The world is only six thousand years old

 It's untrue, sorry, in spite of statements like these:

The world was created on 22nd October, 4004 BC at 6 o’clock in the evening.
—James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1581–1656), Chronologia Sacra.

The poor world is almost six thousand years old …
— William Shakespeare (1564–1616), As You Like It, IV, i, 95.

James Ussher was an Irish Church of England clergyman who became archbishop of Armagh before moving to London in 1640. A learned gentleman with leanings towards John Calvin, he believed in the literal truth of the Bible, and deduced from a careful reading that the world was created on October 23, 4004 BC at noon. He is now a feature of scientific mythology, often spelt Usher (as he often was in his own life), and with a number of variant dates and/or times other than the time and date he actually specified (9 am is popular, so is October 26: for example, Daniel Boorstin, in The Discoverers, p. 451, has October 26 at 9 am).

Relying on the Maker’s Manual (the Bible), Ussher added together the ages of the Biblical patriarchs, and got a planetary age of around 6000 years (today) in post-Eden timing. The actual Day One that Ussher selected was the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere, with a thirty-day correction thrown in to allow for known faults in the calendar which had been used before the corrected Julian calendar. For about two centuries, we have been aware (or the thinkers among us have) that humans have been around for more than the 6000 years that Bishop Ussher suggested.

There were too many contradictions, at least if you were a scientist who assumed that the world got to be the way it is by the operation of processes that we can still see today. This date implied only a short time since the start of the earth, far too little time for evolution and geology, meaning that fossils, species and the landscape had to be explained in some other way.

A dispute over flint tools in The Times in November 1859, a month before Darwin published his Origin of Species, and the argument turned on age. The tools lay far deeper than tombs which contained coins 2000 years old. The Biblical 6000 years was too short for the depths at which the flints occurred, unless you assume a change in conditions. A massive flood like Noah’s might explain the deep burial, but geologists knew that chalk beds are formed slowly by tiny organisms, not by floods. “The discovery of these relics of a race which seems to have been of far greater antiquity than any that has been hitherto supposed to have inhabited our planet, involves many interesting and difficult questions,” wrote T. W. Flower.

Boucher de Perthes was an amateur at a time when geologists were becoming professional. It took the mainstream scientists a while to trust him, but he just kept on, digging interesting human-made tools from deep chalk deposits in France. In the end, the scientists came around to his ideas (or his results, anyhow), thanks mainly to Charles Lyell, who visited Boucher de Perthes’ excavations in 1859 and came away convinced that the tools were not only real, but offered strong evidence that humans were older than supposed.

The geologists ended up pushing the age of the Earth out from the 6000 years that was popular in the 1600s to 4.6 billion years, making the planet 750,000 times as old as people had once assumed. It was like expanding the distance between New York and London from 7.5 metres (a distance Jesse Owens could jump as a school boy) to 5500 kilometres.

A popular solution to the 6000 years problem was to assume a number of separate creations of life, with humans only appearing in the most recent round of creation. That would account for older fossils and other embarrassing contradictions, but it was at best a poor work-around. When human remains were found with those of extinct animals previously assigned to earlier cycles, the whole scheme would fall apart.

Hugh Miller, a geologist and stern Scottish churchman, died in 1856. In 1857, his widow referred in a new edition of his The Old Red Sandstone to “infidels” among the geologists, so clearly the lines were being drawn on the Biblical age of the Earth. A few geologists joined Mrs Miller in her fundamentalist approach to the age of the Earth, but the professional geologists and most trained scientists already accepted that life had been on Earth far longer than the 6000 years that could be read into a literal reading of the Old Testament.

Reading the rocks requires a far cleverer type of literacy. Fossils are curious things, and fossil experts are adept at detecting slight variations that reveal hidden secrets. Most fossils carry subtle clues in their shape, their form, where they lie, or what lies around them, but perceiving this only comes after looking at large numbers of fossils with a clever eye.

That sort of insight does not necessarily help explain how a fossil came to be where it was, but it is a start. After that, you are left with a choice between logical reasoning and inference, or supposition and wild fantasy. Many people, finding a conclusion they don’t like, will denounce another scientist’s logical reasoning as crazy fantasy, or hail a colleague’s wild surmise as pure gold. Those who do this can sometimes be anti-scientists of the worst sort, some of them may also be qualified as scientists.

The mainstream geologists were annoyed by the catastrophists, moist of them amateurs who wanted all geology to have been produced in several major disasters like Noah’s flood. The normal geologist’s view is uniformitarian, meaning that conditions have been the same, uniform, over the eons, with geology caused by processes we can see today, with weathering, erosion, volcanoes and other ordinary events shaping the Earth.

Some of the modern opposition to asteroid theories that account for the “end of the dinosaurs” stemmed from this same visceral reaction to any suggestion that catastrophes shaped the Earth. Rational geologists now tend to assume a sort of geological punctuated equilibrium, where normal conditions apply most of the time, with the occasional surprise. All the same, geological mavericks who stress tsunamis, asteroids and other catastrophes tend to be looked down on, even today.

The debate was not straightforward, because physicists also questioned the geological view on the planet’s age from their own scientific perspectives. The planet was warm below ground, they said, so it must be cooling, which meant it used to be hotter, because there was no apparent source of continuing warmth.

If you went back far enough, they said, the planet would have been too hot for life, and that set a limit to the time life had existed. The answer to this paradox later turned out to be that internal radioactivity has kept the planet warm for billions of years, but in 1859, radioactivity was unknown, and it is the decay of radioactive nuclei that keeps the planet’s interior hot.

Note that science never offers proof, just evidence, although as we have seen,  Thomas Jefferson did manage to prove from scientific data that Noah’s flood could not have happened. All the same, when so many different classes of evidence point in the same direction, perhaps we should forgive those scientists claim to have “proof that evolution happened”. Now back to the age evidence.

Edmond Halley suggested a method of determining the age of the Earth’s oceans: measuring the salinity of the sea, and finding the rate at which salt was added to the sea each year. The Irish physicist John Joly calculated in the late 19th century that the sodium content of the oceans was 1.5 x 10¹⁶ tonnes. Sodium is now believed to be added at the rate of 6 x 10⁷ tonnes per year, giving an estimated age for the oceans of about 250 million years.

The method will always give low estimates because it does not allow for any losses of salt back to the land, either as salt spray, or as halite deposits. Still, in an age when James Ussher was still setting the world’s age at 6000 years, scientists like Halley, were looking at a far greater time-scale:

But the rivers in their long passage over the earth do imbibe some of the saline particles thereof, though in so small a quantity as not to be perceived, unless in these their depositories [lakes and rivers] over a long tract of time … Now if this be the true reason for the saltness of these lakes, ‘tis not improbable but that the ocean itself is become salt from the same cause, and we are thereby furnished with an argument for estimating the duration of all things, from an observation of the increment of saltness in their waters.

