What is multiculturalism?

I am back from a long tour (eight weeks) in Europe, and now polishing off several almost complete books before galloping arthritis stops me from writing polemics. One of these works is the fifth edition of The Big Book of Australian History. The first four editions were commissioned by the National Library of Australia (for foreigners, it's a bit like the Libary of Congress. but Australian). Anyhow, the flow each time was hobbled by space requirements. The Library accepted my (as they termed it) Bolshie attitudes (that meant I was brutally honest), but I had to leave out a whole lot of truthful stuff. It is just about all wrapped up, and as I polish chapter 21 (Multiculturalism), some idiot fishwife is squealing to an adoring press about this very topic. An Opposition leader (once a GPS boy, and with all their charm) is dodging defining the word, so here is my present view of the matter: comments welcome.

Oh yes, I forgot to say that the fifth edition is three times as long as the fourth. Here, you will meet a Chinese bushranger, a sewer that ran through Sydney, how John Hindmarsh almost sank Adelaide, a cruel joke about Perth, how Melbourne's society feared an invasion, how my Auntie Dulce was the second Australian to know about the Japanese midget subs, a governor who owned slaves, women who wore trousers and lots of Good Blokes and Good Blokesses. I explain how the Light Horse pissed off Lawrence of Arabia, how Rupert Murdoch's father nearly lost us the Great War and when the better class of ladies climbed on their chairs and twirled their hankies in 1901.

In my books, there are more good people than people to whom I have to say:

In Veritas, Rectum Es *

 21. Being Multicultural

Australia had many cultures before 1788, but modern Multicultural Australia began in 1788, when people came here from all over the world as officials, convicts, servants or crew members on ships, and later as migrants or refugees. They were outnumbered by English speakers and just adopted the customs of the majority British, giving up their own cultures, knowledge, language and insights. Then in the end, Australians started to realise what they were losing.

A White Australia Policy

Officially, there was no White Australia Policy. Still, in the first half of the twentieth century, some non-white people were given a dictation test in a European language they were unlikely to know. If they failed the test, as they usually did, they were not allowed to stay in Australia. This approach was also used for ‘political undesirables’ like the communist journalist Egon Kisch. Kisch came to Australia in 1934 to warn about the threat from Hitler’s Germany. He was fluent in several European languages, and so he was tested in Scottish Gaelic. When he failed the dictation test, he was ordered to leave Australia. Kisch challenged the order in the High Court and won, so he was allowed to stay and spread his message. His challenge made some Australians, especially his left-wing supporters, even more aware of how unfair the test was. Because there was no officially named ‘White Australia Policy’, no official action was required to remove it and so, over time, the White Australia Policy was allowed to fade away.

Nabbing Nancy
In 1965, a little girl called Nancy Prasad was to be deported from Australia, mainly because she was an Indian Fijian. An Aboriginal student activist Charles Perkins staged a ‘kidnap’ of Nancy at the airport to draw attention to the unfairness of Australia’s immigration policies. To the demonstrators’ disappointment, the government made sure Nancy left the next day. She was finally allowed to settle in Australia in the 1970s when she was a teenager.

The Labor Party was usually the party that supported equality but, because the unions feared ‘opening the floodgates’ to foreign labourers, who might work for lower wages, the party was afraid to act. Instead, former cycling champion Hubert Opperman, as Liberal Minister for Immigration between 1963 and 1965, oversaw the end of the old policy.

Historical background

In 1895, the colonial premiers had met to discuss restricting the entry of all non-white people in the event of federation of the colonies. In the end, they agreed instead to ban ‘undesirable persons’. There were probably some who would have suggested banning the Irish, or even the Scots.

A pipe band after an Anzac Day march in Melbourne. Nobody would now question the right of these ‘foreigners’ to lead the march.

One thing was certain: with three of the first six governors (Hunter, Macquarie and Brisbane) being Scots, the Scots would be accepted as part of the ruling group. Long before other ethnic groups established their cultures as worthy of celebration, the Scots were being Scottish in public. They celebrated St Andrew’s Day, marked Hogmanay (New Year’s Day) and toasted Burns’ Night (January 25); they wore the kilt, played their pipes and showed the way for other cultures, later, to preserve their own cultures, with Highland Games. Sadly, much of what has been saved can be listed under three headings: “weird music” (such as bagpipes); “spicy tucker” (think haggis); and “peculiar clobber” (like kilt and sporran). These three headings are used to stereotype any group, but as any member of any minority culture knows, a culture is far more than the sum of those items—but that trio is at least a start. Having a Scots name, I see stereotyping, but for us, it is harmless: others are less lucky. The Scots, according to Anthony Trollope, were well represented in the squattocracy:

Most of [the squatters] have, I think, originally come out of Scotland. When you hear an absent acquaintance spoken of as ‘Mac’, you will not at all know who is meant, but you may safely conclude that it is some prosperous individual. Some were butchers, drovers, or shepherds themselves but a few years since. But they now form an established aristocracy, with very conservative feelings, and are quickly becoming as firm a country party as that which is formed by our squirearchy at home.
—Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 442.

