Getting mail in the early days

Oops! I have been ankle-deep but head-down in Australian history this month, Never mind why just now, but all will be revealed when the time is right, at the appropriate juncture. Here's a sample of this month's work:

How mail was delivered in 1810

In the earliest days of each colony, letters and packages were held for collection at the Post Office, and people went to collect their mail. Advertisements were lodged to indicate unclaimed mail, and while writing the previous chapter, this practice allowed me to find where Blandowski was expected to be in 1851. The introduction of postal deliveries to homes and businesses seems to be one of those improvements that nobody saw fit to mention, but in 1828, The Monitor suggested that “Post carriers” travelling along country roads could distribute “those letters &c. along the road, which are addressed to parties thereon…”

In 1831, the Australian offered a similar idea, but it was now more advanced, involving a “…POST-BOY, whose task it should be to ride through his proper district—call at the settlers’ farms, and deliver his letters, newspapers, and so forth correctly, as addressed at least once, and if requisite twice or three times a week.” Then the NSW Post Office Act of 1835 makes a passing reference that may be relevant:

That it shall and may be lawful for the said Governor to fix the Rates and sums of money to be demanded by the said Postmaster-General, and Postmasters respectively, and their Assistants, for receiving, despatching, and delivering of letters and packets…
— The Sydney Monitor, 15 July 1835, 4,.

By 1836, deliveries to some homes must have been happening, because the Sydney Herald urged that Post-office carriers be sent to “…the southern boundary of the town of Sydney, for the convenience of the inhabitants of what is now called Parramatta-street”. In 1845, deliveries were clearly happening, but citizens were now pestering the delivery men in the street, wanting their letters, and the authorities stepped in:

Post Office Regulations—In consequence of the very great delay and inconvenience experienced at the post-office by the practice of parties impatient to receive their letters, waylaying and stopping the postmen in the street for that purpose, the Postmaster-General has issued an order that any letter carrier who delivers a letter in the street shall be dismissed. The same objectionable practice had gained ground in England to such an extent, that Lord Lonsdale issued a similar order to prevent frauds.
— The Sentinel (Sydney), 19 October 1845, 2.

Before the gold rush, Thomas M’Combie reported that Melbourne’s post office was a small cottage, with two apartments—the back being used for newspapers, the front for letters and one man. He operated through a small open window, and had a neat scam running, one which still operates to this day in Morocco. It’s called “no change”.

It was a remarkable fact that he never had any change. If the postage upon a letter was but threepence, and the owner had no coin smaller than half-a-crown, he must hand it over, or, hard fate! go without the much-desired and anxiously-looked-for letter from “home.”
— Thomas M’Combie, Australian Sketches, 110 – 11.

(When we found the same scam being operated in Morocco, just a few years back, it ended when we set the hotel barman up, with photos, and told him the whole thing would go on the internet, so the hotel lost business, and he lost his job.)

In Melbourne, When a mail delivery arrived, this man emptied the whole of the newspapers in the interior room, and all applicants were politely ushered in there, and requested to help themselves to their own. M’Combie said he often spent a complete day tumbling over some thousands of newspapers, in search of his property. By 1853, the Post Office gave employment to hundreds of individuals, but it still failed to meet the requirements of the colony.

Even in the 1850s, the Post Office in Melbourne was a shambles, as William Kelly discovered. He called the building “a wretched wooden hovel, awkwardly propped up in a filthy quagmire”, surmounted by an eccentric clock.

There were two approaches for inquiry, railed off at the immediate approach to the delivering apertures; but as the letters of the alphabet were impartially divided in twain and assigned to each, it followed, as a matter of course, that the aperture to which such unpopular letters as Q, U, V, X, Y, and Z were allotted would be comparatively idle, while the other would be crowded with a column of unintermitting applicants. I belonged to the popular aperture, and found that the transit of a couple of hours only brought me within the railing, when, weary and disgusted, I would have raised the siege, only that I was unwilling to subject myself to the ordeal of the jeering laugh to which every tired-out “lime-juicer,” as we new chums were called, was treated on his abdication.
— William Kelly, Life in Victoria or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858, vol 1, 44 – 5.

Having gone to the goldfields, Kelly visited the Ballarat Post Office in 1853. He found it a moderate-sized log cabin, most of which was devoted to general business “…and the person who wanted an ounce of tobacco was attended to before the man in quest of letters.” The whole exterior was papered over with quaintly-worded and ingeniously-spelled hand-scribed advertisements, and he quoted some:

If this should meet the eye of John Tims he will hear of his shipmate at Pennyweight Flat, next tent to the tub and cradle.

James dakin notyces the publik agin thrustin his wife.

Patt Flynn calls on biddy to return to the tint forninst the cross roads.

Ten pounds reward for my black mare. No questions asked nor ideas insinuated. [There was no address.]

For sale, several householt an kulenary articles, as also a numerous frackshun of odds an ends, at the Tent oppsite the Frenchman’s store at the Ureka.

The rule, Kelly deduced was that if you could find a vacant space you were at liberty to occupy it; but “woe betide you if caught either in pulling off or overriding a previously posted notice, which, under pick-and-shovel law, were allowed to remain until they fell off in scabs, like a poor man’s plaister.” He paid a shilling at the post-office counter for a
sheet of paper and liberty to write a line to my friend, and an advertisement,

…for which I fortunately found a vacancy; but after dropping my note in the box, and in the act of wafering up my notice, a young man who read it over my shoulder said “he thought he knew my friend and party, and if I would accompany him to Prince Regent’s Gully, he would take me to them.”

