Critics, malice and criticism

 

I have just transferred this from my Playwiths blog to here. Since i posted it there, it has slipped into my now-published commonplace book, Sign on the Dotted Lion, available from Amazon as an e-book (recommended), or as a dead-tree book. It would make a very suitable Christmas present for people who like a bit of savagery.

If I have sent this before, so be it. I just came across the Radulph quote while reading on a bus. After I recovered from a snorting attack, I recalled that I had previously filed it.

Then I found all of this lot. I must have had more spare time, back then.

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.

 

Carrying on with the wildlife

For those of you who have just arrived in this universe, I am a trained botanist and zoologist, and wildlife is my thing.

It is spring here in Australia, and everything is boiling over, bursting into bloom and stuff, and I have been leading friends, relations and the general public on wildlife tours.

Now a bit of background: I enjoy pulling legs, and several years ago, Chris and I were having lunch at a boatshed on Akuna Bay. Having been there before, I asked for some crusts to feed the fish.

We were watched by some American tourists who clearly had their wits about them. So when one asked if I knew the names of the fish, I sagely advised them that fortuitously, I did. "What are their names?"

I pointed: "Alfred over there, Mary, Bessie and Albert." Then,  laughter subsiding, I said I was a far better botanist, but even there, I sometimes failed to know a name: botanical biodiversity is an Australian thing, and when anybody asked me the name of a plant I did not know,  my response was always 'Albert'. 

The other day, while leading a tour along a steel track in a swamp, a lady alerted me that there was a diamond python beside the track. I asked my party to walk quietly, and got my shot before ushering them through.

"Will it bite?" several nervous ones asked.

"No," I said. "That's Albert!"

Assured that the snake had a name, they all walked through, past it.

Ho hum, one more tour tomorrow, then I can get back to this sort of thing. which is my latest hobby:

Eva's track and its flowers.

There are a few drawbacks with this track, like its soggy nature, so wear good boots. Also, there are said to be a few red-bellied black snakes, and while people have told me the ones around here are quite shy, the ones I know best are from New England, and those can be quite aggressive. I threw a stick off to the right, which should make a shy snake go to the left. This one dashed to the right, and chased a second stick further, at which point, we skittled through.

If you live near where I do, you can find this bush track, but only friends get the map, because there are flower thieves about. If you Google it, you can find it, but thieves are low on Google fu. This walk has drops and rises and mud that I can manage without a pole, and I have passed four score years. Still, being cunning, I will take a pole hereafter.

The track takes its name from a Silesian lady, so Eva more or less rhymes with never. Apparently, she loved the wildflowers there, and a good friend told me to watch out for orchids, just before she showed me this one on another track: it is a sun orchid, Thelymitra, and most of them are still in bud.

This orchid may be on Eva's track, but I was on my own, and watching my step carefully (concerned about falls and snakes), so I missed seeing any orchids, but, there were two species of Boronia, first B. pinnata, and then the one that gets stolen, B. ledifolia.

The track has a mix of environments, some of them quite soggy, and two entry points, one near my home, and the other requiring an agile duck under the water pipeline, and you need to know where to duck under, so try the other entry first, or apply a keen eye as you wander along beside the pipeline.

Another flower of note on this track is Dampiera stricta, small and sort of blue-mauve, I think (I am colour-blind, so check the picture on the left). In September, as I write this, they fill in the expanses of green, and the plant is also popular in gardens. The petal pattern tells us it fits into the Goodeniaceae, the family that takes its name from the Goodenia.

Then there is the dogrose, Bauera rubioides, with its characteristic downcast flowers, and I seem to recall having a saccharine children's book about some sort of terrible shame being brought down upon the flower. It maust have had a happy ending, but I would happily see all authors who write simpering tales of anthropomorphism brought to an unhappy ending.

Anyhow, the plant is quite widespread, but not all that common. On the left, Burchardia umbellata is pretty enough for some to count it as an orchid, which it is not: it is in the mostly African family Colchicaceae.

It gains a common name: 
milkmaids

The ti-trees (pronounced and often written as tea-trees), are in the genus Leptospermum , in the family Myrtaceae. There are various myths about early scurvy cases in 1788 being treated with tea brewed from their leaves, but my book Australianisms, which looks at when terms came into use in Australia, has tea-tree as a medicinal only in the 1870s.

