Australian seasons

This is an excerpt from chapter 6 in  Australian Backyard Earth Scientist, due for release on 1 February 2019.

Credit where credit is due: I work-shopped this essay with my Stage 3 students at Manly Vale Public School, where I make occasional visits as their "visiting scientist".  I learned a lot from Years 5 and 6...

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In the northern hemisphere, away from the tropics, they have four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter, but is that number right for Australia? Much of Australia doesn’t have a real winter, leaving just three seasons, but there might be five or six seasons in other places.

The First Fleeters called Australia “a land of contrarieties”. The swans were black, not white; trees kept their leaves but dropped their bark; it was warm on the hills and cool in the valleys; the eagles were white; the bees had no sting — and the seasons were the wrong way around!

Legend says the NSW Corps soldiers changed between winter and summer uniforms, using seasons based on the first days of March, June, September and December. Those arbitrary dates worked, sort of.

Waratah (Telopea speciosissima), a spring
marker for Sydney.

The invaders might have been better off with the natural calendar of the Dharawal people of Sydney. You can find the details on the web, if you search on <Dharawal seasons>.

This chapter was written during Ngoonungi, which is cool, getting warmer, when the Miwa Gawaian (waratah) flowers.

Ngoonungi is also the time of the gathering of the flying foxes. In my part of Sydney, just north of Dharawal lands, as dusk gathers each night, I see these fruit bats fluttering east along the valley below me, sometimes near my window, rushing to gorge on figs nearby.

Flying foxes at dusk, Manly Vale.

Seeing them, I know the time has come to work barefoot by day. It is my season of happy toes, lasting six delicious months.

Far to my north, in Yolngu country, the stringybark is in flower then, as Rarranhdharr comes to an end. In the Anangu Pitjantjatjara country, which we call the north of South Australia, it is the end of Piriyakutu/Piriya-Piriya, when the hibernating reptiles come out. In Western Australia, the Noongar people call this time Kambarang, when the rain gets less, and the quandong is in fruit.

I notice the first blowfly, cicada or koel; the first magpie attack; the first funnelweb in the swimming pool or the first Christmas beetle. My children knew it was proper summer when the first Bogong moth started banging around on the ceiling at night.

Angophora costata, or Sydney Smooth-barked Apple,
shedding its bark, November, Forty Baskets area.

My high summer comes when the trunks of the Sydney smooth-barked apple, Angophora costata, turn orange-brown in mid-November. We take friends on mystery walks through a grove of these trees, just to watch their delight.

Early-days jacarandas, Circular Quay,
October 2017.

Sydney’s very first jacaranda comes out each year at Circular Quay, and I saw it the day I wrote this. The day I saw the first orange tinges on the Angophora trees, I noticed that the Quay jacarandas were in decline. I also notice the first evening storms with warm rain that people want to run around in, and the first big electrical storm that people should not run around in.

But what do city folk use as season markers? I asked my friends, and we found these: the first time your breath comes out of your mouth like smoke, as the water vapour in your breath condenses in the cold; the time when parents stop nagging their children to wear a hat and have to start nagging them to wear a jumper, or when you wake up in spring and hate the thought of porridge, so you switch to muesli — and when you go back again, in autumn.

I really loved this thought from Anil Tortop, a talented Turkish-born illustrator who lives in Brisbane: “The time I use/stop using the hair dryer. Or when ants start to invade the kitchen. Or when geckos start singing all together.”

I suppose I'd best say something about high summer then, given that's where we are right now.

Here's a link.

A short overview of bicycles

There were earlier oddities, but cycling really began in the 1840s and 1850s with the Aellopodes, which are now almost forgotten, but which apparently had a reputation in British cities back then. Here is how the device was written up in the Mechanics’ Magazine, volume 31, 1839:

The Aellopodes. A curious specimen of mechanical ingenuity bearing the above title is at present exhibited at Lowther Rooms, Strand. It is a carriage for travelling without horse or steam, propelled solely by the traveller’s own weight; and it is the invention of Mr. Nevis, a native of Cambridge. Its structure is light and elegant; and any persons may, on common roads, propel themselves at the rate of between twenty and thirty miles an hour, and on railroads it might be worked with incredible velocity. The chief object of its inventor is, that it might be employed to take up the cross mails, whereby he calculates that a very large saving would be effected by the post office.
—Mechanics’ Magazine, volume 31, 1839, p. 16

There are no pictures of this device available, though the sparse literature suggests that the “Mr. Nevis” mentioned in the piece was actually Thomas Revis. The Aellopodes was 12 feet long, and the rear wheels were six feet high, with propulsion being effected, “not by the user’s weight in the usual sense, but by stepping on treadles”.