We know of Friedrich Gerstäcker’s mail cart torture, travelling from Sydney to Albury, but what of the mail, and the suffering mail carter, after he climbed out in Albury, in pre-Gold Rush days? The mail itself went on to Melbourne, about two hundred miles distant from the place, from which there was a connection once a week with Adelaide, “but not through the wilderness of the Murray Scrub, but along the more cultivated, or at least better settled districts of the sea-coast.”

At the end of the century though, the movement of rural mails was still a little ad hoc, as novelist Miles Franklin shows in the excerpt below from My Brilliant Career. This is fiction, but was closely based on her own experience.

A bush mailman, 1850s. (S. T. Gill)

In pursuance of his duty a government mail-contractor passed Caddagat every Monday, dropping the Bossier mail as he went. On Thursday we also got the post, but had to depend partly on our own exertions.

A selector at Dogtrap, on the Wyambeet run, at a point of the compass ten miles down the road from Caddagat, kept a hooded van. Every Thursday he ran this to and from Gool-Gool for the purpose of taking to market vegetables and other farm produce. He also took parcels and passengers, both ways, if called upon to do so. Caddagat and Five-Bob gave him a great deal of carrying, and he brought the mail for these and two or three other places.

It was one of my duties, or rather privileges, to ride thither on Thursday afternoon for the post, a leather bag slung round my shoulders for the purpose. I always had a splendid mount, and the weather being beautifully hot, it was a jaunt which I never failed to enjoy.
— Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career, ch 17.

Sydney post boys, 1881,

But how did Australia get its mail from overseas? Anthony Trollope, aside from being a novelist, introduced the British pillar-box for mailing letters, so he cared. Some news came from the USA, mostly reaching Sydney, but the English mail touched first at King George’s Sound (Albany), then passing Adelaide, South Australian mail went into a branch boat to be taken ashore, while the rest of the mail went on to Melbourne. As Adelaide got the branch boat sooner, important news came from Adelaide by telegraph.

Looking at skulls and teeth

This is an excerpt from Australian Backyard Naturalist, published by the National Library of Australia, now only available in second-hand shops, or in my revised edition, available through Polymoth Books, or from Amazon, as an e-book, or as print. The book shared the 2012 W. A. Premier's Prize for Children's Literature. It is a very different look at Australian life forms.

2.02 Mammals at a glance

Mammals are warm-blooded animals like us. They have fur or hair (sometimes not very much), they give birth to live young (except for platypuses and echidnas, which lay eggs), and they all feed their young with milk. Some mammals like whales and dolphins live in the sea, and polar bears live in extremely cold places. Camels can live in very dry deserts, and humans are able to live just about anywhere.

Most people think Australia’s mammals are all marsupials—mammals that have pouches, but even before European settlement, Australia had more placental mammals (that means mammals like us, whose babies are nourished before birth by an organ called the placenta, attached to the wall of the mother’s uterus).

Australia’s placental mammals include the bats and native rats and mice on the land, and the whales, dolphins and seals in our oceans. Evolution sometimes deals animals a nasty hand, and that is certainly the case with the marsupials. Putting it simply, the ‘plumbing’ of a female marsupial is such that they cannot give birth to large babies.

The solution is sensible: the joey is born as a tiny speck, little more than an appetite with two legs that it uses to haul itself to a pouch, where it attaches to a teat, and proceeds to develop a full body, just as a lamb, a kitten or a human child does, inside the mother, before it is born.

The odd thing about evolution is that any system that works and lets a new generation survive is allowed to repeat itself. Sometimes, there are even advantages, like the mother being able to store a fertilised embryo when conditions were bad, but that, as they say, is another story.

A possum skull, a rabbit skull and a piranha jaw: which is which? (The 32 mm coin is there for a scale: you will see quite a lot of it.)

2.03 The teeth of mammals

Then there are the mammals that lay eggs, but I will come to them later. First, we need to talk about teeth (which platypuses and echidnas don’t have). Teeth are amazingly tough and they last much better than bones. The teeth of mammals are worth studying because they are all different, and can often tell you what animal they belonged to, and what it ate. The teeth of dead animals are safer to look at than those in live animals, so this is mainly about the teeth of dead mammals.

Dentition tells us that this mandible or jaw bone, found on a deserted beach on Thursday Island, came from a dugong. Local hunters butcher their catch there, far from their homes because they don’t want to attract crocodiles and sharks to where they live and swim.

Teeth are classed as incisors, canines, premolars and molars, and the patterns of these teeth, in this order, are called ‘dentition’. To get a proper identification, you often need to see and count the teeth (or the sockets, in which the teeth once sat) in one half of each jaw.

The incisors (I) are the front teeth, the cutting teeth, and in humans we write this as 2/2, meaning you have two incisors on each side of the upper and lower jaw (we only count the teeth on one side). Our canines (C) are coded 1/1, premolars (Pm) are 2/2 and molars (M) are 3/3 (children have molars as 2/2 until their ‘wisdom teeth’ emerge in their later teen years). Zoologists write the dentition in a formula like this for human beings: I2/2 C1/1 Pm2/2 M3/3. Now take a look at the five Australian skulls below.

Because they are close relatives, it’s not surprising that chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have the same dental formula as us. A wombat, on the other hand, is I1/1 C0/0 Pm1/1 M4/4.