On the right, this is Leptospermum squarrosum, the Pink Ti-tree. So: there are some pretty flowers to see on Eva's track, and I never saw a snake: as I walk lightly, that makes the risk of you encountering one even less,

We need more teacher-librarians, not less!

Last week, teacher-librarians at 58 schools in the Newcastle/Maitland diocese were informed they were either being made redundant or ‘redeployed’.  This is not an isolated event: across Australia, teacher-librarians are quietly being phased out of schools. 

I have taught at every level from kindergarten to undergraduate and adult education. I have a Master's degree in Education, specialising in assessment and evaluation, and I retired from the education sector at the age of 43 as a Principal Education Officer, to pursue other interests. I had directed the recovery of the 1985 HSC examinations after a disaster at the Government Printing Office had made a disaster seem inevitable.

I am, first and foremost, a meticulous planner and cunning writer, with a nose for stupidity, and the skill to prepare for it, so I had done so, and I had plans for most kinds of disaster. I knew the smell of rank mental corruption, and that is relevant here: nobody has heard of the 1985 HSC disaster, because I stopped it dead, and I also defeated the internal ghoul who was trying to sabotage us (I was ready for him as well). Thanks to me, the disaster never happened, and that got me bumped up to Principal at the age of 41, well ahead of the normal.

The scheme to do away with teacher-librarians stinks, and it must be stopped. It must not pass! Read my background again: add in that I was the policy advisor and fixer to the two statutory boards that controlled education in Ausralia's largest state, and you will realise that I may just be entitled to call myself qualified to call out maladministration.

In my writing career, I won a number of major awards, and even more minor ones, writing for children. Along the way, my later career was littered with fraud cases that I broke. That is relevant because it is my professional assessment that the dunces who plan to do away with teacher-librarians are the very lowest grade of frauds. They pretend to be adninistrators, and they are the sort of people I would normally dismiss with a sneer, as beneath my interest.

In my teaching career, it was my pleasure at one point to banjax an unqualified and illiterate principal (I had first taught the literate members of staff to call him "Wackford Squeers" *) because he declared that we did not need a library: "you can get everything off the internet"' he told us. Kids need libraries, and libraries need teacher-librarians, because TLs are first and foremost trained as teachers before getting specialist library training, all aimed at shaping kids' minds and directing their skills as Young Discoverers. Teaching without TLs is like raising an army by giving youngsters guns and saying "get out there and fight!".

I concluded that I was about number 6 on his shit-list of urbane intellectuals, so having assembled a nice dirt file, and needled him until I hit number one spot and went for the jugular. Poor bugger, hadn't stopped to wonder why the debates master kept annoying him, but my methods remain sealed, just in case I need them again. Suffice it to say that the dirt file's existence was flagged, and those interested knew I would make it available.

The Peter Principle (no relation to me) says that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. I have seen three cases where the subject entered, already above his (it's  generally a male thing) level of incompetence, and so had no limit to their further rises. In educational administration, I submit that this is very common, and may well explain the Maitland/Newcastle stupidity.

Let me stress: getting rid of teacher/librarians is an act of extreme ignorance, with or without total incompetence. But how do I know about TLs and their roles?

As the main content provider for WebsterWorld, the Australian competitor to Microsoft's Encarta, I worked very closely with TLs and reference librarians for five years, and I have maintained the links and their passion for feeding minds.

And "Squeers", the principal who knew it all? He was so innumerate around computers that he could not even hide from me that he was playing Solitaire in his office. Of course, I never told him that I could see his screen in the glass-fronted book-free book case that sat behind his desk, when he thought I assumed he was working. Now THAT was a Catholic school: I wonder if he has found a part among this singularly philistine bunch of boors, yahoos and ignorami?

Disclaimer: I have no idea how the Wackford Squeers Depreciation Society found out about the book case and what it revealed. Absolutely none.

_____________________________________________

* Wackford Squeers? It's a Dickensian reference to a fictional evil headmaster in Nicholas Nickleby. My version was hardest on the kids I sought to protect from that vile man.

Springtime, it brings on the wildflowers

 Australian readers may be moved to song by that title, others may need to seek help to understand it. These days, wool is not such a major export, and shearing is a dying art, but even in suburbia, our Australian wildflowers are going bananas, and that's an Australianism that is now in my new book of Australian lingo, to be found on that link (hint get the ebook, which is cheaper and updated more often, f'rinstance by adding bananas, going, 31 August).