Some of the devices, though, were rather more alarming to the rider. What could be more daunting, for example, than a unicycle like the one above? Scientific American, perhaps more than usually tongue-in-cheek, questioned criticism of this design in another journal, suggesting that it would be no harder to ride than it would be “to sit in a chair balanced upon two legs, resting upon the rather uncertain substratum of a slack rope”.

Having once seen a nude unicyclist leading a crowd of mainly equally unclad bicyclists on a chilly north British evening in Manchester (no, I don’t wish to explain further), I would not be prepared to attempt to pontificate on what people can or can’t do on one-wheel vehicles. I simply wouldn’t be persuaded to get up on one of those, myself!

I might, on the other hand, be more tempted to risk my nose, chin and other extremities in the device above, given that the feet are not engaged in pedalling, but the apparent lack of any brakes or any steering (aside from that achieved by leaning out to one side or the other) would give me some pause.

Meanwhile, other minds were concerning themselves with other amusing variations, like the ice velocipede and the water velocipede below. At this stage, there were no public attempts to develop a pedal-powered flying machine, but there must surely have been a few, somewhere, quietly out of sight. Most of the smart money was being invested in steam power.

And now I am prepared to discuss the Australian case, beginning in early 2019.

The moose cavalry threat

Another excerpt from The Speed of Nearly Everything.

Because horses are herd animals, seen as food by larger predators, they get nervous easily. A wild stallion may move forward to threaten a human, but picking up a stick is enough to make the horse think again, and choose retreat.

Clearly, horses are fairly easily ‘spooked’, and people who know horses are well aware of this. They will also assure anybody who will listen that the smell of a strange animal will always upset horses. Camels and Hannibal’s elephants have both been cited in the past as species that can cause cavalry horses to stampede.

I once stood in open woodland in Finland, as a reindeer farmer banged loudly on a tree, three times. The reindeer who knew that this was the food signal, came racing in. That was terrifying, and moose are bigger.

The moose has been used in a number of northern European cultures as a draught animal, pulling a sleigh, and even carrying riders on occasion. There are also tales of moose cavalry at various times, though these are hard to test out.

Blame Monty Python, who made the moose a running joke, for some of the confusion. There is at least one excellently manipulated digital image of a harnessed moose, supposedly used to haul logs out of forests. The giveaway is that one pile of logs appears on each side, one of the elements reversed, but if there has been one legpull, there may have been others.

You can read that Ivan the Terrible banned moose husbandry in Siberia in the 1500s to stop the locals using moose cavalry against him. You can also learn that in the 1700s, Sweden tried moose cavalry, because they believed the moose smell would terrify enemy horses, but the idea failed when it proved too hard to gather food for the animals, which seems improbable, given that they eat twigs.

They may or may not have existed, but if they ever did, the moose cavalry would have charged at 55 km/hr or 35 mph — and provided the Python team with some excellent material.

The pace of the pachyderms

Another excerpt from The Speed of Nearly Everything. My delightful commissioning editor said that it should be "suitable for reading on the john", and then said there was no need to explain that.

The classification of animals and plants always involves a bit of opinion, and that can sometimes cause confusion. Aristotle did not exactly see that whales and porpoises were mammals, but he knew they were not like fish. Linnaeus, who invented our classification system, listed whales and porpoises as fish in the first ten editions of his book, Systema Naturae.

Asian elephants, Minneriya, Sri Lanka, pachyderms to scholars of old.

