What do we mean by 'Elderly'?

Far enough back that ‘billy’ was still a novel word, at least in Adelaide, one that had to be placed in quotes, this little tale appeared in a South Australian newspaper:

Lionel Lindsay, Ruins, wood engraving.

...we fell in with an elderly man who was tailing cattle. Having just boiled the “billy,” we invited him to partake of a pannican of tea, which he accepted.
— South Australian Register, 3 November 1857, 3.

The old man turned out to be an old lag, but how old was he, really? What did they mean by "elderly".

My curiosity all started with the 1931 case that shows up as the last item in the short list. I had come across that particular snippet some years ago, and for the present work I am doing on Australian English I went back, looking for that curious paragraph.

I may rate as elderly in their terms, but my search skills are still good, so I found it, Then I cast the net wider, seeking more evidence of how we thought when life expectancy was lower. 

My samples are telling. Watch the changing (and unchanging) meaning of ‘elderly’, below:

1900:

An elderly man was walking along the Port Melbourne pier, near the railway station, when he suddenly fell unconscious … and was afterward conveyed to the Melbourne Hospital by Constable Dooley. On examination in the casualty room the unfortunate man was found to be dead. The deceased was about 55 years of age…
— The Argus, 2 January 1900, 5.

1901:

A fatality occurred at Daly's Baths in the Royal Arcade to-day. This afternoon, an elderly man between 55 and 60 years of age … went to Daly's, and paid for a warm bath … efforts [were] made to resuscitate him, but without avail.
— Mount Alexander Mail (Vic) 30 July 1901, 3.

1915:

An elderly man named John Roberts died suddenly in the killing pen of John Smith, butcher, yesterday afternoon … He was 53 years of age…
— The Inverell Times, 9 February 1915, 4.

1928:

ELDERLY WOMAN INJURED. Knocked down by a motor car in Wellington-parade, near Cliveden Mansions, Teresa Evans, 53 years, of Jolimont, was yesterday admitted to Melbourne Hospit[al] suffering from a fractured skull.
— The Age, 8 May 1928, 10.

1931:

The alleged victim of the assault, an elderly woman, 46 years of age, said she resided with her husband and children at Boulder.
— Kalgoorlie Miner, 6 June 1931, 7.

So now you know what I claim to be of advanced middle age!

When did we start saying that?

Updated 27 March: there is now a new title.

Picking up from where I left off in my last post, I have decided to convert a former database, banjaxed when iinet trashed my websites without warning, but rescued and placed here, and make a book of it.

In the process, I am finally doing a serious trawl through Trove, and Oz literature: I have largely completed the Trove portion, and I am reading a lot of my old favourites from the 19th century (On Our Selection alerted me to the Cockatoo fence, for example). It is already over 194,000 words, but I will trim some fat before it goes out.

My original aim was to provide myself with the wherewithal to write historical fiction by establishing when, for example, people talked about a billy or a damper, or sly grog.

When I dropped the historical fiction plan, I shared the database. This is, on one level, a writer's tool, but it is also fun to just leaf through. I had fun pinning down the origins of fairy bread, and I can share that. Likewise duffer, stringybark and Jack the Painter.

On the right, you can see the working title on a vastly overloaded dummy title page (it got a new title on 27 March). Now looking back, I see that I have trotted out the yarn below, three times before, but it needs a new trot around the paddock.

***

In a short story, His Country—After All, Henry Lawson tells of a conversation he heard on a coach in New Zealand, where an Australian declares he will never go back to that “mongrel desert”, meaning Australia. Then he smells Australian gums before seeing them, but they are in New Zealand. The trees have strange, not-Australian, shapes, but they smell like Australian gums, and next he sniffs out a camp fire which also has a familiar smell.

There was a rabbit trapper’s camp amongst those trees; he had made a fire to boil his billy with gum leaves and twigs, and it was the scent of that fire which interested the exile’s nose, and brought a wave of memories with it.

‘Good day, mate!’ he shouted suddenly to the rabbit trapper, and to the astonishment of his fellow passengers.

‘Good day, mate!’ The answer came back like an echo—it seemed to him—from the past.

Suddenly, this declared ex-Australian, this total never-again and former Australian wants to head back to Australia. Smell can do that, and so can the laugh of a kookaburra—for most Australians. The sight of gum trees in foreign climes works a sort of spell, and the red of the country around Uluru may do it for us as well, but language is the Big One. Hearing our own Oz words and Oz intonations in a foreign place always stops us dead.

Sit in a crowd as I have done, in a pub in Riga; a wine bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps; a hamburger joint in Siem Reap; a reindeer restaurant in Bergen; a Greek café in Banff; a chippie in Glasgow; a tapas bar in Cuzco; Murphy’s curry and Guinness house in San Francisco; high tea at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel; a coffee shop at Heathrow; a tea shop in Kandy; or a bangers-and-mash restaurant in Reykjavik. When you hear Australian tones (and trust me, you will), project your voice and call out “G’day!” with a hint of a rising terminal, but do it with your lips hardly moving, and your vowels as flat as a roadkill goanna after a road train convoy has passed through.

It always works: sit silently, unblinking and poker-faced, watching as Australian heads turn, urgently seeking their unseen compatriot who may, perhaps, have news from back home. It also makes them home-sick. That’s the home we care about, and that single “G’day!” reminds us all of where home is. It’s the place where they talk like us, but I have always wondered how we came to talk our way, and by fossicking around, I know our national voice was alive, two centuries ago.

Our society is divided…We have…first, the Sterling and Currency, or English and Colonial born, the latter bearing also the name of corn stalks (Indian corn), from the way in which they shoot up. This is the first grand division.
—Peter Cunningham, Two Years In New South Wales, third edition, vol 2, 1828, p. 108.

The names Currency and Sterling, he said, were conferred by ‘…a facetious paymaster of the 73rd regiment quartered here—the pound currency being at that time inferior to the pound sterling.’ By 1827, Cunningham had sailed to Australia four times as a surgeon, supervising convicts, and he clearly felt he was an Australian by then, writing of ‘our’ Currency lads and lasses.

Cunningham said currency and sterling each looked down on the other. ‘The Currency lads’, he told us, was a popular standing toast, after it was given by Major Goulburn at an Agricultural Society dinner, while ‘The Currency lasses’ was a favourite colonial tune. These currency lads and lasses, he said, were good workers, but they preferred taking up a trade, or going to sea, rather than doing farm work, which he thought they saw as work fit only for convicts. Currency lads and lasses made good servants on a wage of £10 to £15 per annum.

