Climbing Mount Exmouth

This went to air on the ABC on Sunday 29 October 2006 8:45AM, and you can still listen to it through this link, if you wish. One reason for placing this here is that Jeff McGill has just been in touch with me to correct a couple of points. I have sought and gained his permission to add his comments as a guest blog: you can find it here.

I keep a standard CV ready for the times when po-faced people ask me for an account of my experience, skills and habits. Among other thing, it says, more or less truthfully, that my hobbies include walking up small mountains slowly and sitting on top of small mountains wondering how to get down. Last September, I re-defined my sense of 'small', but I never planned it that way.

Another hobby is having temporary obsessions, cascades of curiosity that end up as talks like this, or books. This time, my obsession was with explorers in Australia and the methods they used. It will probably end up as a book, but it's had me off chasing all sorts of oddities. I rode camels in Central Australia a couple of years back, in part to work out how John Horrocks came to be shot by his camel.

This time my target was a mountain in the central west of New South Wales, a peak that John Oxley spotted from 130 kilometres away in 1818. By world standards, we have sad mountains in Australia. Our highest peak is barely 2200 metres above sea level, and most ranges are much less.

The Warrumbungles are volcanic remnants in central New South Wales, the result of our tectonic plate having passed over a hotspot some millions of years ago. Mount Exmouth reaches 1206 metres, making it the highest peak in the Warrumbungles. There used to be a road part of the way up, but that's long since closed, so I walked all the way from a car park at about 330 metres, but I thought I had started out much higher up. I'd looked at an old map and when I was thinking about walking up Mount Exmouth, I assumed the top of the old road was my starting place. This was not a good idea.

I'd looked at the contours and worked out the vertical part of the climb, going from the top of the old road about 750 metres above sea level. When I found the road wasn't there any more, I forgot to look at the map again, and missed noticing that I was starting much lower down. I headed off, expecting to walk up a small mountain and sit on it, but I was much more than 450 metres below the summit.

The first part is suitable even for old-age pensioners (indeed I met two British OAPs as I was walking out), and while it rises a bit, maybe 30 metres from end to end, it isn't extreme. Then you come to the old road, and that suddenly becomes steep pinch after steep pinch. It's pleasant enough if you can make your own pace, and because it bends, it's deceptive. You go up a rise, turn, and find another rise, or on one occasion, two kangaroos hurtling down the track. In one straight line it would be heartbreaking; here, it offers constant variety.

I always wear Volley sandshoes when I walk. This upset our English guide in the Troodos mountains of Cyprus recently; she wanted me to wear boots, until I showed her the soles and explained that roofing contractors here wear nothing else. Her eyes flickered at this curious Australian custom, then another Australian in our group clarified, 'On their feet', he said.

This kangaroo saw me coming and stood his ground.

Anyhow, Volleys are traditional with wilderness walkers of a certain vintage. I am of that vintage, and I've walked in them for 35 years or more. They let you feel the ground, so I walk quietly, especially when I am alone. My silent progress meant I was frequently alarmed by kangaroos feeding by the track. Animals that saw me only at the last minute and fled, thumpingly through the bush. My heart thumped even louder, but I knew they'd been equally alarmed.

Something like 250 metres to go!

Two-hundred-and-fifty metres below the peak, you come close to the mountain proper, and from a small saddle, you start walking up. That was the point where I looked more closely at the map and wondered why I was feeling so worn.

I realised my error, that the total climb was more like 850 metres, not 450. I'd now climbed 600 metres, not 200 metres, but having gone that far, I thought I would try a bit more. My legs were querulous but I spoke sternly to them. We would do the last 250 metres, I snarled.

The final climb begins as a narrow trace across and up a scree of loose rock. There was nothing too daunting, but the track drives steeply up to a bend and then doubles back on itself. Off the scree, there's a flat bit through trees, before the path slides up the mountainside again.

At one point I needed to work around a rock face carefully, with strands of fencing wire strung between two trees behind me. It was slippery, nothing dangerous, but I'd seen no fresh footprints on the way up (and I was in fact the only person up that far that day), so I knew help would be a while coming.

I'd posted a walk plan, giving 8.pm as the alarm time to send out searchers, which now seemed a bit late. So I needed to go extra carefully over stuff I wouldn't think twice about down at sea level. There was a steep drop below me, so I just took my time, leaning in and keeping three limbs attached at all times. Serious climbers might sneer at my Nervous Nellie technique, but I felt safer.

That eagle only came close when I wasn't ready.

A wedge-tailed eagle had been circling the peak all morning, and now it swooped in repeatedly, about five metres over my head as I worked around the face. Of course, as soon as I rounded the corner and got my camera out, the rotten magnificent bird lost interest in me and drifted away out of range.

So I just kept plodding up the track, wondering if I really needed all this. Suddenly, I was on top. Well, I was on the ridge, and that meant I only had little jump-ups along the ridge to the peak. My knees groaned a bit, but in the end, they jumped.

It was a perfect day for being on top of a mountain; two days later, I drove past, coming back from the west, and the peak was all wrapped in cloud. But that day I had a perfect monarch-of-all-I-survey view of the Warrumbungles. I ate salami, cheese and dried apples, I drank water, I mooched.

On top of the world.

I went there to see what Oxley saw. I wanted to see Mount Harris (which I'll get to in a moment), but it was hidden in haze. I wanted to see the mountains to the east, which drew Oxley on, through Tamworth and Walcha, down to Port Macquarie, and I saw them, but only as distant smudges.

That teasing eagle stayed well up, but kept flying so its shadow passed over me - it had to be deliberate - and because it was in the sun, I was unable to capture it with the camera. It circled at a distance until a second eagle came into view. They flew wingtip to wingtip, then the new bird rolled over and grasped at the first eagle with its talons, after which the two of them dropped, talons together, falling down the sky before they parted, recovered, and did it again. I wondered at this: was it a mating display or aggression? As far as I could see, they never made actual contact with their feet.

My knees continued to remind me that they're elderly. They'd had enough, they averred. Four hours from starting, I headed back down, each step carefully placed. The day wasn't hot, but I still used most of the four litres of water I took. I never used my kiwi jacket, my sweater, the extra food, the torch or the other emergency stuff, but they were insurance. Best of all, I didn't use the bivvy bag, an orange plastic sack large enough to put broken people in to keep them warm, dry and visible. I've carried it for 19 years, and never needed it yet.

It took three hours of slow and careful treading to get back to the car. I swore occasionally at Mr Oxley, who said that he got up there in two brisk hours, and seems to describe the route I was on. Like most of the so-called explorers, he was probably following what some of them called 'a native road', in other words, a foot track worn by generations of Aboriginal feet.

It was a hard climb.

The day after Mount Exmouth, I drove west, and then north, to walk up Mount Harris, described by a later explorer, Charles Sturt, as 'a hill 120 feet high', but one of just two rises near the Macquarie River. Mount Harris is private property, but the owner, John Egan, gave me permission to walk up it.

John Oxley visited that hill in 1818, saw the Warrumbungles, the Arbuthnot Range, as he called it, and decided to go there. He saw the Great Dividing Range from Mount Exmouth, and decided to push on to Walcha and then to the coast at Port Macquarie. Mount Harris is north of Warren and far enough west for the flies to be bad already. It was of course, the only day that my trusty fly veil wasn't in my pack.

Photography in dense fly swarms is no fun, as anybody who's been in the high country in summer will know. In spite of the flies, in spite of no veil, I came back with 500 pictures. It was spring, and there'd been rain in the west. Not a lot, but enough to make flies and wildflowers flourish.

