Cryptogams of North Head

Nobody really talks about cryptogams these days. Cryptograms, yes, but not cryptogams. In the 19th century, cryptogams were the 'lower plants', the ones lacking flowers and seeds. Essentially, they were fungi, lichens, liverworts, mosses and hornworts, though others might also include the ferns. I will leave them out, but I will include the slime moulds, and I will throw in one bacterium. And one group of plants. The mosses can wait: nobody takes them to be fungi.

To be blunt, 'cryptogam' is just a polite way of saying odds and sods. This blog entry is mainly pictures: as I see it, even people who see and notice the ~500 wildflower species rarely notice the lower plants.

All of the things you read about here may (correctly or incorrectly) be thought of as fungus-related, and I am detailing them because I am about to introduce some youngsters to the fungi (and related life forms) of North Head. Having put this account together, I wanted to share my play space and its beautiful life forms to the general public, but it was started for my young companions.

Fungi.

Mushrooms and other visible fungi

This mauve mushroom turned up on the oval in April 2025. Not seen before or since. The 50-cent coins that show up are there as a scale: they are 32 mm from side to side, and each edge is 8 mm long.

The outside mushrooms were on the oval, the central one was in the Sanctuary compound.

Bracket fungi

These are typically found on dead timber, and they can be as much as 300 mm across. In dry weather, these may be the only genuine fungi you will see on North Head. There are very many of them.

Can you estimate the size of the bracket fungus on the right? The coin is 32 mm across.

More bracket fungi

 

Even more bracket fungi

Puffballs

These have a ball-shaped fruiting body that bursts when it is mature, when it is ht or touched. Then it releases a cloud of dust, actually spores that can become new fungi.

Right now, there are several in the control-burned area near the Crossfit gymnasium. Because the fire touched them, they don't look all that healthy.

 Lichens

A lichen is complicated: we used to think they were a fungus and an alga, living in symbiosis, then people said it was helotism, a form of slavery, where the fungus exploited the alga, then there were two fungi, and now some people say there are three fungi!

At one stage, while I was writing The Nature of North Head, I discussed with a colleague the lack of lichens, and she agreed. Later, I found quite a few. If you want that book by the way, you can have it as a dead-tree book from Amazon, or as a Kindle e-book, but the version from Google Play is cheaper, and more up-to-date: get it here: it covers all of the wildlife, flowering plants, geology and much more.

Anyhow, we do indeed have lichens, and this one is only found on asphalt, I believe, and I have seen a very similar organism on a tar road in New Zealand: you can find it on the asphalt in the Sanctuary compound

There are also quite a few lichens on the Memorial Walk, and in our defence, the ones on the brick have all appeared since Jenny and I agreed that there were no lichens on the headland: we were wrong! (In fact, we were no more than 10 metres from some lichens as we discussed their absence

Lichens on the Memorial Walk.

There used to be other lichens on old timber, at the back of the lawn near the walk: I need to look to see if they are still there:

  Liverworts.

 I have never seen these growing wild, but they show up in our nursery, where we raise plants from seedlings and cuttings. The liverworts are like mosses, but they have things like leaves.

 Leptothrix.

Leptothrix is a bacterium, but many people have mistaken it for an oil slick or some sort of mould, meaning a fungus: the 'oil slick' shown below is actually a very thin layer of manganese, present in Sydney's Hawkesbury sandstone as a trace element. There is some deep biochemistry here, and some amazing physics.

Leptothrix is my favourite small organism, so here are two more of my shots:

 Slime moulds.

Look them up. They sometimes show up in our mulch heaps, and I include them here because as an undergraduate in botany, it was part of our mycology course.

There is some very deep science involved with these things, relating to quorum sensing. Look that up, as well. 

 

Orchids.

Hang about, those are plants with flowers and seeds, right? Yes, but orchids have no roots, but they have mycorrhizae, specialised fungi that live on the orchids and take food from other plants to feed them. Besides, I am a sucker for weird orchids:

Sun orchid, tongue orchid, bootlace orchid.

Bearded man, flying duck and donkey orchids, all three residents of the Third Quarantine Cemetery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mycorrhizae like those on the orchids are associated with most plants in the bush, including Woollsia, Epacris and Leucopogon, but Banksia, Grevillea and Hakea do not. All of these genera are common on North Head.

And remember the liverworts? They have fungal associations as well: these are like mycorrhizae, but as liverworts have no roots, the experts say they are not real mycorrhizae.

 

Updated 12 November 2025.

You don’t have to be crazy to be a writer (It does help, though.)