Against that, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) carried out cooling experiments with large hot iron balls. From his data, he deduced the planet was at white heat, 75,000 years ago, and had carried life only for 40,000 years.

Jean-Baptiste Joseph, Baron de Fourier (1768–1830) argued that the earth’s central heat, revealed in higher temperatures in mines and by volcanic activity could best be explained by assuming the whole earth was once hot, and that the temperature of the earth was now falling.

In 1862 Lord Kelvin estimated the age of the Earth, based on its cooling time to be 98 million years, but by 1897 he had lowered this to between 20 and 40 million years, unless some other source of heat could be found. In May 1892, Scientific American reported an opinion from Sir Robert Ball that the Sun had existed for 18 million years, and would burn out in another 5 million, still limiting the planet to a very short age.

The debate boiled down to a struggle between the biologists and the geologists on the one hand, who all demanded ever-longer ages for life on earth as they saw it, and the physicists on the other, who could see no way of fuelling the long, slow, steady-state earth that we now accept.

The question of age arose slowly, starting with an estimate, based on the ages of the patriarchs in the Bible, of some 6000 years, though many assumed that there had been a lifeless Earth before the Garden of Eden affair, but the stopping point was that nobody could explain why the Earth had not frozen. Long before Charles Lyell and Ernest Rutherford showed that Ussher’s date was impossible, people had realised that this was so.

In fairness, Ussher cannot be accused of holding back science with his calculation, though this accusation is commonly levelled at him. So until the 19^th century, the age of the planet was taken largely from the Biblical record, but then they discovered radioactivity...

And what about Noah's Flood?

Noah's Flood: a no-no

This is the first of a few excerpts that I will offer from a work, currently on the block, and likely to be called either MythConceptions. or Oh No, They Didn't. It will look into all those legends that aren't true, bits like the bunyip, the speed of the botfly, 'one in a thousand', Pavlov ringing bells (he didn't), viruses and bacteria that are good for us, sharks that do get cancer, Victorian frills on table legs, a camel that shot a man and throwing Christians to the lions — among other gems of misinformation. Many of these, by the way, have already appeared in trhe almost 700 entries in this blog.

So: did Noah's Flood happen? Answer: not as specified in the Maker's Manual, Genesis 7.

* * * *

…and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
—Genesis 7, 19-20, KJV.

Around 400, St Augustine considered the distributions of the animals after Noah's flood, and suggested that either men or angels must have transported them to their present locations. Science says there never was a flood like Noah's, and so the present locations of kangaroos and koalas do not raise a real problem.

If there was a flood in Noah’s time, it certainly wasn’t as described in the Bible, and we know this because Thomas Jefferson was intelligent enough to consider the evidence, to apply science, mathematics and logic. As he saw it, there simply would not have been enough water available.

All the same, Jefferson was only a politician, planter and slave owner, so what would he know? On April 29 1962, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy addressed a gathering of 49 Nobel laureates at the White House with these words:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

Now that isn’t the sort of comment we might reasonably expect to hear either from, or about, the most recent incumbent of the Oval Office, but Jefferson (1743–1826) really was an amazing intellect. At a time when religious leaders mainly denied that fossils were traces of ancient life, and kept pushing the Biblical ‘truth’ of Genesis, claiming a 6000-year-old planet, Jefferson analysed the available information, and proved that Noah’s flood could never have happened. It appeared in his 1785 Notes on Virginia, and the relevant part reads like this:

The atmosphere, and all its contents, whether of water, air, or other matters, gravitate to the earth, that is to say, they have weight. Experience tells us, that the weight of all these together never exceeds that of a column of mercury of 31 inches height, which is equal to one of rain water of 35 feet high. If the whole contents of the atmosphere then were water, instead of what they are, it would cover the globe but 35 feet deep; but as these waters, as they fell, would run into the seas, the superficial measure of which is to that of the dry parts of the globe, as two to one, the seas would be raised only 52 1–2 feet above their present level, and of course would overflow the lands to that height only.

To put this in perspective, consider these events:

In 1695, John Woodward had published his Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth, proposing that fossils formed when Noah’s flood destroyed the surface of the earth.

In 1696, William Whiston had published his New Theory of the Earth, which suggested that Noah’s deluge might have been caused by a comet striking the earth.

In 1796 (after Jefferson’s analysis, Georges Cuvier attributed the succession of fossil forms to a series of simultaneous extinctions caused by natural catastrophes, one of them Noah’s flood.

In 1823 William Buckland published his Reliquiae Diluvianae, which attributed fossils to caves filled with mud during Noah’s flood.

Our mythologies are full, even today, of flood legends, ranging from Atlantis to Gilgamesh to Noah, our cinemas are full of asteroids, alien invasions, volcanoes, ships sinking and monsters arising from the deep, so we are suckers for a disaster story. At a time when religious leaders mainly denied that fossils were traces of ancient life, and kept pushing the Biblical ‘truth’ of a 6000-year-old planet, Jefferson (1743–1826) analysed the science, and proved that Noah’s flood could never have happened.

Notes on Virginia also reveals his lively interest in fossils, making him an early starter, but he was not the first to realise what fossils were. This was at a time when ordinary people (and even experts like Buckland) still assumed that species were fixed and established forever. Extinct species were generally explained as the losers from Noah’s flood, but around the world, as more and more samples were taken, dissected, drawn and described, the idea that species might change was bound to come up in more and more minds.

Still, there may have been real floods, of a sort, happening around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. In 1997, oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman suggested that rising sea levels in the Mediterranean around 7500 years ago may have broken through the Bosphorus strait to plunge down into a freshwater lake, lying at a much lower level, producing an apocalyptic flood that may well have inspired legends such as the floods of Noah and Gilgamesh.

Later dredging of the Black Sea seemed to confirm that suggestion when an ancient beach was dredged at a depth of 170 metres (550 feet) and analysis revealed freshwater molluscs dated to 7500 years ago and saltwater species, dated to 6900 years ago.

On the other hand, there used to be people who said the planet is even younger than either of those dates. 

And I have dealt with that, as well.

The nature of a hick

Turning aside from my current onslaught on STEAM amusements, of which there are about 90 right now, what is a hick?