The area's dead flat, right across the flood plain, so I was amused at one point to find a flood depth indicator in the middle of nowhere. It would be most useful in a flood to have a sign telling you that you'd been driving in two metres of water for the past five or ten kilometres.

It's the sort of country where explorers climb trees or each other's backs in desperation, seeking the sight of a landmark, any landmark, on the horizon. There are no 35-metre trees, so a hillock reaching that locally amazing height is a boon, especially when a person on top can see an interesting peak, almost 130 kilometres away.

Explorers like distant landmarks to take sights on as they travel, because it helps them map their way. One of my beefs with the school curriculum is that trigonometry would be a lot more interesting if the applications of triangulation were given better coverage in maths classes, and it'd be nice if the reliance of explorers on 'native roads' became an element in the history class.

Anyhow, there I was on Mount Harris, which I hadn't seen from Mount Exmouth because it was lost in the haze, but now I could see the Warrumbungles and Mount Exmouth from Mount Harris. They were faint, but they were there. Mr Oxley managed to see each from the other, so he must have been lucky.

Mount Harris was named for John Harris, the surgeon who patched up Governor Phillip after he was speared near my home in Manly. He also gave his name to Harris Street, Ultimo, the Sydney home of the ABC, to Harris Park in Sydney and to at least one other mountain.

In 1801, Harris went on the first expedition to study the resources of the Hunter River, and a hillock there was labelled 'Mount Harris' as well. It was used as a reference point while they were mapping the river, but this mere pimple has since fallen off the map, so I went looking for it.

There's another hill on the Hunter, originally named Mount Ann, and then dubbed Comerford's Hill, and if you go there as I did, it has a road up it called 'Mount Harris Drive', but it's not the original Mount Harris of 1801, so I was glad to have found the surgeon's second and rather more important personal mountain out west. I'm glad I toddled up Oxley's Mount Harris.

And looking back, I'm equally glad I went up Mount Exmouth, but I probably wouldn't do it again on my own, and possibly not even in company; one has to learn one's limitations with age. Or maybe one should ignore the limitations and go out in style? Not just yet though, there are too many Mount Harris-sized small mountains to walk up and sit on top of. I just need to clarify my internal concept of 'small mountain' a bit. Small is beautiful, but the genuinely small can be a joy forever.

Now make sure you read the preceding item in this blog.

The wrong Mt Exmouth

This is the story of how you can get things wrong. Jeff McGill alerted me to my error, and I believe in setting the record straight, so I suggested to him that I could add the original talk to this blog, with his notes.

His response was:

No problem, peter, as long as we cite john whitehead....he's the expert. I was struggling to understand the inconsistencies until I read his work. He is now acting as a brains trust on my own book on the warrumbungles which is about 95 per cent finished, and now in the process of being double-checked :)

So, with thanks from both of us to John Whitehead, here’s his correction:

Dear Peter,

I just wanted to send you a little bit of info to ease your mind on one particular topic – your climb to the top of Mount Exmouth.

I'm a former newspaper editor and keen writer of history...and am doing a book at present on my family, who were pioneers in the Warrumbungle Mountains from 1841, holding several farms in the range.

My great-great grandmother was Rachel Jane Kennedy/McGill/Inglis who became quite a folk hero of the region as a midwife, squatter-fighter and horsewoman. She, and my family, always knew Mount Exmouth as 'Mount Wambelong'.

Peter, I read about your experience climbing Mount Exmouth, "to see what Oxley saw". You said it took you many hours, and your knees groaned in the steepest sections, and on the way down, you said: ‘It took three hours of slow and careful treading to get back to the car. I swore occasionally at Mr Oxley, who said that he got up there in two brisk hours…’. 

There was no need to be so hard on yourself, Peter. Oxley was on a completely different mountain. He actually climbed Mount Bullaway, to the north.

The mountain range was of course first seen by European explorers in 1818 when Oxley approached from the west. Three peaks stood out on the skyline, so he cited their compass bearings and named them: Mount Exmouth [Mount Bullaway], Mount Harrison [Mount Wambelong/Exmouth] and Vernon’s Peake [Tonduron Spire].

On his way through, Oxley camped at ‘Kangaroo Hill’ (today's Mount Tenandra) and then spent a few nights at ‘Loadstone Hill’, easily-identified as present-day Black Mountain, because of the wild effect its magnetic rocks had on his compass.

From this campsite, Oxley looked due east to the large peak that he called ‘Mount Exmouth’ – today’s Mount Bullaway.

He wrote in his journal: ‘We set off early this morning to ascend Mount Exmouth, distant four or five miles: at its base we crossed a pretty stream of water, having its source in the Mount; it took us nearly two hours of hard labour to ascend its rugged summits…’.

Mount Bullaway is 8 kilometres from Black Mountain, fitting perfectly the ‘four or five miles’ described by Oxley, and the ‘pretty stream’ flowing out of the mountain was Caleriwi Creek, also called Frasers Creek. And, today it still takes about two hours to climb Mount Bullaway.

The modern peak that is incorrectly-named Mount Exmouth – Oxley’s ‘Mount Harrison’ – was in a different direction and much further away. For Oxley to walk more than 12 kilometres across a marshy plain (a full day’s work given the marshy flooding that it was experiencing at the time), and then climbing to the top of the mountain (a 5-7 hour round-trek, according to the National Parks & Wildlife Service), only to then battle it back across the flooded plain to return to Loadstone Hill by 4pm, as Oxley noted in his journal, seems impossible.

When the explorer left Loadstone Hill, he described his route to the north-east, ‘over low strong ridges, the sides and summits of some of which were very thick brush of cypress trees…We [camped] in an extensive low valley north of Mount Exmouth and running under its base, bounded on the north-east by low forest hills.’

That describes present-day Goorianawa valley. If Oxley’s ‘Mount Exmouth’ was truly the Mount Exmouth of today, the only ‘valley’ would be the one underneath Siding Spring Observatory – and it does not have ‘low forest hills’ to the north-east, but rugged mountain ridges.

When you throw in the explorer’s own maps and bearings, it is clear Mount Bullaway was the peak climbed. John Oxley never set foot within the present-day boundary of Warrumbungle National Park.

Oxley’s route was, in the 1960s, comprehensively plotted by local researchers such as John Whitehead – a keen historian who was a shire engineer of Coonabarabran Council  and a national park trustee. His conclusions and maps are explained in detail in his painstaking 2008 book, The Warrumbungles: Dead Volcanoes, National Parks, Telescopes and Scrub.

Oxley’s original mountain names from 1818 were forgotten by the white settlers of the 1830s-1850s who used Aboriginal words instead, and knew the tallest peak in the range as ‘Mount Wambelong’. That name was also cited on parish maps and in newspaper articles.

The confusion began in the 1930s when environmentalist Miles Dunphy – who was spearheading the campaign to create a Warrumbungle National Park – drew up a tourist map for the use of early visitors. It was a beautiful piece of work, but Dunphy took it upon himself to rename Mount Wambelong as ‘Mount Exmouth’, based on his mistaken belief that it was that peak that had been climbed by Oxley.

Dunphy’s map – the only of its type in existence – was printed and reprinted, and government staffers and others cited from it for decades, entrenching the error.

By the early 1970s, local researchers had mounted such a strong case that Dunphy was mistaken, that the peak was officially renamed Mount Wambelong. This, however, left some influential noses out of joint.

