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.

Of timetables and tourism

I have been busy, cleaning up old books, so here's a bit of new stuff I have written for one of them. 

Despite what my publishers often assume, I am not really an historian. I do, however, write about historical matters, because like any good scientist, I am kin to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Kipling’s mongoose, who always had to “run and find out”. I want to know why things happened, and what made them happen as they did, and not differently. That is why I can argue that without the steam engine and the telegraph, Einstein may not have started the line of thought that led to special relativity.

It all began with a need to synchronise clocks, but nobody needed to do that until railways came in, and timetables were needed to make sure that up and down trains did not collide on the single tracks that were normal. (The single tracks between towns worked because train drivers would pull into sidings to let other trains pass. That is why they needed synchronised clocks and watches.)

Before long-distance railways, the only people who needed accurate times were those on ships who needed reliable time for navigation. The distance of a ship north or south of the equator, its latitude, was measured by taking sightings on certain stars, or on the sun, preferably at noon.

The harder task was finding your longitude, how far east or west you were. British sailors would set their chronometers by the standard time, as measured by the observatory at Greenwich. Using that as a basis, if the sun reached the highest point in the sky four minutes earlier than at Greenwich, you were one degree east of Greenwich, and if noon came four minutes later, you were one degree west of Greenwich.

Up until the 1850s, anybody with a telescope could set a ‘local noon’, but even in a small country like Britain, this system was no longer safe for the railways, and so Greenwich Mean Time was adopted in Britain.

An international convention in 1881 met to establish what we now know as the international date line as the prime meridian, but the convention had a majority of European members, and so the meridian through Greenwich became the standard for time-keeping, simply because it was closer to home for a majority of members. But if that meridian was the base line for timing, it still took more than 30 years for French and German geographers to accept the use of the Greenwich meridian as the base for all world mapping.

Einstein’s thinking about time arose from the needs of steam train drivers, but until the telegraph was available, synchronisation was hard. Without telegraphy, Einstein may not have pursued the deep problems of time and space.

Probably he would have got there, because trains and telegraphs were helpful precursors, rather than what scholars back then designated as sine qua non, a Latin tag meaning without which, nothing. There were many essential precursors like the invention of calculus, and probably a few enabling technologies.

In cities and towns, steam whistles, bells, flags and lights on towers indicated impending or recent arrivals and departures, summoning those to start walking who planned to meet (or be) passengers, and those seeking to send or collect goods or mail.

Timetables also fed tourism, the great leveller, that all too often pulls every culture down to the lowest common denominator, but which also opens the door to the acquisition of knowledge. Mass tourism corrupts, most of the time, causing hordes to rush from ticking Mona Lisa on their bucket list, to watching a “crocodile show” in Australia, or ogling the bare-breasted apsaras at Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat apsaras.

Along the way, though, one learns to drink rauchbier, or to put lemon in weissbier, to gain a degree of cultural perspective. Tourism also eliminates weak vessels, the ones who want to play with grizzly bears or lions, so it has its good points.

The idea of the Grand Tour began in the late 1600s, but as late as 1843, travelling from London to Rome took 21 weary days, though in 1860, steam ships and trains got you there in just two and a half days. In those earlier and slower days, when people went on the Grand Tour, they tried to tick as many boxes as possible, and after Pompeii was rediscovered in 1748, it went on the list of marvels to see. Seeing things like that helped educate people more widely.

The Mona Lisa crowd. This was as close as I wanted to go.

Just as the new technology brought fast travel to the masses, so Thomas Cook brought the masses to fast travel. He augmented the technology with group excursions, travellers’ cheques, hotel coupons and round-trip tickets, teaching first a nation, then the world, to obey timetables.

Cook began simply, arranging for a temperance group of 485 people to go from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841 at a shilling a head, with a brass band, speeches and food thrown in. He built up slowly, then left his job in 1845 to run tours full-time. By 1848, he was taking parties to Scotland and the Lake District, then ran ‘specials’ to see the Great Exhibition in 1851, and private trains to London to see the Duke of Wellington lying in state before his funeral in 1852.

Mr Cook’s train with 28 carriages of paying customers ran across Brunel’s magnificent Saltash Bridge when it opened in 1859. Ten years later, he was offering a 105-day tour of Egypt and Palestine, and one of his 1872 brochures is supposed to have inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days.