An eastern grey kangaroo is I3/1 C0/0 Pm2/2 M4/4. A koala is I3/1 C1/0 Pm1/1 M4/4. A ringtail possum is I3/2 C1/0 Pm3/3 M4/4. A Tasmanian devil is I4/3 C1/1 Pm2/2 M4/4. The dentition of Australian marsupials, such as kangaroos and Tasmanian devils is clearly quite unlike that of humans.

You only need two terms to work with skulls, along with a bit of careful hygiene (dead meat can be germy, so use latex gloves and wash up afterwards). Those terms are dentition and dental formula. Just fire up your favourite search engine, and off you go.

This skull on the right, found near Sydney Harbour was easy to identify by its dentition as having once belonged to a possum. 

Young explorers

This is an excerpt from my Australian Backyard Explorer, published by the National Library of Australia, now only available in second-hand shops, or in my revised edition, available through Polymoth Books, or from Amazon. The book won the 2010 Eve Pownall Book of the Year. It is a very different look at the way Australia was "explored" by the white invaders after 1788.

The young explorers

There was a surprising number of youngsters who went out exploring, some of them far more deliberately than Lieutenant King’s young stowaway. John Lhotsky had a youth, whom he refers to like this:

Paddy a little Irish lad performed the more minute occupation of insect catching…
—John Lhotsky, Journal.

Alan Andrews, who edited an edition of Lhotsky’s journey, worked out that ‘Paddy’ was Patrick Moore. By October 1834, Moore had run away, and Lhotsky offered a reward of two dollars for the boy’s return:

PATRICK MOORE, born in Dublin, Catholic, 13 years of age, a well looking, stout, intelligent, and rather talkative lad; brown hair, hazel eyes, and good teeth, ruddy complexion;—had on when he went away, a blue striped shirt, brown corduroy trowsers, dark striped waistcoat, a straw hat, and laced boots, rather big…

Boys would do as they were told, mainly getting wood, water and other lowly tasks, but some youngsters went for darker reasons. As we have already seen, Governor Gawler and Captain Charles Sturt took along Mrs Sturt, Julia Gawler, the governor’s teenage daughter, her teenage maid, Eliza Arbuckle, and an English boy of 18, Henry Bryan. The reasoning behind taking them comes from Eliza Davies, this being the married name of Eliza Arbuckle.

I heard a conversation between high officials, from which I learned that the policy of taking ladies with them, and bringing all back in safety, would ensure a readier sale of land in England. Capitalists would not fear the savages when ladies had traversed the country in safety.
—Eliza Davies, née Arbuckle, Diary, quoted by Monteath.

Peter Monteath cited this passage to support his view that Emily Creaghe and Bessie Favenc were expected to play a similar ‘window-dressing’ role. The aim was to ‘open up’ the Top End, and that meant showing that ‘white women’ could survive the experience of living there.

Emily Creaghe died, just after I was born... (SLNSW image)

When Leichhardt set out in 1844, he took along John Murphy who was 15, but he had met Leichhardt as a 12-year-old on the passage to Australia. On 22 September 1845, young Murphy discovered the allergenic effects of certain species of Grevillea, when he stowed botanical specimens inside his shirt. We will look at this in chapter 5.

Murphy was perhaps lucky, given that we have already met Henry Bryan who died aged 18, though we will look at both his case and also at the fate of Frederick Smith, also 18, at the end of chapter 7.

One other young explorer was Charles Whitmore Babbage, who was only about 18 when he drew the sketch of the Murray-Darling junction that you can see later in this book [In this blog entry, that image appears below.]. He had previously been out exploring with his father, the highly competent Herschel Babbage, when he was 15.

The fictionalised image on the right shows ‘an explorer’ camping out for the night. The tent is large enough to hold six men, yet only one man is shown, and one horse. The cooking pot, large enough to feed a small army, would be too large to carry on a horse, but where is the dray or cart and where are the horses to pull it? Where are the other explorers?

Perhaps they were off, looking for a way forward, but if they were, they should have waited until daylight.

Sydney under attack, 1942

Sydney harbour today, from North Head. The boom referred to below was more or less where the dotted line appears.

This is a sidelight from my Kokoda Track: 101 Days, an Honour Book in the 2007 Eve Pownalls, and it was short-listed for the NSW Premier's History Prize. Originally published by Black Dog, which later became Walker, it is now available in my own updated and better-designed Polymoth Books imprint. This is from the Introduction.

The attack on Sydney

There was no valid reason the authorities to worry about the Japanese invading Australia, because as we know now, Allied code-breakers would have had early warning of any Japanese fleet being assembled to invade Australia.

Attacks on key sites like ports were more likely and harder to predict. That had to be kept secret, though, so the codes would not be changed. So the public were told the threat was real, to help keep the secret.

In June, 1942, the USS Chicago was in Sydney harbour. It was partly protected by a boom net close to the harbour entrance, from near Watson’s Bay to George’s Head. Some parts of the net were kept up by buoys, while other parts were strung between timber piles, driven into the sea floor. It was rather like a shark net, except that shark nets don’t have gates, sections that can be swung open to let ships in and out. These floating gates were pulled open, and hauled closed again, by an old ferry,

The gates and the gaps they left caused a problem that was made worse, because the boom wasn’t finished. Work was started in January 1942, and not completed until August. When the raiders called on the night of 31 May–1 June, there were easy ways in.

There was a third problem: when the attackers were seen, it took two hours before anybody “in charge” would believe there were submarines in the harbour. Midget submarines had been used unsuccessfully in the attack on Pearl Harbor, so the authorities knew they existed.