 Biography

Peter Macinnis is a Sydney-based writer. Being no longer able to claim he is a New Kid, he blogs as Old Writer on the Block. He has two Australian history books at the printer, Not Your Usual Bushrangers and Not Your Usual Gold Stories, out through Five Mile Press, later this year. He usually works on four books at a time. Right now, he is working on just one thing, something he calls the Big New Project: currently at 400,000 words but likely to be larger than War and Peace, this is a collection of original Australian historical source material, gathered from the archives, and assembled into a logical order. Because of its size and the need for internal navigation, this will be released as an e-book.

This story began in a talk I gave at Birrong Girls High, when I used a shot of myself near a lava flow on Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. You could see from the photo that I was sweating profusely, but one of the girls asked about the heat, and I mentioned that it was sufficient to frizzle the hairs on my legs.

The girls were largely NESB, but with the bubbling confidence of young Australians. ‘You’re mad!’ one of them told me firmly. ‘You’d have to be!’

I told her of an old and probably apocryphal Chinese curse. ‘I’m not mad,’ I explained. ‘I just like living in interesting times. Interesting is good.’

As a small boy, I knew I would write books one day. As a five-year-old early reader, any books within reach were fair game for me, but after tackling Salmond’s Law of Torts one morning, I learned to review the available data more closely before choosing my reading.

In the late 1940s, as we emerged from austerity, most books had dust jackets, which contained enticing splashes of colour, and information about the book and its author. I read the blurbs and then, because I wanted to be a writer, I examined authors’ life stories.

 I realised that everybody has an interesting life. The difference is that authors make proper use of their interesting lives. My next task was to make the acquaintance of interesting people, and see where that led.

I suspected that if a writer lacked a background of hair’s-breadth escapes, desperate acts of derring-do, like quelling a riot with a derringer and a solar topee, they never got published. As I approach advanced middle age, my cynical streak has expanded to a broad band, and I wonder if they made their adventures up, but that came too late to save me.

I just knew that I needed to live an interesting life. By the time I left school, I had mastered most of the skills of subterfuge that I might need to prosecute a guerrilla war after becoming an escaped prisoner-of-war.

Against that, I now placed a value on my pelt that ruled most of those plans out. I am a good shot with a rifle, but I only shoot at things that don’t bleed, scream, or shoot back. That’s quite proper for humans, but it might be problematic for guerrillas, so I dropped that idea.

In the early 1960s, my dreams included sailing a lakatoi from Port Moresby to Singapore, but that became submerged in a desire to be a pre- and post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese historian, and I set to work building a bank roll to pay for that.

The 1965 coup in Indonesia, and a consideration of the leftish politics of my Indonesian friends led me to conclude that perhaps this was an unwise ambition, given that leftists were dying on Java, so I made the obvious choice and started a science degree.

My thoughts of living an interesting life were put to one side as I threw myself into the riveting mysteries of apical meristems in plants and mesoderm in animals. To save my sanity, I started going bush, and became at least as much a naturalist, and the interesting life was suddenly back on the agenda.

Then one day, I realised that everybody has an interesting life. The difference is that authors make proper use of their interesting lives. My next task was to make the acquaintance of interesting people, and see where that led.

As a botanist, I got work tending the gardens of people who had ‘Australian native’ gardens, the idea being that I wouldn’t mistake the waratahs for onion weed. That gave me the time to tackle two key questions: what do we mean by interesting? and who should I respect?

In the end, my first answer came down to this: if anything makes me want to run and find out, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, then it is interesting. That answered the respect question: anybody that knows more than I do about anything interesting is worthy of respect.

Given my highly-developed Rikki-Tikki- Tavi tendencies, that first answer meant that almost the whole world deserved my respect. Later, I discovered that Karl Popper went through a similar bout of introspection while working as a cabinet-maker, but he used his time far better.

Still, my two criteria for interesting and deserving of respect put me in the way of interesting ideas, and gave me a life rationale as a teacher and as a writer: provoke them to the point where they want to run and find out. And that, dear reader, is why I trot off out into the wilderness, seeking provocative things to share with my readers.

In the first years of this century, I got a bee in my bonnet about Australian exploration. My cohort were all taught that Lawson, Blaxland and Wentworth (that was the order in which Macquarie listed them) were the only ones wise enough to head ‘up the ridges’ (meaning the spurs) to get to the top. We were also taught that explorers went out into trackless wastes.

As any fule kno, walking up the spur is always the easiest route, and any bushwalker looking at a mountain always runs an eye up the spur. More to the point, any wilderness walker knows there are traces of past feet out there, pads and tracks that show the way. The explorers knew this and followed ‘native roads’, especially when they sought water in an arid zone.

Reading up on the old explorers, I came across Harry the Camel, who shot his owner, John Ainsworth Horrocks, and of course I had to Run and Find Out. In 1846, Horrocks had the only camel in Australia, and it looked as though Harry was badly managed, but the only way to test this was to go out with camels and learn the basics of camel management, how to make friends with them, how to hobble them, and so on.