Verne seems to be one of the few writers of his time who was sensitive to how the world was shrinking. Cook offered a tour lasting a more relaxed 222 days but Phileas Fogg used timetables to find a faster way. In 1859, a New Zealander could reach London in comfort in 80 days, via Suez and Marseilles, but getting around the world in that time was still a bit of a challenge.

Some had more pressing reasons to travel, like dodging spouses or obligations. The classifieds in The Times on January 3 reveal that people could advertise for missing friends in Australia, while a New York enquiry agency offered to provide information about traders or to collect debts. In London, Charles Frederick Field, a former Chief Inspector of the Detective Police of the Metropolis, offered London and Continental Private Inquiries, and access to his New York agent.

Before about 1859, travel books were written either by intrepid explorers to recoup their costs, or as guides for intending emigrants. Now steamships made foreign travel more available, and Murray’s Guide to Madras and Bombay Presidencies for 1859 was the beginning of a long line of guides. The author was Edward Eastwick and the “Murray” who usually gets more credit was John Murray, the publisher of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Eastwick advised his readers that on arriving at Madras (now Chennai), the trick was “to get into a palankeen and be carried to the club, if a bachelor; or if travelling with ladies, to some friend’s house. There are, indeed, hotels which may be repaired to as a dernier ressort.”

Isabella Bird Bishop published her The Englishwoman in America in 1856. She became the first woman member of the Royal Geographic Society in 1892 and publishing still in 1900. She started when her clergyman father sent her to America to do research on American Christianity for him. A relative of William Wilberforce and cousin to John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1848 to 1862, she was well-connected enough to get an introduction to John Murray, who accepted her first work– and she never looked back.

After the death of her parents, she sailed for Melbourne in 1872, then visited New Zealand and Hawaii before crossing America and reaching New York at the end of 1873. There were more travels, and she circumnavigated the world three times, a record that few humans could have matched in the 19th century — and it was all down to steam transport. Steamships also carried an England cricket team to North America in 1859, the first international tour involving any team sport. England won every match.

Sometimes, travel failed to broaden the mind. An American visitor to Berne had returned claiming that everything in Berne smelled of cheese. “Cheese is the Bernese otto of roses”, he grizzled, using the then common version of ‘attar of roses’, an oil distilled from rose petals and still used in many perfumes. Every city had its smells, but the odour of horse dung was common to all of them.

But that's another story.

Shipwrecks

Recapping what I said in a recent essay, every ship has to be a compromise. Sailing vessels must trade off a reduction in strength from thinner hulls in order to float higher and sail faster—or to carry more cargo. A broad-beamed vessel would carry more cargo, but it would wallow along, losing time. The tea clippers were lean, narrow and beautiful, and carried a light cargo, the new season’s tea, from China to a waiting world, eager to pay a high price for fresh tea.

The wreck of the Admella in Australian waters was a colonial scandal and cause for concern, but the loss of the Royal Charter in late 1859 was a far greater concern in Britain. Charles Dickens visited the site of the wreck and wrote about it in The Uncommercial Traveller, while every British man and his dog held an opinion on the cause.

Royal Charter was a famous iron ship which had gone from Liverpool to Melbourne in 59 days. The Reverend Captain William Scoresby FRS had travelled to and from Australia in the ship in 1856, studying how the compasses behaved, because compass adjustment was still an inexact art at best. 

Scoresby wanted to study the interplay of terrestrial magnetism and compass deviation on board an iron-hulled ship, but achieved little before he died in 1857. The meagre results of his researches were published posthumously in 1859.

Scoresby was a famous whaling captain who later became a parson and scientist. Aside from the link to Scoresby, the ship’s owners also made her famous, advertising her speed. Royal Charter was 2719 tons, and had 200 hp auxiliary engines, so the ship was 8 times the weight of Admella, but she only had twice the engine power. Royal Charter also had sails, which became part of the problem.

Late in August, the ship left Hobson’s Bay in Victoria with half a million pounds (around $100 million today) worth of gold and 400 passengers, bound for Liverpool. Reaching Ireland in late October, she anchored off the Cove of Cork, and some of the passengers sent letters and telegrams by the Petrel pilot-boat to their family and friends, then the captain pushed on for Liverpool as the weather closed in.

A wild storm on October 25 wrecked more than 200 vessels, but one ship grabbed people’s attention later. Off the Skerries, the Royal Charter signalled for a pilot, but no pilot could put out. The ship anchored, but both cables parted in quick succession. Wind pressure on the masts and rigging probably added to the strain, but the skipper may have avoided getting rid of the masts, fearing that the stern screw might be fouled by some of the lines that would still be attached– or perhaps he thought the masts would not go over the side cleanly.