Foir foreigners, 'bush' is what you would call 'forest' or 'woods': because most Australian soils are ancient and poor, our bush plants show amazing diversity, and there are always some in flower.

This is Boronia, probably B. ledifolia, one of our prettiest bush flowers. It is growing in a patch of bush, less than two paces from a busy road, within 200 metres of where we now live. Sadly, most of it was stripped out, some time last week.

Freed for the moment from writing, I have been out and about, plying my original trade of botanising.  Let me say, though, that even without a real winter, there is a sudden spurt in the number of flowering plants, about a month before our vernal equinox, and we go from 25 species in flower to 50 or 60 this past week, at least on the larger patch of North Head (250 hectares or a square mile).

Now you may or may not know that Chris and I are both botanists, and we trained at the University of Sydney when that was the only place in Australia where systematic botany was taught, so we notice what is around. We really got into that during covid, when bushwalking was one of the few allowable things.

Even in my new suburban environment, walking along one fire trail as it changes down into a foot and bike track, I scored about 24 species blooming this morning. One of these, the Boronia above, is especially likely to be stolen by thieves, so while those who know me can work out where these grow, I am saying only that they come from a higher part of the Northern Beaches of Sydney.

Heading out our gate and turning right onto the fire trail, my first find was a Patersonia, aka a Native Iris.

This delightful plant blooms, based on some set of environmental factors, but only for one day. (My pet theory is that they get a go signal from the internet, but they are certainly synchronised, and being serious, it may be hours of sunshine, temperature or rain.)

There are at least two species of Patersonia in this area.

Now we turn to the Sydney Golden Wattle, Acacia longifolia, which has been uncouth and ill-behaved for the past two years. It used to come out on June 28, but moved back to June 24, and last year, came out in late July, and this year was out around July 14. In my view, this gave Australia its national colours.

Next, meet Epacris microphylla. The Epacridaceae are our answer to the heaths of Europe, and they are many and varied. This one, usually likes 'wet feet', but here, was growing on high ground.

Plants, we have to realise, are often anarchists. and as a former anarchist/surrealist bureaucrat, I cheer them on. So there: they will get no unsmiley snarly faces from me.

There are many members of the Leptospermum or ti-tree genus, and I suspect that we have three of them here. Go and look, if you know where I was working, and decide for yourself.

Most people assume that Darwinia was named after Charles Darwin, who popped into Sydney in 1836 and disappeared a month later, entirely unnoticed. In fact, it was named for his grandfather Erasmus, who was so mighty that he  had a semi-circle cut out of the dining table to let him get his paws closer to his dinner.

The track has more than plants, dogs and cyclists: there are also spiders like these ones, sheltering under a web in a rut left by a wheel.

Now here is another Epacris, and in the way of settlers, this one was dubbed 'native Fuchsia'. In the absence of any evidence of an Australian (pre-1788) name for it, I just call it Epacris longiflora.

This is one of the many 'bush peas', and I am afraid that I am less than expert at naming these things, so just call it, as most botanists do, 'eggs and bacon'.

Why? Look at the colours!

Now the next on was part of our university teacher's primary interest: the Goodeniaceae. I think I can safely label this as Scaevola scandens (almost probably, certainly maybe).

Now we come to a puzzle to most botanists, but not me, because I always run-and-find-out.

It turns out that the genus Grevillea was named to commemorate Charles Francis Greville, a founder of the Royal Horticultural Society. Like the Banksia and waratah, it is a member of the Proteaceae.

This one I choose to identify only as Grevillea sp., which is botanical shorthand  for "look, I know it's a Grevillea, but the species name has escaped my mind."

This sort of thing happens all the time in botany, but this next one is Grevillea buxifolia, the box-leaf Grevillea, aka the grey spider-flower, although my colleagues on North Head just refer to it as "bux".

Since covid, Chris and I have noticed that it is always blooming.

Now here is Phebalium, a small and unassuming plant, which seems to have a bit of a name for causing allergies, if touched.

We have done so without ill effect, but just a note of caution there.

And now, at last, a pea that I can put a name to: this one is Bossiaea, and it has large flowers with these colours.

Pimelea sp. is the rice flower, and this one (now) emerges at the end of August.

