The talented Mr Stephen

This is an out-take that didn't fit my upcoming The Big(ger) Book of Australian History.  The work began with The Big Book of Australian History, which went through four editions under the National Library of Australia's imprint. but as they have hesitated too long, I am going my own way, though the title will now be Australia: a social history.

The odd original title reflects that this version is 2.5 times the size of the original version. Soon, I will be seeking a publisher...

* * *

The colony of South Australia was 15 years old in 1851, but the population was disappearing as all the young and fit men, rushed off to hunt for gold in Victoria. Adelaide could not afford to lose its most capable workers, and so the saga of Mitchell’s Flat started, following the offer of £1000 in the South Australian Register on 17 December 1851 ‘…for the purpose of rewarding the discoverers of productive gold-fields…’

South Australians knew Australia’s first gold mine had been in their colony, so now they began looking harder, for more gold. George Milner Stephen was a gifted man, a member of a powerful family of lawyers and judges, and probably too clever for his own good, which may explain why and how he became involved in a scandal.

He may have been trapped by others because he was too trusting, but his later history makes it more likely that he was in the original plot, up to his neck. His family was notable for its brilliance and also for its long history of instability and living on the edge.

His brother had a convict mistress in Sydney and helped her to escape to New Zealand. Another member of the family was a judge who became insane during a famous British murder trial, yet another was a suspect in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ case, while Virginia Woolf (née Stephen), filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself.

George Milner Stephen clearly thought he could fool people. This first ‘game’ may not have been a fraud: he was never in a position to make money from it, and somebody else may have been the hoaxer, but he was certainly a fraudulent quack later on. On 29 December, 1851, Charles Bonney and Herschel Babbage, both Government Commissioners, were taken by five men, including Mr Stephen, a sharebroker named Edmund Freeman, and Freeman’s lawyer, to the Mount Lofty Ranges, outside Adelaide.

Bonney and Babbage reported to the Colonial Secretary on 30 December, and the South Australian Register had the news the next day, New Year’s Eve. They had just one spade and one pan, but after ten washings, they had found gold in the pan, every time—but that was not necessarily the same thing as finding gold on the site.

If there had been several pans, it would have been far harder for one person to add gold to each pan, and without any doubt, some sort of addition took place. Babbage and Bonney advised the government against selling any of the land in the area, hinting that somebody had played a few tricks.

Still, the South Australian Register mentioned that the locality was on a tributary of the Onkaparinga River, where gold had been found some years earlier, and that ‘…those who make Mitchell’s Flat their destination will not be very far out.’

Then, as now, New Year’s Day was a holiday, and the Register said on 3 January 1852, that 400 to 500 people headed for Mitchell’s Flat. They found no gold, and before long, some of them must have been wishing that Mr Stephen or the Commissioner of Crown Lands was there to show them where to look.

One of the men in the original party, Galbraith by name, had recently returned from Mount Alexander so he could have supplied the planted gold. He may have been a part of the fraud, but he may also have been innocent. Galbraith was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying a friend had said that the find was Mount Alexander gold,

…which belief was confirmed through the course of the day by the man himself confessing, that one of Mr. Stephen’s party placed the gold in the pan for him.
— Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 1852, 3.

The Herald quoted the editor of the Morning Chronicle as saying Stephen had:

…addressed a note to him in which he, Mr. G. M. Stephen says, ‘that this man, Buckland, put the piece of gold in the pan to play off a practical joke.’

Already, people had their suspicions, but Stephen was said to be out looking for gold and could not be found to be questioned. On his return on 8 January, he said he was personally convinced, or else why had he been out seeking for more gold? He had spent money on the search, and even tried to buy blocks of land there.

In passing, he mentioned Freeman’s former business partner, a Mr Galbraith, who had recently returned from Mount Alexander. Babbage said that Stephen had gone back to prospect in a hole from which Charles Bonney had apparently taken gold on 29 December—and failed to find any. Either Stephen genuinely expected to find gold there, or he was cunningly covering his tracks.

Then the Sydney Morning Herald picked up the tale, and a new name appeared, that of a man called Buckland. Soon after, Stephen and Galbraith claimed to have learned that Buckland had played a practical joke, which is probably true, at least in part. The angry Adelaideans who had sweated on New Year’s Day were not amused.

But was Buckland alone in the hoax (or fraud)? Somebody arranged to take just one spade and one pan. That person wanted to control things, and was a guilty party, probably the guilty party. Sadly, we will never know who it was. Another piece of evidence for the innocence of Mr Stephen comes from a comment passed by Herschel Babbage in his report, written on 8 January 1852.

Babbage was no fool: he was the son of Charles Babbage, the 19th century pioneer of mechanical computers, and he assisted his father in that work. He bore the name of his father’s good friend, the astronomer Sir John Herschel. The son had worked with the famous engineer of Victorian Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel on planning railways in Italy, and Babbage’s report on sanitation in the town of Haworth, written at the request of Patrick Brontë, the father of those Brontës, led to massive changes there. He was, as they say, connected—and bright.

So naturally, Babbage was chosen in 1851 as just the person to undertake a mineralogical and geological survey of South Australia. This was just at the start of scientific specialisation, and any scientist was still expected to be able to do all sorts of things—even though the word ‘scientist’, coined in 1841, was not widely used. Babbage, the man of science, did not mince his words, and they were of sufficient interest for them to be reprinted in Sydney, several weeks later on 28 January 1852.

It rests then between Mr. George Milner Stephen and his constituents to point out the parties who have, by the introduction of pieces of gold into the soil washed upon the previous occasion, attempted to mislead the Government and the public.
— The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 January 1852, 2.

Babbage seems to be saying, by implication, that Stephen was not the guilty party. The same Sydney Morning Herald article went on to quote a statement made by Freeman, generally protesting his innocence, but mentioning two key names: Buckland and Galbraith.

…I have since the day above-mentioned seen gold washed and dug out of the soil at Mitchell’s Flat, by one Buckland, on two occasions—one being in the presence of one T. N. Mitchell, and one in the presence of a working man belonging to a party fitted out by Mr. Milner Stephen; and I have also seen two pieces of gold there dug and washed out of the soil, in the presence of Messrs. Penman and Davie, by one Mr. Galbraith…

The guilty party was lucky, and the affair was dismissed as just a hoax, and it may indeed have been no more than a prank that got out of hand. A few years later, Stephen claimed that his find had been real, and was an outlying part of the Echunga field, but nobody took very much notice.

In early 1870, Stephen invented a ‘Gold and Diamond Cradle Amalgamator’. Later in the year, he followed that up with a ‘cheap and portable hammer quartz-crushing battery’. These were praised by others, but the clever Mr Stephen, also an accomplished artist and musician, may not have been quite the innocent he pretended to be. From 1880 until his death in 1894, George Milner Stephen had a flourishing practice as a mesmeric or spiritualist healer, using what he called the “red flannel cure”, because he used red flannel in his treatments.

