradivarius violins being declared a fake, based on tree-ring analysis, somewhere in Germany.  I couldn't find a link to that, but I did find this story from the University of Arkansas: Summary: "We can’t confirm that this is a Stradivarius, but we can say that it’s in the right time frame."

More about animal tracks

This follows on from The mysterious cloven-hoofed animals of Australia.

These two photos are old slides (notice the lens cap, used as a scale!).

The shots show late afternoon tracks on a beach.

No matter what sort of animal you are after, tracks in sand are seen best when the sun is low in the sky. That means winter is better than summer, but early morning and late afternoon are much better, because the high and low parts are contrasted better. (This also applies if you are looking for Aboriginal rock engravings, or when you are looking at the impressions on a sheet of paper, left by somebody writing on the sheet above.)

If you live near sand dunes (or can get to some), you will have no shortage of animal tracks to study, but the problem is that most of the time, you won't know what made the tracks.

The best way to collect tracks in your backyard is to leave out either food or water in the middle of a patch of smooth, dry sand. To keep it dry, you may like to rig a temporary awning of "poly tarp" or something similar, or use a tray that you can take inside when it rains. Then you just need to observe carefully. Once again, you won't know what made the tracks, though I will come back to that later.

An easy way to get tracks that you can identify is to use captured animals—you can always let them go later.  You will need either some flat, dry, clean sand, or a large tin lid, candle, pliers, large spider (orb-weaver or a huntsman) or a lizard of reasonable length (say >10 cm long) or a large beetle.  In what follows, I will just say "spider", but feel free to improvise or change the animal.  Basically, I am suggesting that you try this old method as a starting-point, and see if you can adapt it.

In either case, you will need two pieces of wood about 30 cm long.  You will probably need a jar with a lid and some cardboard or a brush to catch your test animal. You will definitely need a large water container like a baby bath and some bricks or wood blocks. Most experiments like this work best when the apparatus is set up in a large dish like a baby's plastic bath with some water in the bottom. Set everything up on wood blocks or bricks, and use the water as a sort of moat to keep the spider from escaping.

Spiders are most easily caught in the evening, after they have made their webs. Take the jar and use a camel hair brush to urge the spider to move in the right direction then catch it as it drops off the web.

I don't recommend getting snake tracks using any
other method than the one I used here, where I
took my shot after the snake was well and truly
gone.

Light a candle and use the pliers to hold the tin lid over the flame, moving it around until the whole of the surface of the lid is black. Watch out that you don't get burned!

Once the lid has cooled, you can let your spider walk across it between the two pieces of wood, to collect spider tracks. You will get a neater result if the wood pieces rest on something else, like two matches, and don't touch the tin lid. You could also use an old light-coloured dinner plate instead of a tin lid.

For comparison, try the same large spider on smooth dry sand. Does it leave a track?

Note: the lid/plate method works well with beetles, centipedes and lizards. Catch a flat spider, the sort which lives under the bark of gum trees, and compare its tracks with those of an orb weaver. After you have collected a variety of spider tracks, see whether you can learn to identify a species by the track it makes. (I tried this and I couldn't!)

Next time, I'll say a bit about tracks in mud.

Some thoughts about insects

Well, the new book is out tomorrow, and today I tramp the media trail, yacking about it on radio.

As a goodly part of Australian Backyard Naturalist is about insects, here are some odd thoughts on insects from my quotes file. It will be two or three days until I have time free to do regular posts here.

I believe that our very concept of beauty, necessarily relative and cultural, has over the centuries patterned itself on them, as on the stars, the mountains, and the sea.  We have proof of this if we consider what happens when we examine the head of a butterfly under the microscope; for the greater part of observers, admiration is replaced by horror or revulsion.
— Primo Levi, 'Butterflies' in Other People's Trades, p. 7

Happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.
— Anna Pavlova (1881-1931), Russian ballerina.

 It is said that the famous British biologist, J. B. S. Haldane ... asked by a churchman what his concept of God was, answered: 'He is inordinately fond of beetles'.
 — Primo Levi, 'Beetles' in Other People's Trades, page 14

It appears, by the dung that they drop on the turf, that beetles are no inconsiderable part of their food.
— Gilbert White (1720 - 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter XXVII, about hedgehogs.