‘Having Oxley pass through Warrumbungle National Park was seen by many to enhance its status as a tourist and historical attraction,’ John Whitehead explained, whereas Mount Bullaway – Oxley’s real Mount Exmouth – was narrowly outside the park boundary. Others, he believed, were simply reluctant to contradict Dunphy, the great founding father of the park.

In March 1979, the NSW Geographical Names Board reversed its decision and reinstated the Mount Exmouth name, a concession being that a trig station on its summit was to be known as ‘Wambelong Trig’. The reason given by Board was that the peak was already too commonly known by the local community and park visitors as Mount Exmouth. This was an unlikely claim, but was accepted by officialdom.

The problem is, history is now being unwittingly misrepresented. It is not hard to find scores of examples of media outlets and websites incorrectly claiming that it was today’s incorrectly-named Mount Exmouth that was climbed by John Oxley.

I’d just didn't want you to feel bad about your inability to match Oxley's fitness, Peter.... time yourself up Mount Bullaway instead :) 

Cheers, Jeff McGill

A question of collaboration

Anybody who knows much about the books I write could be excused for sniffing and saying "Ah, yes, Macinnis—always got his nose stuck in the 19th century!"  Well. it's true—I do find the middle of the 19th century fascinating, but only as a nice place to visit.  I wouldn't want to live there, not unless I can have a time machine to send back antibiotics, good cheese and a decent bicycle.

It was a simple era, and somebody from our time can understand even the fastest of the changes in science and technology happening back then.  Later, it all became too complex.  Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee could go back in time to King Arthur's court and reproduce 19th century technology, but could you make a transistor, a computer, or a motor car?

This belongs to somebody, If it's yours, give me a shout!

I don't long for the old times, but I find them interesting, and I like finding things that belong more in the realm of alternative-future fiction or steam punk.  I lap up clockwork fly traps, steam-powered, wing-flapping flying machines, balloons powered by tanks of compressed hydrogen driving engines that turn the propellers or even balloons hauled by eagles.

It's hard not to feel smugly superior, reading their predictions of the future.  Let me lie back on the couch, doctor, and I'll tell you about it.

It all began when I was a teenager, still in short pants, reading the words of Egon Larsen, a mid-20th century science writer, praising the virtues of atomic energy:

"Within a few years isotopes will turn up in many more expected or unexpected places — perhaps the slogan 'Gamma Washes Whiter', will become quite familiar to us when our ultra-sonic washing machines are equipped with some gamma source to sterilize shirts and socks and napkins." [1]

A little earlier, he'd explained nuclear waste disposal like this:

"Even highly radio-active solid wastes can be disposed of safely in the sea provided all relevant factors are kept in mind: movement of the surface water, the breeding and migratory habits of fish, and the possible hazard to seaweed where it is harvested for food, fertilization, or industrial use." [2]

Perhaps, doctor, you can see why I grew alarmed.  I knew little of food chains and concentrations and nothing of the effects of ionising radiation on tissues.  I'd barely heard of the concept of half-life, but these predictions just felt wrong. They seemed like a bad future.

Being a compulsive book gatherer, I started collecting old books which offered visions of the future.  I found they always warned us to make way for the bright new future, to plan, to prepare, and to act now.  I also noticed that the future always included flying cars and a world where we had swapped eating for the efficiency and superior nutritional value of food pills.

What's that, doctor?  No, I don't want to take two fish and chips pills and call you in the morning. May I continue?  Thank you.

Popular Science, 1930s.

Popular Science, 1930s.

Another common early 20th century theme was the modern airliner. This had all the frills of a 1920s luxury ocean liner, but slung beneath the gas bag of a motorised balloon.  These Zeppelins on the grand scale each had a ballroom, a dining room seating 129 fashionably attired gentlemen and ladies, with space for dozens of servants and individual cabins, each fitted with a bath and a shower. Modern cattle class, eat your heart out!

And one more definite, absolutely certain future: the pneumatic telegraph.  This did in fact happen in a small way.  It was still around when I was old enough to be aware of it at a local clothing shop, where money and sales dockets were carried through tubes to a cashier on another floor, and the change and a receipt were returned similarly.  It was scaled-down, but still clearly the pneumatic telegraph.

From Scientific American, 1860s.

The money and paperwork travelled in a small cylinder, just the right size for the tubes.  It was neat and effective, but a mere shadow of the projected pneumatic telegraph, which 19th century seers thought would replace messenger boys and telegraphy, carrying messages and parcels unerringly to their destinations though tubes, using high pressure behind or low pressure in front—or both.

Readers were assured that these innovations would revolutionise their lives.  Capitalists were admonished in the early 1860s to put money into these schemes, ignoring all others.

Now imagine a world where farmers had walked off the land, because, let's face it, food pills would soon do them out of the job.  Think of a world where the roads had been dug up and sold off to developers, because flying cars need no roads.

Contemplate a world where the cables have all been torn down or dug up and sold for scrap, because the pneumatic telegraph was coming.  Ponder a world where the airports have been sold off to robber barons and covered with towering future slums, intended to house the otherwise unemployed farmers, road-makers and cable layers, because modern airships don't need long runways.

Nobody would plan on that basis, would they, doctor?  I mean, it's ludicrous, isn't it?  What sort of idiot would plan for the future, based on half-baked notions, pipe-dreams?  Who would base decisions on special pleading from interested parties, all eager to hack out an empire for themselves?

So, why do people happily embrace the prospect of a world without libraries, based on the prediction that we don't need books or libraries any more, because we can get everything we need from the internet?

Those who make sweeping assertions like this don't know what books are, have no sense of what libraries do, and absolutely no idea of what the internet is—or offers.  Most importantly, these rigid descendants of Wackford Squeers lack the wit to see that institutions evolve.  Change is attained through finesse, using scalpels, files and sandpaper, not bulldozers, flamethrowers and explosives!

OK, doctor, so I'm probably biased, being a book collector and writer who likes hanging out with librarians, but at least I've studied change and how it happens.  Perhaps that doesn't qualify me to predict the future, but it gives me a clear insight into what doesn't work.

One profound and simple change to our society came when a bright spark had the idea of combining the mouse and the graphic user interface to make it easier for people to access their computers.  Most people credit Alan Kay with this idea, and he was certainly involved in creating our mouse and windows world.  That's why I like his comment:

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it." [3]

He said that in 1971, forty years ago, probably before the mouse and GUI came up.  But then he did the necessary work.  The people like that who do things are the ones that make change happen.  Some may make better mousetraps or a brighter light, others just nudge the system. These are small moves that by themselves do little.  Together, they make a Brave New World.

One emerging cause of change is collaboration.  For all the problems caused by mischievous people, Wikipedia is an amazing resource of ideas, notes and reminders.  As more and more people offer their expertise, adding original sources and detail, it continues to outgrow the silly games of the vandals.

You can see one of my contributions in the entry on the Flint Piano or lithophone.  I made it after I came across some original material, looked at Wikipedia for more detail, found the account deficient, and rewrote the article, using what I'd found.

Another time, I added the text (and a pointer to the source) of a first-hand account of an 1811 earthquake on the New Madrid fault in America.  That tremor made the Mississippi River run backwards, and it rang church bells in Boston.  I tripped over the account while seeking the origins of the word 'diggings', and thought it interesting.  At some time in the not-too-distant future, that fault will move again.  When it does, my contributions will be there, waiting and accessible.