Here the author must emerge briefly as a player. I have experience both as a perpetrator of hoaxes (for non-fraudulent purposes), and also in fraud investigation, catching genuine crooks. I gave up that trade for the safer alternative of teaching teenage boys, but catching frauds and keeping a lid on bright young minds are both professions that require confidence and the ability to make the “marks” believe what you need them to believe.

On one occasion, I only survived a fraud investigation unscathed because I played the part of Mr Bean so hard that the malefactors, who had broken the arm of one colleague and threatened another with a pistol, ignored me as harmless, when I turned up to ask questions. We knew there was fraud going on, but not how it was being worked. I needed data that I could feed to a computer, and once we had that in a spreadsheet, we knew who was behind it. Dismissing me as a numpty, they gave me the evidence we needed, confident that I was an idiot, and we nailed them. My point is this: I know when something has the wrong smell, and the tale that follows reeks of deception, as I will show in my comments.

Picture a train in April, 1880, travelling from Melbourne to Sandhurst (Bendigo, today). Captain and Mrs Organ, of Prahran are in the saloon carriage, clearly respectable people. A man, apparently an invalid, is carried in by two men, one dressed as a clergyman, and they lay him out on a seat.

A third man is present, Max Kreitmayer, and I will say something of his profession later, because it was he who wrote to The Argus to tell of the events that unfolded. He said the invalid explained that he had been thrown out of a buggy some two months earlier, that a week previously he took a Turkish bath, and in walking afterwards in Collins street staggered and fell, and had lost the use of his legs. Notice all the irrelevant detail, designed to distract the reader? The key point came next: the man was going to Castlemaine to get buried or cured, as his friends lived there. Kreitmayer purported to test this claim:

I gave one of his legs a good pinch, and he assured me that he did not feel it, and consequently I put his case down as a decided case of paralysis. I noticed that when he wished to raise himself a little he had to hold on to the rack above, and on several occasions I lifted the legs off and on the couch, to change his position…
— Argus, 8 May 1880, 8.

So we have an amateur diagnosis, stated as fact, and now the scene is set. The innocents (the Organs) are in place to act as witnesses: cue the miracle worker!

At Gisborne station, Mr George Milner Stephen (whom I knew by sight many years ago) entered the carriage, and had to sit close to the sick man for want of room. He offered his rug, to insure more comfort, and naturally asked what was the matter. The man repeated his story, and Mr Stephen, in a decided tone said, “I can cure you.”

Kreitmayer described how Milner Stephen began his treatment, and notice how the allegedly sick man is now “the patient”—like subliminal advertising, this slips beneath your guard, unless you are looking for it.

My curiosity was aroused to fever heat, and I watched events. Mr Stephen asked the patient to lie on his face, and after making a few passes and breathing on the supposed injured spot, he told him “to rise,” which summons he obeyed with slight success, and he dropped on the seat again, saying that the pain seemed considerably less. He then rose and walked…

Amazing! Hallelujah! Hosanna! (and any other cry that will get the innocent “marks” excited!). Stephen repeated the process and told the man “rise and walk across the carriage.” The man did so and returned to his place without any support.

In 34 minutes after leaving Gisborne, at Kyneton, I left the carriage for a few minutes, and on returning, to my astonishment the patient had gone. Looking out, I found him on the platform, walking about very carefully, and on arrival at Castlemaine, he took his luggage and walked away. Altogether the affair has been so vividly impressed upon my mind, that I can recall the most trifling conversation or incident on this ever memorable journey.

The writer signed himself this way: “MAX. L. KREITMAYER, Waxworks, Bourke-street, May 1”. A cynic might say: how curious that nobody seems to have noticed that Kreitmayer was a good showman himself!

With that spectacular launch, Stephen was off and running. His “cure” was effected by breathing on people through a piece of red flannel, and while a few believed in him, others knew him of old and had their doubts about the aging faith-healer. But was Stephen genuinely convinced he had “the power”? He was no goose, but he may have had delusions of gander.

Others had no doubts at all: two years after Stephens’ death, a coroner was summing up in the case of Honora Judd who died in Melbourne after being attended by a “Professor” Davis, another fraud. The coroner railed against ignorant people who went to quacks, and cited the case of an intelligent journalist whose arm had been hurt by lightning. He had consulted Milner Stephen and his red flannel, and imagined an improvement, “…but soon found his mistake out.”

Flannel was always a favourite folk and quack remedy, long before Milner Stephen. Even John Wesley recommended flannel, though as usual, he offered a whole range of other remedies, in this case, his treatments for chilblains included flannel socks, chamois leather socks and a poultice of onions. Colin Mackenzie, on the other hand, thought flannel good to deal with consumption: the flannel might even prevent the disease altogether!

A complete suit of flannel, worn next the skin, is an indispensable article for every one who is even inclined to this most fatal disorder.
— Colin Mackenzie, Mackenzie’s Ten Thousand Receipts in all the useful and domestic arts, 127.

They truly belonged

The magistrates of colonial Australia were, as we say, a rum bunch, and many of them were bent. The blue text is extracted from chapters 14 and 14 of Involuntary Belonging.

We have already seen something of how Aborigines were treated, as serfs that came, with the land, belonging to the new possessor of the land. This held, even when the land was taken without the permission of those who, in the law, we are now more likely to recognise as the rightful owners, but there is more that needs to be said. It is possible that the Aborigine did indeed belong to that Country, but he also seems to have been treated as a possession to the extent that any gold he found belonged to the new ‘owner’.

Around 1900, a writer claimed that indentures protected Aboriginal women. The agreements had to be witnessed by either Resident Magistrates, Justices of the Peace, persons appointed under the Act, or officers of the police force. These people, said a letter writer, just a little bit naïvely, were unlikely to witness an agreement between employers and natives unless the natives were willing to make such agreement, and were under no fear, coercion, or constraint.

Until 1900, the Police Act had made it an offence to tamper with or detain another person’s native servant, and a breach led to a fine of from £20 to £40, when costs were added in. The writer then cited a case where a white man in the Gascoyne district had lured away “a rather nice looking native girl”.

Her employer took out a summons, the man was fined, and the girl was ordered to go back to her service “where she is still”. This was too much for the editor, who expostulated: “Still there after eight years; the 12 months agreement is evidently pretty durable.” Men, on the other hand, were “caught and apprenticed to a kind master at about nothing and sixpence a year”, said the writer in The Bulletin, as quoted in a Perth newspaper.

Westralia is proud of its slave system on the ground that it prevents native girls being led astray by wandering white men of the swagman and prospector description [but] doesn’t make the seduction of aboriginal girls a punishable offence. It doesn’t protect them to any extent that is worth a straw against their own white boss, the squatter. Before they are “apprenticed” or enslaved, or after their period of enslavement has expired, the law takes no notice of their morals, and does nothing in particular for their protection.