March 28.  A neighbour complained to me that her house was over-run with a kind of black-beetle, or as she expressed herself, with a kind of black-bob, which swarmed in her kitchen when they get up in a morning before daybreak.  Soon after this account, I observed an unusual insect in one of my dark chimney-closets; & find since that in the night they swarm also in my kitchen.  On examination I soon ascertained the Species to be the Blatta orientalis of Linnaeus, & the Blatta molendinaria of Mouffet.  The male is winged, the female is not; but shows somewhat like the rudiments of wings, as if in the pupa state.  These insects belonged originally in the warmer parts of America, & were conveyed from thence by shipping to the East Indies; & by means of commerce begin to prevail in the more N. parts of Europe, as Russia, Sweden &c.  How long they have abounded in England I cannot say; but have never observed them in my house 'till lately. [They had probably been there since late in the 17th century]
— Gilbert White (1720 - 1793), Journal, (1790), MIT Press, 1970.

 When the servants are gone to bed, the kitchen-hearth swarms with minute crickets not so big as fleas.  The Blattae are almost subdued by the persevering assiduity of Mrs. J. W. who waged war with them for many months, & destroyed thousands: at first she killed some hundreds every night.
— Gilbert White (1720 - 1793), Journal, (1792), MIT Press, 1970.

And you should never own to a mosquito.  I once unfortunately stated to a Queensland gentleman that my coat had been bitten by cockroaches at his brother's house, which I had just left.  'You must have brought them with you then,' was the fraternal defence immediately set up.  I was compelled at once to antedate the cockroaches to my previous resting-place, owned by a friend, not by a brother.  'It is possible,' said the squatter, 'but I think you must have had them with you longer than that.'  I acquiesced in silence, and said no more about my coat till I could get it mended elsewhere.
— Trollope, Anthony, Australia and New Zealand, London: 1873 and Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1967 (edited by Edwards and Joyce), page 67.

  And some taxonomy thoughts:

 Taxonomy, the most underappreciated of all sciences, is the keystone of historical disciplines.

— Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile, Penguin 1991, 19.

All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you.  There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground.  Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper.  But all other winged creatures that have four legs you are to detest.
— Holy Bible, Leviticus, 11:20-23, New International Version.

The fact that we are able to classify organisms at all in accordance with the structural characteristics which they present, is due to the fact of their being related by descent.
— Ray Lankester (1847 - 1929)

There are really only individuals in nature, and genera, orders and classes exist only in our imagination.
 — Georges Buffon (1707 - 1788).

I suspect much there may be two species of water-rats.  Ray says, and Linnaeus after him, that the water-rat is web-footed behind.  Now I have discovered a rat on the banks of our little stream that is not web-footed, and yet is an excellent swimmer and diver. . .
— Gilbert White (1720 - 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter X.

Modern biologists sometimes do less than justice to the genius of the men who, behind the bewildering variety of morphologies and modes of life of living beings, succeeded in identifying, if not a unique 'form', at least a finite number of anatomical archetypes, each of them invariant within the group characterized.  It was of course not difficult to see that seals are mammals closely related to carnivores living on land.  It was much harder to discern the same fundamental scheme in the tunicates and the vertebrates, so as to group them together in the phylum Chordata; and it was still more a feat to perceive the affinities between chordates and echinoderms; yet it is certain, and biochemistry confirms it, that sea urchins are more closely related to us than the members of certain much more evolved groups of invertebrates such as the cephalopods, for example.
 — Jacques Monod (trans. Austryn Wainhouse), Chance and Necessity, Fontana 1974, p. 100.

A plant should be mutually known from its specific name, and the name from the plant, and both from their proper character, written in the former and delineated in the latter.
 — Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) (1707 - 1778), The Elements of Botany (1775), quoted by Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973).

It is a folly to use a great many where few words are sufficient.
— Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) (1707 - 1778), The Elements of Botany (1775), quoted by Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life (1973).

Life has come to be regarded by the majority of biologists as forming one vast genealogical tree, the roots of which are buried deep down in the lowest fossiliferous strata, and the tops of whose branches, constituting the life that now exists on the globe, are alone seen above the surface.
— John Gibson, 'Fossil fishes of Scotland' in Science Gleanings in Many Fields (1884).

... each pollen was very beautiful and specific: one could distinguish its separate granules, delicate and elegant architectures, small spheres, ovoids, polyhedrons, some smooth and shiny, others bristling with ridges or thorns, white, brown, or golden.
— Primo Levi, 'The Invisible World' in Other People's Trades, page 50.

Plague germs in Melbourne

This is out of the normal run of things, but this is too good a yarn not to share.

For reasons that I won't elaborate on here, I have been looking at the bubonic plague outbreak that happened in Sydney at the start of the 20th century, when fast steamers were able to carry plague rats to a number of Pacific and Asian ports.