Customs officers would examine the papers and backgrounds of people applying to enter Australia. If the applicants seemed to be ‘the wrong sorts’, the dictation test would be used to ensure that they failed. Entry was never refused on racial grounds because, officially, all entrants were given the same test. In 1901, at the time of Federation, there were two major groups in Australian politics—the Protectionists and the Free-Traders. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) was growing, and Protectionist Edmund Barton only became Prime Minister in 1901 with the support of the ALP.

The ALP had to act in the interests of its greatest supporters, especially the Australian Workers Union (AWU). This union had grown out of a number of shearers’ unions in the individual colonies. The AWU feared the effect of cheap foreign labour on the working conditions of its members. The original plan was to ban all foreign nationals, but Britain complained that this would offend British subjects in India and people from Japan—then Britain’s ally—so the dictation test was introduced instead. After World War I, with Japan taking over old German colonies in the Pacific, Japan was later seen as a threat, and World War II seemed to justify that view.

In 1910, ‘White Australia’ supporters even had their own music to march to.

During World War II, many refugees reached Australia, including 4400 ‘Asiatics’. In December 1947, Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration, spoke of plans to send most of these refugees back to their home countries, even though some had married Australians. He then made insensitive comments that upset many people. That may have contributed to the ultimate failure of the White Australia Policy, although there were other influences.

The Colombo Plan

The Colombo Plan was designed to help restore Asian economies affected by Japanese occupation and the deprivations of World War II. It began in 1950 and originally involved sending Australian experts in various fields to Asia. By 1952, 150 Asian students were studying as undergraduates or for higher degrees in Australian universities, and the number grew rapidly.

Later, there was a similar plan for people from African countries that were members of the British Commonwealth—the Special Commonwealth Assistance for Africa Plan, and a Commonwealth Scholarship Fellowship program.

(Your author spent the year 1965 greeting and farewelling the scholars and fellows, and later counted a number of them as friends, so this is from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.)

These plans worked on two levels. The students were selected carefully and, once in Australia, they were supported and taught about local customs and manners. In fact, they were generally given far better support than most post-war migrants.

In the longer term, many of these talented students returned home and then rose to prominence in their own countries. By then, they had a good understanding of Australia, and often had fond memories of the time they had spent here. They were welcomed to Australia as guests and were never regarded as foreign job-stealers. Some of the old fears about foreigners were now dying away.

The dictation test remained until 1958 and after 1963, under Hubert Opperman, the Immigration Department began easing the restrictions on people of ‘mixed race’, making entry easier for foreigners with qualifications.

Sadly, in recent times, we have begun to hear uneducated people with a Trumpist mindset murmuring about ‘White Australia’, once again, babbling about the need for a monoculture. I have a policy of never acknowledging scum by name.

Luckily, the scum are very much a minority in Parliament (even if they are surging in some polls, as I write this), because Australia still has only a weak hold on its status as a world citizen.

Refugees in Australia

Vietnamese ‘boat people’

At the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, many people in South Vietnam feared living under a communist government. Some of them had worked for the allies, others had fought in South Vietnam’s army against the communists, and some just did not agree with communism.

An estimated 60,000 South Vietnamese were executed at the end of the Vietnam War. Another million were sent to ‘re-education’ camps, where around 160,000 died. About 130,000 Vietnamese who were close allies of the USA were helped to leave the country and resettle, mostly in the USA. The Vietnam War was fought to contain international communism and, before the war was lost, the domino theory predicted that international communism would roll south, but this did not happen. In 1976, the Vietnamese communist party was purged when one faction, the pro-China wing, lost power, while the pro-Russia group took full control. This alarmed China, because there were many people of Chinese origin in Vietnam.

These people of Chinese origin, known as the Hoa, felt threatened and, in both Vietnam and China, ethnicity tended to count even more than politics. There were other problems in nearby countries. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge was trying to persuade the Chinese to remain neutral when war broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam.

The Vietnamese pressure on the Hoa people increased during 1977 and 1978, and many fled to China, where they were welcomed, but then sent to work as peasants on state-run farms. Most of the Vietnamese Hoa were wealthy traders and merchants and so, rather than work on a farm, many of them travelled by boat to other places like Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Later, some of them sailed even further.

On 25 December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and forced the Khmer Rouge out. In February 1979, the Chinese army invaded Vietnam, but achieved little. The Vietnamese occupied Cambodia for almost ten years. Most of these incidents were part of a larger fight for supremacy between Chinese and Russian communists.