Westringia sp. is commonly known as the coastal rosemary.

It is quite common on North Head in a cultivar that I suspect was planted by the army, but suspicions aren't proof.

Hibbertia sp. occurs in a number of species on North Head, including one, H. scandens, which has proved such a pest that we no longer plant, and actively remove it.

Thankfully, this is a different one.

Boronia sp. is still to be found on the fire trail, just where it changes into a bike track and footpath.

With luck the flower thieves won't find it.

This is a Eucalyptus, a gum tree to ordinary Australians. The flowers will eventually become gumnuts.

That is what you can find on a single typical track, where what passes for soil is the largely sterile sand that comes from the Triassic (quarter billion year old) Hawkesbury sandstone.

I will be back to this area, because there are quite a few other plants that will be bobbing up here, over the next few months, and this is now one of my regular pads.

Moving residence does that to you.

About Sheep May Safely Craze

Sheep May Safely Craze: a gloomy prospectus

In this novel, you will learn of the πth dimension, a fish called Dada, how Hannibal really got the elephants over the Alps, sesquivalent zinc and hemisemidemiconductors, but there will be nothing about the obscene verses of Cosher Bailey.

The sample below does not mention the ravens who used to be dragons, the role the Lone Ranger played in  triggering their change, what caused the Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii, or the vampire wannabe novelists, Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland. Or how Dr Moreau operated on King George III, or who really warned Julius Caesar about the Ides of March. These were all in the NDA I signed, but the rats' lawyer was a crook, and for two doubloons and residual rights, she made sure that the NDA said nothing about any books, so you can find most of it in this ebook and dead tree book.

The NDA also said nothing about the dark side of pea soup, but I have been counselled against even mentioning that topic.

The Sample

Since the dawn of time, humans have always pondered: what is life? why are we here? is there life after death?  This book does not answer any of those questions, but it has nice colours.
—Loki Svartifossson, R. E. M.

Loki-verification: with the exception of this statement, absolutely nothing in this book is completely untrue.

Prologue

Reader, here, we reduce a tale of multidimensional beings to a linear narrative. Just hang onto your hat, seat and undergarments (also your teeth, if the Ninja Tooth Fairy warning light is flashing). We will be as gentle as we can.

<SPOILER ALERT> To begin at the ending (and this is quite helpful as a way of reassuring any excessively nervous readers), the sheep had completed their quest and had very clearly won. <END SPOILER ALERT> So now they were free from all compulsion, but the first dawn of their new freedom saw them stuck with a great deal of filing. Some of the more classically trained ones even muttered darkly about Pyrrhic victories.

Of course, it might have been worse, because the winners in any quest must always meet the stern and precise requirements of the five Protocols of Postadventurism. The rats had gone off somewhere, Eric, Alice and the ravens were headed for Paris, and as usual, the sheep were left with the task of tidying up and clearing away.

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 have successfully completed their allotted tasks in a quest. Aided by Alice and Eric, the sheep had completed every single task in their quest (OK. so there was only one…), and now was the time for somebody’s comeuppance. It was No Free Lunch time…

Even Erasmus, who had been through all of this before, could not recall the full details of the Protocols, so Hypatia went into the Library of Lost Manuscripts while the others stopped for coffee, read up on the subject, and returned to tell them they had got off lucky.

“It seems we did very well,” she said, in a fruity school-marmish contralto. “By tradition and law, those left standing at the declared end of any adventure must meet the specific terms of a total of five Protocols, but as things have turned out, only the last Protocol really needs any attention. That said, even that one can be 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 as they all agreed after looking around, those bits were all entirely absent. The second item relates to damaged people and property, along with smaller loose, lopped 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 all 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, and leave the robotic floor scrubbers to deal with it.

That meant that the fifth and final Protocol was all they had to work on. That one deals with Filing — and as finger-wagging lawyers will tell you, that requirement 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.

While it may be argued that some of their own-way efforts did not necessarily lie entirely within the strict meanings set out in section 84 (2) (b) (iii) of the Protocols Interpretation Act, Hypatia had decided to let that ride. Just being seen to be filing if the inspectors came in would meet the letter of the law, so Myfanwy was filing a callus on her right front hoof, a lump caused by the waldos she wore for operating keyboards, phones and calculators.