To get some good background, I started wading through reports from the start of 1897. I read of tick plagues, rabbit plagues, rinderpest, grasshoppers and more, because I had chosen the blunderbuss approach of searching just on plague. Using this method slows things down a bit, but ensures that I don't miss any gems.

I was working in my favourite resource, the Trove digitised newspapers collection at the National Library of Australia, and the 133rd article that I looked at was the one in the clipping on the right (or possibly above, depending on your browser and its settings).  If you want to read on (and I hope you will), here is a link to the whole article.

The skinny: Dr. Haydon had indeed brought back plague bacilli (interestingly, the story uses all three common terms: microbe, bacillus and germ).  He refused to hand them over, as he wanted to carry out experiments.

The authorities found they had no power to seize the bacteria, but then came a twist that W. S. Gilbert would have loved:

Microbes are not dutiable, and there is no law to prevent their importation, but the Secretary of Trade and Customs states that everyone coming to the colony is technically bound to report everything in his possession. Mr. Williams, at the interview with Dr. Wollaston, suggested that an officer of the Customs Department should be sent to seize the germs, and that Dr. Haydon, instead of being compensated; should be prosecuted for secretly importing the germs of a horribly dangerous disease.

Mr. Williams favored desperate measures, but as soon as Dr. Wollaston heard that the microbes had been imported in gelatine, he saw his opportunity to proceed in a legal manner, for gelatine is subject to a duty of 3d per lb, and, as Dr. Haydon had not paid the duty, the department was entitled to seize the gelatine; Mr. Williams gleamed with satisfaction, and Dr. Wollaston hastened to give effect to his intention.

And so it came to pass, in due course, that Detective-Inspector Christie, expert seizer and destroyer of illicit whisky stills, contraband cigars and the like, hastened off with Dr. Gray, seized the vile bugs and promptly consigned them to the fire.

Naturally, I suspected a leg-pull, but there was wide coverage over many years. Dr. Haydon was apparently Dr. Leonard G. Haydon.  Moreover, he had discussed his actions with officers of the Public Health Department, and they had seen the cultures.

Haydon offered a spirited defence of his actions in The Argus on November 14, and by his explanation and after tracing has later career (my search in Trove was on Haydon AND plague), I conclude that Haydon was in the right and the authorities were in full knee-jerk panic mode.

In fairness, there had been an outbreak in Vienna in the previous month, when several staff at a medical institute died of bubonic plague, and the method of transmission was yet to be worked out, so the fear was understandable.

But nothing can take away from the ploy about unpaid gelatine duties. What a pity only three other reports mention that aspect of the yarn.

Oh dear!  I think I may have been taken in by a bit of journalistic embellishment, corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

Remind me again: who was it that said that?

Addendum: after many years in South Africa, Leonard Guscote Haydon retired to Australia and died in 1941. Here is a link to an obituary.

The mysterious cloven-hoofed animals of Australia

No hoof here: this is a 2-metre
portion of a snake's track, left
on a fire trail near Sydney.

I was going to write about tracks in the next few entries, and indeed I will, but first, a bit of history that stems from a current early-stages writing project which has me back looking at the records of exploration in Australia, and early impressions of Australia.

The other day, I came across a reference from the 1880s to two early explorers who reported that they had seen the tracks of an animal with a cloven hoof, like a buffalo. (I don't have a picture of this to share, but if you search in Google Images on buffalo spoor, you will soon get the idea.

One of the two who claimed to have fond these tracks was George Grey, who was commonly regarded (with some justification) as an idiot because of his dangerous and stupid decisions, so I didn't take much notice of that.

(That's aside from the fact that I don't have time for explorers who get other people killed, or explorers who, having been abject failures, abuse their power to belittle successful explorers like Edward John Eyre and Charles Sturt. Just take it from me, Grey was both a fool and a swine, though he lacked a cloven hoof.)

Anyhow, today, having had the brainwave that I will come to in a moment, I checked Grey's journal and found this quote from 1838:

… I have still to record the remarkable fact of the existence in these parts of a large quadruped with a divided hoof: this animal I have never seen, but twice came upon its traces.

George Grey, Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Volume 1, chapter 11.

The other report came from Lieutenant William Dawes, a rational and sensible man, but as a First Fleeter who spent something like three years here, he had less chance to realise that what he claimed was an impossibility. Sadly, Dawes left no journal, but prosaic David Collins recorded Dawes' reported find in December 1789.

