Australian history as it should be: a new book

I have, this morning published an ebook and a paperback with the same content. One has full-colour illustrations and costs $6, but because of printing costs, the $34 paper version is monochrome.

The pricing if you buy both is exactly the same as any one of the four editions published by the National Library of Australia. The difference? 264,000 words here, as against 80,000 there. Now I have added in all of the improbable, unlikely but true details. You might call this the QI (Quite Interesting) of Australian history.

Two of my history teachers would approve my work, but I am sure that conservative politicians (ptui!) would not. For starters, I offer S. T. Gill's two views of  'squatter', 1788 and 1863, as evidence. These offer warts-and-all history, all the stuff that prim conservatives shriek and run away from. Here they are:

I detest those conservative fogeys who demand that History be LISTS OF PEOPLE ("like me", implied). History should not be endless lists, it needs to be stories that we can learn from.  

Those conservatives want our history to be tales of  BCDEFG: Bushrangers and Convicts (all scum), Diggers (the military ones), Explorers (brave openers of untamed total wilderness), Farmers (who turned the sterile wilderness into riches at no cost) and Gold (ours by right of conquest). They cannot name even five of more than 2000 bushrangers; their grasp of the convict system is pitiful (they can’t tell a ticket of leave from a pardon); they could not locate a single battlefield on a map; they would be lucky to name more four explorers worthy of note (and  Burke and Wills don’t count!); they don't know the harm that farming does  on our fragile soils, they know nothing about gold before Hargraves.

No lists of things, dates or people here. I had to learn lists in the 50s, like all the rivers Leichhardt crossed or followed in 1844 – 45, and performing that is my party trick among people who think. I enjoy watching them wince in horror as they realise (or recall) that such tasks were once thought to be education.

My version of Australian history is written by a science-trained story-teller, so it begins with geology and biology, then the first Australians and then the invaders. It also argues that Australia Day should be January 30.

I mention a few usual suspects, but you will also meet some Melbourne pirates; intellectuals; fools; geniuses; crooks, liars, hoaxer, frauds and cheats; eccentrics; runaways and women who wore trousers, swam naked or ran races in crinolines. I offer Governor King’s official thief and Moondyne Joe, pardoned for being good at escaping; a monster snake; a governor who owned slaves and a bureaucrat who saved Macquarie Street in Sydney; and teenage, girl and women explorers: they don't mention those in schools!

You will learn how poor people survived the Depression; their medicines, what they ate and wore, and meet a cannibal who died of plague—stuff that was left out of my school classes, as were the crimes against the first Australians. You will learn the true tale of gold discovery, which is not at all what you read, and how the Australian Light Horse annoyed Lawrence of Arabia. I also explain the first redback on a dunny seat.

Then there are bunyips, how to treat scurvy, how Eyre is usually shown walking backwards and Major Mitchell’s duel. Also, there are the scandals like the German’s fat-bellied fish: honestly it sound like fiction but it isn’t, and there are references to let you check.

Why did I write this book? I know where the bodies are buried, but more to the point, George Santayana said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In my view, those who seek to cover up our past must be wickedly determined to ensure that we all repeat it. We can do better than that, and for the good of our nation, we have to do better than that. The stuff here may trigger hissy-fits among the white-blindfold mob: so be it.

I have lived in Australia for just over one-third of the elapsed time from 1788, when Australia was invaded* by my people, up to now. Our population has quadrupled since I was born, and our ways of thinking have changed during that time, mainly for the better. In the past, I have talked to old Anzacs, old World War II POWs,19th century motorists, and people who knew the explorers. I used to sit under dining tables and behind lounges and heard unsuitable things, as the adults would have said.

This is history as it should be.

* For the cretins who think 1788 was not an invasion, chew on this: taken from David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1, 2-3, published 1798.

It must however be observed, that at Botany Bay the natives had hitherto conducted themselves sociably and peaceably toward all the parties of our officers and people with whom they had hitherto met, and by no means seemed to regard them as enemies or invaders of their country and tranquillity*.

[footnote on page 3:]
* How grateful to every feeling of humanity would it be could we conclude this narrative without being compelled to say, that these unoffending people had found reason to change both their opinions and their conduct!

Or, consider William Westgarth, Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria, 15 (1844).