The grand planners and self-promoters want to scrap everything, so only their vision of the future can be enacted.  Sounds a bit like China's Cultural Revolution, doesn't it?  I'd rather see cultural evolution, where we get to keep all the best bits, and preserve the spare bits for a while at least, in a box in the garage.

In 1990, two mathematicians, Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, offered a refreshing view of computer art. They thought its future lay in 

"… the dynamic, the animated, the interactive.  It should look not towards Rembrandt, but towards Verdi's 'Aïda'.  Not just the classical 'Aïda', but an 'Aïda' with the audience singing along and scrambling onto the backs of the elephants on stage.  Chaos?  No.  Total theatre." [4]

This is the way our society is quietly heading.  Invisibly, it's happening, all around us.  The National Library of Australia (who are, let me confess, sometimes my publisher) have a remarkable resource called Trove.  This is a massive collection of digitised newspapers, linked to computer-generated text which registered users can correct.

More than that, they can add generic tags like "bushrangers", "39th Battalion", or one of my favourites, "early use of language", the tag I hang on the earliest instances I find of words like 'squatter', 'billy', 'bludger', 'swag' and 'fossick'—among others.  Those tags are there for all time.

Equally, I was researching two London conmen called Tripe and Montague, who in 1852, fleeced would-be emigrants who were headed for Australia's goldfields.

I found their trial transcript at the Old Bailey, but until I found a record of their pardon, I believed they had been transported to Australia.  I grinned at their probable reception here, if they met any of those they had robbed.

Curious, I burrowed and found an 1856 classified ad in the Sydney Morning Herald where 'W.W.' was advertising for friends who'd been caught up in the swindle. Trawling along, I found another ad in the same paper in 1865, where William Waterford was mentioned. I went back to the first ad, and attached a comment, drawing any later reader's attention to the second ad and the likelihood that the mysterious W. W. was in fact William Waterford.

Slowly, the resource is growing, and the prospects for future researchers are being quietly enhanced, not by hewing and slashing behemoths, but by nibbling and gnawing mice.

One day, I hope, people will turn around, raise their eyebrows and ask "Where did all that come from?" That day isn't here yet, but we can hope for it, and work towards it. If I'm wrong, no harm will've been done, because nothing is scrapped as these small additions drop into place.

But we're not there yet. The other day, I was looking at an old Times Literary Supplement in the State Library of New South Wales' online collections, when another article on the same page caught my eye.  It mentioned Sir Horace Mann appearing in a painting in Florence.  I soon found Zoffany's The Tribuna of the Uffizi and with some effort, tracked down a key to the people in the painting.

I wanted to annotate the TLS article so others could find the same resource, but I couldn't.  One day, that'll be a given, because every system will have that sort of flexibility worked into it.  As a stopgap, I edited the relevant entry in Wikipedia, and added a link there.

That's the future I look forward to.  The difference between my vision and that of the people who'd sack the librarians, pulp the books and demolish the shelves, all to make room for soft lounges, a couple of computers and a gleaming great coffee machine is this: my vision offers hope, and doesn't prescribe world-crashing and irreversible destruction.  We build on what we have, knowing that some of the old stuff—and some of the new—will be discarded, once we're in a position to decide.

As the twig bends, so the tree bends.  A future built on collaboration relies on people who gain a quiet joy from contributing gems, nuggets and crumbs to future generations, whimsical folk who amuse themselves by committing acts of anonymous scholarship.

You see, doctor, this is the way the world bends—not with a bang, but with a whimsy.

---

[1] Egon Larsen, Atomic Energy, Pan Books, 1958, p. 136-7.

[2] Egon Larsen, Atomic Energy, Pan Books, 1958, p. 136.

[3] http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html

[4] Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes' Dream, Penguin, 1990, p. 53.

Charles Wilkes and the US Exploring Expedition

This one went to air in late 1989, close to the sesquicentenary of Wilkes' arrival in Sydney. Preparing for it involved reading, among other things, the facsimile of Wilkes' rather contentious 500+ page autobiography, never published in print, but reproduced as a facsimile. He was, shall we say, an interesting case.

It was a dark and moonless night, the night of November 29th, 1839, a hundred and fifty years ago last week. The place was the Heads, at the entrance to Sydney Harbour, and it was just after sunset. Unseen by the watchers on South Head, who were paid to notice such things, two alien warships slipped quietly into Port Jackson.

It wasn't really all that hard for them to sail in: Macquarie Light shone bravely out on South Head showing the way, and they had sailing directions and an accurate chart of the harbour, prepared by Phillip Parker King, about twenty years earlier.

Since that time, a new light had been placed on the only dangerous reef, the Sow and Pigs, but the chart and sailing directions were otherwise complete and accurate. In any case, there were scattered lights along the southern shore, to guide the ships as they sailed in. It wasn't really a great navigational feat, the way the foreign captain later claimed.

The two ships sailed quietly down the harbour to Sydney Cove and dropped anchor: the United States Exploring Expedition had started to reach Sydney. Next morning, according to the Americans, the whole town was shocked and horrified to discover that two foreign warships could approach in this way, all unseen, mind you, to a position where they might have destroyed Sydney, had they so wished.

So what were they doing here, these Americans? The Exploring Expedition, consisting of the two warships, and two other ships which followed a day or so afterwards, was on the way to explore the Antarctic, to go where no man had gone before, to discover new realms.

I suppose it was pretty inevitable that I'd one day turn to the study of Antarctic exploration. After all, Charles Laseron who wrote South With Mawson used to live in a house that backed on to ours, and my first science teacher, the man we called "Penguin" Watson, was another of those fabulous south-gangers.

And yet it was a completely different line of enquiry that brought me to the United States Exploring Expedition. You see, one of those who visited Sydney with the American fleet was James Dwight Dana, the man who gave us that classic of geology that we still know, even in its most recent editions, as Dana's Mineralogy.

But what was a geologist doing, sailing around the world in a flotilla of US naval craft, I wondered? I mean, sailors usually prefer to steer clear of rocks, don't they? You'd think the pickings for a ship-board geologist would be slim, limited to what you could dredge up from a great depth, or find stuck to the anchor.

Maybe, I thought, it was something to do with his distant relative, Richard Dana, who dropped out of legal studies to travel around Cape Horn, a trip that Richard later celebrated in the famous book Two Years Before the Mast.

But no, geologist James was on the maritime kick first, for he'd been a sea-borne tutor in mathematics to midshipmen in 1833, well before Richard's trip. In those days, midshipmen were sent to sea in training ships, and taught practical skills as they went. So off he sailed, off round the Mediterranean for sixteen months.

James Dana made the trip mainly so he could examine famous geological features in the breaks between his mathematics classes. Then, when that cruise was over, Dana returned to America as a junior assistant in a college, and just a few years after, published his System of Mineralogy at the ripe old age of 24, in 1837. The seventh edition of Dana's Mineralogy, by the way, was completed in 1962, so you can see that the book is something of a perennial.

And that was how the US Navy came to import this bright young man, already blooded in a sixteen-months cruise, when they headed off into the Pacific in 1838. There were going to be lots of rocks to be seen, and I suspect that there might just have been the odd Colonialist glint in the eyes of those who wrote Wilkes' orders in Washington.

The US authorities even admitted to grubby commercial considerations as the prime concern of the expedition, and if the Americans did have any colonial ambitions, it would be handy to have somebody along who could recognise valuable minerals when they turned up.

At that time, whale fishing alone accounted for ten per cent of all US ships on the seas, and the annual loss of ships on uncharted reefs and islands was about as much as the total anticipated cost of the expedition. But if that was all they had in mind, just the charting of new reefs and islands, there was no need of a geologist: a navigator was what they really wanted.