He also noted that thieves’ slang terms (like plant and swag), along with Dharuk (Sydney Aboriginal) words like jirrand (afraid) might be heard in currency slang. To others in Australian society, speech was a mark of class, but words poured in from all over the world and these new Australians were already using words like bandicoot, verandah and bungalow, all from India, and creek and bush from North America. Various Aboriginal languages gave us names of many plants and animals (like kangaroo, wombat, waratah and yabby) as well as bunyip, woomera and waddy, cooee and yakka.

In time, the Australian language would unite us, but that came later, once new words and phrases were coined and adopted. What united all Australians for most of the 19^th century was either their experience of a long sea voyage to Australia, or the family tales of that voyage. In 112 years, less time than it took for the “Hundred Years’ War” (which lasted for 116 years!), Australia went from a peaceful and settled land, sustainably managed under independent land-holders, to an unsustainable but united continent-nation with its own ways, myths and legends.

Some Australian habits, practices, terms and assumptions were imported from Europe, some came from America, a few were acquired from the original inhabitants, and some were invented from scratch. Many of them we cannot explain with any certainty, but others are more explicable. Take just two verses of a song, familiar to and understood by all Australians, where the words in bold would be confusing to most other speakers of English:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,
Under the shade of a coolabah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled,
Who’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me.

Down came a jumbuck to drink at that billabong
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee,
And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker bag,
You’ll come a Waltzing Matilda with me.

Those bolded terms had all entered the Australian language before 1901, and they all reflect an Australian way of thinking, our own way of life.

So had many other expressions like dunny*, ironbark, stringybark, sheoak, budgerigar, kookaburra, chooks, numbat, goanna, redback, galah, waler, squatter, fossick, bludger, bingie, kangaroos in the top paddock, bushranger, digger, mate, bowyangs, larrikin, wowser, jackeroo, gunyah, fair dinkum, spruik, coolamon, cooee, damper, lamington, shout, sly grog and willy-willy—to list just a few.

* I just ran a check, and dunny wasn't there, but it is now:

dunny: 1942

South Western Times (Bunbury, WA), 30 July 1942, 7. This appears to be the earliest newspaper use of the d-word

I actually had to take a different brand of cigarette than the sort I've been smoking since Dad caught me lighting up the first attempt behind the “dunny.”

dunny: 1956

The Argus, 14 July 1956, 12. This is a savage book review. The book was not for an Oz audience…

In “Not to Mention the Kangaroos” we find Australian characters, who have escaped the penetrating vision of Steele Rudd, Tom Collins, Henry Lawson, and Edward Dyson, to inflict themselves, per favor of Mrs. Corben, on the unenlightened readers of today … In the suburbs, the backward people are still in transports of delight over the installation of flush toilets in their houses. One young wife speaking to Mrs. Corben refers airily to the “dunny cart man,” who, according to Mrs. Corben's informant, was, until quite recently, a familiar sight in the streets and streets of “clapboard” houses of suburbia.

dunny: 1969

Noosa News (Qld), 8 August 1969, 2. Letter to the editor.

Words, excuses and promises do not conceal non-existent results. We have also to put up with a dusty, boggy car park with a promise of “We have a plan for it”. Visitors, both rural and interstate, have been horrified when they have utilized the change sheds, the outside shower and the smelly dunny cans so mis-named ‘Toilets’.

dunny: 1974

The Canberra Times, 10 July 1974, 2. The dunny is still a rara avis in print.

Speaking of toilets, another such regional word is “dumpty” which was the standard word for toilet, dunny, etc in the colleges of the University of Melbourne when I lived in Ormond, but which I've not encountered anywhere else.

***

In mid-2023, I heard a Cooee! near Salzburg in Austria, but lately many old and special words have been slipping away, Still, even as they disappear, the attitude that underlies them remains. Australian custom was made in a very short time, and it lives on, mutating as long as it lives, and as long as I live, I will be observing and annotating it. For example: The term New Australians has three distinct meanings!

A friend (Losang Zopa) wondered why I was not doing “I’m as dry as a dead dingo’s donger”. The answer is that Barry Humphries' lovely coinages are professional, and in slang, I prefer the amateur game. (The line that she quoted came from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie).

So I'm not sulking, just reading 19th century prose...and I am on a break, starting at Easter.

That mongrel language, English

Here is a common version of something James Nicoll wrote in a discussion group many moons ago (the source is long gone, as I wasn't there):

English doesn't “borrow” from other languages: it follows them down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar and valuable vocabulary.

My miserably pedantic and uncreative Arts-graduate father persisted in foisting on me the crapulosity of parsing sentences, and curtailed my boyish adventurism in rifling the pockets of other languages. He is one of the reasons I have always hoped I was adopted. (My perennially unstable mother was the other.)

There is no such thing as proper English: I have no problems with loan words or evolving words. If they make sense, they are fine. In 1490, William Caxton felt the ground of his language moving under him, a century after Chaucer:

And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used and spoken whan I was borne. In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyes, for to have sayled over the sea into zelande. And for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in-to a hows and axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys. And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coulde speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde have eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understod hym wel. Loo, what shode a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren. Certaynly, it is harde to playse every man, by cause of dyversite and chaunge of language.

William Caxton, Preface to Eneydos c 1490.

Here is a quick parallel translation: clumsy in a way, but easier to follow than an elegant version.

And certainly our language as it is now used varies greatly from that which was used and spoken when I was born. Insomuch that in my days certain merchants were in a ship in the Thames, ready to sail over the sea to Zealand. And for lack of wind, they tarried at Foreland, and went to land to refresh themselves. And one of them named Sheffield, a mercer, came into a house and asked for meat and especially he asked after eggs. And the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but would have had eggs, and she understood him not. And then at last another said that he would have eyren. Then the good wife said that she understood him well. Lo, what should a man in these days now write, egges or eyren. Certainly, it is hard to please every man, because of diversity and change of language.

Why do I care about this right now? Well, I am taking an old website, now stored here, and testing it to see if there is a book in it. Working title Early print instances of Australian language use, it looks at how special Australian words crept into out language. Conceived originally as a handy guide for writers of historical fiction, I have pinned down terms like billy, damper and even doover, probably coined as an April Fool's joke in 1942. I have yet to work out why it morphed into dooverlacky, because I am busy mining Henry Lawson's prose works, which I read at age 12 as an antidote to my parents' unpleasant pro-British stance.