H. L. Mencken once told a long and involved tale about how a rather grand American lady had objected to the use of the word 'hick'. As Mencken describes it, " . . . an American woman novelist, Roof by name, dispatched a long letter to the Times, denouncing this hick as 'middle class' slang from the West, hinting that such barbarisms were deliberately given circulation by 'the German-speaking Jewish population of New York'."

This lady, if Mencken is to be believed, declared that her own ancestors had travelled from Britain to America "in 1620", and vowed her loyalty to "the King's English." Now it is important to note here that Mencken was a master of the grand lie, and was responsible for convincing most Americans in late 1917 that the first American bathtub was used on the night of December 10, 1842, having been made for Adam Thompson of Cincinnati. The tale was told with large amounts of circumstantial detail, and by 1926, Mencken, alarmed at the way the story had travelled and multiplied, confessed all.

Without this spreading of the tale, Mencken would never have confessed, so when you read the detail Mencken offered about the origins of 'hick', it may be wise to keep this in mind. Mencken assures us that a William Archer showed that that hick was actually perfectly sound English, and that it could be found in Steele's comedy, The Funeral. Moreover, says Mencken, a fortnight later, a Norwegian philologist, S. N. Baral, wrote to say that hick was connected with the Anglo-Saxon haeg, a menial or lout, and that it had cognates in all the ancient Teutonic languages, and even in Sanskrit!

Sadly, not one word of this can be confirmed. There is no trace of S. N. Baral, the Old English haeg is a border or hedge, the author called Roof also appears to have been invented, so all in all, it would appear that Henry Mencken was up to his old tricks. There was indeed a comedy by Richard Steele called The Funeral, but it seems not to include the word in question.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is a by-form of 'Richard', and it appears to be more like Rube or Charlie or Guy, all names that can be used in a derogatory way. The earliest record of it in use is in 1565, though the OED identifies it as being now a US term.

There are probably more slang, regional and class-limited words for a simple rustic than there are for anything other than fighting, getting drunk, bodily eliminations or getting very friendly with members of the opposite sex, the reason presumably being that townspeople needed a way of telling each other that here was a naive individual, ripe for gulling, plucking, or otherwise being taken advantage of.

According to those who know, the word has been known since 1565, but first appeared as an adjective in the Sinclair Lewis novel Main Street, in 1920. There is a somewhat unreliable folk etymology that says in rural areas of the USA, hickory sticks were used as teaching aids and motivators, long after this cruel and unusual form of pedagogy had died out in city schools.

I doubt it, and it never did  appear in the entertainment trade journal, Variety, in the headline 'STIX NIX HIX PIX' over a story that people in the sticks or boondocks were less than impressed by a movie, though the headline did in fact appear in a movie, Yankee Doodle Dandy, in 1924. Not quite the same thing, but that, combined with the Lewis use a few years earlier and Mencken's 1921 article on the word would seem to point at a World War I origin for the term as a common expression.

I am busy elsewhere.

The Old Writer on th e Block blog (where you are reading this) is being allowed to slide, just a bit, because I am busy on a companion blog, called Playwiths and Fun.  This is STEAM, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics activities and challenges for all ages, with brain-benders for older ones, and curious new stuff for younger ones. In early May, there are about 80 entries.

The blog is not teaching in the stolid Tory grind-the little-beasts style, but it is clearly educational, in the classical sense of "leading out". In my world, my mind, education involves a bit of teaching and loads of wisdom, knowledge, learning, culture, training, understanding, thinking, insight  and erudition, but most of all we must foster enthusiasm—and wonder and curiosity.

This new (actually old) collection is for people like me. Now, a word to teachers:

Pedant:     “But where do these things fit in the curriculum?"
Me:           “They fit in the slot marked Wonder…”
Pedant:     “But there isn’t any slot marked Wonder!”

Me:           “Then you must make one.”

OK, I am an educator/teacher, and like Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenforde, Gladly Wold I Teche.

To find out what this collection sets out to do, read this. I have to say that right now, navigation in the new blog is proving difficult, as there are already more than fifty entries, and there is no easy way of listing them

I rather hope that once we get into May, the navigation will be easier. If it does not play nicely, I will apply brute force.

The new blog is based on an earlier website that had more than 4 million views. Back when the Internet was a pup, Science Playwiths was about all of the curious bits you could explore, in or out of the classroom and the main aim was to show K-6 teachers how easy it was to write HTML. Back then, it was the only one of its kind.

In other words, it took off, and then in 2019, I was at a writers and kids luncheon, and a Year 6 boy who had found the website urged me to make it a book. (The sort of kid that goes to things like that is always book-oriented, just as I was, and am.)

I worked on the book in a basic sort of way until covid-19 started closing schools, and then I rushed it out as both a print book and an e-book. 

In that iteration, though, I set out consciously to go beyond STEM (Science, Technology, Engineerings and Mathematics), by adding in some assorted arts, making it STEAM.

Everything was tested, and my twin granddaughters at age two and a bit were coopted to try out some of the bits, like the water-powered turbine, below. The very last link (Hero was here) in this blog entry tells you how to make one of those.

Those granddaughters are now eight, and I have started doing photo essays for them from my Sci/Tech/Nature collections, like this one: bendy rocks. This isn't my first album: when my now out-of-print Australian Backyard Earth Scientist came out, I released five albums of earth science shots that you can find from that last link, or from this one.

This next picture is the next job (or soon, anyhow) on the slab: creating art from microphotographs of conchoidal fractures in glass. There is STEAM in everything, and everything shows up in STEAM.

The one after that will be art from a bacterium called Leptothrix. That was never there before, but the marks of Leptothrix on water look very like oil slicks: look at this example.

After that, echidnas, volcanoes, waratahs and flannel flowers, probably, and definitely something about ant lions and wombats.

I kept the website up, and reminded people that the source material was all available for free, but then my ISP treacherously dumped the whole lot. So no more free stuff, but now I am liberating all my work again, and adding to it, and if you look at the top of any page, you will find a SEARCH box. To get a sample of what is there, look for ARTS or MATHS or SCI or TECH or ENG.

Or search on Chemistry, Physics, Rocks... you will be surprised.

The thing is, I am back, trying to get a free version out there. Here are a few recent additions: there are now about 82 in all.

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/sci-naphthalene-crystals-and-julius.html;

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/maths-mobius-strips.html; 

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/tech-art-of-making-sundials.html;

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/scitech-three-curious-things.html;

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/perfect-abundant-numbers.html;

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/magic-squares.html; 

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/maths-curious-case-of-1729.html; 

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/maths-fibonacci-and-phi.html;

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/puzzle-solving-some-tricks-of-trade.html;

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/variants-on-chess.html;

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/science-limericks-on-rainy-day.html; 

https://playwithsfun.blogspot.com/2025/04/hero-was-here.html

By the way, the sort of mind I am after is the sort who knows what I had for lunch: there is a 20-cent prize for all correct answers written in pencil on a $10 note.