During their spell of slavery it doesn’t protect their morals either, but it falls like Sodom and Gomorrah on any bad man who beguiles them away and thereby deprives the good boss of their services. And it is presumably out of the ‘Groper law’s anxiety to preserve the morals of the aboriginal girl that it compels the aboriginal man to also work for the squatter as his “apprentice” at nothing or thereabouts per annum — at least it doesn’t actually compel him, but when [offensive word]s are scarce an obliging J.P. is generally at hand to gaol the aboriginal for vagrancy till he consents, of his own free will, and quite voluntarily, to be indentured.

The Westralian boss magnates have always had a great yearning after the [offensive word]’s soul, and in the early days they couldn’t, sleep at night for wondering how to save the local black girl in the Altogether [i.e., naked] from being led astray. Then it dawned on them that the best way to save her soul was to make her work darned hard without anything that could be called wages, and in consequence of this discovery their minds have been at ease ever since.
— West Australian Sunday Times 1 April 1900. 8 (taken from The Bulletin).

Not sickened yet? Try this, but be warned that it is unpleasant reading, which is why, among family and friends, I call this Bog-snorkelling in a cess-pit. 

In September 1897, Ernest William Anderson, one of the proprietors of Bendhu Station in the Pilbara, reported to the officer in charge of the local police that on the 13^th, three aboriginal natives, identified as Spider, Biddy, and Polly, had died at Bendhu. Their names were actually Pringamurra, Warradamngenmia, and Narilung. These three, and three others who survived, had “escaped” (‽), so Alexander Anderson went in pursuit of them and

… encountered them at Redbank, 24 miles from Bendhu. He persuaded them to return, leaving the following morning for home. He arrived at the station at half-past two that day, having, it is stated, walked the absconders the distance of 24 miles without water. It is further alleged that on reaching the homestead the natives were soundly thrashed by the Anderson Brothers with a piece of half-inch rope, and were then allowed to drink water from the well. Shortly afterwards they sickened, and the three of the aboriginals first named died about six o’clock that evening.
— The West Australian, 23 September 1897, 5.

When you read this, note that the victims “escaped” and were then “persuaded” and later “thrashed” . To me, that is a state of slavery, pure and simple, though they weren’t traded, so far as we know. Maybe, just barely, it was not slavery in the strict sense.

Anderson reported the deaths to the police, suggesting that the victims died from being overheated and then swallowing too much water. Sergeant McCarthy notified the Coroner, and sent a constable to proceed to collect information from witnesses and make arrangements for an inquiry. Later, the District Coroner travelled to Bendhu, and, obtaining a jury of three at Bamboo Creek, conducted an investigation into the case.

The jury returned a verdict that the deaths were caused by exhaustion caused by travelling the deceased natives from Redbank to Bendhu without water. They added a rider, censuring the Andersons for the manner in which they had beaten the deceased people. The coroner also examined two of the survivors, girls aged 8 and 12, and squeamish readers may prefer not to read this next paragraph, even though you really should:

… both appeared to have been severely beaten, the former’s back being one mass of festering wounds of the color of sunbaked clay. She presented a pitiable spectacle, whilst the aspect of the elder girl Louie, was not much less deplorable … The Anderson Bros. are but young men, the elder, Ernest, being about 21 years of age, whilst the younger, Alex, would be something like 18.
— The Pilbarra Goldfield News (Marble Bar) 1 October 1897, 2.

On 19 October, the brothers were behind bars, held on a charge of murder. Alexander had arrived with a case of typhoid fever, and this killed him on 30 November. Alexander was on trial on December 20, when evidence showed that Pringamurra’s shoulder blade had been broken. The evidence listed the wounds on both the dead and the living, and no witnesses were called for the defence. The prosecutor summed up:

It might be argued that the charge could be reduced to one of manslaughter had the deed been done under sudden and great provocation, but when such deliberate and barbaric violence sufficient to cause death had been proved he could not see how that would be possible.
— The West Australian 22 December 1897, 3.

As there were no witnesses for the defence, there will be no recounting here of the weasel words added in defence, but sadly, they had an effect. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty of manslaughter. Anderson had eluded the noose, but he still had an incandescent Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Onslow, to descant on his case:

Ernest William Anderson, the jury have taken a very lenient view of your case. Nobody who has heard the evidence given in this case can have a shadow of a doubt in his mind about the crime in question. Your crime is nothing but a deliberate, brutal, base and cruel murder of a man and two women, and an inhuman flogging of mere girls besides. However, the jury have done what they have in law a right to do, and it remains only for me to pass sentence upon you. That sentence is the most severe I am able to give-you are sentenced to penal servitude for life.
— The West Australian, 22 December 1897, 3.

On 10 February 1903, Anderson was allowed out on a ‘ticket of leave’ arrangement. As they say about policemen, there’s never a touch of typhoid fever around when you need it, and if that comment seems harsh, Onslow would have agreed with me, given the way he weighed in again the very next day after sentencing the surviving Anderson, at the start of another trial:

But I cannot forget that only 18 months ago I myself tried a case at Geraldton when a man named Thompson was charged with flogging a native to death. The circumstances of the case were equally revolting to that of the Andersons, the great difference being that in Thompson’s case one man instead of three was flogged, and there was also no inhuman beating of females.
— The West Australian, 24 December 1897, 6.

This reference pleased me, because while I had seen and been chasing references to “Thompson”, the name is common, so the details had eluded me, but that one word, “Geraldton”, gave me a way in. The case went to court in July 1896, when Ernest Waugh, George Thompson and William Purtill flogged ‘Micky’, an Aboriginal described as “a fighting man” who took no nonsense from white men, giving as good as he got. He was overpowered by the three, and chained to a verandah post before Thompson and Waugh whipped him.

The next piece of evidence should serve to quell any doubts about whether or not the rank smell of slavery in the air at that time.

James Aitken, affirmed in the Scotch method, said: — I am a Justice of the Peace, as well as a squatter and merchant, and know the accused, who bear a good character. I have never heard of any complaints about them. I have 65 natives in my employ. Occasionally I find it necessary to punish them in order to maintain discipline.

His Honor: What do you mean by punishing them?

Mr. Aitken: By thrashing them.

His Honor. — With what?

Witness: — With a piece of leather trace. I have heard what Micky did to Waugh, and I certainly say he deserved punishing for what he did.

His Honor: You are a magistrate of the peace. What do you suppose they are appointed for? Do you think they are appointed for the purpose of illegally punishing natives? Let me urge you to seriously consider the position you have placed yourself in in giving your opinion that it is right and proper to take into your own hands the duty of punishing natives. I am quite shocked to hear a Justice of the Peace express himself in this way.

Mr. Aitken: I am quite prepared to resign my Commission at any time. We have to tell the truth in a Court of law.
— Geraldton Advertiser, 10 July 1896, 3.