And where did goanna come from?

Did you know that scab, once the sheep herder's enemy, became the squatter's friend and the shearers' enemy? Did you know that in the early 1800s a bushranger was never a thief, just a person who ranged the bush?

Did you know that what the Brits call pavement, and the Yanks call sidewalk was already a footpath in Australia in 1803? The pie floater I can take back to 1923, and it seems to have held firm in its meaning, unlike many other colloquial Australian items.

Our society is divided…We have…first, the Sterling and Currency, or English and Colonial born, the latter bearing also the name of corn stalks (Indian corn), from the way in which they shoot up. This is the first grand division.
—Peter Cunningham, Two Years In New South Wales, third edition, vol 2, 1828, 108.

The names Currency and Sterling, Cunningham said, were conferred by ‘…a facetious paymaster of the 73rd regiment quartered here—the pound currency being at that time inferior to the pound sterling.’ By 1827, Cunningham had sailed to Australia four times as a surgeon, supervising convicts, and he clearly felt he was an Australian by then, writing of ‘our’ Currency lads and lasses.

He also noted that thieves’ slang terms (like plant and swag), along with Dharuk (Sydney Aboriginal) words like jirrand (afraid) might be heard in currency slang. To others in Australian society, speech was a mark of class, but words poured in from all over the world and these new Australians were already using words like bandicoot, verandah and bungalow, all from India, and creek, diggings, funnelweb, squatter and bush from North America. Various Aboriginal languages gave us names of many plants and animals (like bingie, kangaroo, wombat, waratah and yabby) as well as bunyip, woomera and waddy, cooee and yakka.

So bother me not over changing words, or I shall give you a standing ovation on my definition. This involves placing you upright against a wall, and pelting you with eyren.

As it happens, I habitually speak cultivated (once, educated) English, and I was in Alex Mitchell's original sample of several thousand Australians, from which he discerned three Australian dialects: educated, general and broad, but educated (we call it 'cultivated' now, and it is what I used on the ABC). It  gave me the most fun as an undergraduate, because the poodles who had been to a Public School would hear me speak in tones that said People Like Us to them, and wag their tails, asking what school had I gone to?

Remember that Henry Lawson was one of my boyhood heroes. Their faces would crumble when I used the beautifully rounded vowels that all my family use, to name my local (albeit selective) high school. "But you don't sound like a state school boy..."

Did I mention I was a natural Third Speaker? No matter, I am. I would smile gently, take them by the upper arm and explain to them that some people needed to go to a special school to learn how to speak. "With some of us, though," I would say gently, "it's just a matter of breeding."

I love the squishing sound of wilting poodles. After maybe twenty of those, word must have spread, because when they saw me coming, the poodles would cross their fingers, eyes, legs and the road. I used to try to time my delivery so there was a bus coming (not out of cruelty, just as social, genetic and environmental improvement), but I never got the timing right.

So with that unkind anecdote out of the way, on to an unkind hobby, also related to accent and speech.

Sit in a crowd as I have done, in a pub in Riga; a wine bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps; a hamburger joint in Siem Reap; a reindeer restaurant in Bergen; a Greek café in Banff; a chippie in Glasgow; a tapas bar in Cuzco; Murphy’s curry and Guinness house in San Francisco; high tea at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel; a coffee shop at Heathrow; a tea shop in Kandy; or a bangers-and-mash restaurant in Reykjavik. When you hear Australian tones (and trust me, you will), project your voice and call out “G’day!” with a hint of a rising terminal, but do it with your lips hardly moving, and your vowels as flat as a roadkill goanna after a road train convoy has passed through.

It always works: sit silently, unblinking and poker-faced, watching as Australian heads turn, urgently seeking their unseen compatriot who may, perhaps, have news from back home. That’s the home we care about, and that single “G’day!” reminds us all of where home is. It’s the place where they talk like us, but I have always wondered how we came to talk our way, and by fossicking around, I know our national voice was alive, two centuries ago, and that is what I am now chasing.

I am, you are, we are Australian, and we can talk as we wish hijacking words and amending their meaning as we go, just as our forebears* did.

Why? Because their forebears* did: just look up Amusing, Awful, and Artificial.

-------------------------------------------------------

* The forebears knew nothing of Goldilocks...

The apprentices who were taught nothing

This is another sample from the work I have just completed, Keeping People is Wrong.

The Colonial Secretary in Sydney, Alexander M’Leay announced in 1831 that a bunch of colleens were about to arrive and would be divided up among the deserving rich. They would not be slaves, though; they would be paid just over nine pence a week (though they would not be allowed to spend any of it, until they were out of their indentures).

Some girls about fifteen years of age were to be sent from “one of the Public Institutions in Ireland, where they have been brought up with much care and attention to their moral and religious duties; and it being desirable that they should be disposed of in a manner the most likely to render them useful members of society…” In other words, these would be convenient and obedient servants, and the governor wanted to know who would like one, given that they would be bound as apprentices.

*

When slavery was abolished in British colonies on 1 August 1834, 770,280 slaves became free, and a number of sops were thrown to the slave-owners. First, they were massively compensated for their “property loss”, but then they were not stripped of their property at all. The African slaves were just “apprenticed” for six years. They were semi-dependent on their masters for that period of time, while having some rights as free men, and not able to be sold.

The idea was to “prepare” them for the responsibilities of free labour and economic independence (we will see that this is a recurrent theme, whenever a downtrodden group seeks proper pay: “You aren’t ready for it, all that money will go to your head, it will spoil you…”)

The “indentured Negroes” were blunt, wondering why it should take them six years to learn what they had been doing all their lives. So there was form for using indentures to entrap, or maybe even enslave. It became common in the 19th century to muddle up the indentures of apprenticeship with the indentures of a one-sided labour contract, the idea being to imply that the victims of indentured servitude were bound, hand and foot, to do the will of their rightful masters.

*

A girl apprentice

All too often the indenture system was used, not to train apprentices, but to create an underclass of manual labourers and domestic servants. Sarah Rankin appears to have been one such victim, coming from the Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children, which was created to care for abandoned children or for those whose parents were ‘dissolute characters’. Single parents could place children there if they paid a fixed sum for the child’s maintenance, but we have no information on how Sarah ended up in the Asylum.