It seemed that the ideal of international communism had been lost. There was still a lot of suffering in the name of communism. Many Vietnamese ‘boat people’ who had reached other Asian nations wanted to settle somewhere else, and so they looked to their former allies. In the end, the USA agreed to take 823,000 Vietnamese refugees, Australia and Canada each agreed to take 137,000, France offered to take 96,000, and Britain and Germany each agreed to accept 19,000. Many more refugees who left Vietnam by boat either drowned or were killed by pirates. One of the first Vietnamese ‘boat people’ was Hieu Van Le, who reached Australia in 1977. In September 2014, he became the first Asian migrant to be sworn in as the Governor of South Australia. He stepped down in 2021, and on his last day in office, he appealed for kindness to refugees coming in from Afghanistan.

Unlike today’s ‘boat people’, who usually come by boat from refugee camps in Indonesia, most of the first wave of refugees who came to Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s arrived by plane on the last leg of their journey. Many of the patterns and assumptions for later waves of refugees were established then, but there were many other refugees with different needs.

Vietnamese ‘boat people’ reaching Darwin in November 1977.

Economic refugees

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees distinguishes between economic migrants, who leave their country to find a better life elsewhere, and refugees, who leave their homes because their lives are in danger or they are being persecuted because of their religious, cultural or political beliefs.

Many refugees started coming to Australia from Lebanon in the Middle East after a civil war broke out there in 1975, but the first Lebanese migrants had actually reached Australia in the late 1800s. The early arrivals were mainly Christian and well-off, but many of the later arrivals were poor Muslims. Australia had no qualms about taking them in, even though their culture, language, religion and ethnicity were different. Still, some people did question their ability to fit in.

Today, Australia is being asked to accept refugees from many parts of the world—Tamils from Sri Lanka, minority groups from Burma, Syrians, Farsi-speaking Hazara people from Afghanistan, as well as people from Somalia, Ethiopia and other African countries. Under the law, anybody can ask for asylum as a refugee in Australia, but that is not the same as being granted asylum. In 2009–12, only around 44 per cent of requests for onshore protection visas were approved.

Australia has shown compassion for the victims of many conflicts—too many people, according to the critics, but far too few, according to others.

 

 

Afghan refugees with a treasured carpet that they brought from Kabul, 2005; an African food stall, Newcastle, 2010.

Chain migration

When people arrive in a new country, they often seek out links to their home country: food, clothing, news, their own language and religion, plus the support of friends and family. Immigration often begins with a handful of people migrating and then encouraging others to follow them, so they have familiar company in their new country. As a migrant community grows, others from the same area or culture may follow from the home country. This is called chain migration, and it happened in Australia.

Working in Australia

Until the gold rushes, groups of people from the same country did not usually congregate in one place in Australia. On the large goldfields, Germans, Scots, the Irish, even American diggers often worked with their own people. Before the gold rushes, convicts went where they were sent, and free workers went where there was work. Many Scots became squatters in Victoria and New England, but there were few other ‘ethnic clumpings’ in the 1800s.

Other concentrations of national groups were less obvious. The Cornish tin miners at Moonta in South Australia went there to mine copper, and many Cornish people, whose descendants live around Daylesford in Victoria even today, settled there because they were ‘hard rock’ miners.

Late in the nineteenth century, some of them moved to Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie to mine reef gold. German immigrants were recruited to work in South Australia and in Queensland, where German place and personal names can still be found.

Other trades sometimes brought national groups to a single place. After World War I, parts of the old Austro- Hungarian and Ottoman Turk Empires were formed into Yugoslavia, but many people from that area, including Croatians and Serbians, began leaving in the mid-1920s.

Some of them reached Fremantle and settled there as fishermen, while others moved to the eastern goldfields of Western Australia, where they mainly worked at cutting the timber that fuelled the steam engines. Migrants from the Greek islands understood fishing, and so they often settled in fishing ports.

Migrants leaving their ship in 1964. Many of them had family or friends waiting on the dock.

Chinese gold diggers usually came to Australia in close-knit groups from a single village or group of villages. In some cases, the Chinese gold diggers were allowed to work only in certain diggings, but even off the diggings they tended to stay together, living near their temples. The term ‘Chinatown’ was used in California in the 1850s, and it probably came to Australia from there. Ballarat had the first Australian Chinatown, although Bendigo’s was established soon after.

A Chinese-staffed furniture factory.

Chinese carpenters

Woodworking tools are much the same, all over the world, so many Chinese left the gold-fields behind and began to make furniture. The pieces were well-made, so the workers were seen as a threat, and in the late 19th century, laws required Chinese-made and “part-Chinese-made” furniture to carry a stamp stating this.

(Some manufacturers went further, adding stamps stating that no Chinese labour had been used, and the author regrets not having kept the low-boy, a kind of closet, that he used in the 1940s and into the 1960s, which featured a decal offering this certification of racial purity, but it went to the tip, which was probably the most appropriate way to deal with it.)