Beside her, and totally unaware that all the items in question were 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, as the conga line went can-can. His file was also made of papier mâché, but nobody said a word to George about how that choice of materials might be related to his slow progress in the act of freeing himself.

Nobody minded his failure to contribute, because this task kept him engaged, slightly amused, and out of harm’s way, and as Hypatia pointed out, if the inspectors did show up, they would go after him first, and arguing with King George III invariably made inspectors collapse into a confused slumber. George may have been short on IQ points, but his fracturing illogic was a weapon of mass distraction.

As a group, the reserve team red sheep conga line, weren’t very bright, either, and their Filing consisted of forming a line (after all, as they explained to Erasmus, they were in single file) and zipping back and forth across the floor, trying out the less outrageous of the advanced moves that the élite top team had shown off, late on the previous night. Wisely, these second-tier sheep elected not to try imitating the moves of the IT people, whose can-can conga had totally eclipsed the top team’s performance.

All the same, the actions of the reserves were enough to cause Erasmus to wonder briefly if any elements 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 donned his blue waldos, and stripped down his abnormality projector, before using a triangular file to give it a hair trigger, but that’s another story.

Only Erasmus and Hypatia were doing things that truly 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 single sheet of paper flew loose, and drifted, almost unseen, to the floor. Humming Candle in the Wind with a twisted and inverted conga rhythm that totally wrong-footed the entire reserve team, King George III bent and picked up the paper before he passed it up to Hypatia.

* * *

See? More smart-arsery, and in most cases running several layers deep. F'rinstance, do the names Eric Blair and Alice Liddell ring a vague bell? Here's a hint: in another quarter, Eric Blair wrote Homage to Catatonia, and Alice Liddell worked with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on looking-glasses, but my latest NDA allows me to go no further.

That one (the book or the NDA?) is scary!

Some thoughts about sharing history

It will be noticed that the teaching of history is conspicuous by its absence. But for Australians, who so far have no history of their own, this important area of knowledge comes last. History is only taught in the State schools of Australia by means of unconnected accounts strewn throughout the six graded books (called royal readers), which are used to teach the children to read. It is not enough.
 — Oscar Comettant, In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines, 154.

I am a member of Project Wombat: an international gang of devotees of the fictional Greek goddess Erudite. We burrow for hard to find facts. Some of what I will be serving up hereafter is based on things I have written over the past fifty years, as I indulged (1) my curiosity about what happened when, and (2) my taste for the muted rabble-roused riot that is the story of recent (post invasion) Australia.

This won't be Grand Approved History, with lists of dates and lots of dead white males, as approved by conservative politicians: this is the warts and all version, the small realities that make us Us. It will be, to be honest, gossip disguised as social history . It is the stuff I was never taught in school, like the following little known act of female larrikinism that took place in Melbourne in 1901. These ladies may have acted up, but they were Australians, and I think they deserve our admiration.

The ladies, in their eagerness to show their loyalty, climbed on their chairs, waved their handkerchiefs, and joined as loudly in the applause as their powers would admit. It was a fitting conclusion to a magnificent ceremony.
—The Brisbane Courier, 10 May 1901, 5.

That account described the opening of the first Australian Parliament in Melbourne in May 1901, and most Australians were ecstatic. A century earlier, in 1801, Australian society ladies (we must have had several of them by then) would never have stood on chairs , or waved handkerchiefs and if they had, it would have been hushed up. Hiding that sort of thing was easy when Australia s historical records were written with quill pens (steel pens came later) in special books, or on sheets of paper that were later bound into books. There was usually only one copy, easily misfiled

I once acquired a manuscript foolscap ledger. It came my way in a box of books from a deceased estate , and it was clearly important , so I consulted a rare books librarian at the University of Sydney's Fisher Library. He immediately implored me to donate the volume to Fisher, but I decided to consult somebody at the State Library's Mitchell Library first. Then on the way across town, I popped in and showed the volume to an antiquarian bookseller of my acquaintance. He took one look and offered me $200 for it.

I was a young science undergraduate, and that was a lot of money back in 1966, but I knew my apples. When I said "Henry, I think you'll find that this comes under the Archives Act", his face took on a definite pallor I don't think he expected a spotty youth to know about the relevant legislation, but I did and clearly, he knew about the Act as well.