It was neither an orphanage nor a workhouse, but Randwick was not pleasant. In 1867 there were 77 deaths there from whooping cough, so perhaps Sarah Rankin was lucky to be apprenticed from the Asylum to Julien Scriber—or was she all that lucky? For starters, Julien (or Jules or Julius) appears to have had no trade, although he had a farm and some cattle, and the apprenticeship was for six years. There was also a Mrs Scriber, whose behaviour led Sarah to write a letter to the Asylum,

…complaining of ill-treatment by Mrs. Scriber, and stating, that in consequence of ill-usage, and a fear that Mrs. Scriber would kill her, she had left.
—The Kiama Independent, and Shoalhaven Advertiser 3 August 1877, 2.

The Kiama Police court was told by Mr Connell (P.M.) that there would be no difficulty in obtaining another more suitable place, and she had asked for permission to do so. On the other hand, there was a second letter from Mr Scriber to the Asylum stating that Sarah Rankin had, without just cause or reason, left his indentured service, and requesting either that she be sent back, or he be released from his responsibility in regard to her.

In evidence, Sarah said she had no fault to find with Mr Scriber, who was a kind master, but Mrs Scriber was so violent of temper and had abused her so that she could not and would not live with her. There were times when Mrs Scriber had knocked her down, dashed her against the fireplace, dragged her by her hair, kicked her, beaten her with a whip, and threatened to kill her.

Mrs Scriber said the girl had been in their service for nearly three years, and had been a good, willing servant until about three months ago, when some relationship was discovered between her and the Boyles, who were neighbours. After that she had been saucy, indolent, careless, and apparently under some sinister and adverse influence. She conceded that, under provocation, she chastised Sarah with a small riding-whip (which she produced), the same as she would chastise her own children; but it was absolutely false to say she had knocked her down, dragged her by her hair, kicked her, or threatened to kill her.

Mr Scriber said Sarah had never wanted for money or clothes, and at the end of each year he had paid her the balance of pocket money due to her. This applied to the first two years only, as the third had not yet expired. He was willing to take the girl—who was now living with Mrs Boyle—back again if she promised to reform, or he was willing to agree if the indentures should be cancelled.

Sarah Randall [sic!] stoutly and pertinaciously denied ever having received a farthing of pocket money. On one occasion she went with the family to a picnic when the master paid 9d for her admission, and gave her 6d for herself, and that was the only money she had received.

Mr. Connell advised the girl to go back to her service, pending the decision of the Asylum Committee; but she absolutely refused to go back on any consideration, and Mrs. Boyle, who was present, said she would keep the girl till she got another place.
—The Kiama Independent, and Shoalhaven Advertiser 3 August 1877, 2.

Anybody seeking further detail will need to know that Scriber (as he was listed in the newspaper) normally used his birth-name, Schreiber, and so far as I can find, this man's only 'trade' was farmer. Nothing in the evidence ever suggested that Sarah was being educated in any trade, and it is reasonable to suspect that her “apprenticeship” was just as much a sham as that of the slaves in the Caribbean four decades earlier. The indenture was no more than a fetter to tie her down.

Now we will look at some other cases, where the apprenticeship was clearly a sham for entrapment:

The Stolen Generations

The Stolen Generations were Aboriginal children taken away from their parents and families. The people taking the children away believed that Aboriginal culture was inferior to European culture, but many of the children they took away grew up feeling that they had no people, no family, no country, and no place. These four things are all a central part of a continuing culture in Aboriginal society.

Looking back, it now seems very cruel to take children away from their parents, so why did white people do it? As well as wrongly believing that Aboriginal people were inferior, many thought that the Aboriginal race would die out. They also believed, again wrongly, that all Aboriginal people had black d Aboriginal children had ‘white blood’ and therefore needed to be ‘rescued’.skin, like many of those in the Northern Territory. So they assumed that any pale-skinne

Saving the children
Some Aboriginal adults worked out ways to stop the government from taking their children away. For example, children would be encouraged to sit quietly in a hole in the ground, covered by a few pieces of corrugated iron, when “the welfare” came to find children to take away.

I had this horror tale from a work colleague, who told me that as a child, she had a problematic pale skin, not unusual in her kin group, far paler than the skin of the “full bloods” of the Northern Territory. If they saw her, “the welfare” would have concluded she was ‘part white’, and torn her away from culture and a loving family. So she hid, patiently.

Most of the people who took the children of the Stolen Generations from their parents sincerely believed they were doing the right thing. When the truth came out, most of the few white participants who were still alive were upset to learn what harm they had really done.

The children who were taken were placed in 480 institutions with differing degrees of gentleness, and many were fostered or adopted by non-Indigenous families. Many were given new names and forbidden to speak any language but English and there was little or no formal education, because they were expected to become manual labourers or domestic servants.

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

Until 1900, the Police Act had made it an offence to tamper with or detain another person’s native servant, and a breach led to a fine of from £20 to £40, when costs were added in. The writer then cited a case where a white man in the Gascoyne district had lured away “a rather nice looking native girl”. Her employer took out a summons, the man was fined, and the girl was ordered to go back to her service “where she is still”.

This was too much for the editor, who did the sums and expostulated: “Still there after eight years; the 12 months agreement is evidently pretty durable.” Men, on the other hand, were “caught and apprenticed to a kind master at about nothing and sixpence a year”, said a writer in The Bulletin, as quoted in a Perth newspaper.

Westralia is proud of its slave system on the ground that it prevents native girls being led astray by wandering white men of the swagman and prospector description [but] doesn’t make the seduction of aboriginal girls a punishable offence. It doesn’t protect them to any extent that is worth a straw against their own white boss, the squatter. Before they are “apprenticed” or enslaved, or after their period of enslavement has expired, the law takes no notice of their morals, and does nothing in particular for their protection.
— West Australian Sunday Times 1 April 1900. 8 (taken from The Bulletin).

About Keeping People is Wrong

This book examines the nature of forced or compulsory service, and the name stems from an 1852 newspaper description of an Aboriginal man as “belonging to Mr Andrews”. The language of slavery and being a boss tend to merge into each other, all too easily. Among family and friends, I call this work Bog-snorkelling in a cesspool, due to the loathsome creatures encountered.

Starting with a quick look at classical and plantation (sugar/cotton) slavery, we look at slavery’s poor cousin, indentured servitude in North America, and how indentured worked for apprentices. Then we move onto compulsory labour in Australia (the convict era), and how ‘servants’ were managed, usually badly. This was not slavery, but close, and the trained eye will discern the seeds of slavery.