In the late nineteenth century, Cairns, Rockhampton and other Queensland towns had Chinatowns, and so did Sydney. The original Sydney Chinatown was in The Rocks area, until bubonic plague (which came in with diseased rats on ships) broke out in that area in 1900. Many buildings were demolished, and Chinatown moved to an area near the Haymarket, where it is today.

In other areas, Chinese workers “fitted in”, becoming market gardeners who provided vegetables to miners, and so managed to avoid being seen as competitors. In 1874, much to the annoyance of carters at Cooktown, Chinese storekeepers brought in 400 ‘coolies’ to carry stock across to the Palmer River gold-fields.

Being competitors always put them at risk. The Chinese carriers walked with baskets on bamboo poles, and because they feared the attacks of Aboriginal warriors, they always travelled in numbers and in single file.

Many a time they would draw down anathema of carriers by parading on the off-side of the bullocks, which were being yoked up, dangling their tins in an offensive manner to the animals, which often resulted in the drivers hunting them away with their bullock whips.
—W. H. Corfield, Reminiscences of Queensland 1862-1869 (1921), ch. 6.

John Alloo’s Chinese Restaurant, Main Road, Ballarat, 1853. His real name was Chin Thum Lock.

The first Chinese Australian.
This was Mak Sai-Ying, who arrived on Laurel in February 1818, presumably having boarded the ship at Canton. He is sometimes listed under the name Matchiping, and he worked as a carpenter. By 1829, was the licensee of the Lion Hotel (or Golden Lion Inn) in Parramatta, under the name John Shying, and he sold off a number of houses in the Parramatta area in 1830.

Moving in, moving on

In ‘pure’ chain migration, one or two men reach a new land, find work, learn enough of the local language to survive, and then send for more people from their family or their village. The new arrivals settle close to the founders but, within a generation, the well-off often move out. Sydney’s Leichhardt was a centre of Italian culture but, just 20 years after the first Italians settled there, some of them were moving to suburbs like Five Dock, or further afield.

A church, temple, synagogue or mosque can be a powerful anchor to hold people in an area. For example, before the number of Vietnamese in Cabramatta in Sydney grew, the area was dotted with Serbian Orthodox churches. Melbourne was once called the city with the second-highest number of Greeks anywhere in the world. This would not be so now, partly because fewer Greeks have migrated to Australia recently, but mainly because later generations moved around and married outside their culture. This often leads to the loss of old traditions, and it is important that we cling to as much of the old ways as we can.

Early white settlers in Australia usually married partners from their own country and, until the 1950s, Australians usually married people of the same religion. Many people now marry partners from different races and with different religious affiliations. The challenge for future Australians is to appreciate and conserve as much of our rich multicultural heritage as we can.

Multicultural Australia

In many ways, Australia has always been multicultural. In colonial times, the Scots and the Irish sometimes seemed like alien cultures to the English, but there were also Africans like the outlaw ‘Black Caesar’, as well as Chinese, Indian and people from other races who had come to Australia in small numbers. Even earlier, Maori sailors from New Zealand could also be seen on Sydney streets.

Once the gold rushes started, the number of different nationalities increased greatly, but these people, if they stayed in Australia, were expected to assimilate—to give up their ‘foreign ways’, to learn to speak English, and to conform to British standards.

Just about the only culture, apart from the English, that thrived was that of the Scottish community, although the Irish also managed to hang onto many of their old ways. Today, the pipe bands that lead the Anzac Day march and the celebration of St Patrick’s Day are part of Australian tradition for many people.

Introducing ‘exotic’ food

Some of the twentieth-century waves of refugees introduced unfamiliar religions to Australia, and they also brought new food traditions with them from places like Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Indian and Lebanese food was also introduced, and it represents a wide range of Mediterranean and Islamic or Arabic traditions.

In a way, food was often a vehicle for the acceptance of new cultures into Australian life. In rural Australia, some Greek migrants opened cafes in which standard ‘Aussie fare’—such as meat pies, steak and eggs, and ‘mixed grills’—were served. They also served souvlaki, dolmades and other Greek delicacies. Before long, a few Anglo-Australians, some of whom had widened their horizons through overseas travel, were trying this food, and these foods slowly became an accepted part of Australian culinary tradition.

Chinese restaurants also opened up, offering ‘Australian’ meals and Australianised Chinese food. Such food introduced more ‘exotic’ foreign dishes such as sweet-and-sour pork, along the same lines as Italian ham and pineapple pizza, and mild Indian curries.

The food was often far from authentic, but it allowed Australians to taste and to start to appreciate what other cultures had to offer. These dishes were a way in. Multicultural food helped many Australians to appreciate that there is more than one way of looking at the world, and that every culture is worthy of respect.

So advice, good friends: have I been sufficiently Bolshie?

* You really are an a-hole

Appalling behaviour in Prague

I have been busy refinancing tourist-depleted Europe, and until today people have been remarkably nice.