The ship struck and the masts were then cut away, but it was too late. Guns of distress were fired, blue lights were sent up, and a line was put ashore. The captain sent 16 crew members ashore to work the line, but before anybody could be landed, the ship broke up and only 39 of the 498 passengers and crew survived.

A writer styling himself ‘Amicus’ wrote to The Times on December 6, arguing that iron ships were made of poor quality iron called ‘boat iron’. The writer wondered why a ship, a mere 50 yards offshore with a hawser in place saw so many deaths. The Great Britain had stayed aground for a whole winter without breaking up, and ‘Amicus’ said other examples showed that a well-built iron ship was safe, but Royal Charter was made of materials as wrong as a Yankee trader’s wooden nutmegs, a grocer’s sanded sugar or a petty swindler’s sewing cotton that is shorter than advertised.

Three days before the ‘Amicus’ letter, The Times reported that the plates had been tested earlier, and had then been found to be “above standard”. The view now is that the captain of an ordinary sailing ship might have dropped anchor, but the proud skipper of a famous fast ship felt impelled to rely on a drastically underpowered engine which could only drive the ship at eight knots per hour (“knots per hour” was the common usage in 1859) in dead water, according to The Times. It was a learning experience, but a harsh one.

H. Hallock and Isaac Smith announced in Scientific American that they had designed a state-room, self-contained and sheltered below a deck that might open, a room able to be sealed and equipped with food and water for those within. In an accident, the state-room would be detached and allowed to float free of the ship. It had a pump to keep waters at bay and lamps that could be lit at night. The idea sank without trace.

Other inventors were determined that warships, which by definition carried explosives, would be safer. In France, La Gloire was launched in 1859, described as the world’s first iron-clad, though Korea had iron-clad ships in the late 1500s. A ship of the line in the early 19th century used 3500 oaks, the product of 900 acres, timber which needed to be seasoned fir up to 25 years, but saving trees was not La Gloire’s inspiration, because she was timber beneath the plating. The ship was a response to the burning of the wooden Turkish fleet at Sinope in 1853 by the Russian navy’s explosive shells.

The launching of La Gloire signalled the end of the wooden warship, because where one nation led, others had to follow. In 1860, the Royal Navy’s HMS Warrior had guns mounted on a single deck, running 380 feet, displacing 9000 tons. The last wooden British ship-of-the-line was a three-decker launched in 1859, but by the end of the century, timber ships had been replaced by iron and steel dreadnoughts weighing 20,000 tons.

Charles Atherton wrote to The Times in January from Woolwich Dockyard to share his idea for making vessels with an interior of light material up to the waterline. Gunboats, floating-batteries and mortars could benefit, he said. The solids might consist of “cork shavings, light wood sawdust, rush stems, cotton waste, flocks, hemp, and other lightweight material, which, by the aid of a solution of gutta percha or other chemical process, would form a solidifying mass, so tough that it could not be knocked to pieces by shot, and so light that it would only be one half the specific gravity of water, and therefore, unsinkable, however perforated by shot…”

Atherton had previously offered a similar idea for treasure ships, so they would float, allowing recovery of the riches. It took until the end of the year for Scientific American to mention the idea, when a writer said that cork would not suit because heated shot could set fire to it, but a suitable material ought to be able to be found. Half a century on, most lifeboats were fitted with sealed cork-filled compartments and self-draining seacocks to keep them afloat under the worst of conditions.

Fast transport and slow deaths

The factors that influence the spread and/or limitations of disease can often be quite unexpected, and in some cases, the causes remain unknown.

The delivery of tea to England by fast ship may have kept the English drinking tea, which constrained them to boil their water to make the tea, which killed the bacteria that caused cholera and other diseases. On the other hand, fast transport also caused some curious outbreaks of disease.

Airport malaria is a known phenomenon today, where people close to airports may very occasionally catch malaria when an infected mosquito emerges from an aircraft and draws blood from somebody before it dies. That sort of thing was far less likely in the days of steamships, but not impossible, even with a sailing ship like the barque Hecla, which once carried yellow fever to Wales.

Hecla reached Swansea with a cargo of copper ore from Cuba on 8 September 1865, and did not raise the quarantine flag. The ship had left one crewman, dead of yellow fever in Cuba, and she was under-crewed due to three deaths at sea that were put down to yellow fever.

