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.