Australia: a social history

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

A cave at the base of Uluru.

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

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

Weathering on the surface of Uluru.

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

About this book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australianisms

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

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

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

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

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

a bad apple: 1890

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

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

billy: 1848

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

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

Collins street cocky: 1924

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

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

cooee: 1826

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

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

damper: 1825

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

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

drop bear: 1967

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

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

Esky: 1955

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

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

fat lamp: 1827

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

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

fat lamp: 1847

Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March 1847, 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the Macquarie Dictionary gets it wrong!

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

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

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

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

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

I come to beret Caesar

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

pusillanimous. A term used to describe the act of a writer who provides secret or sensitive material in a work in order to constrain others to buy all the available copies of it.

antinomy. 1. A problem for proof readers and spell checkers who often assume it to be an error. 2. The act of applying the normal rules of zoological nomenclature to specimens of the Formicidae.

pentangle. Writing instruments thrown carelessly into a drawer will often form one of these.

author. 1. When used as a self-descriptor, a writer who has yet to find a publisher. Once they realise the pen is mightier than the pseud, they call themselves ‘writer’. 2. An author was once a person who put words together with the aid of a quill, drawn from a goose’s left wing. In recent times, recognising the undue influence that the goose seemed to be having, many writers have moved to the use of word processors. In this, they have failed to recognise what many people now understand: that to err is human, but that real stupidity is generally associated with artificial intelligence.

beret. There was an Italian explorer named Antonio who had gone into an area where, he was warned, there were cannibals who liked to eat Italian, or to be precise, they liked to eat Italians. Not relishing the prospect of a very hot bath with chopped-up vegetables, Antonio took a Parisian beret with him, and wore it all the time, so he could pass himself off as Antoine, the French chef.
He explained to the locals that the beret was a magical item which Frenchmen wore, so they would be safe from all misfortunes. Alive or dead, the wearer was protected by this item of headgear.
The cannibals made him welcome, but one night, they showed him a mummy in a toga, and when they unwrapped it, he saw that it was wearing a laurel wreath.
“Antoine,” they told him, “this is a very old Italian called Julius Caesar. He’s nicely aged, and we were wondering if you could help us cook him. We know the Gauls, your ancestors, hated him…”
Antoine found himself in a quandary. How could he refuse to cook a fellow-Italian and not blow his cover?
Then he saw a way out. He took off his headgear and exchanged it for Caesar’s wreath.
The cannibals were curious. “What does this mean?” they asked.
He shook his head and smiled, gently. “I come to beret Caesar, not to braise him.”

a fortiori. The English tradition of the steeplechase has very ancient roots, going back to the time when much of Britain was under Roman control, but several 17^th century authors have claimed that the Romans used Pictish slaves as their mounts. In fact, the Romans did indeed ride “Picts”, but these were Pict ponies, the animals more modern writers have called pit ponies, and not humans The races went along Hadrian’s wall, from fort to fort, hence the name.

incommunicado. The ancient Roman British fortified town of Communicadum is the modern-day city of Coventry. As a consequence, this term is no more than an ancient form of sent to Coventry.

Abacus. A Roman general, Abacus was the grandson of Count Belisarius of the Byzantine Roman Empire, from whom he inherited title of Count. His name is derived from A-Bacchus, a spurner of Bacchus, but it was a name he often failed to live up to. He settled in Britain, late in the 6th century and married the Lady Beadawen of the Cambrians. Their son, Abacus Beadus, was the first of a line of counts that ended when Abacus’ great-great-grandson, the venerable Bede, entered the church, and relinquished the title.

coracle. A small water craft, made from a light wood frame, covered with leather. The best-known ones today are from Britain, but they were originally a Greek invention. Today, the only Greek version still widely known is the Delphic coracle.

Marshall McLuhan. A man who wrote and published several books to demonstrate that the print medium was dead. He dies in 1980, my reference books say.

exfoliation. The act of taking a leaf from somebody’s book.

doggerel. Poetry when it is written by an enemy.

verse. Poetry written by somebody who is not a friend.

haiku. A poetic form much favoured by absent-minded poets who keep losing their rhyming dictionaries.

pentode. Any form of verse with five lines, like a limerick, or a haiku written by an innumerate poet.