One of the subs surfaced near Dobroyd Head and was seen by a fisherman, who ran about 5 km to the nearest police station at Manly to report it. Nobody believed him. The most reliable report came from a boom watchman who heard the crew trying to free the first submarine, after it got tangled in the net.

The watchman radioed in a report. Finally, the submarine’s crew realised they could not get free, and blew their vessel up with demolition charges. After that, the Navy accepted that something was wrong.

This was a battle which would be won by the side which was the least incompetent, but most of the time, neither side really looked like winning. When a searchlight operator on USS Chicago saw a second submarine, the gunners opened up with machine guns and artillery, but the guns could not depress (tilt down) enough to hit the submarine. At least one of the shells bounced off the water and hit Fort Denison, and other shell fragments were found later in the suburbs of Cremorne and Mosman.

The submarine submerged and moved to a point in the harbour where it could see Chicago in silhouette, backlit by construction lights on Garden Island. The Japanese crews were on what was almost a suicide mission, yet amazingly, they failed to move in and launch a torpedo at Chicago. Equally amazingly, the lights on Garden Island stayed on for an hour and a half, but even more amazingly, the submarine only fired its torpedoes five minutes after the lights went out.

Both torpedoes missed Chicago, but one sank a ferry being used as a floating dormitory. In all, 21 sailors died, and ten were wounded. A third submarine was also in the harbour, and small vessels were rushing around, making and losing contact, dropping depth charges and in the process, damaging the third submarine to the extent that it could do no harm.

The midget submarines had failed in their main mission of sinking a major warship, but they certainly succeeded in their second aim of bringing alarm and despair to Sydney. People who could get away fled to the Blue Mountains, far from the sea. And in the Eastern suburbs, close to the ocean, there were spectacular falls in property prices in the winter of 1942.

Now about that fisherman who saw the sub: you probably won’t read about him anywhere, but he was real enough. He shouted to my (now deceased) aunt that the Japanese were invading, as he ran past her. This is one reason why we need more oral historians!

It pays to advertise

If you don't know about Polymoth Books, click here.

I wish to announce a rather crazy scheme on my part: a package of 22 of the best books I have written this century, all curated and presented as DRM-free PDF files. This is now in place, if you click on this link.

Note that all of the books are available as Kindle e-books and Amazon Print-on-demand books as well (but I can do mates rates).

The main aim of this PDF scheme is to set my intellectual property loose in schools. Teacher-librarians will be allowed to make class sets of any book (or books), for one term, once they have paid a one-off fee of AUD$50 for the collection, on either a CD-ROM or a USB stick. That includes postage and GST, but you need to order, get an invoice and pay first.

At the end of the term, I ask that TLs delete the files from devices, but if they wish, they can immediately copy them again. I rely on the ethics of TLs, and won't be checking. I also have no plan to check the credentials of purchasers, and will declare all such to be honorary teacher-librarians. My aim is to influence minds, not to make money, so if you fulfil any TL-like role, that's good enough for me. Ordinary librarians count as well, and friends are welcome.

Some of the books in this scheme came out through mainstream publishers and some of them won awards, but were allowed to lapse by lazy publishers, others were excellent ideas that nervous publishers shied away from. All have been seized back, meticulously curated and brought up to date. It has to be conceded that small portions of text (and some illustrations) may appear in more than one volume, because there are certain themes I harp on.

Any good educator does exactly that, repeating the key points.

As you can read on a link that I will post by the end of the month, this century, my work has been awarded:

• Seven CBCA long listings (notables), two CBCA short listings, one Honour Book and one Book of the Year;
• One Short Listing in the NSW Premier's History Awards, Young People's History Prize ;
• Two Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing;
• One WA Premier's Book Award for Children's Literature;
• One international White Ravens List entry (Germany);
• One Wilderness Society Short List entry, and
• Two Whitley awards.

In other words, there's some serious intellectual merit here.

The titles involved are: 

Australia's Hidden Heroes; sample here

Australia's Pioneers Heroes and Fools; a sort of sample here

Australian Backyard Explorer; sample here

Australian Backyard Naturalist; sample here

Curious Minds; sort of sample here

Kokoda Track: 101 Days; sample here

Looking at Small Things; sample here

Mistaken for Granite; sample here

The Monster Maintenance Manual; sample here

Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World; sample here

Nature of North Head; sample here

Not Your Usual Bushrangers; sample here

Not Your Usual Clever Ideas; sample here

Not Your Usual Gold Stories; sample here

Not Your Usual Treatments; sample here

Not Your Usual Villains; sample here

Old Grandpa's Book of Practical Poems; sort of sample here

Playwiths; sample here

The Lawn a Social History; sample here

The Speed of Nearly Everything; sample here

They Saw The Difference;  (sample) and 

You Missed a Bit. Typical example

I already have a marketing operation in place, and dead-tree versions of all of these books (and also individual e-books with DRM) are available from Polymoth Books, and you can find out about the contents of each title through that link.

I will, in the near future, be providing sample chapters or excerpts through this blog, each bearing the title of the book they come from.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some files to sort.

On shooting a bishop in Melbourne

One of the most interesting accounts of goldfield life is Stanley Robe's translation of Seweryn Korzelinski's memoir, written in Polish, but one bit has been annoying me for ten years. Korzelinski wrote:

Bishop Medianski had gone to France after the Hungarian uprising and then to Australia, where he worked for a time on the diggings. He was on his way to Melbourne on business when attacked and shot by a bushranger. He knocked out the robber and went for help, but his left arm needed to be amputated.

