Diary of a project

 Or, I am going dotty.

Some of my older friends know that I used to do stipple doodles. Some of my former colleagues know that I used to do such doodles in planning meetings, where the evolving shapes kept stupid idiot drones mesmerised, so the intelligent ones could get on with decision making.

The one above later became the Dangerous Goldfish in my revised Monster Maintenance Manual. (You can see a sample of the ebook here.) (And the paperback version is here.)

Others were done at home, like my take on a work by Mussorgsky. At the time, my ears were stopped up with steppe, and so I did not quite depict A Night on Bare Mountain with reliable accuracy, but caveat emptor and all that, what you see is what you get, that and no more.

Anyhow, as I have decided to stop writing books, I have bought some new fine point pens, and gone back to stippling.

Here is my first subject, a Roman aqueduct in Segovia in Spain, a name which until then I had associated with incredibly virtuosic guitar playing.

And here is the start of play.

I think this will keep me off the streets for a few weeks.

Let it not be said, however, that I draw the line with this: there is just one rule: dots only!

Now, to see how much further I have to go, take a look at the work of this Ukrainian artist, beside whom, I am a mere doodler. (I note that he calls his work doodles as well, but seriously, his work is totally amazing.

This stipple style lets you mess with texture, and a close look at the original shows that all of the stone is the same. I cannot easily reflect the unevenness of the stone, so I have changed some of the rock to darker stone.

Here is stage 2.

And here is Stage 3, almost there, and something interesting here: I copied stage 2 with the camera, and stage 3 with the printer-scanner.

I am not entirely happy with the bleed there...

So I did a scan at 1200 dpi and grey scale. As a first effort, I will leave it there. I rushed this one a bit, and I chose a tricky subject, so a more careful choice, slower planning, and less rush in the execution.

That said, the first effort was AWFUL. All the same, dunno if I should stay with wildlife... or this sculpture found in Oslo in Norway

You don’t have to be crazy to be a writer (It does help, though.)

This is a resurrection of an article I wrote ten years back, because it says a few important things, and it had been locked away behind a paywall.

 

Biography

Peter Macinnis is a Sydney-based writer. Being no longer able to claim he is a New Kid, he blogs as Old Writer on the Block. He has two Australian history books at the printer, Not Your Usual Bushrangers and Not Your Usual Gold Stories, out through Five Mile Press, later this year. He usually works on four books at a time. Right now, he is working on just one thing, something he calls the Big New Project: currently at 400,000 words but likely to be larger than War and Peace, this is a collection of original Australian historical source material, gathered from the archives, and assembled into a logical order. Because of its size and the need for internal navigation, this will be released as an e-book.

This story began in a talk I gave at Birrong Girls High, when I used this shot of myself near a lava flow on Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. You could see from the photo that I was sweating profusely, but one of the girls asked about the heat, and I mentioned that it was sufficient to frizzle the hairs on my legs.

The girls were largely NESB, but with the bubbling confidence of young Australians. ‘You’re mad!’ one of them told me firmly. ‘You’d have to be!’

I told her of an old and probably apocryphal Chinese curse. ‘I’m not mad,’ I explained after explaining the curse. ‘I just like living in interesting times. Interesting is good.’

As a small boy, I knew I would write books one day. As a five-year-old early reader, any books within reach were fair game for me, but after tackling Salmond’s Law of Torts one morning, I learned to review the available data more closely before choosing my reading.

In the late 1940s, as we emerged from World War II austerity, most books had dust jackets, which contained enticing splashes of colour, and information about the book and its author. I read the blurbs and then, because I wanted to be a writer, I examined authors’ life stories.

I suspected that if a writer lacked a background of hair’s-breadth escapes, desperate acts of derring-do, like quelling a riot with a derringer and a solar topee, they never got published. As I approach advanced middle age, my cynical streak has expanded to a broad band, and I wonder if they made their adventures up, but that came too late to save me.

I just knew that I needed to live an interesting life. By the time I left school, I had mastered most of the skills of subterfuge that I might need to prosecute a guerrilla war after if I ever became an escaped prisoner-of-war.

Against that, I long ago placed a value on my pelt that ruled most of those plans out. I am a good shot with a rifle, but I only shoot at things that don’t bleed, scream, or shoot back. That’s quite proper for humans, but it might be problematic for guerrillas, so I dropped that idea.