During his toilsome march he met with nothing very remarkable, except the impressions of the cloven feet of an animal differing from other cloven feet by the great width of the division in each. He was not fortunate enough to see the animal that had made them.
David Collins: An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, (end of Chapter VIII).

Exhibit 1: Wallabia bicolor track, West Head, Ku-ring-gai
Chase National Park, near Sydney.

Over the years, I imagine a lot of people have puzzled briefly over these reports, muttered something like "well, they got that wrong, then" and moved on. It was just luck that led me to be sifting through my track shots, looking for some to use, soon after reading G. B. Barton's report of the two findings.

Exhibit 1 is the track of a swamp wallaby, Wallabia bicolor, taken close to Sydney on a sandy track.  This is a characteristic macropod track from a hopping beast: two hind feet, each with two toes, side by side.

Exhibit 2, unidentified wallaby track, Wilpena Pound. Can you
see the vague similarity to a cattle hoof?

Exhibit 2 is another wallaby of similar size, but I took this near Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges, north of Adelaide.  This was the shot that made me realise what Grey and Dawes may have seen.

I have enhanced the second picture a bit to make the small toe show up better, but this was the best track I could find one early September morning, a couple of years ago.  Most of the tracks failed to show the small toe, and because I didn't know about the "cloven hoof" theory, I ignored them.

It was just that I had seen Barton's comment two days before I pulled up these shots and now, as I looked at my Wilpena Pound shot, I could see what they must have seen.

Of course there was a great division in the "hoof"—it was really two feet, side by side on ground that was reasonably hard!

A few things that I will come back to: why you should always try capturing animal track shots early or late in the day, how to get them and how to identify the animal that made them.

Read on in More about animal tracks.

Sundews

Sundews (Drosera sp.) are insect-eating plants, found in swamps and marshes in much of Australia. Their leaves have sticky hairs that hold drops of protein-dissolving enzymes.

When an insect sticks to a leaf, the enzymes break the insect's protein down to amino acids, and this stimulates the leaf to curl over, slowly, bringing more hairs into contact with the insect, holding it better and dissolving it more.

The process generally takes several hours, so this would be a good case for time-lapse photography.

Gentle people can try feeding a sundew on tiny bits of cheese or meat, but if you are growing a sundew in a pot, you need to grow it in very pure sand, and never add any fertiliser, because these plants won't produce the sticky 'dew' if they can get enough nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil. Don't overfeed them.

Sounds like a science project? I thought so as well.  Congratulations on having such an excellent idea!

There are three other genera in the family Droseraceae: the Drosophyllum of the western Mediterranean, Dionaea, from the Carolinas (USA) and Aldrovanda, described in one of my reference books as "widespread in the Old World".

Here are some things to explore:

• Do the plants 'react' faster in a warmer temperature? 

• Do sundews like sugar?

• How would you find out? 

• How do different species compare? 

• There is less protein in cheese: does this produce a slower reaction? 

• Do they react to small pieces of metal or glass?

Just a note in passing: be careful how you speak. At one stage, I was teaching a bunch of teen-agers who were a bit wild.  We got on fairly well, because I used to be a wild teen-ager myself (more in thought than in deed, if the truth be known, but I understand the mind-set).

Anyhow, one day, I told them I had found some carnivorous plants in the school grounds, and that we were going to leave the classroom to go and see them.

Off we went, and one of the wildest and most switched-off ones was amazingly excited and animated.  It took a while to learn that he thought we were going to visit some cannabis plants!  The good news: he took just as excitedly to the carnivorous plants, finding them food and going back to check them.

There's one thing I haven't worked out yet: why are the leaves often red? Is it some response to its own enzymes, or a defence against them?

Here are some pictures of a few different species.  I need to take some more time to photograph them, but mainly, I need to go out, equipped with a ground-sheet to lie on, given that these things are always in swampy country!

The coin in the first shot is an Australian $2 coin: it is 2cm (0.8") across.
 

Seeing inside a shell

This exploration involves making something called an endocast (that means a cast of the interior) of a snail shell. In nature, endocasts can form when a shell or a skull fills with mud before it is buried. Later, ground water sometimes removes or dissolves the shell or bone, just leaving the internal cast.

The real process takes ages, but you can make a much quicker inside cast of a shell by filling it with plaster, and dissolving the shell with acid. Plaster of Paris can be messy stuff, so be careful always to work in the middle of several large sheets of newspaper, and be sure to clean up after yourself. Better still, use a large plastic bowl as your work space.

You also need to talk with an adult about a safe place to leave the acid, and you should get some help in diluting the acid and pouring it. Remember that acid spills are best treated with lots of water, so keep water handy, and work in a place where you can splash water around if you need to.