This was a grand corrobboree, arranged for amongst themselves by surrounding tribes, including the still considerable tribe of the River Goulburn. This was, as it were, one last aboriginal defiance, hurled in despair from the expiring native cause against the too-victorious colonial invasion.

These quotes are part of my 280,000-word collection Australianisms, to be released on Amazon, just a few days from now: go for the ebook which has colour, and is much cheaper.

Oh yes, I forgot: as part of my support for multiculturalism, here is the whole of chapter 21.

A fifth edition of The Big Book of Australian History

A note to file in mid-2026: editing and formatting is done for the dead-tree version: a week should see the e-book version done.

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.

Why the nature of North Head matters.

When the white invaders arrived in Australia in 1788, Manly was one of the first places they named. It already had a name (Kai'ymay), but impressed by the confidence of the Guringai men, who waded confidently out to greet their boat, Governor Arthur Phillip called the beach they were approaching Manly Cove. Invaders like to change the place names...

Before long, things went sour, as a disease that was identified by the invaders as smallpox (I take the view that it was not smallpox, but something else, just as harmful) hit the Guringai people. The original paradise was over, but Manly remains a pretty place, best approached by ferry, and offering a wealth beaches and walks.

I fled Queensland in 1944 at the ripe age of six months (I just knew Queensland and I would never get on), reached Manly, and I never left. In the welcoming spirit of the Guringai, I like to share some of its gems, ones the Guringai would have known, and that means North Head. It is a place of sandstone cliffs and deep sands, blown onto what is now the headland, way back in the last Ice Age.

Look closely at the ridge on the left, and find the sea eagle that photo-bombed the shot.
At the centre bottom, look for the site of  a rockfall, dubbed The Great North Head Calamity.

My favourite animal.

The sandstone is almost 250 million years old, Triassic rock with ever few fossils, and lacking most of the nutrients plants and animals need. It's a paradox, but places with depauperate (poor) soil are hotspots of biodiversity, and there are about 450 species of flowering plants there, birds, mammals, reptiles and a rich fauna of invertebrates.

Would you know this one?

Since I officially retired, I have worked on North Head as a volunteer, weeding, planting and doing other stuff to help maintain a fragile ecosystem, but I am also a lifelong educator, and wearing that hat, I decided to generate a web site about the place, and host it myself. It was to show the casual visitor just how much more was there to be seen.

Once you know this is a spittle-
bug, you will be able to look it up.

Because I always travel with at least a phone and a camera, the web site was soon bloated with pics, so during one of our escape-from-lockdown rambles, I decided to do an e-book version that people could carry around. I added a great deal of extra information, even more images, and some internal navigation, and then, pushed by friends, I did the print version.

For a variety of reasons, the headland has retained many unusual like forms, and while I deliberately do not give detailed locations, the e-book and the print book help the visitor to understand what they are looking at, and provide some background.

A donkey orchid.

A dragon that like grapes.

Why no locations? Because some people cannot resist 'adopting' some of what they see.

If they had to work to find the unusual plant or animal, somewhere on our 250 hectares (that's a square mile for the old-fashioned and Americans), they will care more about it, take just a photo, and leave the plant or animal there...

Finding everything will take a very long time: in the past year, I have found my first North Head flatworm, and only my second centipede. There are things I have missed, but sooner or later, I will find them, just as I found a python.

I stopped the traffic for this one.

In the book, in all its versions, you get the geology, the history of the headland, the tracks that are worth following, and what to look for as you wander along them. I even tell you about these fig trees, and where to get the best views.

Where do you get the book? The cheapest way is as a $2 e-book from Google Play, and at the other end, a full-colour paperback will cost you $50 from Amazon. There is also a $4 e-book from Amazon, which is the lowest price they allow. Get the Google Play one, instead, because they are the same!

My Visiting Scientist talk

One of the fun things I do is to be the "visiting scientist" at a local primary school, and I am to give a talk to stage 3 later this week. What follows is an outline of what I will probably say, though I still need to cut a bit. That said, any savvy adults wishing to chip in with comments, or, in particular, detected errors, go for it.

There are quite a few salient links here, and there is also some additional material, because I will encourage my students to read this, when they are ready.

My basic brief was to show them how other cultures helped us learn about the night sky. If you know me, you will know that I stand up for respect for other cultures.