At the Mitchell Library, I was handed over to an important person, and when she declared the work genuine, I told her that I would bring it in next week, once I had photocopied it. No, you won't, she told me gently but firmly This is a Black Book, and I've seen Tasmanian ones, but no other New South Wales volumes exist. It's very rare, and it's staying here!

I agreed and when I told her about Henry's offer, I was slightly deafened as she ground her teeth. You see, the ledger was a list of convicts in the Hunter Valley, their crimes in Britain, ships and sentences, their assigned masters, each offence they had been tried for in Australia, the witnesses called, and the punishments meted out, so we could both see its importance.

“And if you'd sold it to that old rogue , it would have disappeared forever, she told me. I produced the wrapping I had found it in, and b etween us, we deduced that this document , recording many convicts and their misdeeds, had been in a courthousecourthouse in Burwood, before it was sent to Manly in Burwood, before it was sent to Manly courthouse in the 1930s, and fell into the hands of in the 1930s, and fell into the hands of the deceased owner of the estate. Probably, said the librarian, it had  been stolenstolen to cover up the name of a convict ancestor.

The volume did indeed come under the Act, and it now lives in the State Archives. When I say records can go astray, I mean it.  This is why we often don't know how, or why, people did things as they did, because the humdrum and the ordinary if they had ever even been mentioned, became collateral damage as unfortunate facts and uncomfortable truths were deep sixed.

Then again, some record keepers were good at their duties but their handwriting was atrocious, which helped hide the details. Another librarian told me once that a researcher she knew had concluded that a single hand had written the whole of one set of shipping records. Some pages were neat and clear but others were totally illegible, and the researcher believed the official might sometimes have been drunk, reducing his lists on those days to a fearful scrawl. We will never know, now, we will never read some of the pages, either, and already, many young people can no longer read even a clear cursive script.

Even if the records survived and the handwriting was clear, later scholars had to travel to where the registers, records, ledgers account books, lists and letters were stored. Most of these are now in Australia, but others are or were in Britain, so r esearch cost time and money especially time. Locally held microfilms still give the reader walloping great headaches, and microfiches are almost as bad.

Now more and more of the surviving old records and rare books have been digitised and are online, so we can sit comfortably at our desks, sipping tea and reading documents that are stored on the other side of the street, the town, or the world. Distance is no problem any more, because our world has repeatedly changed.

There have been five distinct quantum leaps (a term I use in its correct, scientific sense) in the elimination of distance for Australians. The first was when steamships replaced sail and reduced the time to or from Europe from up to half a year to a couple of months, via the overland route at Suez, and later, through the Suez Canal

Miss Douglas “planting” the first post for the Overland Telegraph.

The second change came just a few year s later, when the Overland Telegraph, combined with cables under the sea, reduced the time it took for vital news to cross the world from two months to a day or less, just as rail lines and a growing sense of common destiny linked our scattered colonies to gether. These first two advances happened in colonial times and both changed Australia.

The other three improvements came in post colonial times: the availability of jet travel that takes us to Europe in around 24 hours, the introduction of satellite TV, and the internet. Today, thanks to modern technology, we can all read the real stories of real people from the past, using original sources, sitting anywhere in the world.

In the 21st century, writers aren't the only ones to scour the records , so every history reader can now be a history researcher. I have always cherished the view of computer art that two of my favourite mathematicians once offered their readers, because their vision applies to many other pursuits, including history!

If computer art has a future as an art form in its own right, it is to be found in the dynamic, the animated, the interactive. It should look not towards Rembrandt, but towards Verdi’s ‘Aïda’. Not just the classical ‘Aïda’, but an ‘Aïda’ with the audience singing along and scrambling onto the backs of the elephants on stage. Chaos? No. Total theatre.
— Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes’ Dream, Penguin, 53.

I also have a personal reason for doubting all official records, because I was born in Queensland in the later days of World War II, and when my father (an RAAF officer), moved north into “the islands”, my mother flew to Sydney with me as a babe in arms on an Air Force Catalina, what they quaintly called a “flying boat”.

The RAAF was driven by regulations, and the number of passengers allowed on a Catalina was restricted. As we were one over on the head count, an Air Commodore who was on the flight ordered that I be embarked as a Gladstone bag, and that was how I appeared on the manifest. Anybody seeking evidence of my juvenile interstate travels on faded, curled foolscap sheets, or even their digitised versions, would now seek in vain.