Charles Wilkes

And so we come to Wilkes, an expert navigator. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, as he was then, though he was a Rear-Admiral before he died, and rather lucky as well.

Incredibly lucky, in fact. Exploring Polar seas is best done by experienced people in strong vessels: Charles Wilkes went into the howling Antarctic gales, totally inexperienced, in four veritable cockle-shells, and yet he came out with all his ships intact. The crew were scurvy-ridden, but he brought them back.

Then again, being court-martialled and found guilty is usually enough to ruin any naval officer's career. Wilkes was court-martialled twice, and found guilty twice, the second time for almost provoking war with England, and yet he still ended up Rear Admiral.

When I learned this, I decided that maybe Wilkes was an interesting character who ought to be further investigated. Well after all, he left his name on the Antarctic continent, in Wilkes' Land, didn't he? In the end, I was right and I was wrong.

A specialist in charts and navigation, Wilkes had sailed to England in 1836 to purchase books and instruments for the expedition. While there, he met with James Clark Ross, soon to command a British expedition to find the South Magnetic Pole, and their paths were to cross again, rather disastrously for Wilkes, in southern waters.

But back to Wilkes. After fitting out, he led his motley flotilla of six ships out to sea in August 1838. The largest was a 780 ton sloop, Vincennes, and the rest were all even smaller, down to a couple of hundred-ton tenders, Flying Fish and Sea Gull. By the time they reached Sydney in 1839, a stores ship had been sent back to America, and Sea Gull had been lost with all hands, so the fleetlet was down to four ships when they arrived in Sydney.

Many writers have been critical of the structural weakness and small size of Wilkes' ships, given that they were to sail in Antarctic waters. As a matter of fact, the people of Sydney were unimpressed by the fleet as suitable vessels for tackling the icy wastes, but this was only one of the Americans' aims, just a small part a four-year cruise around the Pacific, and around the world.

A little pilot boat like Flying Fish was ideal for surveying and charting in close to coral reefs. Yet while they were suited to exploring the ice-free waters further north, the vessels lacked sufficient strengthening, and they were poorly insulated.

In fairness, we should note that Wilkes had tried reinforced ships: in his autobiography, he records that the ships handled appallingly. On top of that, they couldn't carry enough gear, and so Wilkes was forced to accept something rather second-best, a compromise.

From a scientific view-point, his trip to the ice was most disappointing. All of the scientists were left behind in Sydney, ostensibly because they would be "worse than a useless appendage".

There may have been more than this, for whatever was found on the trip was to be kept a secret by the US government, and the scientists would have this urge to publish, wouldn't they? And what did the US government hope to find? Why, Symmes' Hole, of course! At least, I think that's what they were after. They denied it so often, they must have been looking for Symmes' Hole.

Symmes was an American military gentleman, who had a novel idea about the world's structure. It was hollow, he said. Those Magellanic clouds in the southern sky weren't really collections of stellar matter, way out in space: they were reflections of other worlds, inside the earth, accessible only by holes that opened out near the poles.

Symmes almost got congressional support to mount an expedition to find these holes in the 1820s, and the idea was still about in the late 1830s, though nobody of any sense believed the yarn. But if there was any hope in anybody's mind about finding Symmes' Hole in the Antarctic, it would make good sense to keep the whole business secret from the scientists, just in case you failed. Still, whatever the reason, Dana and the other scientists were all left behind in Sydney.

This enforced stay in Sydney gave Dana time to contemplate, to think things over. He'd already been studying coral islands, and had some glimmerings of an idea as to how they were formed.

While he was in Sydney, Dana read a short newspaper account of Charles Darwin's ideas: these were in accord with Dana's own ideas, and he was spurred on to gather even more information to support their joint theory.

Meanwhile, some distance to the south, Wilkes had found no holes leading into the interior, and no land either, apart from Adelie Land, discovered by Dumont D'urville, just seven days earlier.

At anchor in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, Wilkes had dashed off a quick letter and a sketch map for his friend Ross, to save Ross time in his own search. As it happened, though, Ross was more interested in magnetic variations, and so he sailed over the same area. And where Wilkes recorded land at 65o40' South, 165o East, Ross could find no bottom with a six-hundred-fathom line. Wilkes' alleged coast-line was at least a kilometre under water!

Wilkes had been wrong. Either he'd misinterpreted cloud as land, which is easy to do, or he'd made an error in navigation. Whatever the cause, he was wrong. Ross tried to make this error known to Wilkes on the quiet. Sadly, Ross used an intermediary by the name of Aulick, another American naval officer who was in the Pacific, and who claimed to be a friend of Wilkes'. He wasn't.

Aulick took great pleasure in spreading the word far and wide around the Pacific that Wilkes had got it all wrong, that there was no land there at all, that the English had proved this. Aulick's pleasure may have been related to the fact that he had tried to talk Wilkes into giving up the command.

Wilkes lacked experience, he suggested. Quite obviously, Aulick felt that he would have been better choice, and Wilkes did not endear himself to the older man when he clicked his fingers under Aulick's nose before walking off. And so Aulick took his gleeful revenge on Wilkes.

This meant that Wilkes was not only denied his discovery of new land, he was made to look universally foolish, both in the Pacific, and back in America.

Ah, you may say though, what about Wilkes Land in Antarctica? He must have discovered that, surely? Well, I'll let Sir Douglas Mawson answer that question for us. After all, it was Sir Douglas who discovered what we now call Wilkes' Land.

To this country, which had never before been seen, was given the name of Wilkes's Land, to commemorate that great American Exploring Expedition.

Though Wilkes fixed such names as Knox Land, North's High Land etc., to coasts reported to have been seen by him, it has been left for us to commemorate his own name in like manner by attaching it to this new stretch of coast.

So in the end, what did Wilkes achieve? Well, the expedition collected much useful information, and many useful plants, all round the Pacific, ranging from close to Antarctica, all the way up to Japan, and he circumnavigated the world.

James Dana gained the time to mature his scientific thinking, and Dana, Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray all worked on the expedition's collections, describing and detailing them, and the abridged version of the report became a minor classic of the 19th century. Wilkes has also given rise to a rather interesting display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

But Wilkes didn't find Symmes' Hole, he didn't discover new lands in Antarctic waters, and I don't think he really frightened the burghers of Sydney by rudely landing, unannounced, in their midst.

You see, I've read the local papers for the whole of the period of his visit, and hardly a reference to the expedition could I find, and certainly no breath of scandal about enemy warships sneaking in.

I suspect that tale was all the fabrication of a cranky old man, rather careless of the truth at the best of times, scrawling out his autobiography in his declining days. One thing is sure: Wilkes says he sailed ten miles up the harbour to anchor at Sydney Cove, and that's impossible.

Or at least I think it is. I live in Manly, and I'm currently checking the records to see if any strange keel marks were found, running down the Corso, late in 1839. For unless he sailed over dry land, there can be no way that he travelled ten miles down the harbour to Sydney Cove.

But it was a dark and moonless night: my colleague Nick Lomb at Sydney Observatory checked it for me in his tables -- they're rather good at that up at the Observatory -- and the moon rose rather late, around midnight. So that part of the story is indeed confirmed as true, unless of course Wilkes sailed in later than he told us: after all, nobody actually saw him, did they?