I could find no trace of 'Medianski' anywhere, but as I am revising my Not Your Usual Gold Stories, I decided to give it another spin. To my delight, I found one hit, but it was in a string of English in a PDF that appeared to be in Hungarian, a language in which I used to have three words, long since forgotten. Still, I gave it a go.

Alas, the PDF just quoted Robe, in English, in a footnote, but being devious, I looked more closely at footnote 36, and saw Mednyánszky in the text. So I fed that to Trove, and bingo! I got this from the South Australian Register:

The Late Attempted Murder. — The Hungarian so atrociously assailed and shot at in the Government Paddock on Sunday night, is doing well. His name is Caesar Mednyaszky, and his connections in his native land are said to be inferior to none. One of his brothers is a General in the Hungarian army, the other a Bishop, and his family is declared to be allied in a close degree to Prince Albert It will be seen by a reference to our City Police report that a man has been apprehended and remanded on suspicion of being the party who wounded Mednyaszky, but whether he can be identified has not been as yet ascertained.

 Here is the story, courtesy of Adelaide Times:

The Attempted Assassination.—On further reference to our files of Melbourne papers, we find the following particulars regarding the attempt upon the life of Mr Mednyanszky, to which we yesterday referred:—

ATTEMPTED MURDER AND ROBBERY—Between 11 and 12 o'clock on Sunday night, a Hungarian was proceeding from Melbourne to the house of Trooper Burns, in Tanner-street, Richmond, where he resides, and, on reaching the centre of the Government paddock; a man approached, and demanded of him to surrender his money. The reply of the other was, 'I have none for you, my good friend," wherewith the ruffian presented a pistol, and the Hungarian, raising his left hand to protect himself, received a ball in the arm, and jumping forward at the moment, with his fist struck the highwayman on the nose, by which he was felled to the earth; but the scoundrel quickly regaining his feet succeeded in making his escape through the bush and has not since been heard of.

The Hungarian, though bleeding profusely was not up to this time aware of his having been shot, and was able to walk home, when the extent of his injuries was first ascertained, and Dr. Wilson was called in to attend him. Dr. Eades was subsequently sent for, and about half-past two o'clock amputation of the arm was deemed advisable by both medical gentlemen The operation was performed under the influence of chloroform, and the arm taken off from near the shoulder. He is doing well. The would-be murderer is described as a low-sized man, wearing a cap, but whether he can be identified by his victim we are unable to say.

So, case closed... or is it? From another source, it appears that he might be Baron Cezar Mednyanszky, a priest who was Catholic chaplain to the 1848-49 revolutionary army in Hungary, Now I have to track down his 1858 posthumous English translation of his The Confessions of a Catholic Priest. Still, if I don't get around to it, the next person making this search will now have a few pointers.

Having some clear space, I delved, and in a 1990 issue of Földrajzi Múzeumi Tanulmányok, I found an article by Dr. Balázs Dénes entitled 'Magyar utazók Ausztráliában', which seems to mean something like 'Hungarians in Australia', which includes a small section in English:

So there you have it: he was not a bishop, but a priest and a baron. Before he died, Mednyánszky wrote a memoir, Confessions of a Catholic Priest, and his account of the shooting starts at page 196. There isn't much there, but the work is available through Google Books.

I think the case is now closed, pro tem.

The sum of two cubes in two different ways

This is a continuation of an entry last March on Ramanujan and the sums of two cubes. If the title makes no sense, start there.

This expands the list of solutions, and below it, I reveal my Diophantine approach to spreadsheets. I should note here that one of my most successful fraud investigations (the precise details of the client remain commercial-in-confidence) only worked because I used a spreadsheet to divine the cunning way a wages swindle was being run.

All I needed was a stapler and a pie chart, but to find out how I managed to get the data and wring out the answer, you need to ply me with beer.

If you make it a Guinness, I will also throw in a practical demonstration of isostasy: look behind the harp in this shot, and see if you can spot it.

Anyhow, here are my solutions:

-9728: 16³ + -24³; -12³ + -20³

-7657: -20³ + 7³; -17³ + -14³

-6832: -19³ + 3³; -18³ + -10³

-5859: -18³ + -3^3; -19³ + 10³

-5824: -18³ + 2³; -16³ + -12³

-5256: -17³ + -7³; -20³ + 14³

-5103:-15³ + -12³; -18³ + 9³

-4104: -15³ + -9³; -16³ + -2³; -18³ + 12³ TRIPLE!

-3367: -16³ + 9³; -15³ + 2³

-3087: -14³ + -7³; -20³ + 17³

-2457: -18³ + 15³; -12³ + -9³

-1736: -12³ + -2³; -18³ + 16³

-1729: -9³ + -10³; -1³ + -12³

-1512: -10³ + -8³; -12³ + 6³

-1216: -12³ + 8³; -10³ + -6³

-1027: -19³ + 18³; -10³ + -3³

-999: -12³ + 9³; -10³ + 1³

-728: -12³ + 10³; -9³ + 1³; -8³ + -6³ TRIPLE!