I am grateful in retrospect to the Air Commodore, but according to my mother (never the most reliable of witnesses), I showed my gratitude at the time by throwing up on him. I tend to believe this, because I have always been a bit of an anarchist at heart, but posthumously (so far as he is concerned), I express my thanks and unreserved regrets to that kindly, and at one point, slightly smelly Air Commodore.

Still, neither my travel nor the arc described by my gastric contents appears in any surviving record. There is a lesson there for us all: should we trust records, even those of apparent eyewitnesses? In my youth in the 1950s, long before history became a participation event, my cohort were subjected to rote learning from the ‘Social Studies’ texts of G. T. Spaull, M.A.

To my young mind, an image was evidence, and the image on the left, below, seen in many different books before I reached my teens, reflected the Truth of the travels of Edward John Eyre and Wylie, walking the southern coast of Australia, more than a century earlier.

Two versions of a common but anonymous image of Eyre and Wylie on the Great Australian Bight. [ii]

Early this century, I read Eyre’s journals as an active history participator, and I looked at the left-hand image again, wondering where Eyre’s horses were, because I knew he released them just as he reached the outskirts of Albany. Then I saw the men’s shadows pointing to the ocean, with the sun on their left. According to that image, they were (and are) going east, the wrong way!

At first, I blamed a lazy northern hemisphere artist for the error, but there is a simpler explanation: most 19^th century images were created first as art work on paper that was copied onto a plate which was used to print an image that was a mirror-image of the plate. Today, with computers, this sort of reversal is easily fixed, as you can see from the right-hand version, which I created with three keystrokes. If you look at images of the Endeavour River, where James Cook’s crew repaired their ship in 1770, you can see a similar reversal ‘twixt painting and engraving in some versions.

Louis de Freycinet’s wife Rose (1794 – 1832) stowed away on Uranie, her husband’s ship, in 1817 and sailed with him until 1820. He seems never to have publicly mentioned her presence after they returned to France, though he had named a dove and a Samoan island after her. She was shown in a watercolour painted by Alphonse Pellion near Shark Bay, but when the painting was later engraved for printing, Rose de Freycinet was nowhere to be seen.

 Now you see her, now you don’t. Rose de Freycinet is visible in front of the conical tent in the left-hand picture (the original watercolour), but not in the engraved version, which is on the right.

The Paris authorities learned of Rose’s stowing away after Uranie was wrecked in the Falkland Islands, but Louis seems to have suffered no punishment, and the matter was probably hushed up. True, there is that watercolour of Shark Bay, painted in 1818, showing Rose on the shore, but when it was reproduced in the official report she was no longer in the picture.

In those days, image doctoring may have been a challenge, but back then, every painting needed to be engraved, allowing such blemishes as unofficial women to be quietly deleted at that stage, though in the small colony of Sydney, her presence had been recorded in the local newspaper:

On Monday last the Commandant of the Expedition and Madame de FREYCINET entertained the principal Officers of the Colony, and their Ladies, on board the Uranie.
— The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 18 December 1819, 3, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2179142

So are words any more reliable? We might hope so, because this book uses many contemporary accounts, but can we trust such stories? Here is a tale which firmly says “no!”. Mind you, the anecdote may or may not be true—but Thomas Carlyle certainly believed that trust should be rationed. He wrote:

The old story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s looking from his prison window on some street tumult, which afterward three witnesses reported in three different ways, himself differing from them all, is still a true lesson to us.

Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’, Fraser’s Magazine, November 1830, 415. Sabine Baring-Gould could only trace the story to the Journal de Paris, 1787, and from there to Letters on Literature by Robert Heron (John Pinkerton), 1785.

Theoretical historians say first-hand accounts are the best sources, but practical historians take all tales with a pinch of salt—if not a whole bucketful. Here are nine accounts from eight people, about a lightning strike that killed livestock, not long after the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove.

As I warned earlier, the curious (some might say illiterate) spelling you will see here happens because even educated people back then often used odd or eccentric spelling, and throughout this book, I have retained the original forms, in all their glory. The words in bold show you the details to look at. Yes, I was too tired to add the sources: Google the exact phrase Six Sheep 2 Labms and one Pigg belonging to Major Ross, and you will find the lot.