And something that Wilkes doesn't tell us, and maybe didn't even know himself, is equally true: Wilkes seems to have been, at least in part, the model on whom Herman Melville based his character, Captain Ahab. You know, Captain Ahab as in Moby Dick. And that's got to be better than frightening a few burghers of Sydney, surely?

Post scriptum: Some two months after this went to air, I read Anthony Trollope's account of his travels in Australia, (and in passing of the huge fortifications around Sydney Harbour). Trollope makes it very clear that the major worry for Sydney-siders around 1871 was the Americans. Look, the folk of Sydney said, at the Alabama case and the Trent case. The Trent case was the incident which led to Wilkes' second court-martial. So maybe Wilkes was telling the truth after all!

Can you trust statistics?

This was a set of two talks, recorded somewhere around 1991 -- it ended up gaining a 'highly commended' in the Michael Daley awards.



As this speaks of health matters, John Snow's pump in Broad Street gains a few mentions in my talks, because it is my favourite example for lots of reasons.

I found where Broad Street used to be when I was in London -- though the Soho people I asked, mentioning a cholera outbreak were horrified, stating vehemently but in a low and urgent voice that there had never been cholera there, while looking around furtively, to make sure no tourists were in earshot.

Just around the corner, I found a replica of the pump, a plaque on which the name of a parochial politician was in larger print than Snow's, and also the John Snow pub. I went in and drank a beer to the great man (Snow, NOT the Councillor) , and bought a souvenir t-shirt. Now read on . . .


* * * * *

I'm a reformed smoker. I gave up many years ago, but I did it for political reasons. I just wasn't prepared to support the government of the day by paying tax on both liquor and tobacco, so I gave up the demon weed. Soon after that, the government changed, but I didn't like the other mob very much either, so I kept on not smoking.

Now it goes without saying that reformed smokers are tiresome people. At least if you're a smoker they are. They will keep on at you, trying to get you to stop as well, so they can hang another scalp on their thoroughly smug and sanctimonious belts.

To all non-smokers, those who still puff smoke are tiresome people, who can't see the carcinoma for the smoke clouds. Stupid fools who deny any possibility of any link between smoking and anything.

Like the tobacco pushers, the smokers dismiss the figures contemptuously as "only statistics". The really tiresome smoker will even say a few unkind things about the statisticians who stand behind the figures. Or about the statisticians who lie behind the figures.

But the smokers don't just settle for simple attacks, like alleging the statisticians are secret non-smokers. It's all very much nastier than that. So much nastier, there must be a deeply ingrained cultural hatred of statisticians in our society, and probably an equal contempt or detestation for statistics as well.

At one stage in my infamous career, I freely confess to having quite a lot to do with gathering statistics, and messing about with numbers, an honourable and harmless activity, I would have thought. But it was then I discovered that such people, while sometimes accused gently of being "mathematicians", more often suffer the far heavier opprobrium of being called "statisticians".

I certainly encountered this all-too-human tendency, and all too often at that. The things people used to say about statistics and the users of statistics offended me greatly.

If you've never suffered from being called a statistician, you may think it's a minor inconvenience to suffer. That's only because you've never heard the jokes which go with the label: there are more jokes about statistics than I know about the dismal science of economics, even if you let me throw in all of the many jokes I know about the economists as well.

Take, for example, the definition of a statistician as "somebody who's rather good around figures, but who lacks the personality to be an accountant". Or the story about the statistician who drowned in a lake with an average depth of six inches.

These days of course, we really ought to say fifteen centimetres, rather than six inches, but I'd like to stress the hoary agedness of so many of these witticisms about statistics: my reasons will become clear soon enough.

Then there are other clever-clogses who earnestly assure and advise us that a statistician collects data and draws confusions. We are also told statisticians are people who draw mathematically precise lines from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.

With this sort of bias floating around, it's little wonder the great physicist, Lord Rutherford, once harumphed, "If your experiment needs statistics, then you ought to have done a better experiment".

Then there was the cruel and cutting comment, attributed to various witty people, and said to be about various people, that "X uses statistics much as a drunkard uses a lamp-post: rather more for support than for illumination".

On a slightly different tack, but still a debunking one, people will sometimes assert that statistics show how the vast majority of people have more than the average number of legs. Which is a bit like the common discovery, popular with conservatives, that tests reveal half our nation's school leavers to be below average.

Or the mildly sexist one-liner that statistics are like bikinis: what they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is vital. And politicians like to get into the act as well, so we find Fiorello La Guardia, one-time mayor of New York saying statistics are like psychiatrists -- alienists he calls them -- statistics are like psychiatrists because they'll testify for either side.

Finally, there's the grand-daddy of them all, the famous line about "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". Now quickly answer out loud, so there's no cheating: who was it who first said that?

The odds are if there are two or three know-alls in your house, you'll now be locked in bitter dispute. At least, I hope you are. It may be hard on you, but it will help me prove my point.

The official version is that this line was first voiced by Mr. Disraeli, the well-known politician, but many quite reputable and reliable reference books attribute it to no less a personage than the author Mark Twain.

Now you can see why I expect to have started a few arguments by asking you to say your answers out loud. Even the experts can't agree on who it was said it! So if the authorities can't answer with one clear voice, how could you and your neighbours?

Well, the true facts of the case are fairly simple. That catchy snippet about "Lies, Damned Lies" et cetera was first published by Mark Twain all right, this can be proven to anybody's satisfaction, but Twain attributed the line to Disraeli.

The only problem is this: search as hard as you like, you won't find the story in any earlier publication than Twain's "Autobiography". In short, Mark Twain made the whole thing up! Disraeli never spoke those words: Twain invented them all, but he wanted the joke to have a greater force, and so gave the credit to an English politician.

Twain wasn't only well-known for his admiration of a good "Stretcher" (of the truth, that is), he even lied when he was talking about lies, and his name wasn't even Mark Twain, but Samuel Clemens! Now would you buy a used statistic from this man?

Come to think of it, the yarn's pedigree should have been enough in itself to cast doubt on the its veracity, with an arch-liar like Twain quoting, of all things, a politician! Yes, sad but true, there are more jokes about politicians than there are about statisticians, but only by a short head. It must be because so many politicians are trained originally as economists.

When you look to the background of the "Damned Lies" story as I did recently, there's an even stronger link between statistics and politics. Last century, when Disraeli is supposed to have made the remark, statistics were just numbers about the State. The state of the State, all summed up in a few simple numbers, as it were.

Now governments being what they are, or were, there was more than a slight tendency in the nineteenth century to twist things just a little, to bend the figures a bit, to bump up the birth rate, or smooth out the death rate, to fudge here, to massage there, to adjust for the number you first thought of, to add a small conjecture or maybe to slip in the odd hypothetical inference.

It was all too easy to tell a few small extravagances about one's armaments capacity, or to spread the occasional minor numerical inexactitude about whatever it was rival nations wanted to know about, and people did just that.

By the end of the last century, though, statistics were no longer the mere playthings of statesmen, and we find Francis Galton explaining that the object of statistics "...is to discover methods of condensing information concerning large groups of allied facts into brief and compendious expressions suitable for discussion".

So while you can go on sniping or objecting about being reduced to a mere statistic, those poor old statistics are still doing a fine job.

It's a pity, though, they've such a bad image problem, especially if you're trying to convert a diehard smoker from his or her evil ways.

As somebody once observed, or should have done if they didn't, figures don't lie, it's just that liars can figure. Presumably we don't set out to deceive ourselves deliberately: but could we use statistical information in such a way as to be unintentionally misled? I think it's very possible. Like fire, statistics make a good servant, but a bad master.