Another sailor, James Saunders, died just after landing, and doctors judged this to be yellow fever, so his body was immediately buried in a tar sheet, his house was cleared and disinfected with lime wash and chloride of lime, and his clothing and bedding were destroyed.

Nobody had any idea that the disease was spread by mosquito bites, so the ship’s water supply, almost certainly complete with mosquitoes in all stages of life, was left unexamined. The ship’s owners resisted moving the ship, and while it was disinfected, though it later moved after locals intimated that it might mysteriously catch fire. This removal would have had no effect on the mosquitoes, though the fire would have curtailed the outbreak.

Before the outbreak ran its course, at least 27 people fell ill with yellow fever and 15 of them died, while there were a few other “possibles”, but how did a tropical disease reach Wales? Yellow fever and its mosquitoes had travelled from Africa to the Caribbean with African slave ships and been established there, but non-tropical Wales was safe from any permanent threat from yellow fever, back then.

The ship travelled in warm weather that let the mosquitoes survive, and it arrived in warm weather, which allowed the mosquitoes to spread, briefly into parts of Swansea. Still, in these days of global warming and climate change, who can say what the future might hold?

*

In China in the late 19th century, political unrest was common, but new technology brought hope to some of China’s urban poor. They could take steam trains into rural areas to shoot, kill and skin ground rodents, and take the skins back to the city for sale. In an age before plastics, skins were always saleable, and if the local people had silly traditions, like not shooting a sick-looking animal, the city slickers saw those animals as fair and easy game.

Bubonic plague is a disease that harms rodents, fleas and humans. A flea bites an infected mammal, gets an infection that blocks its bloodsucking apparatus, so the next time it tries to feed, some of the plague bacteria “blow back” into the new food source, and so the disease spreads. When a host dies, fleas move to any other warm body—like the person skinning the old rodent host.

The hunters caught fast steam trains back to the city before they fell ill, and from there, bubonic plague infected rats in the city, either from the hunters or from fleas that were still in the fur of the skins. Over time, some of the rats found their way onto fast steam ships that went around the world from Chinese ports.

In earlier times, plague usually killed the rats before sailing ships reached port, but steamships bustled from port to port, and sooner or later, some of the rats made it to the other end, found their way ashore to die, and shared their fleas and their ills. Indian ports were hit, along with those in Sydney, San Francisco, Madagascar, Paraguay, South Africa and more. In every port, people died because of fast ships.

*

There is fairly wide agreement that the spread of HIV was brought about by long-haul truck drivers in Africa making use of prostitutes along the way, followed by an entry into the more general population of the western world, thanks to jet aircraft. The world got lucky with SARS, as my next two posts will explain.

Strange armour

Curiosities from the scrap folder

A Cork Ship.—The Mobile papers report the arrival of a great curiosity at that city, a vessel made entirely of cork, which is lying at one of the wharves. That she will never sink may be true enough, but the other claim of the Mobilians, that “she will last forever,” requires some proof.
— Scientific American, April 28, 1866, p. 276.

Charles Atherton was the Chief Engineer at Her Majesty’s Royal Dockyard, Woolwich. When he wrote to The Times in January 1859 about his idea for filling vessels with of light material, up to the waterline, people paid attention. Essentially, he wanted to ensure that no matter how badly holed a ship was, it would never settle lower in the water, because no shot, no reef, no ram could harm the bottom layer. Gunboats, floating-batteries and mortars would all become unsinkable, so long as the guns and crew survived. Suitable solids might be:

…cork shavings, light wood sawdust, rush stems, cotton waste, flocks, hemp, and other lightweight material, which, by the aid of a solution of gutta percha or other chemical process, would form a solidifying mass, so tough that it could not be knocked to pieces by shot, and so light that it would only be one half the specific gravity of water, and therefore, unsinkable, however perforated by shot… 

— The Times Wednesday, Jan 12, 1859; pg. 6; Issue 23201; col E.

While he was concerned with warships withstanding fire, if Atherton’s solution had been applied to the “unsinkable” Titanic, it would have stayed afloat. The usual maritime practice of putting heavy items as low as possible, in order to move the centre of gravity down is an effective way of enhancing stability, but it takes a toll by increasing a vessel’s sinkability.