Really, I am in the school to support all four STEM areas, but if you don't know the jargon, that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and I like to at least give them all a bit of a canter.

I plan to begin my talk by explaining that I turned 21 last month. What I only explain later is that I am counting in base-36. I do explain that mathematicians use notation a lot, and I mention factorial numbers. If you don't know them, factorial 6 is written 6! and that means 6x5x4x3x2x1.

I add that mathematicians use lots of notation, and any mathematician seeing this, would immediately confirm that mine is a correct mathematical statement.

I then move on to observe that STEM is like a four-legged elephant: "Take away one leg and it may fall over." This goes with a pic that is part of my nod to technology: you can find any picture you want on the Interwebs.

That elephant lost its leg to a land mine, a nod to the fact that technology can do bad things, but other technology can fix the harm.

STEM is always about HOW COME? and WHAT IF? and that leads me into a verse that most of those I have ever taught have seen and heard (and the more perceptive reader will note that the elephant theme is still running):

I KEEP six honest serving-men
 (They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
 And How and Where and Who.

That is from Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So story' called  The Elephant's Child, which most people refer to as How the Elephant Got its Trunk.  In summary, it goes something like this:

•   The Elephant’s Child always asked questions, and people spanked him;
•   He wanted to know what crocodiles eat: each one he asked spanked him;
•   The Kolokolo Bird told him to go to:
•         the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, 
           where he asked the crocodile about its diet.

Kipling was a delightful writer for children like me, with the elephant's old nose being a mere-smear nose, which got stretched, and mere-smear nose repeats over and over, as does the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, but the bit I always loved was him saying:

'Led go! You are hurtig be!' Why?  Look at the picture above.

As Kiplingites will know, there is more to the story: if you aren't a Kiplingite: go to this link.

Why do I go off on this tangent? Well Kipling's 'Just So' stories tell us one version of how things began, but they may not be entirely reliable, and science has its own Just So stories.

For example, we say that Mendel discovered genetics, but anybody who has read my Not Your Usual Science Quotations will know about an account that Pierre de Maupertuis wrote about a family with six digits: here is an abbreviated version:

Jacob Ruhe had six digits on each hand and foot, as did his mother Elisabeth, and her mother. Four of Elisabeth’s eight children had six digits. Jacob Ruhe, one of the six-digital children … had six children; two boys had six digits …

So clearly, there was genetics before Mendel, and now, you might think I was ready to start on astronomy, but infuriatingly, I move back into numbers:

Thinking about the Ruhe family, if we had six fingers and six toes, would our counting be based on tens or dozens?

Then I demonstrate how we can count in blocks of five, with the help of an assistant, before revealing this truism on the right.

No, I won't explain it here, either but I do mention some reading (left) that they can do when they are older. My point is simply that we can count in other systems, if we wish. And why does this matter? Well, blame the Babylonians.

I filched this pic from Wikipedia (right), but it is just to show why we measure angles and time in a base-60 counting system.

Now, we really are getting close to astronomy, space and all that stuff. We begin with the shape of the Earth, which most of us think is a sort of sphere.

Did Columbus invent the idea of a planet that was round?  No, of course not: that's just a Just So story, made up by people who knew no better, passed on by modern ignorami.

Some 2000 years before Columbus, the old Greeks knew our planet was a sphere (even though they didn't realise that it was a planet). They knew the shape because:

• things always fall towards the centre of the Earth;
• they saw the Earth's shadow on the moon in a lunar eclipse; 
• things further away disappear over the horizon; and
• they could measure the size of the globe.

Pythagoras was probably the first to say that our planet is more or less spherical, but most Greek philosophers mentioned the shape at one time or another. Aristotle knew about it, and Archimedes clearly knew it, given his Proposition 2:

The surface of any fluid at rest is the surface of a sphere whose centre is the same as that of the Earth.

Even Herodotus (c. 485-425 BC), the first historian, seems to have had a hint of the evidence. He described a circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenicians, and how they saw the Sun to their north when they passed around the southern tip of Africa.

These men made a statement which I myself do not believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya [Africa], they had the sun on their right—to the northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered to be surrounded by sea...