All three were found not guilty. The papers of the later 1890s always seem to link the names Anderson, Thompson and Brockman. We need just one more look, though, to seal the case for the prosecution, but the better informed papers also add the name De Pledge, so one more for luck. Interestingly, like Mr Aitken, De Pledge and Brockman were also magistrates. The prosecution rests.

George Julius Brockman, of Minilya station, was charged in February 1899 with ill-treating an aboriginal named Cooardie. The treatment involved placing Cooardie in stocks for an afternoon and night without food, then kicking him on the head, and flogging him.

The evidence came from the complainant, two other natives, and a Japanese, employed by the defendant as a cook. Cooardie’s story, largely corroborated by his witnesses, was that he was put in the stocks one afternoon and was kept there, in a fowl house, all through the night.

Cooardie escaped the fowl house, but not the stocks, and when Brockman discovered him, he was kicked about the face, and bled from a wound. He was returned to the fowl house and in the morning, with the stocks still on his legs, he was flogged with a whip made of strips of bullock hide. His offence, Cooardie said, was that he had taken a native woman named Maggie, with whom, he said, the defendant had intimate relations. Two natives, Jackie and Billie corroborated the complainant’s evidence. The Japanese cook, Cawabila, saw the complainant in the stocks, and saw him beaten by the defendant with a bullock hide whip. He did not witness the kicking, but when he entered the fowl-house blood was flowing from a wound on Cooardie’s face.

Brockman gave evidence on his own behalf, and his version differed. Yes, he had put Cooardie in the stocks, but could not have kicked him as he had no boots on. The cook, on the other hand, said the boots were on.

Brockman continued. He punished Cooardie, not in connection with the woman Maggie, but because he had attempted to assault an old blind woman. In cross-examination, he admitted telling Corporal Turner that the thrashing was administered because Cooardie had stolen a pair of boots from a contractor named Hough, and that he had made no mention of the old woman.

The contractor Hough gave evidence that during the five years he had worked for Brockman, he had never known him to ill-treat a native. The defendant had admitted enough ill-treatment to sustain the charge, and the Bench, consisting of the Resident Magistrate and three Justices of the Peace, fined the accused £5, ordered him to pay costs to the amount of £9 8s., and cancelled Cooardie’s indentures.

Brockman was a J. P., so he accepted his loss, and then took his seat on the bench, to hear a charge against a Japanese man of supplying liquor to an Aboriginal! That brings us to another J.P., Thomas De Pledge, who along with his employee, Reginald Orkney, was charged with assaulting aboriginal natives, a man and a woman, who were indentured to them. Remembering Brockman’s ‘Maggie’, the man De Pledge had flogged said that it was because he had taken away ‘his woman’. This whole saga begins to read like 19^th century USA, with concupiscence in the slave quarters.

Bridges and voices

 As I emerged from a period of intense work on not one, but two books on Australian history, I found a battle going on around me about something that should be a slam dunk 'yes' vote: the Voice to Parliament.

I mentioned this to a colleague volunteer on North Head (we both do land care work), and she said the Voice referendum was just like having a referendum on whether or not to have a Sydney Harbour Bridge: a vote in favour would have enabled planning and design to go ahead, but it would say nothing about the design. It was just do we want a bridge or not?

Just as we would leave the next step to the engineers, lawyers and politicians would be the people best qualified to make the Voice work. Rabbiting on about "Oooh, we might get sued" is really saying "We are such numpties. any legislation we design will be like a dunny made of balsa wood." It is, if I may use the vernacular, bollocks.

I ducked back into history for a bit at that point. Did you know that the bridge was foretold in 1789? The sage words came from Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather, who had a famous link with Sydney.

When Governor Phillip sent some Sydney clay back to London in 1789, Josiah Wedgwood created a medallion depicting Sydney Cove. An engraving of this appeared in Phillip’s The Voyage to Botany Bay along with a verse by Erasmus Darwin called Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove. Here, we see the engraving from the book. 

Now here is a portion of Erasmus' appalling version of poetry, and if you squint slantendicularly at it, you may even be able to detect the Harbour Bridge and even Manly ferries in the text:

There the proud arch, colossus-like, bestride
Yon glittering streams, and bound the chasing tide;
Embellished villas crown the landscape-scene,
Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between.
There shall tall spires, and dome-capped towers ascend,
And piers and quays their massy structures blend;
While with each breeze approaching vessels glide,
And northern treasures dance on every tide!”

In 1815, Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s architect, Francis Greenway, suggested building a bridge from the south shore to the north shore of Sydney Harbour, but there was no real need for a bridge then. Later, when all the good farmland at Parramatta had been taken up, a few people discovered that the sandstone ridges running north had small caps of shale that made the soil good enough for market gardens, and so settlements developed along what is now the North Shore railway line.

That line opened in 1890. As soon as it did, people began building houses along it. After 1893, they could catch a train to Milsons Point and cross the harbour by steam ferry. People began talking about having a harbour crossing. Here is Benjamin Crispin Simpson's design: the caption is a link to the SLNSW original.

State Library of NSW.

In 1900, a group of politicians tried to get an agreement to a proposal that the Duke of York would lay the foundation stone for a harbour crossing while he was visiting Sydney for the inauguration of Federation in 1901, but the proposal failed to get the nod.

The talk in Sydney in 1900 was mainly about a railway bridge, high enough so that ships could go underneath it. A plan was in place by 1911, and John Bradfield was appointed chief engineer of the project in 1912. By 1916, his design was ready, but it was the middle of the Great War, so the work was delayed.

From 1900 on, motor cars, motor lorries and motor omnibuses had all become important forms of transport, as had trams. It was decided that the new bridge needed two train lines, two tram lines, and as many lanes for road traffic as possible. In the end, Bradfield allowed for what then seemed like the huge number of six traffic lanes!

Building took from 1923 to 1932, when the Bridge opened, and there was never a referendum, because everybody knew we needed a bridge, just as we need the Voice to allow us to stand among the rare decent nations of the world.

My next post will be a small excerpt from what I am pitching under the title Involuntary Belonging, a close look at indentured and enforced servitude in Australia (and even a few cases of slavery in Australia). 

If you don't think we need the Voice, that post may make you think again, as will this image, taken from the Sydney Morning Herald in 1852:

I aten't dead yet

Even if it looks a bit like I've fallen off my perch, I'm still here, but I have been working on two massive works in tandem. Both are now complete, though one of them is still under wraps, and it is more than 200,000 words long, so I am still tweaking the text.

The other is now being pitched, so I am willing to talk about it, all 102,000 words of it. The trigger was a TV program, two months back. that triggered me to say "there was worse than that..."  Her Indoors said "how would you know?" and I said "I have written about bits of it in several books, but nobody has ever done the long-form survey of slavery and forced labour in Australia." That was my mistake, having said I was done with writing books. I started scribbling notes

So three months later, I have done it, starting with this quotation, one of the many bits that I knew about.