Food and drink in the city

What colonial Australians ate 

ROSETTA STABLER respectfully acquaints the Public that she prepares Boiled Mutton and Broths every day at 12 o’clock, and a joint of Meat Roasted always ready at One, which, from its quality and mode of serving, she flatters herself will attract the Notice of the Public. Visitors from remote Settlements, Mariners, &c will find a convenient Accommodation at a moderate expence, and every exertion will be made to render satisfaction.

—The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 26 June 1803, 4.

S. T. Gill: Ticket to the First Subscription Ball, Ballarat, 1854.

In 1817, Sydney had 52 licensed liquor outlets, Parramatta had 12, Windsor had 4 and Liverpool 3, while Castlereagh had just one, Charles Hadley’s ‘First and Last’. Two brewing licences went to Sydney, and one to Parramatta.

And all Persons, other than those mentioned in the foregoing List as duly qualified and licensed, are strictly prohibited from vending Wine, Spirits, or Beer, or the Brewing of Beer, on Pain of being prosecuted and fined, according to the Colonial Regulations.
— The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 19 April 1817, 1, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2177180

Figures are hard to come by, but in 1859, Frank Fowler said there were no less than five hundred public-houses in Sydney and its immediate neighbourhood, while in 1883, Richard Twopeny said that Melbourne had 1120. [i]

There was no shortage of legitimate liquor sellers in the cities: Gerstäcker noticed this on landing in Sydney in 1851, just before gold fever began. He saw many “dram-shops”.

I was struck by the immense number of dram-shops in the streets;  in Pitt-street and many other places they stand house on house, and nearly every corner is sure to be a grog-shop, with the government license upon it to sell spirituous and fermented liquors; and drunken men and women you meet nearly every where. I have really never been in any place yet where I saw so many drunkards as in Sydney, and, more disgusting still, drunken women.
 — Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 388 – 9.

In the days of the gold rush, William Kelly noted the same ‘corner effect’ in Melbourne, where such premises invited both streets equally, and the equality went further:

The bars were always full, the tap-rooms always crowded, and in those resorts, at least, there was no disproportion of the sexes. The women were as numerous as the men, and asserted the equality of their gentle genders by as deep potations, and as blasphemous and obscene vociferations, as their rougher associates.
— William Kelly, Life in Victoria or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858, vol 1, 50.

Less is said about places where meals might be served, but they must have been there, because as we shall see in chapter 15, there were many food places on country roads. Friedrich Gerstäcker certainly saw food being sold in Sydney:

Bread and vegetable-carts meet your eye wherever you look, light milk-carts rattle through the streets early in the morning, and their bells summon the housemaids to the door. “Hot pies, penny a-piece,” are loudly offered, nearly at every street corner, fishmongers drag their hand-trucks through the crowd, and fruit-stalls, with oranges and apples, are every where to be seen at this season of the year.
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 388.

There were certainly prawns to be had, sixpence a pint in Sydney, a shilling in Melbourne, though not always at the most convenient of times. In Sydney,

They are brought to the former place by the Hunter river steamers, and as these boats generally arrive late at night it is not unusual to be awakened from your sleep at one or two in the morning by a fellow shouting “Fine fresh Prawns” just under your window. If the musquitoes are about it is as well to buy some of these prawns, and sit at the window and eat them for amusement.
— Frank Fowler, Southern Lights, 1859.

---

[i] Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, ‘A walk around Melbourne’.

Those magnificent men (and women) in their flying machines

Those magnificent men (and women) in their flying machines 

After the end of World War I, Australia had plenty of adventurous young men who had learnt to fly an aeroplane during the war. Before long, a few Australian women started to join them and learn those same skills.

People thinking about World War I think mostly of the Western Front, but a lot of Australians served in the Light Horse around Palestine, and because riding a plane is like riding a horse, some of them transferred to the Australian Flying Corps. (The proof is found in odd places: in the cavalry, majors and lieutenant-colonels are squadron leaders and wing commanders: think about it!)

Anyhow, many young Australian men moved from riding over the deserts to riding above them. Coming from a land where distance is the great enemy, young men flying over vast distances in the Middle East would naturally think of shortening similar distances at home, using aircraft. In the earliest days, the way to make people aware of aviation was to conduct races, but first, the aviators needed explorers to show them the way

In August and September of 1919, Paul McGinness and Hudson Fysh surveyed part of an official air race route from Katherine (Northern Territory) to Longreach (Queensland). They did this from the ground, driving a Model T Ford, and part of their role was identifying places where landings could be made, and ensuring adequate fuel supplies.

Prime Minister Billy Hughes had arranged a prize of £10,000 for the first Australians to fly an aircraft from England to Australia, around 13,500 km, but to win, they had to do it in less than 30 days. The winners were two brothers, Captain Ross Smith (RAF), Lieutenant Keith Smith (AFC) and two sergeants, Shiers and Bennett. The Smiths were knighted, and the sergeants were both made air force officers for their efforts.

Other Australians were blocked from competing, because the race was held under the rules of the Royal Aero Club in Britain. Bert Hinkler had been flying with the Royal Naval Air Service, and wanted to fly alone. The Aero Club decided that was too unsafe. Charles Kingsford-Smith (ex-RAF) had a team of four, but they could not take part because none of them was a good navigator. Back then, many pilots navigated by following roads, rivers or railway lines, but for long distances, especially over sea, somebody on the plane had to be able to navigate by taking sightings on the stars or the sun.

The Smiths and their two sergeants made it to Darwin on December 10, 1919, in just over 27 days. Bert Hinkler saved his money and bought an Avro Avian aeroplane, completing the same route, making it to Darwin in 1928, in just 15½ days.

Charles Kingsford-Smith wanted to fly a plane across the Pacific, and teamed up with another Australian, Charles Ulm. Trying to attract sponsors, they set a record for flying around Australia, taking 10 days 5½ hours in 1927. Stunts and publicity meant everything to the aviators — and aviatrixes, as people called the women pilots.

By 1934, when another London-Melbourne air race was being planned, several women were likely starters, though 19-year-old Nancy Bird (later Nancy Bird Walton) was thought to be less likely to start, because she lacked experience.

In the late 1980s, I took a pioneer Australian aviator, Lores Bonney, on a night visit around the museum I worked in. Her family told me she was past it, as blind as a bat and as deaf as a post, but after a battle of wills, I persuaded her into the wheelchair, declared myself her servant, and we took off, at her imperious directions.