In the 2nd century AD, an astronomer called Ptolemy summed up the evidence: as you sail north, the Pole Star is higher in the sky; eclipses of the moon are seen at a later hour in the east than in the west, and the differences are proportional to the distances east or west. When you sail toward a mountain, you see the peak first. The Earth always casts a circular shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, and if that isn’t enough, the sphere was the most perfect shape imaginable.

When you put together all of these, the Earth just had to be a sphere, or close to it. Cylinders, flat and concave surfaces just did not measure up. Now all the Greeks needed to put the whole question to bed was a way of measuring the world. The problem was that they could not get a large enough tape measure, and even if they could, trees and mountains would get in the way!

The measuring bit involves another Just So story, because in the official version, Eratosthenes measure an angle of 7°12', which is 1/50 of a circle, but they didn't have protractors then, and we still can't be that precise with just a protractor. 

My guess is that Eratosthenes cut out a wedge of papyrus, matching the angle, and then made more copies, and formed them up into a circle: that's how I would do it. Still, here's the way the story is usually told, and how I told it in a book called 100 Discoveries, which is about how we probably discovered things.

Eratosthenes was a Greek astronomer, born in what is now Libya, and he died at Alexandria in Egypt. Being Greek back then was more of a cultural thing than a matter of living in Greece. If you spoke Greek, and especially if you were educated in the Greek way and lived among other Greeks, you were Greek, like Eratosthenes—or Archimedes, as we will see shortly.

Because he had access to the huge library in Alexandria, Eratosthenes learned about a vertical well at Syenê (today’s Aswân on the Nile). There, on a certain day of the year, the sun shone straight down the well at noon. And on the same day of the year, the noon sun was seven degrees and twelve minutes away from the vertical at Alexandria.

Divide 360° by 50, and you will see that 7° 12’ is one fiftieth of a circle so the two places are a fiftieth of the way around the globe. Long before Eratosthenes, the ancient Egyptians had noticed this difference in sun angle, but they thought the earth was flat, so they used the angular difference to estimate distance of the sun from the earth as about 5000 miles.

Eratosthenes knew the sun was much further off, which meant the sun’s rays must all be parallel, so the difference just had to be a result of the curved surface of the earth. Measure the distance from Syenê to Alexandria, multiply by 50, and there would be the circumference of the earth.

The angles were fairly accurate: modern Aswan is at 24° 5’ 23” north while Alexandria is at 31° 13’ north, so the angle was only wrong by about 1%, but the distance estimate was far more questionable. Syenê was not directly north of Alexandria, so they did not lie on the same meridian of longitude, meaning that if the measured distance was accurate, it would be too high. In any case, the estimated distance over land was always open to error.

The biggest snag for us is that Eratosthenes gave the distances in stadia. Back in the days when units were not standardized, this was fine. Sadly, the length varied from city to city and we have no idea exactly how long Eratosthenes took a stadion to be. If we assume the most probable length of the stadion, he was within a few percent of the correct measure of the planet—but he probably got close only because a few compensating errors evened out the rough bits in his method.

In the end, Eratosthenes said: “If the extent of the Atlantic Ocean were not an obstacle, we might easily pass by sea from Iberia to India, keeping in the same parallel.”

Then because we are in Egypt, I turn to Egyptian astronomy and the Nile floods. The Egyptians had no idea that monsoons in Ethiopia caused floods, but they knew when floods would come, based on the heliacal rising of Sirius, which is the time when Sirius is visible in the morning sky, just before the Sun, each August.

That leads me on to records in preliterate societies, and in the bush, not too far from the school, there are some petroglyphs, engravings in the rock made by Aborigines.

I have been seeking and photographing these for 60 years now, so I know a fair amount about them, as an uninitiated Gubba. I know that they were used for teaching, in much the way that I use PowerPoint. I also know that there are right and wrong ways to photograph them, and spilling water on them is now seen as the best way to record them.

Then there are the oral sources: it has been reported this year that the Gugu Badhun people of northern Queensland have a story about a pit with dust emerging and causing fire to run down gullies, and that sounds very like a volcanic eruption that probably happened 7000 years ago!

Working out some of the old stories mean they mean is hard, but some of them must have been reminders for things to do, or teaching legends, like Wirreenun the Rainmaker and Tiddalik the Frog.

(Wirreenun, in particular, has me excited, because it mentions using "ant-bed" [termite nest] to make a solid floor. I knew this as a common practice followed by early white settlers, but this points to their having obtained this from the people whose land they invaded.)