The food at Cafe-Cafe, Praha 1, Rytirska 10 was good, service from the young girl wait-person was appalling. I will not see 80 again, and she clearly saw me as beneath contempt. Her sneering collection of the order was capped when my bottled  beer came, half-dumped from the bottle into the glass and thus degassed, she hovered and seized plates and glasses as they became free, indeed I had to seize back my beer glass to retain the last sip. I said I was paying cash, and after she brought the card machine, I handed her 800 crowns in notes, then said "And I want the change."   She fled outside, and I told the manager to call her back. Actually, I ordered him to do it.

When she stormed back in, she demanded truculently to know what I wanted. I said I wanted the change, she replied that she thought the stolen money (that is how I see it) was "for service". I said there had been no service, just rudeness, and with exaggerated histrionics, she plonked 35 crowns into my hands, trying to make all three coins fall to the floor with a sharp downward blow. Guess what, I have taught brats in my time, and her attempt failed. I warned the manager that her behaviour would bring a savage review.

If you are of advanced middle age, avoid this place (Rytirska 10) like the plague. The docket says SERVICE IS NOT INCLUDED, and this I can certainly confirm.

If management assure me PROMPTLY that Sustova Klara has been given the boot, I will withdraw this review, but they have two hours.

Sign On The Dotted Lion, Epigraphs, aphorisms and quotes with teeth

Something I adverted to recently has come to  be.

I thought that the phrase Sign on the Dotted Lion originated with me, but apparently, Afferbeck Lauder beat me to it. No matter, his was a throw-away line, while my dotted lion was a vicious instrument of bureaucratic warfare.

As a biologist, I had learned the art of stippling, using clouds of dots to compose an image. Having been dragged into the bureaucracy, I found packs of nervous drones who dared not make a move, and dragged brighter minds down to their level. In a Committee on Publications, we spent three years drafting a publications policy, and published nothing. 

I found that slowly emerging images done with a Rotring pen on crisp white paper distracted them, and that stopped me erupting in righteous wrath. Elsewise, I would have roared about Gutenberg being delayed while policies were drafted on manuscript specs, binding procedures, bookshelf design rukes  andregulations on paper colours. I didn't, but I came close, and I drew this lion.

Early this year, I created a T-shirt, which is available to select friends who appreciate the surrealism of Rene Magritte and his Ceci N'est Pas Un Pipe: the top line on the shirt design was the idea of my colleague-in-crimes committed in and on committees, Ian Munro.

Well that made me decide to use the originsl as a book cover, and that's the whole story. The book itself is what old-time scholars call a commonplace book. So how is it to be used?

Ask yourself, where would you go to find bits like the samples below to kick off an essay, a talk, a chapter or a book?

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
— Richard W. Hamming, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers, 2nd edition, 1973.

We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist.
— William Whewell, (1794-1866), writing in 1840.

Descended from the apes? My dear, we will hope it is not true. But if it is, let us pray that it may not become generally known.
— Alleged to have been said by the wife of a canon of Worcester Cathedral.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 – 1910). Following the Equator.

My poor Swomee-Swans...why, they can’t sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat…
— Theodor Seuss Geisel (‘Dr Seuss, 19045 - 1991), The Lorax.

Take your chance on ozone. There isn’t any such thing anyway. Or, if there is, you can buy a Thermos bottle full for five cents, and put it in your cupboard.
— Stephen Leacock ‘How to live to be 200’ in Literary Lapses, 1910.

The poor world is almost six thousand years old …
— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It, IV, i, 95

Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
— II Chronicles 4:2. (so pi = 3?)

In the data set 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 10, the mode is 1, the median is 2, and the mean is 3, so what is the average?
— Duncan Bain, ‘Being Mean’, Fruitgrowers’ Gazette, 1 April 1998, 1729.

This is certain, I never knew a man’s eye plucked out of his head, but he fell to vomiting upon it, and the stomach cast up all within it.
— Gaius Plinius Secundus (23-79) The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland, 132.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
— Walter Bagehot (1801 – 1859), Physics and Politics.

Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?
— Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat.

Chemistry without catalysis, would be a sword without a handle, a light without brilliance, a bell without sound.
— Alwyn Mittasch (1869 – 1953), Journal of Chemical Education, 1948, 531-2.

… Lord Rayleigh claims that beginners in research also should be “graduates in the school of string and sealing wax”.
— Nature 154, 392–393 (1944)

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
— Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774), The Deserted Village.

1764: it was stated that a patient in Padua had been cured of rabies by drinking three pints of vinegar.
— Cases and Cures of the Hydrophobia, selected from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1807, 48.

And many a Jakke of Dovere hastow soold,
That hath been twies hoot and twies coold.
— Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345 – 1400), Canterbury Tales, ‘The Cook’s Prologue and Tale’.

I find not any science that doth fitly or properly pertain to the imagination.
— Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Of the Advancement of Learning, second book, XI, 3, 1605.