I call the last three months bog-snorkelling in a cess-pit. The clipping below shows how the SMH reported a Wiradjuri hero in 1852, and it gave me my title Involuntary Belonging, now being pitched, is a 102,000-word study of people who were constrained to work, from agriculture workers who could not leave without being tossed in gaol, to Indian, Chinese, German and South Sea islanders who were "indentured", teenagers banged up and trained to be servants (Stolen Generations, Fairbridge and more) to Sulu and Aboriginal slaves in the pearl fisheries, and that's just the start. Some Aboriginal stockmen were beaten and/or murdered. I don't think the Duttons of this world will like my book, if they can read.

You know the joke about Peter Dutton's library burning down? It was a tragedy, because he hadn't finished colouring it in yet... yes, it was once a Spiro Agnew joke, but we've all forgotten him. Those colourless blanks are so easy to forget...

Back to the book, did you know we had slaves in Sydney in 1819, according to a court... they were sent home by probably the first former slave owner in Australia.

Anyhow, half-way through the third pitch to a publisher, there was a heavy fog this morning, and when that happens, it's time to look at the spiders, and as I have now completed the third pitch, here is why I trudged through soggy bush:

(The trick is to get there as the sun burns off the fog, but it being winter, then sun was a bit slow. Under summer conditions, I would have been aiming the camera almost into the sun, and getting something like the last shot, taken eight years back.)

Shot taken on North Head (Sydney), eight years ago.

I'll try to get back sooner, OK?

Maybe I'll tell you about my fight with Telstra, who first, defrauded me with dodgy bills, and when I complained, tried to bully me, then lied to me, and in the end, it seems, tried to harass me. Currently, the people I hold responsible for the bad behaviour, are trying to keep me firewalled from the senior management who could put them through the mincer, and I am about to blow the lid off the whole thing. I want explanations, answers, details of audits undertaken and a list of the criminal charges preferred.

Currently, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has been refusing to recognise the criminality, and is refusing to pass my complaints past the miscreants to those who must bear responsibility for the actions of these petty crooks. They have already refunded the money they stole, and paid me $500 to go away, but there are principles here, and that $500 says they have admitted guilt. 

They will learn that you don't try to defraud an old fraud investigator who was given master classes in head-kicking in the 1960s, and if you do, you don't try to bully him: that is elder abuse, and I have been gutting bullies since the 1950s, and if you do, you don't try to lie to him, and don't send him fake messages about service changes.

You certainly don't rob and then run a campaign of bullying against an elder, not one who has been an advocate for the disabled for more than 40 years. I am the Customer from Hell.

I have nominated the senior managers I want to talk to, and if they don't obey my every requirement, they are going to be in a flustercluck in a cement mixer with 500 broken bottles.

Stay posted...

Losing the European outlook

NOT a tarantula!

NOT a porcupine!

The early Europeans in Australia saw everything through European eyes. The wombat was a 'badger;, the echidna was a 'porcupine, and so on. The huntsman spider was a triantelope, that being a corruption of tarantula.

So in some ways, the early explorers who were born and raised in Europe had problems when it came to travelling in Australia. They followed river valleys, being used to glaciated landforms where the valleys were broad and easy to travel. In the old Australian geology, where chasms had been carved by millennia of rare floods, that was not a good move. The valleys were steep-sided and hard to get out of, and the narrow defile at the bottom was usually blocked by rock fragments that had tumbled down at some point in the past. Worst of all, there was usually no water flowing swiftly, gurgling along, as there would be in any decent European valley.

In the same way, based on what was known of other continents, Major Mitchell was willing to believe in the myth of a great river, stretching across the continent, even though careful mapping of the coast had failed to reveal the mouth of a great river. He had been told by a liar that the river existed, and that was enough for him. It began with a wild tale from a runaway convict called Clarke, otherwise known as "the barber". Clarke returned to settled areas and said he had heard from the Aboriginal people of a river called the Kindur, running to the north-west, and he said he had decided to follow it, hoping to reach another country. Ernest Favenc argues plausibly that Clarke's tale was spun to save him from a flogging when he returned, but naturally enough, Clarke the barber claimed that it was all true.

Clarke said that he began at the Liverpool Plains, and followed a river which he said the natives called the Namoi. Along the way, Oxley's River Peel, the river that Tamworth lies on, joined in. He crossed the Namoi and reached what he took to be the Kindur, which he followed for 400 miles before the Namoi joined it. The river was navigable, and flowed on, he said. He was not sure how far it went, but it never, he asserted flowed to the south of west. In other words, here was a perfect path to strike off up into northern Australia.

A gullible government fell for it, as governments so often do, because they wanted to believe. So the acting Governor, Sir Patrick Lindesay, sent Mitchell out in November 1831. He went across the Peel, over the Hardwicke Range, and reached the Namoi about three weeks later. Expecting a navigable river, the party had come equipped with canvas boats, but these snagged in the river, and so the party reverted to horseback. They reached the Gwydir, turned west along it for 80 miles, then struck north to a grand river that Mitchell found bore the local name of Karaula. He followed this down till the Gwydir joined it, and by this time, given that it was heading south, he concluded that this was the Darling River.

All the same, if the Kindur River was a non-starter, all the water had to flow somewhere, so the prospect of an inland sea remained good. Just as the originators of the European culture saw their world as surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, so the new Australians dreamed of an inland sea, hopefully with snow-capped alps somewhere about the Gibson Desert, but not everybody was convinced. Eyre certainly was doubtful.

Keep in mind that Eyre had tried to reach central Australia along the line of the Flinders Ranges, and had fallen back. That was why he set out around the Great Australian Bight, because he hoped to find, at some point, more gentle and welcoming country to his north, so that he could turn right and reach a land of milk and honey. It was not to be, and wilting under the blast of hot northerlies (he likened them to the blast of a furnace), Eyre wrote:

There was no misunderstanding the nature of the country from which such a wind came; often as I had been annoyed by the heat, I had never experienced any thing like it before. Had anything been wanting to confirm my previous opinion of the arid and desert character of the great mass of the interior of Australia, this wind would have been quite sufficient for that purpose. From those who differ from me in opinion (and some there are who do so whose intelligence and judgment entitle their opinion to great respect), I would ask, could such a wind be wafted over an inland sea? or could it have passed over the supposed high, and perhaps snowcapped mountains of the interior.

In time, the Australian-born explorers like Hume would cease to be a minority, and the Europeans who believed they were born to lead would be replaced by men like the Forrests and the Gregorys, along with supple-minded explorers who were born elsewhere, but who had learned to relate to the country.

Mitchell was a perfectly adequate observer of the lay of the land, the way it sloped and drained. Because of this, he could diverge from the Gwydir, yet know, when it joined the Darling, that this river could from its position and size, only be the Gwydir, but if he had geographical sense, he lacked some of the other senses that an explorer needs to survive, thrive, and produce a complete picture, not only of the line of advance, but the country for a hundred kilometres or more on either side. Anybody could do micro-exploring, just by hopping on a horse and staying alive, but big-picture exploring required an instinct that could generally only be acquired by experience that usually was only available to those born in Australia.