(No, I won’t explain how Harry the Camel shot John Horrocks: look it up on Google, but as a side note, while checking that Google had the answers, I discovered that the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum had plagiarised seven pages on Horrocks from my Australia’s Pioneers, Heroes and Fools. I took two days off from writing the first draft of this to teach them a harsh lesson, and you may come across an account of that in my blog. I do pro bono stuff like this for free, and I happily give my text to worthy causes like museums, but I equally happily burn thieves.)

This article is a case in point: I gave it for free, but somehow, there is no access to a journal called (ironically) Access. As I had lost my copy in a hard disc crash, I asked RMIT to deliver the text to me: they did so without demur, but I want it out there, in public. It is also pages 1 to 12 of the March 2015 issue of Access. Just as well they did, as I had a burning plan ready to roll.

While studying camels, I learned that scorpions circle a camp fi re at a distance determined by the heat of the fire. Sleep across that circle, and you may get stung, as I have noted in two books, but I don’t think I have yet used what happened later that night: it was a full moon, and a pale and ghostly dingo came to visit me as I lay in my swag. I would have used the story if I had been properly prepared.

I should have had my digital camera on and ready, because the dingo had visited two others of the party in the previous 20 minutes, and I knew it would visit me. Instead, when the pale face loomed up, I said certain stern words of dismissal, and missed taking the shot of a lifetime. I won’t make that mistake again.

With a science degree, I am always on the lookout for wildlife. I wear soft rubber shoes and walk silently, which can be alarming for the kangaroos I disturb, and not too good for my heart as they thump off into cover. That happened nine times, one day on Mount Exmouth in the Warrumbungles. None of them was a mean old man roo like this one: you need to know the difference!

Some might call my actions that day crazy. I was out in Mt Exmouth on my own, but I had survival gear, I was on a marked track, and I had filed a walk plan. Also, I expected other people to be on the mountain, but they weren’t.

All the same, there is crazy, and there is apparently crazy. If I wasn’t prepared for the dingo that came to visit, I am always prepared for troubles when I go bush, either on my own or in a small group. Like those writers of almost a century ago in their biographical notes, I work hard to deliver a good yarn, but I don’t really take risks.

While catching piranha in the headwaters of the Amazon, a few months ago, I proposed doing a Rex Hunt and kissing the fish before releasing it, and that thought may seep into my writing one day — but my blood never seeped into the Amazon. Look at the lower jaw on the right of the photo below, if you are wondering why. Equally, when I was swimming with hammerheads in the Galapagos, a week later, I stayed five metres above them.

On Thursday Island, we found ourselves in crocodile territory, where we had gone to examine a dugong jaw, because when William Dampier found one in a shark’s belly, he mistook it for a hippopotamus jaw.

Luckily, a saltwater crocodile cannot ‘gallop’ like the smaller and less aggressive freshwater crocodile. Salties can reach speeds of 10 or 11 km/h when they ‘belly run’. They go faster if sliding down muddy tidal riverbanks — a sort of a crocodilian toboggan with teeth, but that is downhill on mud.

Uphill and on dry land, the saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus, has no chance of catching an active human. In water, it is another matter. The ‘salties’ can swim faster than us, at up to 15 km/hr, though they rely mainly on being able to surge out of hiding and to grab their prey on the water’s edge.

Anaconda at my feet

We stayed away from the water, and kept an eye on the sparse vegetation behind the mud, and I assured my wife that if your hand is already inside its jaws, the trick is to reach down for the palatal valve that stops water running into their throats and drowning them. Grabbing this floods their lungs and leaves them unable to continue the attack. She looked me in the eye. ‘I’d like to shake the remaining hand of whoever came up with that one!’ she told me, as we proceeded cautiously. 

Like me, she is a biologist, and she stands happily by, pulling ferns aside so I can get a better shot of a tarantula, or holds still as an anaconda slithers over our gum-boots. No, I am not willing to comment on the camera shake in the anaconda shot.

She also wrangles leeches for me, but she drew the line once at poking a funnel-web with a stick to make it rear up and show its fangs, and she mostly leaves the mountains to me.

So back to my Warrumbungle mountain; a wedge-tailed eagle was there that day, and it swooped me repeatedly as I worked around a difficult rock face, and I elected not to get the camera out until I was safe.

As soon as I got past the hard bit, it moved away of course, but when I was on the peak, it circled me, always staying in the sun, casting its shadow near or over me and preventing a shot.

Animals are often uncooperative, so plants and rocks are often easier, though when the plants are poisonous, you can still get into trouble. London’s Chelsea Physic Garden has many poisonous plants, but I drew odd looks when I asked where they were in 2006.