The answer is simple: to find more like this, you get into my private collection  of pithy comments, my commonplace file, which has been running for more than fifty years. The catch: it has always been private, but as I approach Advanced Middle Age (quite unwillingly). I am sharing some tools of the trade, and so the file is now out as an ebook, Sign on the Dotted Lion, and there is also a dead-tree version as well, only in paperback for now

Where do you get it? Amazon, of course. I have made the e-book extra cheap to suit the needs of penurious scribblers and scholars, the paperback is for gifting or maybe libraries, but I am in Italy right now so the hardback, better suited to libraries, will be a little later, probably late June.

I published through Amazon, because mainstream commercial publishers are leery of octogenarian authors. As we Ancients know, publishing is no longer a profession for gentlemen. Or ladies, and my concern is merely to reach a small bunch of like-minded folk, to load up some writerly types with useful ammo.

Here, you will learn what we knew about the atomic bomb in 1913 (yes, 1913!), when H. G. Wells imagined it being dropped on Berlin in the 1950s. There are about 2000 gems in the book, so have a look at the free sample from the Amazon page.

For more on bureaucracy and stipples, try this link.

Where did Australians get their own language?

There is room for a very interesting dictionary of  Australianisms. But I have no time to collect such a list.

Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, 1883.

Well, 143 years on, Twopeny's wish is granted. There are three Australian forms of English: this work just had to await the arrival on the scene of an experienced researcher who speaks all three.

Australian English took less than forty years after the white invasion to start showing up and then begin to puzzle those that we later called New Chums (a term that dates back to at least 1827, but I wonder when the Opposition {see below} show the phrase turning up?).

Now then: when did those terms, those new words, enter the language? The receptacle called a billy, the thing that we used to make tea in probably started in the 1820s, but its accepted name only emerged in the 1850s. Like sly grog, it seems to have started in Tasmania.

There are several reference works that purport to give us 'earliest' dates for words, but to be blunt, they don't fill the bill. Gerry Wilkes says 'Apple Isle', a name for Tasmania, dates from 1963, but I found it being used in 1903. Joan Hughes says 'ant caps' dates from 1955, I have it in use in 1896. Hughes has 'Aussie Rules' from 1941, Bruce Moore has it from 1926, Wilkes has it from 1963: I found it in use in 1907! That is just totally sloppy!

The authors cited above are apparently all literary academics, and I suspect that they relied on amateurs and summer vac undergrads, reading books and providing slips of paper. I am a trained scientist with loads of cunning, and I delved into old newspapers.

Here is a pro tip for lexicographers: hiring undergrads to read books is a poor option, even if that method sort-of worked for the first edition of the OED.  Novels do not usually initiate the entry of new terms and phrases: new language is coined in the verbal world, then it spreads by word of mouth and sneaks into newspapers and journals far earlier than it reaches the books. Just two examples: bail up (by a bushranger) was around in newspapers 43 years before its earliest use (that I have found so far) in a novel. Equally, red ned was in the newspapers seven years before Ruth Park used it.

Any fiction writer wanting to avoid anachronisms would be wise to follow me, not Hughes or Moore or Wilkes, and you can do this for the price of a cup of coffee, and for that you get an ebook. I chose that medium because you can search it, it is far cheaper, and I was able to slip in about 200 colour illustrations. There are 271,000 words, links to all of the online sources, and if any errors emerge (as is likely), they can be fixed.

Now consider this quote: mine is not a new idea, after all.

So: who should get this reference work?

1. Writers of Australian historical fiction who hate anachronisms;

2. Academics wanting reliable information on the Oz language;

3. Foreigners trying to understand Australian fiction; or

4. People like me who just glory in the richness of our own tongue.

Here is the link to my lexicon again: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0GR9B1JFV

By the by, I put DRM in play with this work: if you really need a clean and unprotected PDF version for free (or a source file in Word), friends can have it by emailing me, scholars can make their case by way of a comment. I am not doing this to get rich, but I have had my fill of pirates.

Something completely different

 And now you can buy it.

I have decided to recycle some old research. The result is a new blog called salient quotations. You will find the entries here: https://salientquotations.blogspot.com/2026/03/introduction.html

And here is a taste: I came across the Radulph quote below while reading Norwich on a bus. Must share that, I thought,  but then I realised I had filed it before, and went looking for it.

Here is a sample of what I found, including the Radulph one. The topic is critics, and before you comment, my filing cabinet drawers are all labelled Miscellaneous A - Z.

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic.
— Jan Sibelius (1865 – 1957) (attrib.)

 

[Kierkegaard] might be described as a loose-limbed Nordic Pascal (with the mathematical genius left out), born into the Romantic Age in a small country.
— J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 146.

 

Kierkegaard is very queer, I think. I read some selections in German last year, and a French translation … a very odd and good book.
— Aldous Huxley, letter to Edward Sackville-West, 1932, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 356.