In the same way, 19th century scientists grouped elephants, rhinos and hippos as pachyderms. These were big, had thick grey skins, and came from Africa, but the grouping logic made as much sense as linking worms and wombats because they burrow, or butterflies and birds because they fly.

Still, the pachyderms were big and they had a formidable approach to threats: they charged them down. The pachyderms were big and heavy enough not to fear anybody or anything. They still are.

A rhinoceros will charge for short distances at 40 to 50 km/hr (25 to 30 mph), as timed by chargees in motor vehicles. Black rhinos (think of them as dark grey) have poor vision, and often break off, or run into a tree, but they are also very good at changing direction, which takes all the fun out of being charged. They tend to be aggressive to each other, and may keep up their charging speed for some time when chasing other black rhinos.

Hippos can certainly outrun a human on land, though estimates of their speed vary between 30 and 50 km/hr (18 to 30 mph). The hippos are vegetarians, but that does not seem to stop them attacking and killing humans: they have a reputation for killing more people in Africa than lions, though the Cape buffalo is also a contestant there. The good news: hippos can’t jump, but you need to choose a thick tree, and hand go on!

Further reading for extreme taxonomists: look into the Whippomorpha.

Charge!

Another excerpt from The Speed of Nearly Everything.

According to Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade charged the Russian guns in the Crimea at 17 miles per hour, a speed that was quite possible, though we have no idea where he got the figure from. That's about 27 km/hr.

Horses are herd animals, so they are comfortable galloping together at close quarters. The idea of the cavalry charge was to form a line, with the horses close together, and then move forward, first at a trot, and later, over the last hundred yards or metres, at the full gallop, riding down a wretched infantry, terrifying them and causing them to flee.

The theory of the cavalry charge began to come apart when the longbow came into use, because longbowmen could shower many arrows down on the approaching line, injuring the horses and possibly the riders while they were unable to harm the infantry.

Then there were the pikemen, who used long pointy sticks to impale the horses as the charge reached them, palisades and other defences, but the cavalry could often manoeuvre around the defences, which were hard to move around on the churned-up battlefield. Muskets had a practical range of perhaps a 100 yards, and even the best infantryman was unable to fire more than four shots a minute.

In the reload time of 15 seconds, Cardigan’s men would have covered 125 yards between shots, so the infantry had just one chance to kill, wound or stop the cavalry who were hurtling at them, half a ton of thundering horse with a razor-sharp sabre swinging down at their heads and shoulders.

Instead or infantry, Cardigan found himself charging fifty guns that fired grape and round shot over far greater distances, with Russian riflemen on his flanks picking off more riders. The wonder is not that so many were killed (118) or wounded (127) from the 670 men who started out, but that so few were hit.

The tradition of the charge was maintained into the First World War, when infantry were repeatedly sent “over the top” to charge an enemy equipped with machine guns and repeating rifles with a far greater range, and the Australian Light Horse undertook a successful cavalry charge, one of the very last, at Beersheba in 1917.

These were really mounted infantry who rode to the battle and dismounted to fight. Only Poland had cavalry in World War II, but they were mounted infantry like the Light Horse. 

Their Turkish opponents never expected them to charge, and when the ALH did, the Turkish rifles were all set for extreme range, which mean aiming higher, and soon the Australians were riding in, under the bullets, but you could only pull that trick once.

The role of the cavalry passed to the much faster tank regiments, though cavalry ranks like squadron leader (major) and wing commander (lieutenant-colonel) in some air forces reflect a cavalry origin. Tank regiment officers often wear silver insignia, another cavalry tradition.

Aircraft were obviously never used to charge infantry, though tanks were often used, like cavalry, for infantry support in World War II, along with air cover. The charge has largely ceased to be an effective military tactic.

Animals still charge, though. An elephant at 30 mph (50 kph) weighs as much as 12 horses and travels roughly twice as fast. American bison weigh about a ton, but have the same top speed. The bulls of Pamplona, the ones that people run through the streets with, have been clocked at 35 mph (55 kph), the same speed reported for giraffes and African buffalo. We will come back to some of these later.

With the onset of summer, I'm in a bit of a writing doldrum right now, so I thought looking at speed would be appropriate.