I have written several books on poisons and poisoners and I have been translated into a number of other languages. When I explained my background as a poisons specialist, and mentioned how Jo in Little Women, while seeking material for stories ‘… excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons …’, the severe expressions eased. One of the crew that day knew my book.

Still, that required my looking affable and cuddly. As I get older and more sinister-looking, I have taken to hunting rocks. Pretty much by definition, rocks are out of doors, often in scenic places, and they don’t get you into trouble.

Rocks that float are fun, and for the past couple of years, the coasts of NSW have been littered with pumice that came from east of New Zealand, but by the time they washed up here, most of the larger pieces were inhabited.

Chasing those on Myrtle Beach, I recalled that the lowest level of the Sydney Basin was exposed in the cliff behind the beach, so of course we hunted that down. Below, you can see my wife’s hand spanning more than 100 million years.

One example is never enough, so my sons helped me traipse in, almost to another good exposure, 15 km from the road, in a place we had visited before, Christine and I before we had children, and then us with the kids.

We made good time on this trip, until the fog came in and we came to a patch that had been burned at the same time I was on Myrtle Beach.

The track sort of disappeared, and there were brown snakes about. This forced us to go slowly, and in the end, 1.5 km from our target, we reached our turn-around time, and not being crazy, we turned back

Some of my friends are a bit crazy, and when we went looking for alleged fossil trees near Box Head, one of them felt the need to get close to the ‘trees’ to act as a scale. I just took shots, angling them so as to make it look more dangerous than it was.

Basically, my geologising involves temporary obsessions, but tilted strata and folded rocks are always high on my agenda.

Some of my friends are a bit crazy, and when we went looking for alleged fossil trees near Box Head, one of them felt the need to get close to the ‘trees’ to act as a scale. I just took shots, angling them so as to make it look more dangerous than it was.

 We went to Switzerland for several reasons, and the geology was high on the list, but I also needed to go to the Reichenbach Falls, because there is a comic fantasy novel lurking in the wings, and it opens when the hero is saved from drowning by Sherlock Holmes, returns to Australia and invents most of 20th century science.

Why would I do this? Well, at one stage in my mixed career, I conned some violent frauds into giving me the evidence I needed to convict them, after one colleague had been injured, and another had been shown a handgun.

I played the role of Mr Bean so well, they sniggered at me and handed over damning papers to the idiot they saw. I wrote a very interesting report.

Then again, I once spent three days displaying two savages in a cage as an art event/hoax. I write history most of the time, and all of the history will be good, but severely misrepresented and invaded by fictional characters.

The falls are close to the town of Meiringen, claimed to be the place where meringues were invented. People who know their Holmes canon will recall that Holmes staged his death at the top of the falls: anybody who visits Meiringen cannot avoid the connection because there are images, signs, statues and more, celebrating Holmes.

I concluded that I could rewrite the area’s geography to meet my needs, and I realised that after Holmes disappeared, he accompanied our Australian hero to his home and laboratory, somewhere on the NSW coast, and reverted to the geology. It remains a legitimate expense for taxation purposes!

We went up Mount Pilatus for the rocks, strayed into the wilderness of Heidiland, where I found a perfect setting for the Reichenbach Falls sequences. There was just one danger: the area was completely deserted, and the bus out had been empty, but when we went to board the last bus back, geriatric Switzerland had emerged from the woods and crammed the bus to overflowing. In the end, we fitted in, albeit poked by walking poles, but that was the closest we came to danger in Switzerland.

We came home, and for a while, we concentrated on rocks that push in, making dykes and sills. That isn’t too dangerous: you just have to clamber over them, but often the best exposures are on rocky seashores, and that means looking out for blue-ringed octopuses (or octopodes, if you must have a classically correct plural), gaps in the rocks, and waves (plus seals if one is in New Zealand).

It is a curious fact that in Scots English, a dyke can be either a wall or a ditch, but igneous dykes take both those forms, and we chase them. Only once have we found one where the weathering of the dyke had kept pace with the surrounding rock.

The other danger that I have faced in the quest for material is eating local foods. On one occasion, as a representative of the Australian government (long story), I was constrained to eat part of a dog that I had heard being killed while one of my colleagues made a speech. Diplomacy often adds challenges.

After that, it was a downhill run, and in the past two years, I have eaten foal steak, llama, alpaca and guinea pigs, but I will only be happy when I have tried camel, which is recommended by several early

You don’t have to be crazy to be a writer, but having crazy temporary obsessions, pursuing crazy ideas, makes your writing more interesting.

 

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1.

 

Prologue

This is a tale that needs to be read by people doing MBAs, and urban anthropologists looking for a thesis. Its culmination was me saying, in a heavy-hitters’ meeting, “Well, Ted, in that case, I must be an hysterical woman”, but to understand that, you definitely need a context. You need the whole tale: see the links at the end.