Jacques Prévert. A French poet and film-script writer who owed his continued high levels of employment to the frequent errors made in typing his surname. His employers were, however, often disappointed.

limerick. A poem for a person with a short attention span.

prosody. The art of creating either a prose work about odes, or an ode about prose. It is now a dead art, and we are unlikely ever to fathom what the ancients actually meant by the term. The claim, sometimes heard, that the term was invented by two drunken poets, in order to confuse future generations, makes too much sense for it to be really true.

period furniture. Perhaps the best-known example would be the electric chair, commonly used to end a sentence.

gallows humour. Full-throttle comedy, often containing an element of suspense. Not suitable for the highly strung.

The Well-tempered Clavier. The source of a great deal of pleasant music, composed by the immortal J. S. Bach. Bach’s lesser-known Bad-tempered Clavier, like Beethoven’s Rage over a Lost Penny, is a source of a different choler.

Othello. If this play were set in Scandinavia, it would need to involve a Norse of a different colour, especially if the production included a walk-on part for Erik the Red.

air conditioner. A device for spreading infection and assorted toxins equally throughout a building. These machines must always be fitted with the manufacturer’s specified pipes, and never with a hose of a different cooler.

White House. A house of a different colour.

It goes on like that for 84,000 words.

Reviews:

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma…
—W. S. Churchill, A History of the Anguish-Speaking Peoples.

Oh, what a wangled web he weaves…
—William Wordsworth, The Fruitgrowers Gazette and Advertiser.

Infamy, infamy—they’ve all got it infamy.
—Kenneth Williams, Carrion Cleopatra.

He would say that, wouldn’t he?
—Randy Mice-Davies, Buxton Bugle.

Nobody ever erected a statue to a cricket.
—Jean Sibelius (attrib.)

Exceedingly dense.
—F. R. Leavis, New Hearings in English Pottery.

Nothing like having a bucket of cold water flung over you to make you see things as they really are!
—Enid Blyton, Lashings of Cream.

…we tend to believe whatever we first hear about strangers.
—Clifford Irving, True Tales.

I trust my readers will join me in grandly ignoring the complaints of sour-faced and grumpish scholars that “no such person” ever existed…
—Sir John Mandeville, Travels.

One of the most murmurable loose carollaries ever…
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

I don’t believe it!
—Victor Meldrew, Journal of Onkaparingology.

Better than a bag full of angry penguins.
—Ern Malley, Yandackworroby Times.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been run before may legally be run again…
― Jonathan Swift, Gullible's Travels.

Let us be grateful to people who make us sappy…
—Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann.

Other possible titles:

A Crazy Mixed-Up Squid;
A Dark Course Of A Different College;
A Hard Axe To Follow;
A Serpent Of Two Pastors;
As Like As Pork And Peas;
Can You Tell Me How Long The Drain’s Been Gone?;
Dental Men Prefer Bonds;
Faint Art Never Won Fair Lady;
Gentleman Prefer Bronze;
Joggers Can’t Be Boozers;
Never Dog A Fled Horse;
No More Walton But De Falla Next Time;
No Pool Like An Oil Pool;
Of Meissen Men;
Prison Walls Are Never Built To Scale;
Privateers And Public Gossip;
Robbery With Violins;
Thank Heavens For Small Murphys;
The Lhasa Of Two Weasels;|
The Nightjar Nurture Controversy;
The Trout Quintet Needs A Piano Tuna;
The Wine Of Yeast Resistance;
The Wurst Is Yet To Come;
They Also Surf Who Only Stand And Wade;
To Bill Two Kurds With One Stone;
Where There’s A Wheel, There’s A Wain.

About tsunamis

Waitakere City Council warning sign, New Zealand. In places with a high tsunami risk, like the coasts of New Zealand, there may be warning sirens, but if you feel tremors, play safe and go uphill.

In August 1805, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser reprinted a letter from Norfolk Island, a Pacific sub-colony, describing a ‘freak tide’ on 8 May 1805. At 3.30 pm, almost at low tide, all the water drained from a channel that usually had 2 to 3 fathoms (4 to 6 metres) of water in it, and in two minutes it was left dry. Suddenly, the water rushed back and came inland, reaching the military barracks, usually 20 metres above the high tide mark. Then, the water all ran out again.

You can read the story here: The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 4 August, 1805, 1 – 2, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/626869

The “town of Sydney” that is mentioned there is now called Kingston.

This event was later called a ‘tidal wave’. In Japan, where this happened more often, people called it a ‘harbour wave’, or in Japanese, a tsunami. A tsunami is far bigger inside a harbour than it is out in the deep ocean, and it actually has nothing to do with tides. It is caused by movements in or under the sea.