She was a proud old lady, and only agreed to ride in a wheelchair so I could show her more. It was strenuous (I was wearing a dinner suit), but I knew a bit about her and wanted to get more. She was one of our last explorer-adventurers, flying around Australia in 1932, and many other triumphs. In spite of what her family said, she could see Meissen porcelain at 20 metres, she heard and responded to my whispers, and gave me details on how early aviators prepared a new route.

They were very much explorers, and she even researched bush tucker before flying around Australia. In fact, she did what the more effective explorers did. She went out and learned from Aborigines about bush tucker, because she knew she would need it if her plane failed.

She told me also why she flew as “Mrs. Harry Bonney”: she could not have children, and wanted to make her husband’s name live on. While she mentioned that her wealthy husband bought her aircraft for her, she did not tell me that her cousin, Bert Hinkler, had taken her up for her first flight. I found that out later, and I also found these details of her round-Australia flight:

Mrs. Harry Bonney, of Brisbane, who is but comparatively young in the aeronautical world, having completed two years' of flying experience this month, and who is now on a round-Australia solo flight, passed through Longreach on Tuesday morning, arriving at 9.40 a.m. from Blackall … Mrs. Bonney has already two creditable flight to her credit, having flown from Brisbane to Bundaberg and back in a day, whilst in December of last year she flew from Brisbane to Wangaratta. She is using the same Gipsy Moth on the present flight, and which bears a silver plate inscribed with Flight-Lieut. Hill's signature. The machine was used by him on his flight to Australia.
— The Longreach Leader (Qld), 20 August 1932, 15, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37232026

Flying towards Longreach, she noticed a leaking petrol pump, and put down at a homestead, only to find that it was deserted. Fortunately, the plane had landed in a good open stretch and, after placing her handkerchief on a mimosa bush for wind directions, got off safely and flew to Macfarlane homestead proper where assistance was given by Mr. Doyle. In landing there she used a windmill for wind direction…

She states she was about early next morning, in preparation for the run [from Blackall] to Longreach and Cloncurry, but … preparatory to taking off, a flock of galahs flew across her path, and alighted in front of the plane. In her own words … it was a pretty sight, but just too nerve-racking at that particular moment, so she roared the engine and frightened them away…

Her approach to Longreach was unostentatious, probably no one outside the Press, the Shell Company representatives, and Qantas, realising that she had arrived and departed. The aviatrix, who had been flying by compass course, struck the Central Western railroad at Ilfracombe, which, by the way, she mistook for Longreach, but her observant eye picked up the line of steel, which she followed, to eventually land on Qantas aerodrome.
— The Longreach Leader (Qld), 20 August 1932, 15, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37232026

When she flew solo from Brisbane to London in 1938, she landed and was photographed, perched on the edge of the cockpit, looking down her nose at something, and this photograph can be seen if you use a search engine for images of Lores Bonney. I told her she looked a bit annoyed.

We had stopped so I could take a rest, and for once, I was facing her as I sat on a seat. Her eyes twinkled as she replied in cut-glass accents: “Of course I was annoyed! The man asked me where I was from, and I was thinking, you silly little man, don’t you know that VH on the fuselage means Australia?”

Oral history can conserve what would otherwise be lost, but the history gatherer must know how to ‘oral’ in just the right way. I feel that if I, too, had not been using my best cut-glass accent, I might never have winkled out those matters.

How colonial Australians travelled

Tom Roberts, Bailed Up.

There were plenty of coaches after the 1820s, as Friedrich Gerstäcker was aware in the 1850s. Wanting to travel across country from Sydney to Adelaide, even though he had walked in America from the Niagara to Texas, he felt he had done enough walking, and there was a drought that ruled out going by horseback, because the cost of horse feed was then so high,

…and therefore, following the advice of some gentlemen in Sydney, I went with the mail-coach to Albury, a little town on the banks of the Hume, to see if I should be able to get a canoe there, or, if not, make one myself, and try the river.
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 398.

Private contractors carried people, goods and the mail, and the government cared only about the mails. The way passengers were treated, he said, was “a sin to humanity”. The journey began in a grossly overcrowded coach, which was replaced by a wagon (and rain), and then a two-wheeled cart. One passenger sat beside the coachman, the other two faced backwards, losing their hats to low branches, and in fear of being thrown off on uphill sections.

Gerstäcker mentioned that one cart was marked “licensed to carry nine persons”. He said no sober magistrate could get nine people into it, but he could explain the licence:

The mail contractors, who make an enormous profit by the business, invite the magistrate, whenever there is another wagon to be inspected, to a good breakfast, and there these worthy members of Themis sit till they are thought in a fit state for the occasion—that is, to see the wagon double—when he is perfectly right in licensing the cart for the accommodation of nine passengers, and calling the thing a “royal mail.”
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 406 – 407.

From there, he headed for Albury, which had:

… a court-house, a ferry-boat, five taverns, and—a great improvement in the rising civilization of the interior of Australia—a steam-mill, set up by an enterprising English gentleman, a Mr. Heaver. There are also three stores, a white and blacksmith, carpenter, and other tradesmen in the little place.
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 408.

For now, we will leave him by the river, hewing a dug-out canoe (he was the first to voyage down the Murray), until later in this chapter. Instead, let us turn now to Thomas M’Combie, who went by Cobb and Co., from Geelong to Ballarat.

As he describes it, he went to the booking office of Cobb’s line and got a ticket for the morning coach, explaining that Cobb was an American who had returned long ago to his native country, having started a service from Melbourne to Castlemaine, after the gold discoveries. Cobb had imported the best American coaches, won all the customers, then “he sold out, and retired with a moderate fortune”.

At five minutes to six the coach, drawn by six grey horses, drew up before the office of Cobb and Co., Malop Street. In a few seconds the whole fifteen seats were occupied; the clerk examined each passenger’s ticket, which apparently was satisfactory. Six o’clock, chimed, and with a loud shout to the horses from the driver, we went off at a hard canter.
—  Thomas M’Combie, Australian Sketches, 184.

The company used American ‘Concord’ coaches with leather straps instead of iron springs, giving a softer, rolling ride, though one that made some passengers sick. Pulled by eight horses, the coaches had 12 to 18 people inside, and many more outside, often totalling 40 or 50 passengers. Twenty years after the company started, Anthony Trollope thought the vehicles were comfortable enough:

Cobb’s coaches have the name of being very rough,—and more than once I have been warned against travelling by them…This journey I made and did not perish at all;—and on arriving at Rosedale had made up my mind that twenty hours on a Cobb’s coach through the bush in Australia does not inflict so severe a martyrdom as did in the old days a journey of equal duration on one of the time-famous, much-regretted old English mails.
— Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 413-414.