 

[Macaulay] has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)

 

Thou should’st be living at this hour,
Milton, and enjoying power.
England hath need of thee and not
Of Leavis and of Eliot.
— Heathcote William Garrod.

 

You ought to be roasted alive, not that even well-cooked you would be to my taste.
— J. M. Barrie, to George Bernard Shaw, in response to GBS’s criticism of his plays.

 

In his variations on the Paganini theme, Brahms is commenting subtly on physics and dynamics, including light-hearted references to Boyle’s Law and Fletcher’s Trolley.
— Basil Boothroyd (1910 – 1988), quoted by Frank Muir, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose.

 

A good deal of Teilhard is nonsense, but on further reflection I can see it as a dotty, euphoristic kind of nonsense, very greatly preferable to solemn long-faced Germanic nonsense. There is no real harm in it. But what, I wonder, was the origin of the philosophically self-destructive belief that obscurity makes a prima-facie case for profundity? — the origin, I mean, of the comically fallacious syllogism that runs Profound reasoning is difficult to understand; this work is difficult to understand; therefore this work is profound.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 21.

 

The harm Kant unwittingly did to philosophy was to make obscurity seem respectable. From Kant on, any petty metaphysician might hope to be given credit for profundity if what he said was almost impossible to follow.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 22.

 

Schopenhauer: A German; very deep; but it was not really noticeable when he sat down.
— Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Literary Lapses (1910)

 

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’
— Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953), ‘On His Books’ in Stories Essays and Poems, Everyman Library 948, 1957, 413.

 

De la Beche is a DIRTY DOG,— THERE IS PLAIN English & there is no mincing the matter. I knew him to be a thorough jobber & a great intriguer & we have proved him to be thoroughly incompetent to carry on the survey … He writes in one style to you and in another to me … I confess that a very little matter would prevent my having further intercourses with De la B. If I can trace to him the origin of those falsehoods he shall smart.
— Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792 – 1871), quoted in Rudwick, The Great Devonian Conspiracy, University of Chicago 1985, 194.

 

It would have been more accurate for Leavis to say that there has been no debate between him and me. There has not: nor will there be. For one simple and over-riding reason. I can’t trust him to keep to the ground-rules of academic or intellectual controversy.
— C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980), The Case of Leavis and the Serious Case, 1970.

 

Victor Hugo was really a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.
— Anon., quoted by J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 132.

 

Born in Warsaw in 1838 and died there in 1861, aged twenty-three. In this brief lifetime she accomplished, perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilized world with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could play. It is probable that if the market stalls and back-street music shops of Britain were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer would be found to be still selling, and as for the Empire at large, Messrs. Allan of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years after the death of the composer, that their house alone was still disposing of 10,000 copies a year.
— Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th edition, 1955, 64.

 

…one, the notoriously unreliable monk Radulph Glaber (the wildness of whose imagination was rivalled only by that of his private life, which gives him a fair claim to have been expelled from more monasteries than any other littérateur of the eleventh century)…
— John Julius Norwich, The Normans in the South, 1016–1130, 1992.

 

Andrade is like an inverted Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959), recalled by C. Snow (1905 – 1980), Science and Government, 1960.

 

The hatchet is buried for the present: but the handle is conveniently near the surface.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959) on Lord Cherwell, recalled by C. Snow (1905 – 1980), Science and Government, 1960.

 

I have no doubt of your courage, Sir Robert, though you have of mine; but then consider what different lives we have led, and what a school of courage is that troop of Yeomanry at Tamworth — the Tory fencibles! Who can doubt of your courage who has seen you at their head, marching up Pitt Street through Dundas Square onto Liverpool Lane? … the very horses looking at you as if you were going to take away 3 per cent. of their oats. After such spectacles as these, the account you give of your own courage cannot be doubted …
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845), in a letter to Sir Robert Peel, June 20, 1842, quoted in Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), 400

 

Mr Henry James has written a book called The Secret of Swedenborg and has kept it.
— William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920).

 

In retrospect I think my essay on Teilhard was good of its kind, but I confess that when on the insistence of an American writer friend I read Mark Twain’s ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences’ I bowed my head in the presence of a master of literary criticism.
— Sir Peter Medawar (1915 – 1987), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 22.

 

It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.
— Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), quoted in Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, a Memoir, 1920.

 

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
— (James Henry) Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859), ‘Rondeau’. (Jenny was Mrs. Carlyle)

 

LORD DARLINGTON: I can resist everything except temptation.
— Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 – 1900), Lady Windermere’s Fan.

 

Diary of a project

 Or, I am going dotty.

Some of my older friends know that I used to do stipple doodles. Some of my former colleagues know that I used to do such doodles in planning meetings, where the evolving shapes kept stupid idiot drones mesmerised, so the intelligent ones could get on with decision making.

The one above later became the Dangerous Goldfish in my revised Monster Maintenance Manual. (You can see a sample of the ebook here.) (And the paperback version is here.)