English speakers adopted the Japanese name when we began to understand what causes these waves. Out at sea, a tsunami passes under boats without anybody on board noticing. The wave is not just on the surface: the disturbance reaches deep into the water and, as it approaches shallow water, the bottom of the wave touches the sea floor, it gets slowed down, and the water starts to pile up.

On Norfolk Island in 1805, the first warning of looming trouble came when the sea level fell. This often happens with a tsunami, and there will always be people who walk out onto the exposed seafloor when the sea goes out. If you ever see this kind of fall in sea level (with or without a starter wave), move quickly to high ground, because the several following waves will be larger!

In Sri Lanka, when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami hit, the biggest wave was the third or fourth, which gave a British geologist time to warn people to leave the beach. In the ocean, those waves were a metre high, but their tremendous speed—almost 1000 kilometres per hour—is converted into extra height in shallow waters.

We live on top of a 65 metre hill (for primitive societies, that means 200 feet above sea level. Nonetheless a dodgy insurance agent tried to sell us tsunami insurance. and several fellow-residents scurried to sign, until I pointed out that any tsunami hitting us had to come through, 70 metres high, meaning that most of Sydney would be devastated, and the insurance company would be bankrupt, so we would never get any money back.

That aside, I told them, our coastline was unlikely to allow any surge to come our way. The most dangerous place to be during a tsunami is in a steep-sided inlet like a fiord or in a wedge-shaped bay. These shapes funnel the wave’s energy in, increasing the force and the danger.

In 1946, a magnitude 8.1 earthquake in the Aleutian Islands in the northern Pacific Ocean produced a tsunami that killed 96 people in Hilo, a town on a wedge-shaped bay on the eastern side of the island of Hawaii. The people of Hilo had two later tsunami warnings, in 1952 and 1957, but these waves were small and people had stopped worrying about mere waves. A few years later, in 1960, a magnitude 9.5 earthquake in Chile sent another huge wave into Hilo’s bay, killing 61 people. Seven hours later, the wave reached Japan where 142 people were killed.

Some of my Californian friends have just (December 5, 2024) been through a tsunami scare, and while they got off safely this time, there may be another quake that does produce a quake in the near future. Note the may. All I offer is a reasonable hypothesis.

A tsunami can happen when there is an earthquake resulting from a large part of the seafloor moving suddenly up or down; or when there is an earthquake or volcano that makes a large mass of rock tumble into the sea; or when a large solid piece of a meteor falls into the sea.

These days, people receive alerts if a tsunami is coming, but there was an insufficient warning system in place when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami happened in the Indian Ocean, after a quake with a magnitude of about 9.1. In hindsight, that event might have been predictable, because a week or so earlier, there had been a powerful earthquake with a north to south sideways movement of the Australian Plate, south of New Zealand.

Sideways movements make no waves, but they transfer force and, sooner or later, the northern end of the Indian Plate had to slide under the Burma micro-plate, bumping it upwards. When the slide happened, 30 cubic kilometres of water were moved, leading to waves that were about one metre high, out at sea, but up to 15 metres high as they came ashore. With no warning, about 230,000 people died across 14 countries. 

This may perhaps happen off California: every seismic movement transfers stress to to a new place.

At other times nobody may notice. On 16 January 2022, Little Manly beach in Sydney harbour had repeated surges from a tsunami triggered by a volcano near Tonga. Only the present writer was aware of the continued one-minute ebb-and-flow, and my camera caught it: I managed to crop out members of the public and children, but they all remained blissfully unaware.

To the left of those pictures lies North Head, covered in a deep layer of aeolian (wind-blown) sand from the last ice age, but there is at least one Australian geologist who claims the sand was deposited there by a tsunami. If I were to assess this, I would need to use rude words. Let me just say excreta tauri...

Just a note about the height of the water in the lower shot: a "king tide" in March 2025 was about 40 cm lower than this.

This draws on my recent and about-to-be-pitched What on Earth: behind earth science.

So to my Californian friends, I advise a degree of vigilance.

Post card from Norway #2

 This follows on from an earlier post, but it is a work in progress.

Up near the Russian border. there are signs in Cyrillic for the odd border-crosser. We saw a couple of mini-buses coming through, an a girl on  bicycle, who was apparently headed for Russia. Kirkenes was heavily swarmed by Germans and heavily bombed by the Russians, who then liberated it, and apparently behaved nicely enough. For me, the best thing was birch trees,  well north of the Arctic Circle, and more significantly, loads of mistletoe, the clumps in the tree here.

This is a novelty for Australian botanists, because we all know very well that the tree line cuts out where the snow line comes in, and we are far to the north of the snow line. There is even sea ice: not ice bergs as such, but floating lumps.