With good horses on the rare good road, coaches might reach 20 km/hr, but they stopped to change horses, and for passengers to take comfort breaks. Coaches averaged about 13 km/hr. The coastal steamer was rather faster and was more comfortable, if you weren’t seasick—but that might happen in a coach, anyhow!

William Kelly said the other companies were inclined to call upon passengers to get down and walk through mud, to the extent that people thought they might as well walk, and save their money. On top of that, the coaches broke and broke down, often needing a blacksmith to fix them. Cobb’s coaches, rather than being cramped, and plated, and bolted with iron, used leather springs, well suited to corduroy roads and broken forest tracks. (William Kelly, Life in Victoria or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858, vol 1, 280 – 81.)

Honest Australian History

This is about my attempts to disrupt the flow of historical bilge that was churned out to me when I was at school. For example, we were told that Edward John Eyre crossed the Nullarbor (he went around the coast), and the illustration given out was the left-hand one below, which shows him going east, rather than the right-hand one (where he is going west), and right up until the last few days, there was at least one horse.

This was Cod History! Children should not be given such rubbish.

How Eyre and his companion, a Noongar man named Wylie may or may not have travelled.
Now be honest: did you know the companion's name? 

There was nothing in our lessons about everyday life, what people ate or wore, or drank, how they got around, or anything else that made the dead come back to life.

That is what I am fighting against. Then again, the myths about the discovery of gold, and the operations of the bushrangers are all nonsense. And the explorers? They discovered nothing, though they did map the land they travelled over.

So I am setting out to do a bit of truth-telling, and if I get up the noses of a few nasty old fogeys, so be it: there are several ways to get your hands on the facts, all fully documented.

The big lump: You Missed a Bit 

You can buy the dead-tree (print on paper) volume for $60, or the e-book version for just $6, and be aware that the e-book will get additions when I have time. Save your money!

This is almost 350,000 words, and if I say it myself, it is a remarkable resource. It was the first rough draft of the next version (the middling lump, below), which I reduced by 100,000 words so I could add more images.

The print version weighs 1.4 kg, and is 51 mm thick (I used very thin paper), the print size is small, and it still runs out to 820 pages. Don't buy it!

You see, I often come back to particular characters and topics again. later on. Print limitations mean there was no way I could get an index in, but if you use the e-book version, there is a search function waiting to be used.

In short: get the e-book, which needs that $6 price to cover Amazon's in-house costs.

The middling lump: Australia: a Social History

That work is still out there, seeking a publisher: it is 252,000 words, and it is an expanded version of my 80,000 word The Big Book of Australian History, four editions published by the National Library of Australia. At the end of that time, their publishing arm fell over, so I took the rights back, and wrote the version that I thought was needed.

So why all the extra text? Basically, I loathe the way fusty old fogeys want the history of Australia told: nothing before 1788 (aside from a few sailors cruising by, nothing about the geology, the biology or the original people. If you don't understand the geology and the biology, you will fall for the line peddled by the Peasants' Party that Abosrigines wewre dumb: they didn't invent a wheel.

Think about it: kangaroos and wombats cannot pull a cart. By the same token, with no local crop plants, western-style agriculture would not work, but there were still ways to work the land, simple gentle ways of managing and gathering crops.

The silly old grubs' history is about dead but once-important white males and lots of lists that must be learned off by heart. 

I take a different view. The fogeys whine that standards are dropping, that children are no longer taught the important dates and names (presumably including the names of the conservative politicians). If you push them harder to define Australian history, it comes down to Bushrangers and Convicts (both scum), Diggers (the military ones), Explorers (brave openers of untamed wilderness), Farmers (who turned the sterile wilderness into riches at no cost) and Gold (ours by right of conquest). I call this the BCDEFG model.

If you question the politicians about these, they may be able to name five of the more than 2000 bushrangers who once flourished, their understanding of convicts is pitiful, they could not locate a single battlefield on the world map, they would be lucky to name more than four explorers worthy of note (no, Burke and Wills don’t count), they have no understanding of the harm done to country by agriculture, and their “history” of gold is codswallop.

So their BCDEFG history of Australia is a set of worthless scribbles, and only one in fifty of them will amend that to the ABCDEFG, because the ‘Aborigines’ don’t come into it for most of them—and don’t confuse the poor dears by amending it to a more polite IBCDEFG. Mention the role of Indigenous Australia, and they will look at you like a mallee bull that’s just run at full tilt into Crooked Mick of the Speewah (a word of warning: Mick was definitely a legend, but as I tell it, he is highly believable if you aren't paying attention).

Mick also built a railway, and he was a superb cricketer.

For samples, see blog entries like these:

Women Wearing Trousers;

Who Really Found Gold in Australia? but see this as well;

The Strange Case of Samuel Burt;

Australia's slaves (yes, we had some);

What Australians Used to Eat;

How Australians travelled in colonial times;

Getting into the air;

Who Named Australia?;

The Bushrangers.

Australia: a social history

 A short sampler of one of the works up in the air, right now. While this is social history, we need to start with the geology, the rocks that shaped our home, and determined what lives here. It started as the 80,000-word Big Book of Australian History, published in for editions by the National Library of Australia, this is my own Director's Cut, more than three times as long.

This is all the hows and whys that lie beneath Australia’s history, like how the geology of Gondwana shaped its plants and animals and so shaped Indigenous lives, farming and land holding. How the convicts got here, what they wore, how gold was discovered long before Hargraves (and the conspiracy he pulled off), why ladies stood on chairs in Melbourne and waved their hankies, etc. etc. for 252,000 words. This is all the news that was fit to print—but wasn’t.

* * *

If the climate is cold enough to produce frost, water soaks into the surface and changes to ice, which may wedge particles of rock off. Any pointed bits and corners get more water, and are more exposed to the cold, so off they go! Any rock hound looking at rock like this can read its story at a glance, but granite has more surprises to offer.

Near Wave Rock in Western Australia, you can see spheroidal granite—and a truly amazing shape in the rocks, the granite ‘wave’ that you can see just before the start of this chapter. Standing 11 to 12 metres high, the flared slope looks just like a giant wave, about to break.

Wave Rock was featured on 28 April 1965 in Women’s Weekly, and the magazine said the wave shape was a result of wind erosion, though adding the suggestion that the shape might also be due to the ‘action of glaciers’. Later reports said the cause was the action of an ancient sea, lapping the foot of the cliff, and as these tales leak into history, we need to consider them. Geologists asked: if the sea had been there, where were the marine deposits When somebody suggested sand blasting as the cause, the spoilsports explained that a noticeable feature of bare rock surfaces like Hyden Rock or Uluru was that a lot of water ran off them, when the rare rains came by.