At the end of the year, Scientific American mentioned the scheme, but the writer said that cork would not suit, because heated shot could set fire to it, but that a suitable material ought to be able to be found. Half a century on, most lifeboats were fitted with sealed cork-filled compartments and self-draining seacocks to keep them afloat under the worst of conditions, but armour and armour-plating became the preferred solutions.

Mind you, if you knew where to look, the idea had been around for quite a while. The New York Times reported on an old patent in 1862, giving the date of issue as March 19, 1814. (‘The First Iron-Clad’, New York Times, May 30, 1862.)

The following day’s issue of Scientific American stated that a plan for a ball-proof vessel had been patented, “forty-eight years ago”. In each case, the patentee is said to be one Thomas Gregg, and the thrust of the report in each case was the same, that the idea behind the Merrimac (a Confederate ironclad warship) was by no means new.

It has to be said that this was during the US Civil War, and there is no evidence in the on-line records of the US Patent Office of Mr Gregg or his design. Perhaps it was a piece of wartime propaganda? The design and the illustration from Scientific American appeared again in 1889 in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, in an article sponsored by Gregg’s family.

It was in the early years of ironclad-mania that the attempt was made to dress warships up in sheepish clothing. In the 1860s, Australian wool growers were shearing huge flocks, and there must have been some fear of a glut. How their hearts must have sung when they heard that the Royal Navy was testing compressed wool as a way of blocking shot that hit their ships.

The plan was apparently to give ships a fleecy coat of pressed wool, 10 or 12 feet thick. Sadly, the graziers’ hopes were dashed when after tests, The Times reported in March 1864 that “the experiment of Wednesday proved the wool rather more permeable to shot than almost any other novelty that has yet been fired at.”

Every ship that sails the oceans represents a compromise. Sailing vessels had to trade off a reduction in strength from thinner hulls in order to float higher and sail faster—or to carry more cargo. A broad-beamed vessel would carry more cargo, but it would wallow along, losing time. That brings me to shipwrecks, and I shall go there next.

---

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!

The first shot in the Great War

I have written military history in the past, but I don't particularly enjoy it. Basically, I am not a military person, and some of the contemporary enthusiasms I encounter for past wars horrify me. I also find some of the bizarre antics of "patriotic" civilians rather appalling.

When I wrote a history of the Kokoda Track campaign, it won awards and plaudits, and I was asked to do another one, but I declined because I might have to touch again on the life of that nasty, cowardly, lying, thieving bully and drunkard Thomas Blamey.

That man was the embodiment of all that is inglorious in war, and I have chapter and verse on his one and only "experience of combat".  Like Douglas Macarthur, known to his troops as "dugout Doug", Blamey stayed well away from fighting of any sort.

I interviewed a former member of Blamey's WW II staff, and he summed up Blamey with a squatting motion, a thumbs-down and the phrase "brilliant but a bastard!".  Of course if you say that sort of thing in a book, the trolls will issue forth from their cowards' castle, screaming abuse, so I write about other things.

So I have no intention of Mentioning the War again.  That means I won't be mentioning the many brave and gallant women who gave their lives, as they saw it, for their fellow humans. Nor will I write about the brilliant and valiant leaders who did the right thing, and normally got stabbed in the back by scum like Macarthur and Blamey, who both led from the rear, so as to have more backs in their sights.

Still, I would like to throw in one example of the sort of thing that happens when a writer is given a commission, as I was for The Big Book of Australian History.  The commission came with a long list of things that were wanted: I had about 60% well in hand, about 30% I knew enough about to get started, 8% I had heard of.  I also added a couple that I knew about and they didn't. That left 2% that were unknown, and those needed research.

The Pfalz case was one of the 2%. What follows is based on what I wrote after I dug into it.  If you want to dig for yourself, I created a list of relevant newspaper articles that is online.


The first thing to note is that Australia never declared war on Germany in 1914. When Britain declared war on Germany, our nation was automatically at war with Germany as well, because we were part of the British Empire.  The same thing happened in 1939, and to the best of my knowledge, Australia has never declared war on any other nation: we just tag along.

Australia's Great War began when the Governor-General received a telegram from London. He then summoned the Prime Minister (Joseph Cook), and telegrams were sent to the State premiers telling them that a state of war existed between England and Germany. That was all that was needed.

With no radio or television broadcasts and no internet in 1914, the news spread more slowly than it does today, and there was more room for confusion.