I will also mention a story from Jean A. Ellis's book, From the Dreamtime : Australian Aboriginal legends. This tale, The Two Brothers and the Pointers, explains the danger of fire, and whenever children looked up at the Pointers, two stars near our Southern Cross, they would be reminded to be wary of fire.

Here is a key point: I argue that the Greek legends about the stars are also using the stars as reminders, much the same as the way the original Australians used engravings and the stars — but the original Australians also used the stars as a calendar, just like the Egyptians, as these examples show:

Around Yirrkala, Orion and the Pleiades warn of storms that may upset canoes.

The Pitjantjatjara people lnew that the Pleiades (Kungkarungkara) in the dawn sky indicated the start of the dingo breeding (and hunting) season.

In Arnhem Land, the appearance of Arcturus and Vega was fish trap time.

In Victoria, that is time to look for the pupa of the wood ant.

Around Sydney, the Guringai were reminded when to gather emu eggs in October, by the Emu in the Sky.

Let's jump on this last one, because it relates to an engraving site that I have been visiting for 60 years: I went there first in 1957, but only now, have I found out Barnaby Norris' explanation. His pictures are copyright, and I am using them without permission, but I hope he will excuse my admiring use for educational purposes of one of those pictures. I got it from the link below, but go there for even better stuff.

There is a formation in the Milky Way, known in some Aboriginal cultures as the Emu. Here is Barnaby Norris' version of it:

Now the thing Norris noticed was that there are engravings of Baiame and his emu wife, on sandstone in Kuring-Gai Chase National Park, and in October, the Milky Way emu hovers above the stone one, just at the time when one should gather emu eggs.

In this way, the night sky became a reliable calendar (more reliable than the Julian calendar that was going haywire by the early 1500s when Copernicus began looking at it.

The Greeks had named the constellations and gave them legends that helped people remember them, but they named few stars, and they hardly used the stars for navigation, unlike Captain Bligh, who used something called plane sailing (and please notice the spelling!).

At this point, I launch into ways of making simple measures of angular distances in the sky, using hands, a cross stave and a simple astrolabe. I'll say more about those, some other time.

Then there's the kamal, invented by Arabic traders across the Indian Ocean. This uses a card and a strong with knots, and depending on the knot you use, can tell you if you are in the right latitude. The Arabs, by the way, gave a lot of stars their modern names: I cherry-picked this one from Wikipedia as well.

After a bit of jumping around, looking at early instruments, I come to the planets, and why they are called planets, heliocentric and geocentric models and the influence of printing and books and how, after Gutenberg invented moveable type in about 1460, there was a sudden surge in the 1540s: the titles, all in Latin, are left out here, but look up the author's name and the date if you want to know them.

1541, Paracelsus, medicine;

1542, Leonhard Fuchs, plant science;

1543, Vesalius, human anatomy;

1543, Copernicus, astronomy;

1544, Sebastian Münster, geography;

1546, Georgius Agricola, fossils.

One of those books, the De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium (see why I left the Latin out?) of Copernicus, proposed a new model for the solar system, but only to make it easier to correct the calendar that we had been using since the time of Julius Caesar.  he wasn't trying to change astronomy at all: if you think so, that's another Just So story.

Instead, I wrap up with a look at where the star watchers came from:

Aborigines;

Egyptians;

Babylonians;

Greeks;

Arabs.

I have to confess that I know little about any work done by the:

Chinese;

Indians;

Africans; and

Scots.

But I know a few individuals who deserve special credit:

Copernicus (Pole);

Galileo (Italian);

Brahe (Dane);

Kepler (German);

Newton (English).

The thing about science: there's no national science, just human science.

And that's quite enough moralising for one talk!

Collecting engravings

Acacia sp.

Here in Australia, our "winter" is almost at an end, according to the flowers.  That said, the sun is low in the sky, even at noon, and that make this the ideal time to get out in the bush around Sydney, looking for Aboriginal rock engravings.

Today, my wife and I were taken by Matt Hunt to see some we didn't know, not far from home, within cooee of Oxford Falls and within earshot of radio-controlled model aircraft.

During the morning, I counted the following in flower:

• 7 wattles (Acacia sp.)

Acacia longifolia.