As an example, apprenticeship and indentures were often a sham.

Australia’s first slaves were sent home in 1819, by Governor Macquarie, who by an odd quirk, had owned slaves, briefly, and freed the lot. Repression came from various Masters and Servants laws. By the 1830s, Australia was importing trainee servants and serfs: indentured Irish, German and Indian workers. The exploitation of youngsters is followed down to Fairbridge and stolen generations, all trained as domestic servants.

More on importing Chinese and Indians, Ben Boyd’s first South Sea Islanders. Using M&S laws to stop people rushing to the goldfields. The rise of the unions, railways and shearer’s strikes, and how ‘Afghans’ came in, far better protected, to work camels.

Some vignettes on blackbirding, some of the more violent blackbirders: this was definitely close to slavery at times. (One case of an islander with a ‘brand’, later cleared.) Real slaves came in from the Sulu sultanate (Philippines) to fish for pearls, and some of the Aborigines involved may have been enslaved.

Some of the workers that you see above were probably slaves, but as pearl divers, they were paid, and some of them earned enough to buy their freedom.

On the cattle stations: how Aborigines were treated as property, cases of violence and murder, remarkably slaver-like behaviour, stockmen in the 1960s, Vincent Lingiari has a win. Finally, a 2020 conviction for slavery in New Zealand. Slavery still happens!

This looks at all of the potentially enslavable groups in Australia, either prisoners or under indentures: convicts; Irish and other orphans or teenagers; Indians; Germans; Chinese; apprentices and unionists; south sea islanders and Indigenous workers. There are common themes in the methods used to oppress and control, and that brings us to the Fairbridge kids and the Stolen Generations.

Most of the studies I can identify look only at one group, and that means we miss the common themes. Three groups provided undeniable slaves: Indians in Sydney in 1816; Sulu pearl fishers in the 1880s; and Aborigines in the pearl fisheries and cattle stations of WA, some of whom were bashed and murdered.

A few books have looked at the plight of the south sea islanders in the hands of the blackbirders, but this work provides a synoptic view of how the people traffickers worked, and the facile lies they told. The alternative title (Involuntary Belonging) comes from that1852 SMH news report of a Wiradjuri hero as “belonging to Mr. Andrews”!

This book reveals where the bodies are buried, and who buried them, right across Australia’s history. Nobody else has done that, and this is a hot topic, right now.

Chapter breakdown:

1. Defining slavery: Valuing freedom, slavery in ancient times, Egypt, Greece and Rome, sugar slavery, the Somerset and Knight cases outlaw slavery in Britain, the emancipation movements in Britain.

2. Apprentices and indentures, apprentice teachers, indentured servants in America (some of them undoubtedly kidnapped, and it was coerced labour), then a surprise that I may how slavery may have made us human.

3. Convicts to Australia as a way of cleansing Britain on the model of indentured servants: some case studies, how they were shipped, compulsory labour, management and works done, road gangs, the challenge of keeping wages as low as possible.

4. Justice and convict management: tickets of leave, pardons, some of the bad and bent judges, because unsympathetic judges helped keep manual labourers (and wages) under control.

5. Punishment of convicts and others, the life in the Female Factory, Sudds and Thompson, a wicked Archdeacon, the Bushranging Act, some of the system’s victims. This was nothing to what happened in the late 19^th century, but the seeds were sown here.

6. Masters and servants: how the underclass, even when ‘free’ were constrained, how people were blocked from gold hunting, how the gold rush really started, how young people were tamed, indentable colleens who frightened off pirates, Stolen Generations, the Fairbridge failure, runaway servants. How the Masters and Servants laws operated.

7. The end of transportation and changes in the labour supply meant we needed to cast around for other supplies of menial labour, and lots of it, to keep wages low. Giving Australia its name, an innocent convict, colonial rivalry, the Catalpa rescue, the side issues of the convict era.

8. Finding foreigners who might be biddable, including the Irish and the Germans: enough hungry paupers would force wages down. Squatters and how to spot them. The first Australian owner of slaves (Macquarie briefly owned 300!) and the first Australian slaves (chapter 10, sent home by Macquarie!).

9. The wool trade and managing the shepherds and the sheep, on to the shearers’ strikes, and the rise of the unions. Workers standing up for their own rights would become important when they looked at the welfare of their darker-skinned siblings.

10. Indian imports, starting with some slaves in 1816, then Indian labourers for a short while, largely unsuccessful, and replaced by Chinese, then Afghans to work camels after Harry the Camel shot his owner.

11. Chinese servants before the ‘coolies’, their travails, a court case in Goulburn, Chinese reaching Australia to hunt for gold, anti-Chinese riots, free Chinese in Australia.

Kanakas on a pineapple plantation.

12. South Sea Islanders, how Ben Boyd started the trade, and was stopped, the villainous blackbirders. There were other less villainous ones, but there was definitely something close to slavery going on here, with slaughter, kidnapping, beating and more. The mindset of the farmers was close to slavery.

Quelling an attempted break-out by kidnapped 'blackbirds' on the brig Carl. This was murder.

13. The pearl fishers, how the trade began and was managed, slaves from the Philippines, the likelihood of exploited or enslaved Aborigines, the treatment of convicted Aborigines, Tjandamurra fights back.

14. Two Wiradjuri heroes. On the cattle stations: how Aborigines were treated: some cases of violence and murder, remarkably slaver-like behaviour, on to stockmen in the 1960s, Vincent Lingiari has a win. Finally, a 2020 conviction for slavery in New Zealand. Slavery is still out there.

Nobody else has done this, according to an Australian emeritus professor of Southeast Asian Modern History (name available if you are a publisher). He wrote:

The subject matter of your manuscript numbering 95,000 words is both timely and important Slavery or servitude in all its manifest form and variation in Australia has not been tackled yet in a single volume. 

It actually grew to 106,000 words after that. If you believe in this book, badger a publisher to pick it up. You, or the publisher, can get a sense of my work here.

For a sample from this work, read about the earliest Australian slaves here.

Keeping People is Wrong

The title is the title of a serious history that I am pitching. Here's a taste: it is about coerced labour: did you know that Australia once had slaves?

*

Before 1786, courts in Britain had ruled that there could be no slaves on English or Scottish soil, and in that year Arthur Phillip—the future first governor at Botany Bay—had written to Lord Sydney about his plans:

The laws of this country [Britain] will, of course, be introduced in [New] South Wales, and there is one that I would wish to take place from the moment His Majesty’s forces take possession of the country: That there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves.