Still, everybody knew war was coming, and the Royal Australian Navy had been founded in 1913 to take part in the coming war, and Captain Kuhlken of the Norddeutscher Lloyd ship SS Pfalz could see what was coming.

He made a decision that put Australia in the record books as the place where the first shot was fired in the Great War.

On the morning of August 5, 1914, Kuhlken dropped the rest of his cargo that he was due to take to Sydney, cast off from the wharf at Williamstown near Melbourne and sailed across Port Phillip Bay towards the Heads. He was on his way back to Germany to save his ship and to avoid internment.

All was well and the pilot saw nothing wrong, until he heard a shot, and saw a splash, 50 yards astern. He took this as a slightly inaccurate "shot across the bows", and looking across to the signal station on the Queenscliff fort, he saw a signal ordering the ship to turn around.

I have to say that if a shot across the bows  went 50 yards astern of my ship, I would be tempted to wonder what chance they had of hitting me before I got out of range, but the pilot was Australian, and he took the ship around, and back to port.

If you read the newspapers of that day, the reports are mostly fictional, so there are various versions of what happened after that, but with or without argument from the captain, the pilot (Captain Robinson) turned the ship around and steamed back to the wharf.

Australia was in the record books, and Pfalz was in the Australian merchant marine, and saw wartime service as a troop carrier under the name HMT Boorara. She was torpedoed twice in British waters, but survived until 1937, when she was wrecked under the name SS Nereus.

A couple of notes: the captain was widely reported as Kuhiken at the time, but he was actually Kuhlken. He was interned in Berrima during the war, but returned as master of the Grandon in 1930, and visited his old haunts at Berrima. The newspapers in 1930 all got his name right.

So, Australia never declared war on Germany, but an Australian gun fired the first shot, though not with the accuracy one might have hoped for.

Steering a course through cyberspace

Cyberspace, that ill-defined area controlled by computer technology, first appeared in William Gibson's Neuromancer, but that was just one point in a long trail that began with the ancient Greeks.

The old Greeks called the art of steering a boat something that sounded like 'kubernan', but for complicated reasons to do with the ways we transliterate Greek into our alphabet, we write this as cybernan. The Romans were more accurate when they adopted this word into Latin as gubernare, calling the steersman a gubernator, a word that lives on in American English in 'gubernatorial race', a competition to elect a governor.

In the engineering sense, a governor is once again involved with a sort of steering. In simple terms, it is a control device which stops something from running out of control, and cybernetics is intended to carry that same sense of control, of maintenance of the status quo.

Watt's governor

James Watt did not invent the first steam engine, but he invented a governor, the first automatic speed control for a steam engine. This neat gadget featured two brass balls and a series of levers called a pantograph (another Watt invention that he later adapted to reproduce drawings, among other things). Watt's 'governor', from the Latin word, reduces the steam supply when it spins faster, and increases the steam supply when it runs slow, and thus by feedback (another Watt invention), it controls the engine's speed.

With careful design, the steam engine and the governor ease into a compromise where the engines spins at constant speed, and the governor holds the balls at a constant angle, so the steam supply is held constant.

Norbert Wiener went to the Greek word to name his method of aiming guns to shoot down German 'buzz bombs' (which used feedback controls as well), he dubbed his control systems and their study "cybernetics". And that, in turn, gave us cyborgs, cyberspace, cybercrime and cybersex, so now 'cyber' means anything done by computer communication. But the language progresses: if people who know each other in cyberspace meet in the real world, they are in meatspace.

In nautical space, the item used by the steersman to control the ship was a stéorbord in Old English, a rudder or paddle placed over the side of a ship, traditionally on the steerboard side, which became the starboard side. The other side of the ship used to be called the larboard side, and this is often explained as a corruption of lee-board, but this is unlikely for a number of reasons.

It is rather more likely that larboard comes from the Middle English laddeborde or latheborde. This indicated the side of the ship from which loading took place, now called the port side, also meaning the side from which loading took place, but preferred by sailors because it was less likely to be confused with 'starboard' when shouted in an order given in a howling gale.

Sadly, one bit of folk etymology attaching to port and starboard, the alleged origin of 'posh' is completely untrue. The yarn has it that 'posh' stands for 'port outward, starboard home', indicating those who, in travelling from England to India, were to be allocated the cabins on the shadier port side while sailing to India, and the shadier starboard cabins sailing back to England. It is a pretty tale, but one entirely unsupported by any evidence. In reality, 'posh' probably was a slang term for money.