-721: -16³ + 15³; -9³ + 2³

-513: -9³ + 6³; -8³ + -1³

-217: -6³ + -1³; -9³ + 8³

-189: -6³ + 3³; -5³ + -4

-152: -5³ + -3³; -6³ + 4³

-91: -4³ + -3³; -6³ + 5³

91: 4³ + 3³; 6³ + -5³

152: 5³ + 3³; 6³ + -4³

189: 6³ + -3³; 5³ + 4

217: 6³ + 1³; 9³ + -8³

513: 9³ + -6³; 8³ + 1³

721: 16³ + -15³; 9³ + -2³

728: 12³ + -10³; 9³ + -1³; 8³ + 6³ TRIPLE!

999: 12³ + -9³; 10³ + -1³

1027: 19³ + -18³; 10³ + 3³

1216: 12³ + -8³; 10³ + 6³

1512: 10³ + 8³; 12³ + -6³

1729: 9³ + 10³; 1³ + 12³

1736: 12³ + 2³; 18³ + -16³

2457: 18³ + -15³; 12³ + 9³

3087: 14³ + 7³; 20³ + -17³

3367: 16³ + -9³; 15³ + -2³

4104: 15³ + 9³; 16³ + 2³; 18³ + -12³ TRIPLE

5103:15³ + 12³; 18³ + -9³

5256: 17³ + 7³; 20³ + -14³

5824: 18³ + -2³; 16³ + 12³

5859: 18³ + 3^3; 19³ + -10³

6832: 19³ + -3³; 18³ + 10³

7657: 20³ + -7³; 17³ + 14³

9728: -16³ + 24³; 12³ + 20³

Here is the base spreadsheet that spat out all the sums of two cubes where the source numbers were -20 to 20:

This is a bit kludgy, but once row 2 was done, I could use FILL-DOWN.

Next, I copied all of the sums of two cubes into a document, sorted them into order, and pasted them into column A of a fresh spreadsheet in column A. Column B had in B2  =IF(A1=A2, "hit","").  

Next, I deleted the non-hit rows, and knew what to look for: here's a sample of the target list:

Now I was ready to search the first spreadsheet, and this was where I copied Diophantus. I might have come up with a routine that did it for me, but it was faster and less brain-damaging just to hack away.

I have been known to sneer at geography a colouring-in, but as I am colour blind, I think I'm allowed to do that. Anyhow, I used colouring-in to pin down my pairs:

All that remained to do now was to check the cells and enter the source values, but as I was doing this manually, I set a check in column E, where E1 read =C1*C1*C1+D1*D1*D1, followed by COPY-DOWN.

My book of STEAM activities for bright young minds, Playwiths, has a number of labour-saving ideas involving spreadsheets, and about 1729 and Ramanujan, but now I need to add some extra stuff, based on what I have written here.

There was a time when hacking was an honourable activity, when the Kalashnikov rifle was described as a hack, and my fraud-busting spreadsheet was most emphatically a hack. We cannot turn the linguistic clock back to save hack, but we can at least try to make recreational computing respectable again!

 

Spittlebugs

 When I was a teenager, the act of spitting was a golly or gollying, and just lately, North Head has been taking a bombardment of gollies, going on appearances. Bushes all over the headland are garlanded like this, with festoons of foam, as though some grubby louts have just passed through.

The 'gollies' are made by small bugs called spittlebugs, and when I say "bugs", I am using entomologist-speak, so my bugs are Hemiptera, insects with piercing mouthparts, like the cicadas, aphids and bird-of-paradise flies (which I will get around to describing one day).

These insects feed on plant sap, and make a sticky foam that seems to keep predators away. Working as a volunteer in a sanctuary, I was asked last Tuesday to prune back some trees that get a bit exuberant. We don't like doing this, but it reduces the fire hazard, so we do it with care. One Monotoca was home to many spittlebugs, and as one of the pockets in my work trousers always has a supply of jars, I snipped away a few of them, and by the time I got home, they had emerged from their foam to see what was going on. So out came the macro lens and the microscope.

First, here we have a juvenile and an adult (some people call them froghoppers): they were both in a Petri dish, which is the curve you can see.

But how big are they? One reason for using a Petri dish is that you cam slip a millimetre scale beneath it: if you let insects loose on a scale, they always seem to run away.

Now let's look at the juveniles:

There's more to say about these beasties, but as I'm flat out (as usual), here's a useful link. I will be playing with these for a few weeks, and this week, I was showing some to Stage 1 kids at Manly Vale, so here are some better shots:

If you want more stuff like this, you could do worse than look into my The Nature of North Head.  The price can be as low as $3 for non-dead-tree versions, $20 for monochrome, but the one in bookshops is colour and dead tree at $50.

It's been a while

 I am travelling right now, but service will be resumed shortly.

Of monsters and other nonsense

In case you are wondering, I have just put to bed my director's cut version of The Monster Maintenance Manual.

It's like the original which made the CBCA Notables list in 2011, but I have added 14 new short stories. Below, I append the fourth and last freebie, to give the adult reader a sense of what is going on here: this is a children's book for groan-ups, Having signed off on the project, I am in a playful mood, before I move onto the next clean-up job.

With no intimations of mortality nipping at my heels, I am still working solidly at the task of sorting out my legacy.  Still, I need also to reduce the makers of third-rate algorithms to tears, so I have just posted this to FB, my intention being to mess furiously with their algorithms:

It being a lay day, I was checking the commonplace file for ideas, and came across this note, from a dozen years in the past:

Dragons hate chocolate. Consider this: every person I know loves chocolate, and none of them has ever been attacked by a dragon. It follows that all the chocolate haters have been eaten by dragons, which shy off at the merest hint of the cocoa bean.