With the British penetrating India in the 1800s, some settlers moved on from India to Australia, and they sometimes brought Indian servants with them. The earliest case seems to be that of Governor Macquarie’s one-time slave, George Jarvis, though by the time he reached Australia, Jarvis was already a free man and the Governor’s loyal manservant. Purchased at the Cochin slave market, along with another boy for a total of 170 rupees, Macquarie gave them Anglo names, but while Macquarie later referred to him as his ‘smart Portuguese boy’, George was probably at least part-Indian. I have to conclude that Macquarie’s purchase was a “rescue”.

The family of Macquarie’s first wife, Jane Jarvis, owned 300 slaves in Antigua. When she died of tuberculosis in 1796, they had already bought the two boys, and she left her fortune (£6000) to him, along with all the slaves. Macquarie promptly freed the slaves in Antigua, but he sent the two boys to school. The other boy, Hector, disappeared in Kolkata (then Calcutta), and Macquarie later (in 1802) sent George to school in Scotland.

Anybody knowing of Somerset’s case and Knight’s case (as Macquarie must have done) will realise that sending George to school in Scotland made him no longer a slave. He might have gone his own way, but he later became Macquarie’s valet, and served the governor throughout his time in New South Wales, and then back in Scotland. That aside, there are hints of other Indian servants in New South Wales, such as those of Mr O’Connor, who was leaving the colony in March 1818, with three “native Bengal servants”, Boxoo, Callachund, and Jument.

Even earlier, William Browne had Indian servants in Sydney. Browne’s mother was Persian, while his father was apparently English; as a rich Calcutta merchant in Sydney, he was probably socially acceptable. He is sometimes said to have settled in Sydney in 1809, but the earliest trace I can find of him is in 1816:

MR. WILLIAM BROWNE (of the Firm of BROWNE & TURNER, Calcutta), intending to reside henceforward in this Colony, proposes to receive Orders for BENGAL and other GOODS, to be imported with all practicable Despatch on the ship Mary, Captain ORMAN, now in this Port, and nearly ready for sea.
—The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 4 May 1816, 2.

When he reached Sydney in 1816 Browne had at least four Indian workers with him. When his wife joined him in 1818, she brought more servants, and he gathered others on contracts for service of between three and ten years. He referred to them as “dungurs”, while others referred to them as Dhangars. The Governor was impressed by Browne and granted him a large area of land. This was worked by the “dungurs”, who are largely missing from the records, but in April 1818 two of them were robbed. Another four, described as “Indian servants of Mr William Brown (sic)”, named as Subball, Hanniff, Rimdiall, and Pearbux, left the colony in 1820. By 1819 most of Browne’s other thirty-nine Indians had already been sent back to India at government expense, and there is a story behind their departure.

In July 1819 William Browne was ordered to appear before the colony’s bench of magistrates to defend himself against allegations of mistreatment and serious abuse of his Indian workers. In all, twenty-two employees complained of gross abuse, and asked to be released from their contracts.

The magistrates found that the workers had indeed been “insufficiently and ill fed, unduly worked, greatly aggrieved and unjustly treated,” ordering that all his Indian workers (forty people) be released at once from his service and returned to Calcutta, with the government footing the bill. The governor then tried to recover this cost from Browne, but the judge (Barron Field, whose curious name will be explained later) found with some regret for Browne on a technicality:

…the Bench might have done more; and might have compelled the defendant adequately to victual and clothe his servants till they should be entitled by their agreements to passage home; and that the finding of such passage too might have been compelled by the Governor, at the peril of the defendant’s being sent out of the Colony himself. But the Governor could not recover this maintenance and passage-money by paying it for the defendant, and then seeking to recover it back from him in a Civil Court … the verdict must be for the defendant.
—The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 18 September 1819, 4.

It must be said that the greatest villain in the piece appears to have been Mrs Browne. A person of mixed race, her animus towards the Indian servants may have related to race, but she may simply have been mean. Certainly, two years after the rest had escaped, Pearbux, who was still working for the Brownes, wrote to one of her former employers in Calcutta, complaining that she was treated “no better than a slave”. She asked him to intercede with the Governor on her behalf to “free her from bondage”.

In evidence in 1819, a servant called Thomassie said “I was beat by Mrs. Browne at the farm at the Devil’s Back; I have been so long with Mr. Browne without wages; and I want some; I have been with him from my infancy…” On that evidence, Thomassie was undoubtedly a slave in Australia.

Later, “Indian servant” was used as a code for “coolies”, and the only way of telling the difference between personal servants and labourers is by the numbers: if there were more than half a dozen “servants”, they were coolies. Being a coolie meant signing a contract by which the servant’s fare was paid by the master, in exchange for the servant agreeing to work for a (usually long) time at a specified (usually very low) rate of pay. Being a coolie in a foreign country also meant being hampered by not being able to communicate with Australians, not even friendly ones. It was the thin end of the slavery wedge, but not itself slavery.

At the very end of the 1800s, there were other bought-and-sold slaves in Australia, but to find out about them, you will need to read the book.

 

Tectonics

I have recently been polishing off a HUGE Australian history, and you cannot explain Australia, its places, biota and people without the geology, and that needs plate tectonics.

In the early 1960s, we gathered the evidence of sea floor spreading, which showed that the Earth’s surface is made up of plates that were moving, and all of a sudden, the planet’s history made a lot more sense.

First, there was the idea of continental drift, a vague notion that somehow the planet had a changing surface. You only had to look at a map of the Atlantic Ocean to see how Africa would fit in neatly against South America, people said. In 1596, a Dutch map maker called Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) suggested that the two sides of the Atlantic had been torn apart, but he did not explain what might have done it.

Once people started collecting plants and animals, some interesting parallels showed up, like the presence of monkeys on both sides. You could explain Asian monkeys by assuming they had wandered across from Africa (or vice versa), but the South American monkeys were a puzzle. A close inspection showed that the New World monkeys were quite different, suggesting that a great deal of change had happened since the groups separated. Other plant and animal distributions would also make more sense if continents had originally been joined together.

In 1912, a German meteorologist named Alfred Lothar Wegener (1880–1930) published an account of how continental drift might have happened. He suggested that the supercontinent Pangaea began to split, about 200 million years ago. Alexander Du Toit in Johannesburg supported him and proposed that Pangaea first broke into two large pieces, Laurasia in the northern hemisphere and Gondwanaland in the southern hemisphere. Laurasia and Gondwanaland later broke apart to make today’s continents.