Sturt and Eyre began with European eyes, yet they seem to have acquired a sense for the land. Leichhardt arrived at the Gulf of Carpentaria with no idea that there were crocodiles there. He was derided by Mitchell and his cronies because he set out to live off the land (and as we have seen, was up to eating anything even remotely edible) but he succeeded, unlike the egotistical Major, who needed gigantic stores to keep going, and treated each excursion as a military campaign.

The Science of the Lambs, Australian English: freebies

This is also available in an American English version.

This is a literary and mathematical romp in the form of a fantasy quest, a torrent of paronomasia, feghoots, sly literary references and running gags, telling the story of our heroes’ struggle to solve a problem. Think Spider Robinson meets Jasper Fforde and Robert Asprin, with more mathematics, superb numerological cryptography, superior literary references and better pea soup.

The sheep are mysterious beings, who wear Viking hats and once claimed to be ‘mad sheep’ (no more, though: in the foreword, they note that the ravens {who once used to be dragons} told them this was not nice). Only intelligent humans and nomads can see them, and they think they are behind 73% of all cases of ‘invisible friends’. Eric Blair and Alice Liddell (note the names, which are the real names of George Orwell and Alice of Alice in Wonderland!) both have doctorates in odd aspects of number-crunching, and when they see the sheep, the sheep investigate them and decide these two have the computer and numerical skills they will need to help them (the sheep) in a quest to recover The Book of Bells. The sheep have been set this challenge by a group known as The Rats (who are behind another 11% of invisible friend cases).

Eric is assisted by a minotaur called Gordon in his first task, breaking into a geology museum to borrow a special crystal. Gordon, we learn later, took a contract with his friend Theseus to carry Hannibal’s elephants over the alps: not all of mythology is true.

Alice then joins the crew, and they break into the London house of a Russian oligarch to get a map that gets them into the Tower of London to ‘borrow’ the Cabbage Diamond, one of the lesser-known crown jewels. After that, three Tower ravens (they used to be dragons) join them, and they rob a German fraudster in the Tyrol, to get some rare zinc, only found in candlesticks in the German’s schloss. A fourth raven, kept by the German, joins them, and they launch an attack on Eric’s former employer, an evil empire called MegaGlobal Limited or MGL. MGL goons capture them, and are rescued by sheep who are red-eye masters (they say Spielberg based his Jedi masters on them), and they meet Loki, an accident-prone black sheep with an abnormality projector. Loki’s projector is a major plot element.

Now they are on the trail of the Book of Bells, and following clues left for them by the rats, they visit Pompeii, and accidentally trigger Mount Vesuvius, then they go to Monte Ceceri, where they meet Leonardo, and accidentally move the Leaning Tower of Florence to Pisa. Still on the hunt, they visit the Norman Invasion in Whitby and accidentally flip it to Hastings instead, and then they head for Norway where a troll called Pebble saves them from werewolves. Then they are given a cunning hint by the rats, using a talking horse called Bucephalus (“call me Buck”) as their messenger. Following his advice, they travel to the Amazon on a ship crewed by vampires and sent out by Sir Joseph Banks with orders to wipe out piracy.

With help from two of the vampires (Barbara Cartland and Enid Blyton), they obtain the document they need, and realise that the Book of Bells was hidden in plain sight (the last of many Poe jokes). They recover the book from the IT Department of Eric’s former employer, and the quest is over. Eric and Alice are free to go — or are they? There is a stub for the sequel...

***

I am now seriously pitching this book, and this is a taster. I am looking for beta-readers, if you would like to see the lot as a ~2 meg PDF. Email me at petermacinnis@ozemail.com.au and specify Australian English or American English.

An apologetic foreword from Hypatia Bluetooth, R. E. M.^*

Chief archivist of the beings formerly known as the Mad Sheep.

The ravens (who were dragons once) say 'mad sheep' is, to modern eyes, offensive, but we entered this Earth universe-cluster through Australia in the late 1980s (on their counting system). At first, no humans could see us, but we soon found that itinerants (variously called tramps, hobos or in Australia, swagmen) could see us. Sheep were the dominant animals and so we took their form, and the swagmen, always hungry, would try to kill and eat us. Taking advantage of the then fear of 'mad cow disease', we wore Viking hats and claimed to be not-good-to-eat mad sheep. This sheep form and name then followed us into other eras and cultures.

True, we might have said to the swagmen "we have a prionic disease called scrapie," but Ermyntrude, who was one of our best ethicists, and who argued for doing exactly that, disappeared without trace from where we last saw her near a billabong, in the company of a profoundly deaf swagman, and we dropped the idea. As a tribute to Ermyntrude, we later took the polite, but misleading course of altering the way we are identified in all the surviving public records.

So when you encounter the expression 'mad sheep' in this history, please think of us as "slightly eccentric sheep", though some of our human friends persist in calling us "totally weird sheep". We are completely comfortable with that, because we know the limitations that humans operate under. We are no longer mad sheep.

That said, this disclaimer does not apply to the entity we call King George III, and you will see why we draw a line there, soon enough. Even our titular leader clearly says (and said) that he is several shingles short of a picnic.

Anyhow, you may now see why we made our selected annalist drop his original title for this tale, Sheep May Safely Craze, even though we allowed him to reproduce all the dialogue, just as it happened. In exchange for his caving in on the title, we allowed him to be ruthlessly honest in all other matters.

This is a True Story.

Hypatia Bluetooth, R.E.M.*

* Red-Eye Master

Prologue

To begin at the ending (and this is quite helpful as a way of reassuring excessively nervous readers), the sheep had completed their quest and won, so they were now free, but the first dawn of their new freedom saw them stuck with a great deal of filing. Some of them even muttered darkly about Pyrrhic victories.

Of course, it might have been worse, because the winners in any quest must always face the stern and precise requirements of the five Protocols of Postadventurism. The rats had gone somewhere, Eric, Alice and the ravens were headed for Paris, and the sheep were left to tidy up. According to a paragraph (in somebody else's hand-writing, but found on an early page in Hypatia's notes), this requirement exists mainly to stop winners getting too full of themselves when they successfully complete their allotted tasks in a quest. Aided by Alice and Eric, the sheep had completed every task, and now was the time for comeuppance.

Even Erasmus, who had done this before, could not recall the full details of the Protocols, so Hypatia had made a quick dive into the Library of Lost Manuscripts, read up on the subject, and returned to tell the others they had got off lucky.

"As it has turned out, we did very well," she said. "By tradition and law, those left standing after any adventure must meet the exacting terms of a total of five Protocols, but, but as things have turned out, only the last Protocol really needs any attention. True, even that one's onerous, but at least it's far less messy."