[John Hunter] In February, the weather was sultry, with lightning, thunder, and heavy rain; this sort of weather continued for a fortnight, with few and very short intervals of fair weather; a flash of lightning fell one night near the camp, and struck a tree near to the post of a centinel, who was much hurt by it; the tree was greatly rent, and there being at the foot of it a pen in which were a few pigs and sheep, they were all killed.

[Watkin Tench] Ere we had been a fortnight on shore we experienced some storms of thunder accompanied with rain, than which nothing can be conceived more violent and tremendous, and their repetition for several days, joined to the damage they did, by killing several of our sheep, led us to draw presages of an unpleasant nature.

[Arthur Phillip] The month of February was ushered in by a very violent storm of thunder and rain. The lightning struck and shivered a tree, under which a shed had been erected for some sheep, and five of those animals were at the same time unfortunately destroyed by it.

[John White ] 2nd February. This morning five sheep, belonging to the lieutenant-governor and quarter-master, were killed by lightning under a tree, at the foot of which a shed had been built for them. The branches and trunk of the tree were shivered and rent in a very extraordinary manner.

[Arthur Bowes Smyth ] Abt. 12 o’Clock in the night one severe flash of Lightg. struck a very large tree in the centre of the Camp under wh. some places were constructed to keep the Sheep & Hogs in: it split the tree from top to bottom; kill’d 5 Sheep belonging to Major Ross & a pig of one of the Lieuts.

[George Worgan ] On the First Day of this Month, We had a vast deal of heavy Rain. Thunder & Lightning, and the next morning 5 Sheep, 1 Lamb & 2 Pigs, were found dead, lying under a Tree, which was riven in a violent Manner by the Lightning.

Worgan was not satisfied with a single conflicting account, and gave a second version:

[Worgan again] We have reason to apprehend that much Mischief may be done by Lightning here. Indeed we have experienced its fatal Effects since we have been here, for one Night 6 Sheep 1 Lamb, & 2 Pigs that were lying under a Tree, were all killed and the Tree violently riven.

[David Collins ] In the night of the 6th February, six sheep, two lambs, and one pig, belonging chiefly to the lieutenant-governor, having been placed at the foot of a large tree, were destroyed by the lightning.

[Ralph Clark] Thursday 7…I am Sorry to find that by the very hard clap of Thunder the lightning Struck one of the Trees near where we were at Supper and Kild Six Sheep 2 Labms and one Pigg belonging to Major Ross…

Well, at least Clark and Collins agreed on the numbers (and in spite of appearances, they probably agreed on the date, as well, seeing that it probably happened on the night of the 6^th – 7^th).

Still, with those examples to warn you, this book describes the matters of daily life that concerned colonists, drawing as far as possible, on the evidence the colonists themselves provided.

Just remember the blind men and the elephant in the old Indian legend. They all felt different parts of the elephant and described it in different terms, each from a limited perspective, just as people in real life always see things from different perspectives.

And where the blind men were dispassionate assessors, our witnesses often had a strong interest in the matters and events, and must, at times, have been seeking to serve those interests. For example, based on his experience in India, Thomas Maslen was convinced that Australia needed elephants and said so in The Friend of Australia (q.v., if you dare):

When arrived in Australia they should be kept in stables at night; and in the winter, well and warmly clothed with a large cloth of stout texture, and a tarpaulin over it fastened on with a girth round the body; and they should sometimes be treated with a meal of cinnamon to warm their insides.

Men of capital who could afford to keep an elephant would clear more land of trees in a month, with a few men to cut them down, than probably a hundred convicts could in double that time without the assistance of that animal.
— ‘A Retired Officer’ (Thomas Maslen), The Friend of Australia, 218.

He also recommended camels and offered designs for towns with a goivernor's palace, a senate house, churches, prisons, cemeteries and no hospiltals or schols. They say a stopped watch is correct twice each day, but Maslen generally missed his time slot. When it comes to ideas like his, they are of little use to those of us not attached to surrealist Grand Guignol and/or the Theatre of the Absurd. 

In the end, the reader must weigh all the elephants, I’m sorry, I mean all the evidence.

So now you know what the next month or so may bring. Here, I may look at the governor who had a tame thief, the one who pardoned a bushranger for being good at escaping, and the one who once owned slaves. I am still working on slavery in Australia, so there may be quite a bit on that sort of inhumanity. I won't discuss women in trousers, though.

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