The key find was the distribution of a fossil fern named Glossopteris, found in South America, southern Africa, Australia—and Antarctica. The snag was explaining the huge force needed to move a continent around. While we use the same slab-names today, much of the background is different, and we regard some of today’s land masses as being assembled from several different scraps.

How the mysterious ‘drift’ of the continents was explained, and went from science fiction to science.

Continental drift tried to account for the shapes of the world’s large land pieces and the distributions of animals and plants. Plate tectonics works on the idea that the crust ‘floats’ on the more dense mantle, and that parts are slowly moved around by convection effects. It explains the continent shapes and plant and animal distributions, but it also explains the main mountain regions like the Himalayas and the Alps, the distribution of volcanoes and earthquakes, the location of island groups like Hawaii and the Aleutian islands—and the forces that drive the process.

It all began with the idea of sea floor spreading, and that came from mapping of the sea floor, at first carried out with long weighted lines, lowered to the floor, and later with sonar: sending ultrasonic ‘pings’ at the sea floor and timing their return. This revealed the shape of the seabed. The first chart showing parts of the mid-Atlantic ridge appeared in 1855. Ships laying telegraph cables across the Atlantic also detected parts of it, then in 1947, cores of the seabed showed that the sediment on the floor of the Atlantic was much thinner than it should have been under an ocean that had existed for 4 billion years. Clearly, a rethink was needed.

Before long, other ships were mapping sea floors and tracing the whole of the global mid-ocean ridge, more than 50,000 kilometres long and, sometimes more than 800 km across. This was no mere range of hills, either, because the mountains averaged 4500 metres above the sea floor.

Then there was an oddity that can be found in basalt: the magnetic fields sometimes go the ‘wrong’ way, the reverse of today’s magnetic field. We know now that every so often, there is a polar reversal, where the Earth’s magnetic field ‘flips’, reversing the magnetic north and south poles. As liquid basalt escapes from the Earth, the magnetic field of the moment is printed into the rocks.

If you map the zones of normal and reversed magnetic fields around the mid-Atlantic ridge, you see a pattern of stripes going across the sea floor. The way this is shown in school texts, most people think the sea floor is striped like a zebra. It isn’t like that, at all: the black and white are there to show the two polarities, and all the basalt is black. The ‘stripes’ were of different sizes, reflecting longer and shorter periods between reversals, but the amazing thing was that the two sides of the ridge showed a mirror pattern.

By 1961, people were beginning to hint, rather nervously, that maybe the basalt was oozing from the floor and spreading out to either side. During the 1960s, deep-sea drilling rigs began to bring up cores from the sea floor, and by 1968, fossil and isotope tests on the cores established a proof for the sea floor spreading hypothesis, young rocks near the ridge, old rocks further out.

Now we can explain the more peculiar earthquake areas. Spreading in one place means rocks being buried somewhere else. The subduction zones where one plate slides under another, the deep sea trenches, the position of Wallace’s Line, and even the origins of Africa’s Rift Valley, where many of the earliest human and pre-human fossils are found today, were all explained.

Wallace’s Line divided Asian plants and animals from Australian plants and animals. It is a subduction trench between Australia and Asia.

The Himalayas, the Swiss Alps, and the Andes are all formed as the crust piles up where plates are colliding. The volcano-free earthquakes of Turkey and Greece are explained: the movement between the plates there is not the sort that generates volcanoes. Around the Pacific, the Ring of Fire, the long chain of active volcanoes is explained, while the Hawaiian islands are the result of a plate slipping over a ‘hot spot’ that keeps generating volcanoes.

And that is probably enough for any single theory to have to explain.

The art of making records

There was a quiet patch there, because I was too busy working on several almost-complete books that I have started to pitch. Here's a bit from one of them, working title Founding Principles.

*

If science is to grow, if knowledge is to be spread, it needs to be shared. Stone engravings are all very well, but in the long run, we need paper and ink, we need writing, and we need printing, but it began on clay and stone, and I have just finished Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth, about how Linear B was decrypted. 

above, the Rosetta Stone which let us decipher hieroglyphics; below, Egyptian hieroglyphics from Abu Simbel

The Rosetta stone was carved in 196 BCE, and it carries three inscriptions, saying the same thing in Greek, in Egyptian demotic script, and in hieroglyphics. The content is fairly boring, a list of taxes repealed by Ptolemy V, but the use of three languages made the stone very exciting when it was found in 1799 by French forces fighting in the Napoleonic Wars in Egypt. When the French lost a major battle, the stone became a prize of war, handed over to the victors, and placed on display in the British Museum in 1802, where it remains.

A few things were needed before writing could catch on. As a rule, nomads would have no interest in making records or carrying records around, especially if they were on clay. So people probably needed something to write on, something to write with, and some useful place where the written records could be kept. Inscribed stones might be set up here and there, but unless there were other uses for writing, the whole recording thing might be a bit of a flash in the pan. As well, there needed to be an agreed alphabet or script that readers and writers could understand.

The Sumerians explained the invention of writing with a tale of a messenger who was so tired when he reached the court of a distant ruler that he could not remember his message from the king of Uruk (between Baghdad and Basrah). Hearing this, the distant ruler took a piece of clay, flattened it, and wrote a message on it for the messenger to take back.

That story has a few sizable holes in it. Just for starters, how would somebody back at Uruk know what the symbols meant? Still, what can we expect in a tale about events that happened so long ago, when it was probably never written down?

The Egyptians said the scribe and historian of the gods, the god Thoth, invented hieroglyphs; the Sumerians either credited the unnamed king, or the god Enlil. The Assyrians and Babylonians said the god Nabu was the inventor. The Maya said they owed their writing system to the supreme deity Itzamna who was a shaman, a sorcerer, and creator of the world. More believably, Chinese tradition says writing was invented by a sage called Ts’ang Chieh, a minister to the legendary Huang Ti (the Yellow Emperor).

Some forms of writing used characters for syllables (Linear B is a good example), other writing systems used a symbol just to mean a letter-sound (as in English), while still others used a symbol to mean a word or idea, as happens in Chinese.

These full-word symbols are called ideograms or logograms (which just means that each symbol writes an idea or a word), and they can mean the same in different languages, rather like the numeral 5 or the signs in airports all over the world. Just to confuse things, some of those airport signs are also called pictograms, because they are pictures of what they represent.