That wet the soil around the rock and supported more vegetation than in other places. So even if desert winds came rushing in, the plants would absorb the force of the wind, and stop the sand grains that were supposed to have shaped the ‘wave’. Flared slopes are also found around other large bodies of rock, like the cave seen here, one of the ones around the base of Uluru that visitors are allowed to enter. Similar shapes can also be found on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.

A cave at the base of Uluru.

The simple answer is that the same water run-off that knocked out the sand-blasting theory was a central part of the true cause of these concave forms. Australia is an old land, with old soils that have been exposed to dry winds over many years. Features like Wave Rock and Uluru that now rear up out of the flat plains were once hidden underground, within the plains. Over time, the winds uncovered them, but once the stone was exposed, rainfall ran straight off it.

The cleverest early white explorers quickly got the idea of asking the people who lived there, the Aboriginal Australians, where to look for water. Some of them followed “native roads”, knowing the tracks made by countless feet had to lead to water, because people who knew the area would not go to dry places. Invariably, the “native wells”, the soaks, lay at the foot of a rocky slope, and this steady supply of water explains how the wave shape developed.

Weathering on the surface of Uluru.

Water weathers some of the minerals in rocks, whether the rock is the granite of Wave Rock, or the arkose sandstone of Uluru. The minerals break down, and in a sense, the rock just rots away under the influence of the damp soil. The minerals that had been rock became dust, and as the wind blew, or a rare flash flood gurgled across the plain, those minerals were carried away.

About this book

I come to this matter as a science-trained observer who can explain how the geology and biology have determined our past, and will determine our future. I explore what makes us Australian, and why that matters.

When I was a child, history was about learning lists of things, but never about the why questions I wanted to ask. And those lists were of important people and places, not about the stuff of the everyday life of life, or how people got their daily needs. There is still too much of that traditionalism, so when the National Library hired me to tell the story of us to the young ones, I jumped in, and we did four editions of The Big Book of Australian History.

Now the National Library has lost its edge, and I want to deliver the same sort of message to Australian adults in any case, because we seem to be losing our edge. As I explain, early on, I like to sit in an overseas eatery or drinkery and let loose an anonymous “G’day!” just to stir the other Australians up. I am the larrikin trouble-maker our history needs.

Starting with Pangaea and Gondwana, I look at how our geology shaped the soil, the climate, plants and animals: with no beasts of burden or high-efficiency crop plants, I examine what makes Australians different, even as those shared differences bring us together. Lacking suitable animals and plants, Indigenous society and land management had to be different. To survive, the first Australians used people rotation, rather than crop rotation.

The European invaders brought in unsuitable crops and unsuitable animals and dismissed the local solutions as primitive, then tried to impose European practices on a foreign clime. The Australians themselves experimented with assimilating a few white people into their society, but these trials mainly failed. At the same time, indigenous artists took to European art media and conventions.

Then we step back, to examine how the Europeans arrived off Australia’s coasts, saw what was in Australia, and liked it enough to grab it. Once they decided to make a land grab, the British invaded, and this is the only way to describe what happened. Denialists may bray that there were no arms, but even if we ignore the guns and flags at the settlement proclamation, the parallels to the Norman invasion make a mockery of any denial.

The Normans looked around England and said, “This is nice land: it’s ours now. Oh, and those laws of yours: forget about them, because you’ll be using ours from now on, and you’d better start speaking our language, as well.” Social disruption is what invasion is about, and that’s what happened in Australia in 1788, along with land-grabbing.

The early white Australians knew the horrors of a sea trip, and the next generation learned from their elders of the sea sickness, heat in the doldrums, slop buckets and dreadful food, but they started wearing their own sorts of clothes and speak their own language. They mixed together so much that there are no regional; dialects, just a few words that betray your colony or state of origin. By the 1820s, an Australian accent and even dialect began to emerge

Next came expansion, but while the explorers may have believed they were going out into trackless and unpeopled areas, they followed the tracks or native roads, and saw either “natives”, or their traces, everywhere. Spilling over the Blue Mountains, freed convicts and new arrivals grabbed more land, forcing the original owners away. Australian ways of doing things began to emerge: bark and slab huts, new clothes and new foods.

A mature society was already there when gold was discovered, and new arrivals enriched our society, Australia, thanks to the inflow of gold, probably had a higher standard of living than any nation in the world, although Australia was not yet a nation. All Australians feared snakes and spiders, they fought drought, floods and fire, but by the 1850s, most people could find their way in the bush and they had laid down roads over the old foot-padded tracks, bringing in engineering to shape Country.

Australians wore the same clothes, ate the same foods, drank the same drinks, sang the same songs, knew the same legends and played the same sports. Becoming a nation in 1901, for a long while, we called ourselves ‘British’, but after gold was officially found (and ever since), people poured in from all over the world, bringing in new ideas and ideals, but all of these people were drawn into speaking and behaving “like Aussies”. In their turn, they warned later foreigners about drop bears and bunyips.

We went off to fight Britain’s wars, though in the 1940s, we changed to regard the USA as a better force to be allied with, and as we approach recent times, from Korea onwards, we joined in the battles of the US. In sport, in science and in the arts, Australia more than held its own on the world stage. We started wearing our own sorts of clothes and speaking our own language. Along the way, women started wearing trousers if they wished: we were forging a new future.

In the end, we started to look at our origins, and sometimes felt less than pleased, but sometimes we thought all was bonzer. Having explored Australia’s troubles, disasters and triumphs, we end with the Voice referendum

Where do you stand? At the end of this warts-and-all book, you will hopefully have moved a bit.

Australianisms

A short sampler of one of the works up in the air, right now. 

There is room for a very interesting dictionary of Australianisms. But I have no time to collect such a list.
Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, 1883.

There are probably 2000 terms and phrases that we regard as Australian (some of them aren't).

Some of them are now lost to the common parlance, but I wondered when they first came into use, because I was writing YA historical fiction.

I speak all three Australian dialects, and adjust my accent and vocabulary, based on where I am, so Struth Bruce, it's down to me to deliver the good oil, right? Take a dekko (1896) at these:

a bad apple: 1890

Bunyip (Gawler, SA), 10 October 1890, 3.

Put a bad apple in a basket of good ones and the whole will become diseased.

billy: 1848

The Courier (Hobart), 29 July 1848, 2. The earliest located instance by a large margin, implying a Tasmanian origin for the word.