My parents’ idea of education was to tell me to go to my room and study. True, they taught me correct and proper speech, but what I did with it, using language as a tool and a weapon, was my own doing. They knew I was an expert debater and public speaker, but they had no idea that I was delving into books on just about anything, guided by a friendly librarian.

So I had an unusual education, and note that I would never equate schooling with education. My education took a turn for the better when my uncle got me work, straight out of school, working as a surveyor’s labourer in Papua, and then planting teak, also in Papua, with a gang of 36 rapists and murderers.

The survey part coincided with the onset of ‘the wet’, a time when rain boils up in the ranges, often dropping 25mm, an inch, of rain in 20 minutes or less. We would work from 0730 to 1300, then head for the Rouna Falls pub until the rain stopped, and then head back to finish the day’s work. The pub also sheltered a gang of anthropologists who saw me as malleable raw meat to indoctrinate, and I learned to observe the undercurrents in society. I owe those anthropologists a great deal.

I think that particular uncle set all of that part of my education up: I had three paternal uncles, and each of them had more influence on my education than ever my PTSD-riddled father did. Working with rapists and murderers (lovely people, all of them) also gave me other insights. Yes, I know it will take a while to get to the hysterical woman bit, but you need the background: just trust me.

Returning to Sydney, I set out, not to get a science degree, but to get an education, so I signed up with the student newspaper, honi soit, and got a later introduction to old-fashioned hot metal printing. I also scored my first academic failure, at which my parents gave up on me, so I joined the public service as a clerk, and as a ‘ginger group’ unionist, triggered an equal pay move that shocked many of my older male union colleagues. After hours, I studied, on and off, for an Arts degree, and I became a regular at Union Night debates.

I also took master classes in political intrigue from Jack Lang, an old war-horse of my preferred political party, the class being me and a later Prime Minister. The future PM took himself seriously, and I could see that unlike me, he had a lot to take seriously, so I went my way, and he went his. No names, no pack drill, OK? Still, keep in mind that I had expert training in arguing a case.

Having been disowned by my parents, I became the token white male in a house with four Chinese students and flourished. My charmingly racist mother complained that I “smelled like a Chinaman”, which was unsurprising since we ate Chinese food. Still, having realised that their attempt to break me with disowning had failed, I was lured back by the news that my father had terminal cancer.

There was other stuff I am leaving out, but I owe my parents nothing. I had luck, and a number of mentors, and my awareness of cultures beyond my own, my respect of those cultures, and my ability to think on my feet caught the notice of a union colleague, who lured me over into the Commonwealth Office of Education. My main role there was collecting overseas students, mostly post-graduate, welcoming them to Australia and settling them in, occasionally holding their hands. This was very much a task for a courteous and culturally aware quick thinker.

By the end of 1965, I had friends at the Indonesian embassy, and having a fair facility in Bahasa Indonesia, I conceived a plan to spend two years in Jogjakarta, tutoring undergrads in English and picking up what I needed to become a pre- and post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese historian, but there was a communist coup in Indonesia, and I had a sense that the people I knew in the Indonesian embassy might be a bit red, so I decided to use my money to go back to science.

My school mathematics teacher had been a dead loss, but with mathematics popping up all over the place, I added a year of General Pure Mathematics to majors in botany and zoology, but that pointed to a teaching career, so having milked the education system for a scholarship, I went a-teaching.

There is more to this story:

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 4. The robbery.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 5. The repair job.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

 

 

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 2.

 

The narrator as a disabled number-cruncher

Teacher training threw me briefly into the hands of Don Spearritt, who fascinated me with his statistical approach to testing and measurement. As I had always been terrified by exams and tests, and having picked up a year of psychology (in all, I took 10 first-year subjects, probably a record), I thought it would be good if the kids being examined had a friend “at court”.

In the time of being sent to my room “to study”, my friend the librarian had introduced me to William Saroyan’s Sam, The Highest Jumper of Them All, a surrealist play which gave me the notion of ‘the ambassador from the audience’, and that was the role I coveted.

By the end of my first year of teaching, I was known as a TV quiz star, thanks in large part to my fascination with backgrounds to things, trivia mainly. The slack of mind said, “You’re Peter from Pick-a-Box: you must be really intelligent”, whereas no intelligence was involved at all: it was just pack-rattery. Anybody who called me a polymath was told the word they were seeking was polymoth.

Having put in two years in the classroom, I was hijacked into a senior examination role, and it was only later that I realised a complete idiot of a Chief Inspector whom I had met while he was carrying out a cover-up, had nominated me because of the quiz show experience.

Still, my now-dead father’s friends had picked up through gossip that I had a certain command of the language and a ready facility for cutting through tripe. So who were his friends? They were inhabiting the world I was just about to enter.