Boronia sp.



• 2 daisies,

• 1 Hibbertia,

• 1 Grevillea,

• 2 flannel flowers (Actinotus sp.),

• 1 Woollsia,

• 1 Boronia,

• 1 Leucopogon,

• 2 Epacris species,

• 1 Eriostemon,

• 1 pea, probably Hardenbergia,

•  1 Banksia.

Boronia sp

 We also saw wallaby tracks, counted a dozen or so birds, and got to a rather wonderful collection of Aboriginal rock art.

Most of this has been almost completely untouched since white people arrived in 1788 with diseases which killed off most of the custodians and severed the spiritual and mythical links between the engravings and the culture that sustained them and was sustained by them.

Click on any of the engravings shots to see larger versions.  Note that no copyright
claim is made on these: they are all Creative Commons attribution shots, but note also
that larger (and unenhanced) originals are available on request for any good cause.

They have been there for 224 years, almost untouched, except when they are harmed by vandals or fools. Sadly, we have a few of those.

The figures are all placed on flat slabs of Triassic Hawkesbury sandstone, most of them on high ridges, and when I was young, I was taught that this was so women and uninitiated boys would not see them, or because it seemed closer to the spirits/gods.  It is more likely that the most suitable stone is that with a high silica content, which is more resistant, and so ends up staying where it was, up high.  I definitely know of sites which can be looked down on.

The figures include humans, food and other animals, and sometimes, spiritual beings—we think. Nobody can be sure, because proper knowledge was only passed down to young men when they were initiated, and the culture shock of white arrival broke those chains of knowledge. We are left guessing.

For a quarter of that time, since 1956, I have been visiting and sometimes finding these sites. It's my way of paying homage to the people we displaced.  I didn't do the wrong thing, but I have benefited from others who did wrong, and that wrong can never now be righted. We can, at least, recognise that wrong was done.

These are probably three eels.  Note that you will often see feet in the photos, as a way of getting a scale: you will never see those feet on any of the lines. We walk softly, respectfully and carefully, because these are fragile works of art, more than two centuries old.

The figure nearest the pool is one of a number which have been stupidly scratched by somebody who hadn't a clue, and who has often gone off the line. You can see something of the same effect below.

Note that male figures are usually identified as such by a rough depiction of a penis, though sometimes male figures are recognised by a line at the waist, representing the hair belt worn by am initiated man.  The eel with the bands (above and below) is a puzzle: is it wearing multiple hair belts?  It was probably important in passing on a teaching legend.

 This fish, for example, has been scratched over by an idiot: it isn't overly clear, but the line of the body cuts across the pectoral fin.

 In the shot below, look at the fin on the right. On the left, just in front of the pectoral fin (lower down the picture), notice how the scratcher has gone outside the line.

Below, several fish, something that may or may not be a bird, and some mundoës, which are supposed to be footprints showing a path to be followed.

This is a shark, something which those with zoological training can tell by looking at the tail, which is heterocercal: it has two unequal lobes. Sharks have negative buoyancy and no swim bladder, and they get lift in the water by the sculling action of the lower lobe, which the more rigid upper lobe drives the shark forward: that means that by angling its pectoral fins, the shark gets lift there as well.

The idiot who worked on this made a mess of the tail, and brought is closer to the homocercal tail of bony fish, as well as missing the line of the upper lobe, which is on the left in the photo.  The idiot also chopped off the fin on the shark's right.

If I am right, this is a wobbegong shark, but whatever it is, the head is seen from above, while the tail is seen from the side: the Australian Aborigines had different criteria on accuracy, and this depiction communicated better to its audience.

If you need to photograph engravings, use water, like this:

We went to a second nearby site which has unusual mundoës with toes.  Or toës.

Now the first rule is to get the sun as low in the sky as possible: winter is better than summer, early or late in the day is better than noon.  Then you need water: compare the shot above with the two below and see how splashing a bit of water around, with the right choice of angle, the detail comes out.

So if you go looking for engravings, take along a few spare litres of water.  After all, these things have been rained-on for more than two centuries now.

Reminder: no copyright claim is made on the shots you see here: they are all Creative Commons attribution pictures, but note also that larger (and unenhanced) originals are available on request for any good cause. The photographs seen here have all been digitally fiddled to improve the clarity.