In the early 1960s, my dreams included sailing a lakatoi from Port Moresby to Singapore, but that became submerged in a desire to be a pre- and post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese historian, and I set to work building a bank roll to pay for that.

The 1965 coup in Indonesia, and a consideration of the leftish politics of my Indonesian friends led me to conclude that perhaps this was an unwise ambition, given that leftists were dying on Java, so I made the obvious choice and started a science degree.

My thoughts of living an interesting life were put to one side as I threw myself into the riveting mysteries of apical meristems in plants and mesoderm in animals. To save my sanity, I started going bush, and became at least as much a naturalist, and the interesting life was suddenly back on the agenda.

Then one day, I realised that everybody has an interesting life. The difference is that authors make proper use of their interesting lives. My next task was to make the acquaintance of interesting people, and see where that led.

As a botanist, I got work tending the gardens of people who had ‘Australian native’ gardens, the idea being that I wouldn’t mistake the waratahs for onion weed. That gave me the time to tackle two key questions: what do we mean by interesting? and who should I respect?

In the end, my first answer came down to this: if anything makes me want to run and find out, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, then it is interesting. That answered the respect question: anybody that knows more than I do about anything interesting is worthy of respect.

Given my highly-developed Rikki-Tikki- Tavi tendencies, that first answer meant that almost the whole world deserved my respect. Later, I discovered that philodopher Karl Popper went through a similar bout of introspection while working as a cabinet-maker, but he used his time far better.

Still, my two criteria for interesting and deserving of respect put me in the way of interesting ideas, and gave me a life rationale as a teacher and as a writer: provoke them to the point where they want to run and find out. And that, dear reader, is why I trot off out into the wilderness, seeking provocative things to share with my readers.

(This month, I have met a 2-metre python and a 1.5 metre goanna.)

In the first years of this century, I got a bee in my bonnet about Australian exploration. My cohort were all taught that Lawson, Blaxland and Wentworth (that was the order in which Macquarie listed them) were the only ones wise enough to head ‘up the ridges’ (meaning the spurs) to get to the top. We were also taught that explorers went out into trackless wastes.

As any fule kno, walking up the spur is always the easiest route, and any bushwalker looking at a mountain always runs an eye up the spur. More to the point, any wilderness walker knows there are traces of past feet out there, pads and tracks that show the way. The explorers knew this and followed ‘native roads’, especially when they sought water in an arid zone.

Reading up on the old explorers, I came across Harry the Camel, who shot his owner, John Ainsworth Horrocks, and of course I had to Run and Find Out. In 1846, Horrocks had the only camel in Australia, and it looked as though Harry was badly managed, but the only way to test this was to go out with camels and learn the basics of camel management, how to make friends with them, how to hobble them, and so on.

(No, I won’t explain how Harry the Camel shot John Horrocks: look it up on Google, but as a side note, while checking that Google had the answers, I discovered that the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum had plagiarised seven pages on Horrocks from my Australia’s Pioneers, Heroes and Fools. I took two days off from writing the first draft of this to teach them a harsh lesson, and you may come across an account of that in my blog. I do pro bono stuff like this for free, and I happily give my text to worthy causes like museums, but I equally happily burn thieves.)

This article is a case in point: I gave it for free, but somehow, there is no public access to a journal called (ironically) Access. As I had lost my copy in a hard disc crash, I asked RMIT to deliver the text to me: they did so without demur, but I want it out there, in public. It is also pages 1 to 12 of the March 2015 issue of Access. Just as well they did deliver, as I had a burning plan ready to roll.

While studying camels, I learned that scorpions circle a camp fire at a distance determined by the heat of the fire. Sleep across that circle, and you may get stung, as I have noted in two books, but I don’t think I have yet used what happened later that night: it was a full moon, and a pale and ghostly dingo came to visit me as I lay in my swag. I would have used the story if I had been properly prepared.

You see, I should have had my digital camera on and ready, because the dingo had visited two others of the party in the previous 20 minutes, and I knew it would visit me. Instead, when the pale face loomed up, I said certain stern words of dismissal, and so missed taking the shot of a lifetime. I won’t make that mistake again.

With a science degree, I am always on the lookout for wildlife. I wear soft rubber shoes and walk silently, which can be alarming for the kangaroos I disturb, and not too good for my heart as they thump off into cover. That happened nine times, one day on Mount Exmouth in the Warrumbungles. None of them was a mean old man roo like this one: you need to know the difference!