She went on to explain that the first of the Protocols involves sorting out dead bodies, including body parts and portions too large to fit in a bucket, but there were none of those. The second relates to damaged people and property, along with smaller loose or separated body parts, and there were none of those either, while the third Protocol (stitching, gluing, soldering and minor surgical procedures) was clearly not applicable.

The fourth Protocol is mainly concerned with the mopping up of blood, but after a quick discussion, the sheep agreed that, even under a generous and loose reading of the text of the Protocols, bleeding noses caused by high-kicking IT people doing the can-can in their celebratory conga line shouldn't really count as Adventure-related, so the survivors could ignore the fourth Protocol as well.

That just left the fifth and final Protocol, which deals with Filing, and as finger-wagging lawyers will tell you, that one can neither be avoided nor evaded. In the aftermath, there is always a great deal of serious Filing to be done, and those who are still conscious and upright must set to work, each in his, or her, own way.

True, some of their efforts did not necessarily lie entirely within the strict meanings set out in section 84 (2) (b) (iii) of the Protocols Interpretation Act, but Hypatia decided to let that ride. Just being seen to be filing was what mattered most, so Myfanwy was filing a callus on her right front hoof, a lump caused by the waldos she wore for operating keyboards and calculators.

Beside her, and totally unaware that these items were all made from papier mâché, King George III was filing the padlock on the ball and chain that Health and Safety had attached to his ankle, just before midnight. His file was also made of papier mâché, but nobody said a word to George about how that choice of materials was related to his slow progress in the act of freeing himself. Nobody minded, because this kept him out of harm’s way.

As a group, the Second XI red sheep conga line, weren't very bright, either, and their Filing consisted of forming a line (as they explained to Erasmus, they were in single file) and zipping back and forth across the floor, trying out the advanced moves that the élite First XI had shown off, late on the previous night.

Wisely, they elected not to try imitating the moves of the IT people, even though the IT can-can conga had totally eclipsed the First XI's performance.

All the same, the actions of the Second XI were enough to cause Erasmus to wonder briefly if any of the first four Protocols might soon come back into play, but Erasmus often worried about the wrong things. In hindsight, he should really have been worrying about Loki, who had stripped down his abnormality projector, and was using a triangular file, to give it a hair trigger, but that's another story.

Only Erasmus and Hypatia were doing things that qualified as Filing within the strict and rigid meaning of the fifth Protocol. At the end, as Hypatia slammed the last box-file shut, a sheet of paper flew loose, and drifted, almost unseen, to the floor. Humming Candle in the Wind with a conga rhythm that wrong-footed the entire Second XI, King George III bent and picked up the paper before he passed it up to Hypatia.

She saw that the loose sheet was a photocopied page from the simplified popular version of Alice's thesis, and Hypatia glanced at it idly, then did a double-take before scrutinizing it closely, after which she went several interesting and non-standard colours.

Some of the Second XI were also oddly coloured now, but we can afford to ignore them for now, because they do not appear again as a group. "This is where it went pear-shaped," she shouted, banging her waldo down on the sheet and leaving a small tear in it. "Look! It all began after the rats read this!"

Erasmus skimmed the sheet, and grunted his agreement. King George III shuffled back to the other side of the room, crooning Both Ends of the Candle and dragging his ball and chain through the Second XI, who were still on the floor, and still wrong-footed. They shrieked in a dutifully loyal sort of way as the papier mâché ball ran over their legs, but he ignored them. "What rats?" he asked.

Hypatia had deduced that the problems began when They (meaning the rats, or as she sniffily called them, "The Wrong People") read Alice's book, A Brief History of Cryolinguistic Quantum Rabbit Hole Theory, the popular and dumbed-down spin-off from her PhD thesis.

We will come to who the rats were later. In good time, we will come also to why Hypatia called them The Wrong People; who Alice was; and even who Hypatia was. King George III, on the other hand, may need to remain inexplicable, due to stringent health and safety regulations. We'll look into the safe portion of his case at the appropriate time. Like the dark side of pea soup, the teeth of Professor Fred Hay and the strictly theoretical aspects of lower mathematics, some things are best left unmentioned and unexplored.

According to Hypatia, the text on that single page had inspired the rats to set off on one of their devious plots, and clearly, none of their drawn-out adventure would ever have happened without that sheet of paper, and somewhere, the soul of a tree exulted, now that it knew it had not died in vain.

So here is the short sample of Alice's work that King George III had picked up, because, in time, this will all make perfect sense.

***

Some universes are fragile and unstable. All the best theorists believe there are many bifurcating universes, which diverged wildly when small but lasting changes caused them to drift apart after somebody made an idiosyncratic choice. Most of these theorists are unsure what 'idiosyncratic' means, but they believe that using it adds bonus points to any scholarly paper.

The experts are wrong about the bonus points, but spot on with the cosmology. Many universes are indeed oddly shaped, and in quite a few of them, Columbus fell off the Earth's edge. In others, the bronze-skinned seafaring inhabitants of Massachusetts sailed east across the Atlantic in pedal-powered ocean liners. Soon after the Black Death faded away, they took over Europe and replaced its huddled farms with bison-covered plains.

In a few universes, the Invisigoths came out of hiding (they were very good at that) and seized the Roman Empire, before inventing the bicycle and conquering the rest of the world with their cunningly camouflaged bicycle cavalry. Those time lines (or at least the ones with bicycle pumps) never saw the Invisigoths coming. They felt them, though.

To this day, the swarm of universes that we call the 'Profundo set' remain permanently deliriously happy, because Adam and Eve thought the apple tree might have been sprayed, so the apples were sure to fail their organic certification. They had no proof of this of course: it was just something about the shifty look on the face of the angel who told them to leave the apples alone. That angel most definitely had something to hide, so instead of trying the apple, they sent out for pizza.

Many universes don't get far, though, because someone believes the red button really wants to be pressed, that vaccines are the work of the devil, or climate change was invented by scientists as a scam to get better research funding. Those universes are all doomed.

There remains a small handful of universes where kangaroos hop around on ingeniously designed Pogo sticks which work on water; unemployable marketing graduates are given gainful work translating Tortellini verse into English; people wear transparent socks; every household has, as a matter of course, a robotic pomposity defenestrator and nobody at all is ever troubled by the apparently lewd sound of the word 'futtocks'.

In those lucky universes, Aeolian pantechnicons patrol the streets, distributing buckets of potentiated rosewater to the deserving poor; gang green is the new black; and ice cream soup on a bun is all the rage.

Unless extreme intelligence is strategically applied, the basic universe form operates like a black hole, drawing wavering universes back into its grasp and smearing out their individuality.

In other words, anything is possible but most universes are blandly similar, and the ones diverting and developing in interesting ways usually slide back and merge once more to form the core of the mainstream universe cluster.