From Galton's time on, his meaning of statistics as some sort of numerical summary has become generally accepted, and the addition of "tests of significance" has added hugely to the number of statistics we can use.

So if the word "statistics" no longer means what it did when Mr. Disraeli didn't really make his comment, then it hardly seems fair to keep on giving statistics such a cruel and unusual treatment.

But as I implied before, I won't rush to the defence of your average number-abuser. If somebody does a Little Jack Horner with a pie that's absolutely bristling with statistical thingummies and they produce just one statistical plum, I won't be impressed at all: the plum's rather more likely to be a lemon, anyhow.

There are several handy little tests I apply to any figures and statistics which come my way: either the figures pass or they fail. These tests let me decide whether I'll take any notice of the figures or not. Statistical tests are very useful, especially if somebody is trying to prove by statistics that X causes Y.

In the first place, I want to know if there is a plausible reason why X might cause Y. If there isn't, then it's all very interesting, and I'll keep a look-out, just in case a plausible reason pops up later, but I won't rush to any conclusion. Not just yet, I won't.

Secondly, I want to know how likely it is that the result could have been obtained by chance. After all, if somebody claims to be able to tell butter from margarine, you wouldn't be too convinced by a single successful demonstration, would you?

Well, perhaps you would: certain advertising agencies think so, anyway. So let's take another tack: if you tossed a coin five times, you wouldn't think it very significant if you got three heads and two tails. Not unless you were using a double-headed coin, maybe.

If somebody guessed right three, or even four, times out of five, on a fifty-fifty bet, you might still want more proof. You should, you know, for there's a fair probability it was still just a fluke, a higher probability than most people realise. There's just about one chance in six of correctly guessing four out of five fifty-fifty events.

Now back to the butter/margarine dichotomy. Getting one right out of one is a fifty-fifty chance, while getting two right out of two is a twenty five per cent chance, still a bit too easy, maybe. So you ought to say "No, that's still not enough. I want to see you do it again!".

Statistical tests work in much the same way. They keep on asking for more proof until there's less than one chance in twenty of any result being just a chance fluctuation. The thing to remember is this: if you toss a coin often enough, sooner or later you'll get a run of five of a kind, and much more often than you'll fill an inside straight at poker.

As a group, scientists have agreed to be impressed by anything rarer than a one in twenty chance, quite impressed by something better than one in a hundred, and generally they're over the moon about anything which gets up to the one in a thousand level. That's really strong medicine when you get something that significant.

There. Did you spot the wool being pulled down over your eyes, did you notice how the speed of the word deceives the eye, the ear, the brain and various other senses? Did you feel the deceptive stiletto, slipping between your ribs? We test statistics to see how "significant" they are, and now, hey presto, I'm asserting that they really are significant. A bit of semantic jiggery-pokery, in fact.

And that's almost as bad as the sort of skullduggery people get up to when they're bad-mouthing statistics. Even though something may be statistically significant, it's a long way away from the thing really being scientifically significant, or significant as a cause, or significant as anything else, for that matter.

As I said earlier, statistics make good servants but bad masters. We need to keep them in their places. But we oughtn't to refuse to use statistics, for they can serve us well.

Some little time ago, I talked about Dr. John Snow, the man who solved a cholera epidemic in London in 1853. He did it by having the handle taken off a pump in Broad Street which was supplying polluted water. The story interested me, and I ended up researching it rather more deeply than I needed to, and I learned about some interesting side issues. Let me share one of them with you now.

During that same cholera epidemic in 1853, not ten minutes' walk from the Broad Street pump, in London's Middlesex Hospital, an unknown woman of thirty-three was helping to look after some of Snow's patients, and many other victims of the epidemic as well. It offered her some relief from the tedium of middle-class Victorian era spinster life, but her decision was a world-shaking one, nonetheless.

To us, she's no mere unknown, for that quiet spinster was Florence Nightingale. And while most people know her as the woman who founded the modern profession of nursing, there are just a few of us who know of her other claim to fame: as a founder of the art and science of statistics.

I'll come back to her in my next talk, and to whether the ABC is secretly driving you insane, and why all the podiatrists in New South Wales seem to be turning into public telephone boxes in South Australia. Or why I think that's what is happening.

My grandmother was one Florence Evans. Not an unusual name, they told me, lots of Evanses in Wales they said, so when I visited her native village of Manorbier, there was some doubt as to just which of several Florence Evanses I was talking about.

Still, after old Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard had eliminated the one who died at seventeen, and the one who died an old maid, she recalled the one who emigrated to wild colonial parts, and that was my Flo Evans.  From there, we found surviving relatives and said g'day.

Anyhow, Florence is a common enough name these days, but in 1820, it wasn't at all common. Only Florence Nightingale carried the name back then, and that was because she was born in the city of Florence, in a room with, by the sounds of it, a truly marvellous view.

It was only later, when Miss Nightingale became world-famous as the founder of modern nursing, that other young girls were also named Florence, in honour of the Lady with the Lamp. Aside, that is, from Percy Florence Shelley, the son of the poet, who was also born in Firenze. But for Ms Nightingale, the name might have remained non-gender-specific.

And yet, Florence the First, Florence Nightingale, could quite easily have turned into a fairly good mathematician: anybody with the steely resolve to break into nursing as it was in those days, when it was peopled by drunks and retired prostitutes, anybody game enough to take on all of that, could have done just about anything at all.

And certainly Florence had the interest in mathematics, and she had the ability. Unfortunately, she bowed to her father's wishes, and abandoned her interests. Or did she? After her name was made famous in the Crimea, Florence Nightingale returned to London in 1857, and started to look at statistics, and the way they were used.

First, she prepared a pamphlet, based on the report of a Royal Commission, studying the Crimean campaign. This little work, named "Mortality in the British Army", is generally believed to feature the first-ever use of pictorial charts to present statistical facts. Graphs, in fact, the origin of all those rinky-dinky little diagrams, beloved of geography teachers, you know the ones, with wheat bags, or oil barrels or human figures lined up like little paper dolls, or skittles, or whatever.

In the following year, 1858, Miss Nightingale was elected to the newly formed Statistical Society, just as she turned her attention to hospital statistics on disease and mortality.

In essence, she said, you could never discover trends in the data if everybody went happily around, concocting their own special data in their own sweet ways. You had to make everybody keep their figures in the same way. And so she prepared her scheme, published in 1859, for uniform hospital statistics. Her aim? No less than to compare the mortality figures for each disease in different hospitals, a thing which just could not be done under the old methods.

As in other spheres, Florence Nightingale was a success here, too, so the Statistical Congress of 1860 had, as its principal topic, her scheme for uniform hospital statistics.

These days, we use rather more sophisticated methods. It won't be sufficient just to say Hospital X loses more patients than Hospital Y does, so therefore Hospital X is doing the wrong thing. We need to look at the patients at the two hospitals, and make allowances for other possible causes. We have to study the things, the variables, which change together.

Earlier, I suggested that statistics are best regarded as convenient ways of wrapping a large amount of information up into a small volume. A sort of short-hand condensation of an unwieldy mess of bits and pieces.

And one of the handiest of these short-hand describers is the correlation coefficient, a measure of how two variables change at the same time, the one with the other.

Now here I'll have to get technical for a moment. You can calculate a correlation coefficient for any two variables, things like number of cigarettes smoked, and probability of getting cancer. The correlation coefficient is a simple number which can suggest how closely related two sets of measurements really are.