… we went in the evening, and he put some bread on the table, and the “billy” on the fire; we told him we would not wait for anything to eat, but would take the things he was going to give and go away.

Collins street cocky: 1924

Williamstown Advertiser (Vic), 15 November 1924, 1. See also Pitt Street farmer; Queen Street cocky and St George’s Terrace cocky.

Before polling day the Farmer’s Union said that the return of a Collins street cocky of the Peacock type would be a tragedy. Now John Allen, leader of the Country party, is proud to lead a Government of which the same Peacock, always eager to be in the ministry, is his second in command. It’s a wonder the paid organisers in the Country party are not ashamed to draw their salaries.

cooee: 1826

The Australian (Sydney), 20 December 1826, 3. This was during a trip, by foot and by boat, to Brisbane Water, via Manly and Pittwater, to somewhere near Terrigal.

Evening was approaching, our provisions were gone — the servant had been despatched to announce us and prepare for dinner, and the struggling through the rich luxuriant vegetation had wearied us more than all the open country, we were nearly exhausted; the freshest of our party was despatched in the right direction, according to the sun, while we rested ourselves anxiously waiting the concerted signal of “coo-ey,” as soon as the path was found.

damper: 1825

Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, 28 January 1825, 2. A report on the harvest.

Then notwithstanding it is so limited as to forbid the enjoyment of superfluities, we have no doubt that it will give the working family a rasher of good bacon, an excellent damper, and a copious draft of new milk, which, we are presumptuous enough to assert, do not appear indicative of famine.

drop bear: 1967

Australian Army (National), 12 October 1967, 1. (The KSLI were the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, engaged in exercises with the Australian Army.)

Something else to come out of PIPING SHRIKE was the hide of a dreaded Drop Bear, below, nailed to a tree outside the Q Store. The KSLI heard many reports from Diggers about this beast. ARMY’s full report on the habits and habitat of the Drop Bear appears on p13, this issue. [Note: Page 13 does not exist.]

Esky: 1955

The Beaudesert Times (Qld), 4 March 1955, 6.

The gifts were a[n] Esky Ice Box and Magic Bric.

fat lamp: 1827

The Australian (Sydney), 20 March 1827, 2. A ride to Bathurst.

Some dirty pork fat or dripping, in a bit of broken plate, was our only lamp…

fat lamp: 1847

Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March 1847, 3.

TAYLOR’S PATENT FAT LAMPS, FOR BURNING TALLOW IN PLACE OF OIL.
This newly invented Lamp is admirably adapted for the Bush and Country Gentlemen, as it will burn waste grease, tallow, or fat of any description, and saves the inconvenience and expense of sending oil into the interior.

It now stretches to 3800 entries covering 1850 terms in 275,000 words. 

More to the point, my work gets the earliest dates far closer to right:

The only competing works fall into two classes: giggle booklets for tourists, presenting Ockers as clones of Paul Hogan or Steve Irwin, offering a few sometimes dubious definitions. These works pay no attention to the origins or changing senses (and no, I don’t define the terms). Then there are two OUP projects which are clearly sub-standard on their research. They are:

Australian words and their origins, edited by Joan Hughes, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989; and

The Australian national dictionary: Australian words and their origins, edited by Bruce Moore. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2016.

Their errors come, I think, from hiring bored undergrads to do their research. Either that or they relied too much on books as sources (and as I know, to my dissatisfaction, it often takes years to get a publisher interested in a slowly-mouldering ms, making the first-use dates appear later). Newspapers are far more immediate, so dates from there for the same phrase tend to be earlier than those drawn from published books. I relied heavily (but not solely) on the National Library of Australia’s Trove newspaper database.

aerial ping pong: Hughes has 1964 for this Moore has 1947, but I have The West Australian, 24 November 1945, 5. Article ‘Brave New Words’.

ant-bed floor: Hughes and Moore have 1913 for this, but I have The Australasian (Melbourne), 12 July 1890, 43.

ant caps: Hughes has 1955 for this, but I have Kalgoorlie Miner, 28 October 1896, 2. I missed checking this in Moore.

Anzac biscuits: Hughes has 1943 for this, Moore has 1923, but I have Sunday Times (Perth), 4 June 1916, 7.

ANZAC Day: Hughes has 1916 for this, but I have The Advertiser, 28 August 1915, 2. The date was to be October 13.

apples (she’s): Hughes and Moore have 1943 for this, but I have Western Mail, 18 December 1941, 35.

I have billy from The Courier (Hobart, Tas.), 29 July 1848, 2, but Bruce Moore p. 92 dates it at 1849.

I have lollies from Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, 5 September 1846, 2, but Moore. p. 94 dates it at 1854.

Even the Macquarie Dictionary gets it wrong!

The Macquarie Dictionary website gives “since the 1960s” for Things are crook in Tallarook, but I have it in the Benalla Ensign (Vic), 24 January 1941, and I have another hit from 1952.

And then there is Gerry Wilkes’ Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms.

There, the dates there do not hold a candle to mine. I gave up after the letter C, but here are his source dates, with my carefully researched dates in brackets. Note the bolded dates: some of the discrepancies are more than half a century!

(I found one instance, where his date was older than mine, but I could not confirm it.)

aerial pingpong 1963 (1945); Albany doctor 1922 (1906); Apple Isle: 1963 (1903); apples (she’s) 1952 (1945); Arthur or Martha, 1957 (1943); Aussie, 1918 (1915); Aussie rules, 1963 (1907); Aussie salute, 1972 (1966); babbler 1919 (1904); back block, 1872 (1864); back country, 1863(1824); back of Bourke, 1898 (1871); Bagman’s Gazette, 1954 (1900); bags, rough as, 1919 (1911); Bananaland, 1893 (1881); bandicoot, 1845 (1799); bardie 1941 (1897); bathers 1936 (1911); beaut, you, 1964 (1908); Big Fella, 1971 (1938); billabong, 1883 (1838); bindii, 1910 (1907); bitser, 1941 (1926); bitumen, 1953 (1926); Blamey, Lady, 1945 (1942); Block, do the, 1869, (1854); bluetongue (rouseabout), 1943 (1910); Bondi tram, 1951 (1943); boomerang, 1901 (1824); boot, put in the, 1915 (1906); box seat, 1949 (1832); brickfielder, 1833 (1829); bullocky, 1933 (1884); Bundy clock, 1936 (1905); bushman’s clock, 1846 (1850); bush telegraph, 1878 (1863); BYO, 1975 (1968); chain, drag the, 1933 (1840); chiack, 1893 (1875), cooe, within, 1876 (1853); cracker night, 1953 (1905).