Get a triangular or flat file, a hand drill with a fine (no more than 2 mm) bit, some snail shells and/or sea shells (try to get some variety!), plaster of Paris, an old yoghurt container, water, an old teaspoon, gardening gloves, rubber gloves, hydrochloric acid, and some safety glasses.

Endocasts of a garden snail shell (left) and a sea snail shell. I had
decided early in the book not to include this project, so I have no
shots of the process to offer, and only this one 20-year-old slide

of the results— and that had to be scanned, hence the quality.

Start by making a scratch at the top of the shell with a triangular file or the corner of a flat file, so the drill has somewhere to grip. Then working very carefully, put on a gardening glove, hold a shell and drill a small hole in the top.

This hole is there to let the air escape when you stuff the shell with wet plaster through the main opening. Drill each shell and test the holes by pouring water into each shell with a wash bottle, then put the drilled shells to one side while you get the plaster ready.

Spoon some plaster powder into the container, pour in a small amount of water, and stir gently, trying not to get any bubbles in the plaster. Mix the plaster and water carefully, until it is about as thick as cream, then try to move any air bubbles to one side, out of the way. Keep adding water until it seems about right; if you add too much water, use a dry spoon or spatula to add a small amount of extra plaster.

When the plaster is ready, use your fingers to push the wet plaster into the opening of the shell until a small 'worm' of wet plaster starts to ooze out the drill hole. Wipe the 'worm' away with a damp tissue and leave the plaster to set. Fill all the shells with plaster, and then go outside and wash the implements you used. Tip the leftover plaster into a hole in the garden or into a container to go in the bin, not down the drain!!

When the plaster is hard, you can put the shells in a beaker (a glass jar will do for this, and so will a plastic yoghurt container), and add some dilute acid. Pool acid or muriatic acid (both are really hydrochloric acid) will be fine, but remember that the acid you buy is strong, so you need to break it down, one part of acid to about nine of water. Strong acid will foam and spit dangerously. As the shell reacts with the acid, bubbles and foam may overflow, so don't fill the beaker more than half-way, and sit the beaker in a large plastic bowl.

For your hands' sake, wear the rubber gloves, for your eyes' sake, wear the safety glasses! With weak acid, you may need to wash out the container and add more dilute acid on the second and third day. Put everything in a safe place (think about pets, small brothers and sisters, unaware adults, wind gusts, and think about what the acid will spill onto if the container tips over).

Wear the rubber gloves when you take the plaster out, once all the shell has gone. What you do now with your trophy is up to you, but you may wish to look, to see if the inside is completely smooth.

Plaster of Paris is a dried-out form of gypsum, which has one molecule of water for every two calcium ions and two sulfate ions, giving us the formula (CaSO4)2.H2O. After you add the water, the plaster forms a solid mass of highly insoluble gypsum crystals, CaSO4.2H2O, with four times as much water, two waters to every calcium sulfate. Plaster expands slightly as it sets, which explains why plaster makes such accurate copies of a surrounding mould. The acid does not affect the plaster, but it does react with the shell, which is mostly calcium carbonate.

You could try making a collection of shell moulds of related species and comparing them, or you could collect some skulls, and make casts of their brain cavities. Hydrochloric acid, diluted with about six times as much water, will take away the hard calcium phosphate of the bone over several days. It is many years since I did this, but three days should reduce the bone to soft cartilage that you can scrape away carefully.

Safety note: unless you are used to handling acid, and maybe even then, give some thought to safety. You need protective goggles and rubber gloves, and anything that has been in acid should be both rinsed and soaked in large amounts of water. Keep pets and small children away!

The technical name for a cast like this is, as I sad at the start, endocast. One of the most important fossils ever found was an endocast of half of the brain of a juvenile Australopithecus africanus, found in the 1920s by (Sir) Raymond Dart. He took one look at the brain cast, and knew that the owner of that brain had walked upright, because he could see where the brain stem left the skull, underneath the brain, rather than at the back! The specimen is often referred to as the Taung baby.

This is a fascinating tale, well worth reading up on. I recommend Lucy: The Befinnings of Humankind by Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, Penguin (my edition is 1981).  The ISBN-10 of that edition is 0-14-013935-4.

Twining in creepers: more left and right

Is this twining plant, seen here climbing a
she-oak, right-handed or is it left-handed? 

This is just a short one, because life is getting a bit hectic: I have a book coming out next week, as I have said before, but I have also launched into something rather different, which has the title Curious Colonists.