In these universes, spin doctors; media moguls; tax dodgers; medical quacks; heritage destroyers; anti-vaxxers; casino operators; gig-economy newspaper delivery contractors; conservative politicians who started out running furniture shops; mining magnates and other blatant scofflaws are looked up to, and given leadership roles. From these exalted positions, those leaders cheerfully designate their own universes as normal.

Then again, a simple act, like hearing "stand-up comedian" when the speaker actually said "stand-up chameleon", or playing 'The Camels Are Coming' when the song sheet specified 'The Candles Are Gumming' may be all that it takes to effect the entry into an innocent universe of undesirable things like zombie dodos, rabid budgerigars, hoop snakes, venomous fruit flies, or eccentric sheep for that matter.

But that's another story…

Alice Liddell, A Brief History of Cryolinguistic Quantum Rabbit Hole Theory, p. 1984. Richmond: Breeks Anathema Press, 2037 (limited vellum edition).

***

And that, Hypatia said as she slammed the last box-file into the cabinet and banged the drawer shut, was where it all went pair-shaped, and by pair, she meant Alice and Eric. We will come to Alice shortly: first, we need a closer look at Eric, and how he became involved, right back at the start.

 ***

Eric Blair would begin to panic, precisely five minutes from now. He didn't know, just yet, why he would panic, nor did he even know that he would panic, because he usually caused serious concern and fear, rather than experiencing it, largely on account of his most prominent feature, his nose. Sometimes, as he floated on his back while swimming, nearby people saw his nose, screamed and fled for the shallows and the shore.

Once on the beach, they would wave their arms and sound shark alarms, because these foolish people had failed to notice his slim, slightly-taller-than average runner's body, or his mop of fair hair. They also missed his unshark-like, piercing blue eyes. People never think deeply when they panic, not even Eric.

As foreshadowed above, very soon, the young man in question would panic quite a bit, just because he had been wished a good morning. Looking at the big picture, he was probably quite right to panic, but his initial reasons for deep concern weren't the ones that became apparent later.

First, he had to wake up from a dream about strippers. Now before anybody gets the wrong impression, it was more of a nightmare than a dream. The strippers Eric saw in his mind were asset strippers, not well-endowed and limber young people with carefully designed, calculated, prepared and functioning future wardrobe malfunctions.

Let it be understood, though, that the asset strippers in his dream weren't the grey-faced balding men he had worked with until a few weeks ago either, though they were probably based on those people. These strippers were large and toothy male things, part alligator, part weasel, but grossly overweight, a bit like sumo boa constrictors, wearing formal attire and identical chrome-yellow top hats that owed the shape of their brims to industrial hard hats.

Where the strippers' drool hit the ground, the local plants withered; concrete was pitted; and small animals fled in unspeakable and abject terror. Nearby paint blistered; birdsong died; banshees hid and howled in fear; and the thorns on brambles turned into vipering, putrescent goo.

In his dream, the strippers snickered and giggled as they pillaged Eric's computer for spare parts. Tears of mirth ran down their cheeks as they ripped and stripped, their repulsive fat bodies wobbling with laughter as they worked. The air was filled with the plinking sound of stripped parts dropping into glass vials and dishes. It was a sound that made small birds wince, and fly off to Polar regions, while Eric whimpered in his sleep, rolled over, and covered his ears.

So all in all, Eric's dream was no fun at all. Mind you, if Alice had been there, and she caught him dreaming about the other sort of stripper, that would have been no fun either. Still, he wasn't dreaming of that sort of stripper, Alice wasn't there, and she isn't part of the story just yet. Be patient.

Seeing his computer stripped, even in a dream, was a traumatic experience for any cosmologist, even a cosmologist who, like Eric, had gone over to the Dark Side, to work in what insiders called the Financial Derivatives gulag at Mega Global Limited, where his money market colleagues had referred to him as "our tame rocket scientist".

To be fair, Eric had quickly realised that in the world of Financial Derivatives, he was like a fish out of water, luck and breakfast, in that order. He was bright enough to see that he would soon be a fish out of work as well, so after causing a small fuss, Eric had jumped ship, something very few fish get to do, unless they happen to be flying fish who are frequent users of banned sporting supplements.

As he explained it to Alice, "At least while it lasted, I was a well-paid fish, and now I'm a very well-paid-off fish." Eric had squeezed a nice golden parachute from the company, in exchange for his signature on a deed of eternal silence on certain irregularities he had found, but that payment came only after he handed over to two sweaty men, with no necks and not many teeth, a large box of what his employers believed were the encrypted printouts of their files, even though the pages were merely covered with what looked like gibberish. Only Eric and Alice knew that the files really were gibberish.

Sometimes, in the small dark hours, just before dawn, Eric worried that his former masters might discover his trick and appear on his doorstep, wanting their money back, and in all probability, that fear was what caused his recurring nightmares about the asset strippers taking revenge. Apart from the bad dreams, he was "resting between jobs", and sharing a house with some lively friendly minds. Living there, being a bit frugal, Eric thought he had enough cash for several years of leisure. He loved Alice, she loved him, and all was well with the world, at least during daylight hours.

He devoted his time to trying to find a method to invert 7-dimensional matrices, and failing. Later, he felt better when Myfanwy told him that even the prionic cows, his world's greatest mathematical geniuses, had failed this particular challenge.

Still, as we have seen, Eric was haunted most nights by those troublesome dreams filled with the horrors of his former trade. Demons resembling the asset strippers; the merchant bankers; market traders and executives in the Product Creation Division of Mega Global Limited, gathered each night as slumber closed in on him, surrounding and subduing him with sinister rattles; foul giggles; hoarse whines and fearsome threats.

Many of the sane people at MGL (and as any sane person would predict, the rational and sane ones were all in IT, working among the broken hand-me-down furniture that was their lot, in their lair in a hidden basement) wondered if the Product Creation people were cloned somewhere deep within a fetid, pox-filled swamp. On the other hand, in Eric's dreams there were numberless hordes of them, extruded with a glooping sound from steaming vats filled with something that his dreams remained diplomatically unclear about.

Whatever was bubbling around in those vats, Eric was quite sure he never wanted to dream any sorts of smells, ever. That was an important clue, when he opened his eyes and saw what appeared to be a yellow sheep standing on his pillow. Its breath smelled like new-mown hay, and since he could smell it, he knew this was no dream, or at the very least, it was not a normal dream.

The panic was about to begin.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 … 

1. The sheep and the jeep

"Good morning, Eric!" the yellow sheep greeted him in a well-modulated contralto voice with a Welsh accent. Eric turned away, then back again, considering this sheep slowly, thinking at about the same speed that an ingrown toenail grows inwards, or tectonic plates drift along. Alice explained this analogy to him later, saying it was an appropriate pairing, because the in-growing toenail causes pain, and the drift causes earthquakes and tsunamis. Sadly, she wasn't there to share that insight right then, so he had no warning of what was coming.