Some things change slowly: young people going to see are still taught that "If two lights you see ahead, port your helm and show your red", which means swinging the tiller over to the port side, which turns the bows to starboard, showing the port light, which is red, yet the tiller was replaced by the ship's wheel soon after 1700.  Small boats still have a tiller, but few of them have navigation lights.

This tiller, nothing to do with farming, was the grooved stock of a crossbow, and hence a beam of similar size used to control a rudder, a word which comes from the same root as 'row', reminding us that originally the helmsman steered with an oar-like paddle.

But why was he called the helmsman? Did he have a special hat, a turn-helm? Apparently not: the steering sort of helm was a hjalm in Old Norse, and that was just another name for the tiller. When Mao Zedong was acclaimed as the Great Helmsman, he may have governed many people, but he did not need a Chairman Mao hat to qualify for the title.

A variety of ships

Sydney is going to be invaded by a huge fleet in a couple of weeks.  I rather think it's to do with the centenary of the Royal Australian Navy, but for some odd reason (given that they are all on the water), these vessels will cause traffic jams.  All the would-be audience, I suppose.

Anyhow, it's a while since I wrote: I have been busy with literary lunches for children, re-editing Not Your Usual Bushrangers, soon to be an e-book, and getting the Teachers' Notes done for The Big Book of Australian History, which will be both a print book and an e-book. How the world changes!

But that coming invasion got me thinking about ships.

"Scholarships not battleships" was once a political slogan, created with mischievous misuse of two different types of 'ship'. Such a play on words is a venerable one, and when Sir Joseph Porter explains how he became First Lord of the Admiralty in H. M. S. Pinafore, he sings (in part):  

Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip
That they took me into the partnership.
And that junior partnership, I ween,
Was the only ship that I ever had seen
But that kind of ship so suited me,
That now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navee!

 The marine sort of ship in Old English was a scip — still pronounced like 'ship', but spelt that way, and Sir Joseph's first ship was not. Somewhere along the way, the word scip divided up into two pronunciations: 'skiff' and 'ship', with a size difference entering into calculations, so that any craft which could be hauled on board another craft was a boat, and any craft too large for that was a ship. It is not such a good definition now we have cranes that can lift even an ocean-going vessel onto the deck of a still larger ship.

Captain Donovan's brig Vision was definitely a boat, but I leave it to the reader to look that one up.

The division in pronunciation also happened with scyrte, an item of clothing which was a short garment, what we would now call a kirtle originally, but it developed into two forms and the meanings of the two pronunciations diverged, so that scyrte gave us both 'skirt' and 'shirt'.

Mind you, the OED disagrees about skiffs, saying that the French have an esquif, while the Portuguese have an esquife, and the Italians have a schifo, all with similar meanings, but then it traces all of these back to the Old High German word scif, which is a ship or a boat, so we are just about back where we started.

Usually a skiff is a small light boat, well suited to sailing or rowing, but the term can also be applied to a long skinny boat of the sort only used in rowing races. Some people call these boats 'sculls', but this is a transfer of name from the oars, which are properly 'sculls', probably because the race is sometimes referred to as 'lightweight sculls'. 'Sculling', though, is done by one oar, over the stern of a small dinghy, with the blade travelling in a figure-of-eight. This is hard to do, which is why boating people do it, to cock a snook at landlubbers.

Now back to our scholarships, battleships and partnerships. The '-ship' ending that we see in marksmanship and dictatorship is an old English ending equivalent to -scape in landscape, or -shape in shipshape, for that matter. It comes from three Old English endings: sciepe, scipe and scype. It comes originally from an Old Teutonic form skapiz, meaning to create or ordain or to shape something. In fact it has come to be used in a variety of ways, as in 'hardship', 'authorship', 'lordship', 'courtship', and the like.

In English place names, we find yet another form of 'ship', where the word is a corruption of 'sheep' (scéap in Old English), so Shipbourne is a 'sheep burn', a stream where sheep were washed, and Shipmeadow needs no explanation at all. But Shipton is not, as many people assume, a town with many sheep — the '-ton' ending on English place names actually means 'enclosure', so Shipton is a sheep enclosure.

The word 'township', on the other hand, is a carry-over from Old English, when it was túnscipe, the only surviving example of a way that the Anglo-Saxons made a new word by adding '-ship' to make a collective: in this case, the inhabitants of a town.

Which possibly sheds a new light on the expression 'ship of fools'.