I explained the basics of this in My Silence Has a Reason in late February. Yesterday, I drafted The Man Who Lost a River, but that's a side issue, except that it means I'm busy.

Now let us return to our moutons.  Snail shells have two forms, left-handed and right-handed, as explained in Handedness in shells.

Any helix can twist in the same two ways. An ant going up a right-handed helix standing on its end, moves to the right as you watch it, until it disappears around the back of the helix, while an ant going up a similar left-handed helix moves to the left as it crosses the front of the helix.

Ordinary bolts and screws are right-handed, but gas fittings have left-handed threads.

Every climbing plant must twine one way or the other to get a grip as it climbs. If it twined first one way and then the other, it might unwrap.

Two brilliant British comedy performers, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, wrote and performed a song called Misalliance. It was about a love affair between the right-handed honeysuckle and the left handed bindweed.

A web search on <Flanders Swann Misalliance> will turn up several versions. To get the original, add the word hat, because the song was featured in a show called At the Drop of a Hat. Here is a link to a Youtube version.

Listen to their song, then wander out into the garden or the bush and look for twining creepers. Check to see which handedness is more common, and see if any species can twine both ways, maybe even on different stems of the same plant.

Brainbuster question

How does a plant "decide"?

Handedness in shells

Most 'snails' have a spiral shell, but not all of them. Slugs have no visible shell, and the shell of a mature limpet is a flattened cone, like an upside-down wok. (A wok, if you do not know what it is, is like a large upside-down limpet.)

Actually, most "spiral" shells are helical, not spiral, but let's stay with the common word.

Left-handed shell on the left, right-handed shell on the right.
(Confession: the left side of the picture is a fake,  produced 

by my digitally reversing the image of a right-handed shell.)
This image has been created from Dover copyright free  art.

Spiral shells come in two kinds, right-handed and left-handed, just like creeping plants (see my next entry when I get around to it). Some of the spiral snails come in left-handed spirals only, some come in right-handed spirals only, and some come in both forms.

The easy way to identify the 'handedness' of a shell is to hold the shell, with the top pointing up, and turned so that you are looking into the entrance hole. If the entrance hole is on the right, the shell is right-handed, if it is on the left, the shell is left-handed.

In one odd example, Sir Theodore Cook (Theodore Cook, The Curves of Life. New York: Dover, 1979), describes a beach at Felixstowe in Britain, where a snail called Fusus antiquus may be found living on the beach, and fossilised in the cliffs behind the beach. Cook said that 99% of the living specimens were right-handed, while all the fossil specimens were left-handed.

Some twenty years ago, I examined several thousand Pacific shells, and several hundred Indonesian shells. They were all right-handed, and so were all the shells on display at the Australian Museum, and the shells of Australia and New Zealand that I examined in several reference books. Even the Australian Museum's fossil shells were all right-handed! I decided to give up my hunt.

Then one day I was cleaning out an aquarium tank. The snails that I kept in the tank to clean the glass were all left-handed! I suspect the snail is an import from overseas, but the lesson here is to never give up looking!

So collect a range of snail and shellfish shells. Sort your shells into species, and into right-handed and left-handed forms (if any). What conclusions can you draw, and why?

While you are at it, look at your snails, and see if you can find any differences within a species. If they are striped, do all of them have the same size stripes? If they have knobs on their shells, are all of them just as knobby, or are some of them smoother? Are they all the same colour?

How could you explain the difference between the fossil Fusus antiquus snails which were left-handed, and the modern ones which are nearly all right-handed? How could such a change be driven by evolution? Right-handed snails go counter-clockwise when mating, and left-handed snails go clockwise, so the two types cannot mate.

If snail species vary in numbers over time, this might explain why a species becomes entirely of one form or the other, just by chance. How could it work across species? Could some predators find left-handed shells easier to attack? Why?

Or could there be another explanation? Maybe the right-handed form has a real advantage, but they used to be eaten by an animal which is now extinct, or the shells dissolved more easily, or the shells of dead right-handed or left-handed animals rolled away into deeper water. See how creative you can be in generating interesting hypotheses.

You can't leave it there, of course. Design a good scientific test which could be used to test your hypotheses.

Helical playwiths

The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it furnished him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or playwiths, but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (1772-1834)

• Crazy speculation: Martin Gardner ( Ambidextrous Universe, 2nd edition. Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1982) claimed that left-handed shells are quite common. As a North American, he was writing in the northern hemisphere. Could there be a difference between the handedness of snails in the two hemispheres? Could it relate to Coriolis forces, maybe, or the way the sun's shadow goes around a vertical stick? Develop your own hypothesis, and draw up a plan to test it. (By the way, I don't really believe the Coriolis idea. There maybe something in the sun theory, but even that strikes me as unlikely.)