Nobody alive has ever seen a dragon, because since the chocolate haters have been eliminated, there has been no food for dragons, and they have all moved to another planet.

Don't stop eating the chocolate, because if they come back, you will be dragon droppings, quicker than you can say "brown bread!"

End of note: I estimate that if I can come up with 31 other theories like this, I can have an entertaining book. If I don't think of any others, I will write a popular diet book about the central role of theobromine as an antidraconic agent.

This will reap me a fortune, because it tells people to eat something they like, but dresses the advice up in New Age gibberish. Note: the foregoing is entirely fictitious, and any similarity to any existing dietary manuals is purely coincidental.

The Freebie:

The Pudding Monster who saved a city

This is the story of Rice, a pudding monster who was born in a humble shed in the city of Shiny, and how she became Dame Ballista, the Champion of Blomp. As we will learn, Rice had her name changed to Ballista because of what she did, and Shiny was changed to Blomp for reasons that we will get to later.

Nobody much expected an army of stoats with spears, goats with leers, toads with beards and coats with sneers to rush over the plain and lay siege to the city of Shiny and nobody would have expected Rice to become so famous.

But they did, and so she did.

There was one person who expected the attack, though. Alexis Soyer was a brilliant pudding chef but he was always poor, because his apprentice, a lad named Bread, gave so many free puddings to monsters in need of a free feed, though Chef Soyer didn’t mind, because he kept an ear to the ground.

He had no choice about keeping an ear to the ground, because he was too poor to own a bed, even if he did own a future grabber.

This was like a time machine, but it grabbed bits of paper from rubbish bins in the future and brought them back. Mr. Soyer was always hoping to find a thrown-out recipe book, but he never did.

One day, the future grabber gave him a picture of himself, serving pudding at the wedding of Dame Ballista. On the same page, he read how she had saved the day at the siege of Shiny. He noticed that Dame Ballista was the poor young pudding monster who used to come around to get any leftover puddings to practise throwing.

He knew the bridegroom, too, and read the rest of the story. “That’s my apprentice, and together, they’re going to be famous,” he told himself, then he thought about this for a while, and added, “They’ll need some help, though.”

He cooked one of his special sticky date and butterscotch with mango chutney, mushy peas, olives and anchovies puddings and took it around to the palace. The Prince was always asking Soyer for one of his puddings, so he ate it all, that very night, and had a nightmare about a siege.

He dreamed about an army of stoats with spears, goats with leers, toads with beards and coats with sneers, and next morning, he sent his people out to mend the city walls, to gather food and to get ready. But he didn’t say why, so nobody expected an army of stoats with spears, goats with leers, toads with beards and coats with sneers.

When the unexpected enemy came across the plain, people shut the gates and drank a toast to their clever prince. He sat in his kitchen, licking out the last crumbs of Soyer’s pudding and worrying, because the dream hadn’t told him how to deal with a siege run by stoats, goats, toads and coats.

He was most worried about the coats with sneers, because as his second cook said “There’s something worrying about coats with sneers. I mean, how do we all just know that an empty coat is sneering—and what are you going to do about it?”

“That’s the problem”, said the Prince. He stopped when the kitchen door opened. “Hello Alexis! Thanks for the pud!”

Soyer smiled. “Gave you good dreams, did it?”

“Dreadful dreams, actually, all about those stoats, goats, toads and coats. Dreadful but useful, I think.”

“As it was supposed to be, Your Highness. But if you want to save the city of Shiny, you need to ask a poor pudding monster called Rice to help you.”

“A pudding monster? Are you sure? How do you know?”

Alexis smiled. “Yes, I’m sure, but as to my methods, I used one of Neon’s inventions, and I think it may qualify as one of the Grey Arts, so don’t ask too much, just trust me.”

The Prince nodded. “Very well. Summon her, will you?”

“I’ve actually come to summon you to her, after I brought her in. She’s up on the battlements right now, and we need you up there to tell Colonel Blenkinsop to stop arguing and give her what she needs.”

“You’re really, really sure she’s the answer?”

“I’ve seen a future picture of her wedding, and you and I are both there, celebrating.”

The Prince put his hands over his ears. “That’s definitely Grey Arts stuff, so it’s just as well I didn’t hear a word of it—let’s go!”

They found Rice and another pudding monster arguing with Colonel Blenkinsop, who was a mess of mustachios and self-importance. “That lad’s a very poor pudding monster,” Alexis murmured, pointing to the other pudding monster. “We call him Bread.”

“You mean Bread-and-butter?” asked the Prince, who knew the etiquette of naming pudding monsters.

“No, his parents couldn’t afford the butter. He’s a nice young monster, and Rice loves him, but he’s just here to fetch and carry. Rice will do all the work.”

As they got closer, Rice was saying “Colonel, the battering rams will charge soon. Please get me some bales of hay and some garlic oil.”

The Prince nodded, the colonel nodded, and three sergeants who trusted Rice got out the hay and garlic oil they had already stacked, just behind the colonel. Bread began pouring the garlic oil on the hay, and just in time, because the whole flock of battering rams charged toward the walls. Rice began throwing the bales of hay, low and flat, just over the heads of the battering rams.

“You’re missing them!” shouted Blenkinsop. “Cease fire!” he roared.

But the Prince had seen what the colonel had missed. One by one, the battering rams were screeching to a halt, sniffing the garlic hay, then turning and running after the hay, right through the enemy camp, chasing the bales. “Keep firing,” he said. Soon there were no battering rams, and the camp was a mess.