Then again, Egyptian hieroglyphs are a mixture of alphabetic characters and ideograms, with a few extra symbols to clarify the meaning. Few writing systems were designed from scratch: they just grew, a bit like English spelling! The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq.

Ignoring the myth of the Uruk messenger, their writing probably started with marks on clay that Sumerian accountants used around 3300 or 3200 BCE to note down numbers of livestock and stores of grain, the sorts of records societies need, once they start farming. Over about 500 years, the symbols became more abstract, allowing ideas to be written down.

Egyptian hieroglyphs (literally “priestly writing”) are unlike Sumerian cuneiform. They probably developed separately, but maybe the Egyptians got the basic idea of marks to represent language from other people. The Harappan script from the Indus valley in what is now Pakistan and western India, seems to be another independent growth, though nobody has learned to read it yet. The civilization which established the script collapsed in about 1900 BCE, so their writing did not develop further.

The oldest alphabets that we understand seem to have emerged in Egypt around 1800 BCE. They were developed by people speaking a Semitic language, and only had consonants. These alphabets later gave rise to several other systems: a Proto-Canaanite alphabet at around 1400 BCE and a South Arabian alphabet, some 200 years later. There were others, but we will stay with this short list.

The Phoenicians adopted the Proto-Canaanite alphabet which later became both Aramaic and Greek, then through Greek, inspired other alphabets used in Anatolia and Italy, and so gave us the Latin alphabet, which became our modern alphabet. Aramaic may have inspired some Indian scripts, and certainly it became the Hebrew and Arabic scripts. Greek and Latin alphabets later inspired Norse runes and also the Gothic and Cyrillic alphabets.

The way was open for poetry, literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, recipes, racing form guides, technical information, comic books, tax, weather and astronomical records, religious teachings and more to be written down and passed from one generation to another.

All of a sudden, people didn’t need to remember so much, and all of the playing pieces that scientists would need were in place.

Writing awards, Peter Macinnis

First draft, with a few wrinkles. Most of the links work...

I apologise for dropping this in here, but after iinet treacherously and without warning, banjaxed my web site, I need a quick fix for submissions to publishers.

 

Some of my gongs: I'm hurrying here, and there are a few missing...

Summary

Most of these works are already accessible from this link: when the pressure lets up, I will add the rest.

CBCA Notable books:  1998: The Desert; 2008: Kokoda Track: 101 Days; 2010: Australian Backyard Explorer; 2011: The Monster Maintenance Manual  2013: Australian Backyard Naturalist  2014: The Big Book of Australian History 2020: Australian Backyard Earth Scientist

CBCA Short List books: 2008: Kokoda Track: 101 Days 2010: Australian Backyard Explorer

CBCA Eve Pownall Honour Book: 2008: Kokoda Track: 101 Days

CBCA Eve Pownall Winner: 2010: Australian Backyard Explorer

NSW Premier's History Awards, Young People's History Prize Short list: 2007: Kokoda Track: 101 Days

Wilderness Society Short List: 2000: The Rainforest

White Ravens List: 2011: Australian Backyard Explorer

Whitley Awards: 2000: The Rainforest; 2012: Australian Backyard Naturalist 

Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing: 1997: Slam Dunk Series (Send it to Forensic and Tall Tales or True?); 2019: Australian Backyard Earth Scientist, Student resource: Arts/Science/Humanities/Social Sciences/Technologies/Health and Physical Education/Languages, winner.

WA Premier's Book Awards, Children's Literature: 2013: Australian Backyard Naturalist  (joint winner)

Background

Friends can be polite and say your book is excellent when it isn't, critics often don't know what they are talking about (and I should know: I write reviews sometimes), but most awards are a bit different. All things being equal, some discerning people have looked at your work and decided they can see merit in it, and marked the event by printing off a fancy certificate.

There is one drawback: I have several times had a reviewer express the opinion that one of my children's books was created to meet the requirements of the Eve Pownall Awards. I don't work that way: I do a story that is honest and scientifically correct, and one that has a beginning, a middle and an end. UPDATE: in April 2008, I was surprised to discover that my Kokoda Track: 101 Days had been shortlisted for that very award, sponsored by the Children's Book Council of Australia! Better still, on August 15, I got Honour Book status. Not quite THE prize, even now, but I'm happy, given the competition.

Kokoda Track: 101 Days was also shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier's History Prize in the Young people's History Prize category, but missed the Big One. No matter, it got up at the CBCA awards as an Eve Pownall Honour Book.

I'm still not trying to write to any specification but I must be on their wavelength. On March 30, 2010, I was present at a function in Sydney when the shortlist was announced, and my Australian Backyard Explorer was in the 2010 Eve Pownall shortlist. Then in August, it was named as the winner of the Children's Book Council of Australia Eve Pownall award for Information Books. I'm not sure if I approve of people getting awards for having fun, but I didn't say that to anybody until I had my paws on the goodies! It was later added to the prestigious international White Ravens awards for 2011. Have a look, and see the fine company I keep!

Titles I have enjoyed writing in the past include Send it to Forensic and Tall Tales or True?, from Treehouse Press. These were part of the SlamDunks series, which gained a "commended" in the Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing. Ho hum, always the bridesmaid . . . well, I was, back then. In 2019, as indicated above, I was a winner in the same awards.

In 1998, "The Desert" was cited as notable in the CBCA Book of the Year awards -- and made it onto the Clayton's short list, but not the real thing. "The Rainforest" was shortlisted for the Wilderness Society's Environment Award for children's literature -- we missed the Big One, but, hey, somebody out there likes us -- and in July 2000, we took out a Whitley award for "Best Children's Book -- Story and Illustration". See The Whitley Awards page of the Royal Zoological Society of NSW for more.

In 2011, my children's book The Monster Maintenance Manual was a CBCA notable book and Australian Backyard Naturalist was a notable in 2013. That means, in all, I have had five notable books. That's not too shabby.

In late 2012, my Australian Backyard Naturalist received a Whitley Award from the Royal Zoological Society of NSW. In July 2013, this book was short-listed for the W.A. Premier's Book Awards, and on September 16, it was joint winner with Steven Herrick's Pookie Allera is Not My Boyfriend.

In April 2014, my The Big Book of Australian History was a notable book in the CBCA Eve Pownalls. I am in the middle of converting this into a three-times-the-size version for adults (suitable for teens and accessible to kids of all ages).