• Oddity: There is a television sequence showing an 'alien' being dissected, supposedly back in the 1950s. You can tell that the dissection is a fake, because there is a phone in one shot which has a coiled lead—phones did not have coiled leads in the 1950s!

• Curiosity, a bit daft at the end: When I first got interested in this question, computer keyboards and telephones all had helical cords, and I found that you could usually deduce the country of origin by looking to see if the twist went to the left or the right. Helical cords are now less common, but look out for them, and see which way they go. Make a study of these leads, and where they were made. See which handedness is favoured in which countries. Does it correlate with the side of the road cars drive on? (Indonesians, Japanese and Malaysians all drive on the left.)

• Useful line of enquiry: What conclusion should we make from the lack of left-handed shells in the southern hemisphere? There is the basis of a good project here for somebody. Collect information from a wide range of sources, comparing east coasts and west coasts, northern and southern hemispheres. Use real shells, photographs and drawings, and be wary of accidentally reversed images in books and on the web!

By the way, I have a whole website full of science playwiths. It's a bit tired and in need of a good dust and polish—and I'll get there one day, but if you ignore the primitive layout, you may find some amusement there.

It began about 15 years ago when I was teaching computing in a high school, and whipped the first page up for a workshop for teachers from the primary 'feeder schools'. It kind of growed, but the design is putrid.  After all, my web-authoring software was the incredibly sophisticated Notepad!

Final note: the two books cited in this entry were also mentioned in http://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/phi-and-spirals.html and I think it is worth having a look at that as well. The next entry looks at twining plants, which are also "handed".

A different ANZAC story

Mehmetciği Derin Saygı Anıtı
(Respect for Mehmetçik monument)

A closer view of the statue, in one of the Turkish war cemeteries.

In Australia and New Zealand, we are about to celebrate ANZAC Day, the Gallipoli landings of 1915, and the carnage that ensued.  Few nations celebrate a defeat, but we do.  It's an amazing story, and in 2002, I visited Gallipoli, though I will probably never write a book about it.

I should, because there are little-heard stories that deserve telling, like the big Turk who, sickened by the suffering, strode out into No Man's Land to a screaming British soldier.  As the men on both sides saw him and what he was doing, the firing must have stopped.

He picked up the 'Johnnie', carried him gently to the trenches of the invaders, laid him gently down where his own people could retrieve him and care for him, and then turned back to his own lines.

The undeclared cease-fire must have held until he was safely back in a trench, because legend has it that he survived the day.  (Full marks, by the way, to our then Governor-General, who was, by that time, Lord Casey, who witnessed the incident, and whose 1967 description of it inspired the statue.

Sadly, if there were scraps and tatters of decency, little of that war was glorious.

Just recently, I have been looking into a little-known* versifier called 'Dryblower', because he used to write popular verse in the mould of Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling and many, many Australian bush balladists.  He had escaped my notice until I came across his celebration of the rescue of an Italian gold miner, trapped in an air pocket, deep in a desert gold mine in Western Australia.

The tale of Modesto Varischetti, how a flash flood in a desert trapped him, a thousand feet (330 metres) underground in an air pocket, and how divers were used to rescue him, kept Australia riveted for a week in March 1907, and 'Dryblower' celebrated the rescue in verse.  I wondered who he was.

A bit of digging revealed that Edwin Greenslade Murphy was 'Dryblower'. He was a Perth journalist, and, I quickly discovered, celebrated mainly for a poem written during the Great War, alias World War I, called 'My Son'.  It describes a father's feelings when his son goes off to war.

I have given you unto the Empire;
  You will follow its battle flag;
You will hear the sound of slaughter
  In valley, on plain and crag.
I have taken you out of the playground,
  From many a merry mate.
To send you, a stripling soldier,
  Out to the field of fate.
But when the good work is over,
  And your share of the strife is done
I shall be proud of the lad I lent,
I shall be proud to say that I sent.
             My son,
                          My son.

They have come in their thousands lusty;
  But the gaps still cry for more;
They have come from the bushland lonely,
  From the scrub and the sounding shore;
They have come from the desert dreaming,
  From out of the rolling range,
From the verdant placid pastures,
  From the hills that never change.
From out of the alleys squalid,
  Where the days are drear and dun;
With pride I have heard their footsteps ring,
And so I have sent, to serve my King;
             My son,
                          My son.