“I’m a pacifist,” Rice said. “I don’t miss, and I send the ammunition where I do  because I don’t want to hit them. Now I need five magnetic boomerangs, ten canned puddings, 15 barrels of custard, 20 oat puddings, 25 containers of mushy peas in a cauldron, and a pot of tea.”

Off went the Second Cook, Alexis Soyer and one of the sergeants, who knew where some magnetic boomerangs had been hidden in the evidence room after they were taken from a suspected Grey Arts practitioner. They brought the boomerangs back, just as nice smells started coming from the kitchen, and as the stoats with spears and the coats with sneers began to advance.

Bread and Rice took a boomerang and gave it a small twist, then Rice threw it out over the stoats and the coats. The whirling magnet lifted the iron-tipped spears of the stoats, and then the wind of the boomerang lifted all of the coats, and carried them out across the plain. “You’ll be sorry when that boomerang comes back!” sniffed the colonel.

“That’s why we twisted it,” grinned Bread. “Now it’s a one-way boomerang. Just watch!” Below the walls, stoats without spears were no threat at all, but the sneers without coats were getting chilly. Soon the sneers were sneezes that blew away on the breezes.

Rice threw two more magnetic boomerangs to make sure there were no stoats with spears, or coats or sneers, anywhere on the plain. “Put the other boomerangs back in the store,” she told the sergeants. She looked out over the plain. “You’d better tell them to hurry with the ten canned puds and the custard!”

The oldest sergeant looked down the ladder. “Puddings and custard are coming now, Miss!” Bread picked up the tin opener.

Out on the plain, the goats with leers and toads with beards were advancing, making a terrible thumping noise as they marched behind a flag with an angry eye on it. “Just in time!” she said.

Carefully, Rice lobbed the custard just over the heads of the advancing enemy, who suddenly realised now it had passed over them that they were in range. Then she took a spare brick and threw it so it broke the stick the eye flag was on. Now they knew she was accurate as well, and they all stopped.

As Bread opened the last tin, Rice started throwing nine of the puddings over their heads and the goats stopped leering, and turned. They were all sniffing at the delicious tin can puddings that were whizzing over the plain, away from Shiny.

Then the goats started chasing the puddings. Their feet got caught in the toads’ beards, and the toads were trampled or dragged into the custard. As the goats stampeded over the plain, the toads fled.

A few caravaggisti came charging in, riding chariots pulled by hippocrenes that came drumming over the plain. Without a word, the sergeants passed Rice the oat puddings. She sent them out with an effortless aim, so close to the hippocrenes that they could almost taste the puddings and read the labels.

In spite of the yells of the caravaggisti, who were all armed with socks filled with sea urchins, the hippocrenes all galloped off over the plain.

“You’re throwing away all our food in the middle of a siege!” complained the colonel.

One of the sergeants took a step back to pick up another oat pudding, and bumped into the colonel, who fell down the stairs and went head-first into the cauldron of mushy peas. He landed in the peas with a loud Blomp!!

“Oops!” said the careless sergeant, trying not to chortle.

“Give peas a chance,” Bread quipped.

Blenkinsop struggled out of the peas, crying. He ran out the gate and around the castle, following the invaders and shouting “Wait for me!”. The Prince turned to Rice.

“He must have been a traitor: can you knock him into the moat, please?”

Rice tossed the last pudding to Bread. “He’s our best spin bowler, your highness, and that’s what this shot needs…”

Bread considered the matter, murmured “Tricky, but do-able” and sent the pudding off. It was spinning so fast that it whirred, but passing the fleeing colonel’s head, the pudding stopped in the air, then jinked sideways, knocking the colonel into the moat, where a moat monster swallowed him, whiskers and all, then burped a loud Blomp!! The sergeants all cheered and high-fived each other, Rice, Bread, the Prince and Soyer.

“I thought he might be one of those Blenkinsops,” said the Prince. “Rice, there are no more enemies, so what do you want to do with the mushy peas?”

Rice took Bread’s hand. We want to get married, so could we have them for our wedding breakfast?”

“I think we can do better than mushy peas,” said the Prince. “What was the pot of tea for?”

“For drinking, your Highness. Throwing is thirsty work.”

“Well, Dame Ballista, step down into the courtyard and we’ll have some mushy peas and tea and talk about the wedding.”

“Oh, sire, I could never be a Dame when Bread’s a plain Mister!”

“My dear Dame Ballista, you could never marry young Lord High Upper Crust, here, if you were ordinary Miss Rice. You’re the saviour of Blomp!”

“Blomp, sire? Are you renaming the city?”

“Yes, to remind us of our only casualty. Oh, and Ballista, you’ll be the new colonel of the guard, if you don’t mind.”

The wedding of Colonel Dame Ballista and Lord High Upper Crust was the society event of the year. Everybody said it was completely unexpected, and as they posed for press photographs, Alexis Soyer decided that he wasn’t going to mention the future grabber. If it wasn’t a Grey Art, it was probably a Grey Area.

Notes (for groan-ups):

All words in this story were provided by the Alexis Soyer Home For Old Alphabet Soup.

No mushy peas were hurt in the falling colonel sequence, and we are not responsible for the well-being of the colonel.

The disused name of Shiny has been registered as a trade mark by the author, who will license it to suitably qualified towns.

Reference:

René Descartes, I Think, Therefore I Aim.

——————————————————————————

* Wondering what that asterisk on the cover was for? You drill a hole to put the string through.

** Review copies available on request. You know where to find me