You see, my father had also been in the education department, and a B.A. in Latin and philosophy, he was an official who worked in the clerical division at a time when admin and clerical was entirely separated from professional, but having been a wartime Squadron Leader (where he gained the PTSD), he returned to find that a leech had taken his job. He took the leech (a gutless wonder who dared not risk his skin in war) to a tribunal, and had him tossed out, so that he could return to his post.

The leech slunk off, and by guile and malevolence, rose in the clerical division, but my father, having a degree, was later elevated to the professional division, and saw the leech no more. He was a shining beacon, a hero to the ‘admin and clerical’ side, because he had broken through the ceiling. Remember the leech, though, because he will return.

In 1972, I decided to engage in a master’s degree in educational measurement, but by that time, I already had a reputation as an analyst who could cut through the nonsense.

The first attempt to get me into “Head Office” was banjaxed by a nasty idiot of a school inspector, the chair of the science syllabus committee who had come up with a bizarre and stupid scheme to assess “attitude to science”, giving it a 30% loading (he thought), but because of the way he planned to apply it, that 30% loading would distort the ranking. A member of the syllabus committee asked me, and I wrote a three-page technical report, which was then tabled, with my name attached, everybody agreed that I was right, and the idea was wrong. The result: Alan Watson blackballed me, and it took a couple of years before he was ordered to back down.

I had not picked a fight with him: I had simply provided an informed technical analysis, and it was a decade before I buried the hatchet (in his head), but that story is surplus to requirements. Those master classes with Jack Lang eventually paid off

After 1976, I was toiling away as an Education Officer, generating item banks, fast and furious, across a range of subjects, including Needlework, Home Science, Agriculture and languages, so a few years later, I was poached into TAFE, Technical And Further Education, to develop methods for item banks in plumbing and mechanical engineering.

Part of my interview was a Dorothy-Dixer, a formulaic question about averaging, to which I replied that I could return all sorts of average to order. In the data set 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 10, I said, the mode is 1, the median is 2, and the mean is 3, but each of these values could be called the average. This to me was normal fare, but the selection panel were delighted, except for the questioner, who grinned: as he told me later, he had heard me saying exactly this in a seminar, so I gained a reputation as a numbers person, and indeed I was.

Not long after, the same man passed to me a fraudulent proposal from the Control Data Corporation, and I enthusiastically worked through their amateurish ‘evaluation’ of a stupid idea, and sank it for four different government departments, saving them something like 12 times my annual salary as a Senior Education Officer. You can read the details here: https://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-selling-of-plato.html

Then, with my reputation as a whizz with numbers, I was called on to assist in a survey of the needs of and provisions for what we were about to stop calling “the handicapped”, who were now given a politer name, disabled. And that brought me to the case of the One-armed Sculptress.

This lady wanted to get an Art Certificate, but a compulsory component was operating a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. That required two hands, and while she could sculpt with one hand, the camera requirement was beyond her, and a nasty gnome called Eddy, a mirror-image of the leech, a Grade-12 clerk, was rigid in his demand that she comply with the regulations. In other words, I saw him as cruising for a bruising, meat for my mincer.

I was asked to intervene, and several nice professional people who knew Eddy’s tricks briefed me on his ploys. I beat him hands-down, or as I put it later, I won the Battle of the One-armed Sculptress. Mixing with the disabled, I began to acquire their attitudes, so when I was sent in to brief a board on what we had learned, a stupid political appointee simpered that it was a pity we did not have “somebody handicapped” doing my task.

I replied that we now called them disabled, not handicapped, we were dealing with eighteen types of disability, and that I, in fact, had three non-manifest disabilities. “I have been working with the wheelies, and they don’t hold back. They would say that you want a cripple in a wheelchair that you could patronise.” She took this on the chin as I continued: “If a wheelie did my job, they would know nothing of my disabilities, any more than I did of theirs, but we talk to each other.”

She did not dare ask what my disabilities were, which was lucky, because I would have to say that I was a colour-blind, slightly short-sighted technical dwarf (my long bones are all shorter by two standard deviations). When a Chief’s position became available back in education (though it was now a “Senior Education Officer, Class 2”), I applied for it and returned to the schools side of education.

I was now close to the realm of politics. I kept my own affiliations hidden, and served faithfully, offering honest advice, even when it failed to fit the preconceptions of a minister.

There is more to this story:

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 4. The robbery.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 5. The repair job.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 3.

 

Applied anarchy and surrealism

Part of my new role was to advise a statutory board, leading them into the paths of examination righteousness, and that was highly (non-party) political, but as a determined non-politician, I was fine. On one occasion, I had my Director sitting behind me, muttering sotto voce, “I don’t like this” as I advised a particular course, but as he conceded at afternoon tea, I had been correct.