Others were done at home, like my take on a work by Mussorgsky. At the time, my ears were stopped up with steppe, and so I did not quite depict A Night on Bare Mountain with reliable accuracy, but caveat emptor and all that, what you see is what you get, that and no more.

Anyhow, as I have decided to stop writing books, I have bought some new fine point pens, and gone back to stippling.

Here is my first subject, a Roman aqueduct in Segovia in Spain, a name which until then I had associated with incredibly virtuosic guitar playing.

And here is the start of play.

I think this will keep me off the streets for a few weeks.

Let it not be said, however, that I draw the line with this: there is just one rule: dots only!

Now, to see how much further I have to go, take a look at the work of this Ukrainian artist, beside whom, I am a mere doodler. (I note that he calls his work doodles as well, but seriously, his work is totally amazing.

This stipple style lets you mess with texture, and a close look at the original shows that all of the stone is the same. I cannot easily reflect the unevenness of the stone, so I have changed some of the rock to darker stone.

Here is stage 2.

And here is Stage 3, almost there, and something interesting here: I copied stage 2 with the camera, and stage 3 with the printer-scanner.

I am not entirely happy with the bleed there...

So I did a scan at 1200 dpi and grey scale. As a first effort, I will leave it there. I rushed this one a bit, and I chose a tricky subject, so a more careful choice, slower planning, and less rush in the execution.

That said, the first effort was AWFUL. All the same, dunno if I should stay with wildlife... or this sculpture found in Oslo in Norway

I Aten't Dead Yet

 I have been unwontedly silent for a bit, getting what is definitely going to be the last book ever  sorted. Currently called Fables, Fibs and Folklore: Tales My Mother Taught Me *, it is about all those things people believe and should not believe, like the cherished belief that before Columbus, people were scared of falling off the edge

It is a collection of essays is about ‘well-known facts’ which only the experts will tell you are untrue. Once, everybody believed the Moon was made of green cheese, they all knew that a full Moon led to mental instability, and we were unanimous about the canals on Mars. These days, there are probably few believers for any of those claims, but some of my American friends learned in school that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and had wooden teeth. They also remain absolutely convinced that southern hemisphere sinks and toilets drain in the opposite direction, because they have seen (faked) ‘demonstrations’ across the equator, done by showmen. All nations have myths like that…

All of those are false, but only the plugholes and teeth appear here, because the real dentures and drains involve interesting science. So I discuss those two items; the self-designated Lunatics who really met in Birmingham each full moon, and 144 other ‘well-known’ facts or beliefs before dismissing almost all of them. Some other points like the impossibility of Nero throwing Christians to the lions, or of Vikings wearing horned helmets, or of Julius Caesar being born by Caesarean section lack a place here because they aren’t as interesting enough. Instead, this is a refuting of the partial-history-of-147-mainly-wrong-ideas, which were all believed at some stage, although thanks to lazy journalists, dodgy authors, and poor teachers, some of them remain current. Where the truth goes down a rabbit-hole, I chase after it, dragging my readers along so we can share the scraps of truth that survive.

* but really should not have taught me.

Anyhow, here is a taste:

You cannot add one hundred numbers in 10 seconds

Yes you can, if they are the first hundred integers, and I will not tell you how it is done, but the solution is credited to Carl Friedrich Gauss, and the answer is 5050. These days, with the internet, that is all you need.

The class to whom I introduced this are probably already grandparents now, and I learned recently that some of them still recall the sneaky way I introduced this at the end of an entertaining maths lesson where I, as a science teacher, was covering an ‘extra’. These were Year 9s, and all teachers know how hard kids of that age are to set on fire, but I told them how, if they cubed a number between 100 and 200 on their calculator and gave me the value, I could give them the cube root.

I then showed them how the last digit of the cube gave me the last digit of the root, and left them to work out the ranges for each decade of roots. A few of them got this, and they were well warmed before I started, a calculated one minute before the bell, a tale about Gauss, a lazy teacher, and the sum of the first hundred integers. As planned, before I could spill the beans on Gauss’ solution, the bell went. It was now recess, and I told them I had to rush, as I was on playground duty.

They were hooked, and I headed out with a dozen boys and girls in close company, all wanting a solution. No, I told them, I was done with teaching maths for the day, but I would answer questions. By the end of the recess, they had elicited the solution from my sternly yes-and-no answers (with a couple of judicious hints), and when I said “Of course, Gauss never went on to add the first two hundred numbers, but he could have done…”, one girl immediately raised her hand (unnecessary in an informal chat, but she was on my wavelength) “The answer would be 20,100…”

I nodded, and several voices cried: “That’s 201 times 100”. The bell rang, and I beat a hasty retreat to the staff room. Perhaps I had made the way easier by telling them at the start about the bumble bee that could not fly, and then taking them through Zeno’s paradox (you will meet both of these in chapter 3, and then you will understand). Nothing is impossible: you just need to think: if nothing else that day, they got that idea.

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.