It works like this: if the variables match perfectly, rising and falling in perfect step, the correlation coefficient comes in with a value of one. But if there's a perfect mismatch, where the more you smoke, the smaller your chance of surviving, then you get a value of minus one.

With no match at all, no relationship, you get a value somewhere around zero. But consider this: if you have a whole lot of tennis balls bouncing around together, quite randomly, some of them will move together, just by chance. No cause, nothing in it at all, just a chance matching up. And random variables can match up in the same way, just by chance. And sometimes, that matching-up may have no meaning at all.

So this is why we have tests of significance. We calculate the probability of getting a given correlation by chance, and we only accept the fairly improbable values, the ones that are unlikely to be caused by mere chance.

The trouble is, all sorts of improbable things do happen by chance. Winning the lottery is improbable, although the lotteries people won't like me saying that. But though it's highly improbable, it happens every day, to somebody. With enough tries, even the most improbable things happen.

So here's why you should look around for some plausible link between the variables, some reason why one of the variables might cause the other. But even then, the lack of a link proves very little either way. There may be an independent linking variable.

Suppose smoking was a habit which most beer drinkers had, suppose most beer drinkers ate beer nuts, and just suppose that some beer nuts were infected with a fungus which produces aflatoxins that cause slow cancers which can, some time later, cause secondary lung cancers.

In this case, we'd get a correlation between smoking and lung cancer which still didn't mean smoking actually caused lung cancer. And that's the sort of grim hope which keeps those drug pushers, the tobacco czars going, anyhow. It also keeps the smokers puffing away at their cancer sticks.

It shouldn't, of course, for people have thrown huge stacks of variables into computers before this. The only answer which keeps coming out is a direct and incontrovertible link between smoking and cancer. The logic is there, when you consider what the cigarettes contain, and how the amount of smoking correlates with the incidence of cancer. It's an open and shut case.

I'm convinced, and I hope you are too. Still, just to tantalise the smokers, I'd like to tell you about some of the improbable things I've been getting out of the computer lately. They aren't really what you might call damned lies, and they are only marginally describable as statistics, but they show you what can happen if you let the computer out for a run without a tight lead.

Now anybody who's been around statistics for any time at all knows the folk-lore of the trade, the old faithful standbys, like the price of rum in Havana being highly correlated with the salaries of Presbyterian ministers in Massachusetts, and the Dutch (or sometimes it's Danish) family size which correlates very well with the number of storks' nests on the roof.

More kids in the house, more storks on the roof. Funny, isn't it? Not really. We just haven't sorted through all of the factors yet.

The Presbyterian rum example is the result of correlating two variables which have increased with inflation over many years. You could probably do the same with the cost of meat and the average salary of a vegetarian, but that wouldn't prove anything much either.

In the case of the storks on the roof, large families have larger houses, and larger houses in cold climates usually have more chimneys, and chimneys are what storks nest on. So naturally enough, larger families have more storks on the roof. With this information, the observed effect is easy to explain, isn't it?

There are others, though, where the explanation is less easy. Did you know, for example, that Hungarian coal gas production correlates very highly with Albanian phosphate usage? Or that South African paperboard production matches the value of Chilean exports, almost exactly?

Or did you know the number of iron ingots shipped annually from Pennsylvania to California between 1900 and 1970 correlates almost perfectly with the number of registered prostitutes in Buenos Aires in the same period? No, I thought you mightn't.

These examples are probably just a few more cases of two items with similar natural growth, linked in some way to the world economy, or else they must be simple coincidences. There are some cases, though, where, no matter how you try to explain it, there doesn't seem to be any conceivable causal link. Not a direct one, anyhow.

There might be indirect causes linking two things, like my hypothetical beer nuts. These cases are worth exploring, if only as sources of ideas for further investigation, or as cures for insomnia. It beats the hell out of calculating the cube root of 17 to three decimal places in the wee small hours, my own favourite soporific.

Now let's see if I can frighten you off listening to the radio, that insomniac's stand-by. Many years ago, in a now-forgotten source, I read there was a very high correlation between the number of wireless receiver licences in Britain, and the number of admissions to British mental institutions.

At the time, I noted this with a wan smile, and turned to the next taxing calculation exercise, for in those far-off days, all correlation coefficients had to be laboriously hand-calculated. It really was a long time ago when I read about this effect.

It struck me, just recently, that radio stations pump a lot of energy into the atmosphere. In America, the average five-year-old lives in a house which, over the child's life to the age of five, has received enough radio energy to lift the family car a kilometre into the air. That's a lot of energy.

Suppose, just suppose, that all this radiation caused some kind of brain damage in some people. Not all of them necessarily, just a susceptible few. Then, as you get more licences for wireless receivers in Britain, so the BBC builds more transmitters and more powerful transmitters, and more people will be affected. And so it is my sad duty to ask you all: are the electronic media really out to rot your brains? Will cable TV save us all?

Presented in this form, it's a contrived and, I hope, unconvincing argument. Not that it matters much, even switching off right now won't stop the radiation coming into your home, so lie back and enjoy it while you can! My purpose in citing these examples is to show you how statistics can be misused to spread alarm and despondency. But why bother?

Well, just a few years ago, problems like this were rare. As I mentioned, calculating just one correlation coefficient was hard yakka in the bad old days. Calculating the several hundred correlation coefficients you would need to get one really improbable lulu was virtually impossible, so fear and alarm seldom arose.

That was before the day of the personal computer and the hand calculator. Now you can churn out the correlation coefficients faster than you can cram the figures in, with absolutely no cerebral process being involved.

As never before, we need to be warned to approach statistics with, not a grain, but a shovelful, of salt. The statistic which can be generated without cerebration is likely also to be considered without cerebration. Which brings me, slowly but inexorably to the strange matter of the podiatrists, the public telephones, and the births.

Seated one night at the keyboard, I was weary and ill at ease. I had lost one of those essential connectors which link the parts of one's computer. Then I found the lost cord, connected up my computer, and fed it a huge dose of random data.

Well, not completely random, just deliberately different. I told it about the rattiest things I could dredge up, all sorts of odds and sods from a statistical year-book that just happened to be lying around. In all, I found twenty ridiculously and obviously unrelated things, so there were one hundred and ninety correlation coefficients to sift through. That seemed about right for what I was trying to do.

When I was done, I pressed button B, switched on the printer, and sat back to wait for the computer to churn out the results of its labours. The first few lines of print-out gave me no comfort, then I got a good'n, then nothing again, then a real beauty, and so it went.

At the end, I scanned the results.

I saw that NSW podiatrists' registrations showed a correlation of minus point nine eight with the number of South Australian public telephones, and minus point nine six with the Tasmanian birth rate. The Tasmanian birth rate in turn correlated plus point nine four with the South Australian public phones.

Well of course the podiatrists and phones part is easy. Quite clearly, New South Wales podiatrists are moving to South Australia and metamorphosing into public phone boxes. Or maybe they're going to Tasmania to have their babies, or maybe Tasmanians can only fall pregnant in South Australian public phone booths.


Or maybe codswallop grows in computers which are treated unkindly. As I said, figures can't lie, but liars can figure. I would trust statistics any day, so long as I can find out where they came from, and I'd even trust statisticians, so long as I knew they knew their own limitations. Most of the professional ones do know their limitations: it's the amateurs who are dangerous.

I'd even use statistics to choose the safest hospital to go to, if I had to go. But I'd still rather not go to hospital in the first place. After all, statistics show clearly that more people die in the average hospital than in the average home.