Then my section was shifted to a new office, under a new Director, but as a youth leader I was distinctly persona grata there, as well, because the boss was also in the same game: he ran the national training for leaders, and liked using me as a sounding board. This was just as well, because I started drawing attention to blunders in the 1983 Higher School Certificate examination papers, typos and factual errors that had come to my notice. The old jealousies between ‘admin and clerical’ and ‘professional’ started to surface, driven, I realised later, to the machinations of the highly unpopular Chief Clerk.

He was, in fact, the aforementioned leech, but I did not know this, and did not know how my father had trampled him. He, on the other hand, knew who I was, and was after me as a proxy that he could take revenge on. He got some of the A&C people to voice complaints about me, but 1983 was a disaster, because the errors were all glaring, and thanks to the complaints, my advice was on record. The Director knew that I had been right.

The battle went on, and at the end of 1984, I wrote a report called The Ones That Got Away. While there were enough errors known to the public, I had found about a dozen more, and aside from a couple of jovial quips about ‘bloody quiz stars’, it was clear that we needed a new regime, and that they had the right person for the job. Not knowing the leech’s game and history, I was irked that I could not start gathering my team until March 1985, and it turned out later that he had deliberately delayed all the changes, in the hope that we would never be able to catch up.

When we finally got the go-ahead, I scooped up the pirates, the lateral thinkers among the clerks, to create a first: a combined professional and A&C operation. Keep the pirates in mind, because they made the difference between our total failure and our total triumph. It was about this time that I began to refer to myself as an anarchist/surrealist bureaucrat as I called in favours to find the left-field teachers and retired principals that I needed to make things happen.

The way I explained it was the occasional case of an architect who, while designing a multi-storey building, fails to include a stair case: it happens, and when it does, another architect looking over the plans, will probably miss the deficiency. We see what we expect, and fill in the gaps, and this is what psychologists mean by response set.

Response set for dummies:
What’s the usual name for Coca Cola?       Coke
What are the fumes that come off fire?     Smoke
What’s another name for a funny story?    Joke
What sort of music was sung in 60s coffee shops?    Folk
What’s another name for the white of an egg?    Yolk.

Do you see the flaw there? Run over it until you do.* Response set was the enemy we faced in getting perfect exam papers, and the only people to find that were generalists, outsiders. We got all of the papers set, and off to the printer, then relaxed.

Now a note about how we prevented errors: my left-field mob were not the final arbiters on any paper where they had expertise. Yes, my former French teacher looked at the French papers, but experts see what they expect to see, so she was just a second pair of eyes there. That system worked, and for the first time in four years, we had error-free papers.

With the papers sent for printing, we started covering other bases. Luckily, because I was the son of the first A&C person to reach the professional division, and because I had run a combined operation, I had special access to former staff at all levels, and they welcomed me when my boss John Cook, a militia officer, asked me to compose a war book.

I knew exactly what he meant: as war looms, competent operators start planning what to do when the balloon goes up, and this goes into the war book. In 1938, Britain’s war book had detailed plans for fuel rationing and managing fraud: Australia’s war book said something like “Oh, we’ll probably need to ration fuel at some stage”. John wanted British-style planning, and I agreed.

So I went around, notebook in hand to talk to former staff, gathering details of unreported problems and reported ones, concentrating on how they solved them, and how they could have done better. Then we discussed fears they had had, that never eventuated, and how they would have dealt with those. This gave me the material for my Compendium of Disasters Great and Small (as somebody said, my titles were always entertaining). Once again, we relaxed.

* The white of an egg is the albumen: the yolk is yellow, but unless you know about response set, you probably fell into the trap. Luckily, one of my ten first-year subjects was psychology.

There is more to this story:

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 4. The robbery.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 5. The repair job.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

 

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 4.

The robbery.

It was too soon for us to relax. There was a wannabe amateur anarchist out there, and he believed that he could sabotage the whole examination process, by stealing large amounts of paper from the ‘confidential waste’ bins in the Government Printing Office. Discarded, spoiled and waste sheets from the presses should have been shredded and pulped each night, but when the boy struck, there was almost a two-month supply of waste, sitting in the bins.

The boy had claimed to be a Year 11 from one school, when he was a Year 12 from another. He had sought a work-experience placement, and wormed his way into places where he should not have been, and learned the weaknesses of the place. He walked in at night, told the only guard that he had a knife (had I been the guard, I would have said “look, please show me the knife, so I can keep my job”) and helped himself to samples of up to 20 separate papers, and then he took off.

His aim was to sabotage the whole system, and for that reason, his first act was to call a Sydney radio station to claim that he had stolen all the HSC papers. My colleague, whose role was media management was alerted, he alerted me, I pulled out my Compendium of Disasters Great and Small, and selected the page relating to a single paper being compromised, then I briefed my pirates as they arrived.