 

As we came into Kirkenes, we saw our first sea-ice. These are slim planes of frozen fresh water. At first, they were less than obvious, but then they were more numerous and thicker.

Once upon a time,  ports up here were blocked in winter, but this is growing rarer. We knew about this from complaints in Amsterdam that one could no longer skate on the canals. Shortly after, on Saaremaa, a sand island off the Estonian coast, we heard how the moose that bred on the island could no longer escape over the sea ice in winter. 

But climate change is, as we all know, a  myth.

I have been amusing myself catching snow flakes in my beard, and leaving tracks in the snow on the deck. After a first walk on snow, wearing spikes as overshoes, we have now mastered the art of spotting and avoiding slippery ice.

Skate-boarding and wheelchair work would be a challenge up here, but I was very much taken by this snow-ready version of a Zimmer frame, and I saw a man scurrying along on a ski-based push scooter.

Back at Kirkenes, I saw a snow cannon in action, and we asked why in such a place of deep snow, they needed to make more of it, but apparently there will be National championships in a ski-based motocross competition.

We nodded sagely, and went to get what we called a Norwegian hot chocolate. At least our sense of the ridiculous has not yet frozen solid.

Here is yet another port that we called into yesterday. Hurtigruten got started as transport for local people and freight up and down the coast, but now it is mainly for tourists. Even in the time we have known the service, the vessels have grown larger and more luxurious. It is no longer rough and scruffy, but that's the down-side of tourism.

That's enough: more later, perhaps. I thought these were puffins, but they weren't.

These sea eagles, on the other hand, near Finnkirk Rock, were the real McCoy: I will come to tge rock in #3

And that ends #2

I have already created the stub for #3, but nothing much there, just yet.

The apprentices who were taught nothing

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

A girl apprentice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stolen Generations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australia's Hidden Heroes

For too long, the story of how Australia was on the winning side in three wars (Boer War and two World Wars) has been hidden, thanks to government suspicion, fear, duplicity and inertia. Australia had two stalwart citizens, whose efforts tipped the balance in favour of the Allies.

One was known as Crooked Mick, a bush hero and strong man who hailed from the Speewah, and this tells of the exploits that he and his companion, a scientist named Henry Cruciform managed to pull off, while surrounded by foreign agents who were, as Mick once said in a candid moment, were "…worse than them Speewah blowflies, the ones that eat crocs".

Here for the first time, readers can learn how Mick and Henry rose to positions of secret prestige and influence, not only in Australia, but across the globe, due in large part to the reports of the foreign spies who gathered close around them, trying to win their secrets. In the world's corridors of power, the two were spoken of in hushed tones.

Here, the reader can learn of Crooked Mick's athletic prowess and how his scratch team of station hands beat the MCC at cricket; how Mick rode four bulls at once; his dog's mathematical skills; how he fought bushfires, floods and droughts; the Speewah girls' snake circus; the world's only Möbius dog; how a British officer at Gallipoli wanted Mick sent off for unsporting behaviour and how Mick sank several German submarines; how Mick sorted the drop bear problem; how Flash Jack drove 400 44-gallon drums from Speewah to the Big Smoke; how Smiling Annie's daughter told the time and other daily events in the Australian bush.

We also meet the many inventions and discoveries of Henry Cruciform, Australia's premier scientist who accidentally blew up Professor Moriarty while working with Sherlock Holmes to perfect the scientist's new explosive, nitrogum. Cruciform also invented radio, X-rays, the transistor and a fiendishly devastating form of psychological warfare.

It was Mick and Cruciform who shot down the Red Baron, and Cruciform acted as a strange attractor, so that during a single picnic lunch in Adelaide, he suggested the titles Forsyte Saga and Heart of Darkness to John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad respectively, as well as suggesting X-ray diffraction to William Bragg, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this very work.

History will never be the same, once these facts are known. Warning: the book contains the shocking truth about Mata Hari's time in Australia, how Professor Moriarty really died, the true genesis of the Boy Scouts, the music of Arnold Schönberg, and who really killed the Red Baron. Readers will need a strong stomach.

This book is hard to put down. I know, because I have already tried poison, flame-throwers, a knife and a squadron of tanks, and STILL the thing lives.

Not to beat about the bush, this is classic Australian yarn-spinning, coming from the only Australian author who is a trained con man who never went over to the dark side.

See a sample here

An ebook in full colour for Kindle $5.45

and a print-on-demand paperback, $25

The base page for all of these is here.