They have gone in the teeming troopship;
  They have fought the fight, and fell;
They have felt on their fearless faces
  Draughts from the deeps of hell;
Thinned by the hidden horror.
  Drowned, in the shot-swept blue,
They have closed up the gaps of glory,
  Steadied and thundered through!
And into that mounded country
  Where the deadly work was done,
Where the bloodstained trenches blur and blend
With no wav'ring weak'ning sigh I send
             My son,
                          My son.

Did I fall in a father's duty.
  Did I keep him with mine and me,
How would he face the question
  In the darkened days to be?
Could he walk in such public places?
  Could he do what all good men do
When the patriot women shunned him
  When it came to his time to woo?
If he took not to-day his bayonet,
  His khaki brave and gun,
I would see his brothers in shame abide,
I would see them pass on the other side
             My son,
                          My son.

God of our destined duty,
  Of our Country, Flag, and King,
Keep him in courage lofty
  When the hell-made missiles swing.
And if he must prove an Abel,
  Killed by another Cain,
Give him, O Lord, at parting
  No portion of Calvary's pain.
Let us write over his slumbers
  The glorious words, "Well done!"
For whether our Flag shall wilt or wave,
Let us remember He also gave
             His Son,
                          His Son.
                                           —DRYBLOWER. 

A bit more digging, and I found that this was Dryblower's reflection on his own oldest son, Harry, signing up, and I wanted to know what Harry's fate was, whether he had survived the war.  There was a good chance that early recruits either died, or if they returned, had been maimed for life.

Harry Mansfield Murphy, No. 1018, 32nd battalion, and most probably in C Company, I think, signed on as a drummer, and I thought that sounded like a less than glorious occupation to be the subject of his father's poem, but drummers were still in the front lines, so I didn't write him off.

Then I found that Harry had returned to Australia in July 1916: this usually meant that he had been wounded, but it appeared he was unharmed.  That took a bit more digging, but I found that he became a jazz drummer and xylophonist, and was a sergeant-drummer in a concert party in World War II.

Harry Murphy, Perth Mirror,
28 August, 1926, p. 6.

In 1917, when Harry was drummer in a recruiting band, he was identified both as a returned soldier and an 18-year-old.  Like many others, he had falsified his age, and his proud father had stood aside as a 16-year-old went off to war.

Harry is quite widely documented (by me) in the Trove historic newspapers collection, so readers who wish can find him by looking for the tag <Harry Mansfield Murphy> (or just use this link).

You will find conflicting information: one contemporary account refers to him going on patrol in 1916, but a later story, written in 1935 by somebody who served with him, claimed that he was sent back from Egypt when his age was discovered, and that he never saw active service—but his father had approved of his joining up.

That's why I don't write military history any more.  I did, once.  My Kokoda Track: 101 Days was a basic and slightly simplified telling of a riveting story of the time in 1942 when two threadbare, unsupported, ill-equipped militia battalions held off a far larger Japanese force, long enough for seasoned troops to be brought into the line, and in the end, to force them back into the sea.

There was another tale, one that I muted, a story of bungling stupidity by the Brass.  It dominated the first draft, which I threw out.  Because my own minimal military experience was survived by emulating Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk (with traces of Yossarian), there was a human note to what I wrote in my second draft.

I didn't glorify war, but I gave an even-handed account, and that interested another of my publishers, who immediately asked me to do a particular campaign for him.  I gently declined, on the ground that when you do military history, you meet with an  awful class of people.

I prefer not to celebrate a world in which fathers could watch proudly as their 16-year-old sons went off to war, not bewailing the fact, but exulting over doing duty to country, flag and king.

The poem continued to live on, after the war, and after Dryblower's death in 1939, though the only copies I can find on the internet come from old newspapers of that era, three in Australia and one in New Zealand.  Well, I have changed that, by putting the clean text online. [Post script: I have since come across a clean version from the West Australian Bush Poets.]

The watchword of ANZAC Day is 'Lest We Forget', but equally, we should make sure we don't forget the butchery and the madness of war, especially the madness that allows a man to urge his first-born on to seek death or glory.  I won't write about it.

But I have a responsibility to write of it.

* Note added May 7: I have amended my description of 'Dryblower' from "lesser" to "little-known, after a W.A. bush poet sent me some of the 'Dryblower's' other stuff.  I now concede that I was judging 'Dryblower' by what appeared in the daily press.  This was often stuff penned on the spot to plug a gap in a page. After reading Going East (1903), I declare him to be an excellent poet. To see some of his other poems, use this link.