As I had been brought up in hot metal printing, and the Government Printing Office was one of the few places still using that technology, the pirates and I worked out exactly how we would go about production, once the questions were rewritten, and the Compendium had a few notes on how to reset questions to lay traps, and I will come to those later. We satisfied ourselves that we could save the situation, but our plan was to use word processors.

We were well into the technicalities when John Cook stormed in and asked what we were doing, so I told him. The whole theft, he told me was Top Secret, and nobody was to be told anything. “But it’s been on the ABC…” He snarled that he didn’t care, adding that I was to tell nobody anything, so I nodded, he rushed off, and we continued planning and briefing the later-arriving pirates.

So when John rushed back, 45 minutes later, in a panic, I handed him a single page, carefully typed. It was a firmed-up version of the war book page, with bells and whistles: “We make twenty copies of this, and implement them all,” I said. An hour later, the Director, John and I were in the Minister’s office. The floor was handed to me, and I had just started to brief the Minister, when an assistant broke in.

Now here, I need to offer an aside. There had, not long before, been a semi-scandal about how much premier Neville (‘Nifty’) Wran knew about something. The issue hinged on somebody hearing the phrase “The Premier’s on the line”. Now Nifty had, in the recent past, suffered a medical mishap that had made him hoarse of voice. End of aside.

The assistant said with a grin, “Minister, how shall I put this: the premier’s on the line”, and the minister, having seized my single sheet, went out to take the call. He returned quickly, handed the sheet back to me and told “Nifty said don’t worry about it, just handle it!”, the italicised part being delivered in a hoarse voice. We were on!

Meanwhile, the thief’s teacher had recognised the boy’s voice from the radio, so he was never going to escape, but that can wait. Suffice it to say, we had got his photo from the school, and the printers recognised him. He was, as we say, nailed.

And we were prepared.

There is more to this story:

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 5. The repair job.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 5.

 

The repair job

I had planned to use modern (for those days) technology, meaning Apple IIe machines to reprint the reset papers, but the Assistant Director determined that everything was Top Secret. The Government Printing Office was toxic, so we could not print there, nor could we typeset there, but the papers produced had to look just like the normal issue. We must not let anybody know which papers had been reset.

It would be another year before an old hand outed Ted McHugh as The Leech, the one my father had booted out, so keep that in mind in what followed because Ted was a treacherous mole in our midst. While we knew he was sabotaging us, we thought it was stupidity, not malice. It was malice, but my pirates were smarter.

Still, when he declared that he had arranged a cell of “Gov” workers, I let it go. I learned later that it was Union activism that had prevented modern methods of production in “the Gov”: hot metal required typesetters and compositors, but modern systems had no need of “comps”. The system we were lumbered with involved strips of print being waxed down by a comp, and the wax was weak, so we kept losing bits. I don’t believe that Ted planned that part, but the two workers they sent us were as thick as a load of bricks.

All the same, we watched them like hawks, checked their output repeatedly, fixed their lost bits and got out papers that were perfect. That left us with the secrecy bit. Most of the papers were typed on an IBM Selectric, and this had a single-use carbon ribbon that could be read, so those went home with me so be slashed into small pieces and hidden away. The output from the shredder went to soak in a baby bath in my backyard.

We were told to refuse to give any information on which papers were being reset, so the Opposition were howling for answers. The Minister, who saw himself as something of an historian, commissioned a fake Modern History paper that was mostly copied from past papers but held occasional giveaways like errors in dates. We had a lot of fun with that, but nobody ever surfaced it.

Our other fear was that the media, meaning invasive TV crews, might barge in. Ted realised this, and put up signs of increasingly urgent security that basically said ‘warm’, ‘really warm’, ‘hot’ and ‘super-hot’. Each day, my pirates would, on a regular basis, rearrange these signs so they led to a broom cupboard. We thought Ted might not have been deliberate in this, but we were suspicious

Then Ted took away the casual worker whose task was to control access to the storage area where the committees were working. We realised then that his interference was deliberate, but I got a person outside of his budgetary control, a professional, to hold the fort.

Meanwhile, the twenty furious committees were picking up on the vibes (I think the pirates were leaking), but they wanted the skin of the thief, and we advised them on ways and means of laying traps, they told us their own tricks, and we shared those. So did the checkers, and there were lulus in the making. The geology committee left one question with the same diagram and wording, except to swap coal and gold. The mathematics committee changed all of the questions except the first, ten one-mark quickies and the last, always a spine-breaker. In the end, the thief got only the first and the last questions right.

The aim was to keep the thief and his friends thinking that no papers had changed, and that worked. A few of his friends, given an advance look at papers emerged, semi-hysterical, crying that it was “the wrong paper”. We scooped up the lot.

There is more to this story:

The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 4. The robbery.

The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 6. The hysterical woman.