Some might call my actions that day crazy. I was out on Mt Exmouth on my own, but I had survival gear, I was on a marked track, and I had filed a walk plan. Also, I expected other people to be on the mountain, but they weren’t out there.

All the same, there is crazy, and there is apparently crazy. If I wasn’t prepared for the dingo that came to visit, I am always prepared for troubles when I go bush, either on my own or in a small group. Like those writers of almost a century ago in their biographical notes, I work hard to deliver a good yarn, but I don’t really take risks.

While catching piranha in the headwaters of the Amazon, a few months ago, I proposed doing a Rex Hunt and kissing the fish before releasing it, and that thought may seep into my writing one day — but my blood never seeped into the Amazon. Look at the jaw on the right of the photo below, if you are wondering why. Equally, when I was swimming with hammerheads in the Galapagos, a week later, I stayed five metres above them.

On Thursday Island, we found ourselves in crocodile territory, where we had gone to examine a dugong jaw, because when William Dampier found one in a shark’s belly, he mistook it for a hippopotamus jaw.

Luckily, a saltwater crocodile cannot ‘gallop’ like the smaller and less aggressive freshwater crocodile. Salties can reach speeds of 10 or 11 km/h when they ‘belly run’. They go faster if sliding down muddy tidal riverbanks — a sort of a crocodilian toboggan with teeth, but that is downhill on mud.

Uphill and on dry land, the saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus, has no chance of catching an active human. In water, it is another matter. The ‘salties’ can swim faster than us, at up to 15 km/hr, though they rely mainly on being able to surge out of hiding and to grab their prey on the water’s edge.

Anaconda at my feet

We stayed away from the water, and kept an eye on the sparse vegetation behind the mud, and I assured my wife that if your hand is already inside its jaws, the trick is to reach down for the palatal valve that stops water running into their throats and drowning them. Grabbing this floods their lungs and leaves them unable to continue the attack. She looked me in the eye. ‘I’d like to shake the remaining hand of whoever came up with that one!’ she told me, as we proceeded cautiously. 

Like me, she is a biologist, and she stands happily by, pulling ferns aside so I can get a better shot of a tarantula, or holds still as an anaconda slithers over our gum-boots. No, I am not willing to comment on the camera shake in the anaconda shot above.

She also wrangles leeches for me, but she drew the line once at poking a funnel-web with a stick to make it rear up and show its fangs, and she mostly leaves the mountains to me.

So back to my Warrumbungle mountain; a wedge-tailed eagle was there that day, and it swooped me repeatedly as I worked around a difficult rock face, and I elected not to get the camera out until I was safe.

As soon as I got past the hard bit, it moved away of course, but when I was on the peak, it circled me, always staying in the sun, casting its shadow near or over me and preventing a shot.

Animals are often uncooperative, so plants and rocks are often easier, though when the plants are poisonous, you can still get into trouble. London’s Chelsea Physic Garden has many poisonous plants, but I drew odd looks when I asked where they were in 2006.

I have written several books on poisons and poisoners and I have been translated into a number of other languages. When I explained my background as a poisons specialist, and mentioned how Jo in Little Women, while seeking material for stories ‘… excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons …’, the severe expressions eased. One of the crew that day knew my book.

Still, that required my looking affable and cuddly. As I get older and more sinister-looking, I have taken to hunting rocks. Pretty much by definition, rocks are out of doors, often in scenic places, and they don’t get you into trouble.

Rocks that float are fun, and for the past couple of years, the coasts of NSW have been littered with pumice that came from east of New Zealand, but by the time they washed up here, most of the larger pieces were inhabited.

Chasing those on Myrtle Beach, I recalled that the lowest level of the Sydney Basin was exposed in the cliff behind the beach, so of course we hunted that down. Below, you can see my wife’s hand spanning more than 100 million years.

One example is never enough, so my sons helped me traipse in, almost to another good exposure, 15 km from the road, in a place we had visited before, Christine and I before we had children, and then us with the kids.

We made good time on this trip, until the fog came in and we came to a patch that had been burned at the same time I was on Myrtle Beach.

The track sort of disappeared, and there were brown snakes about. This forced us to go slowly, and in the end, 1.5 km from our target, we reached our turn-around time, and not being crazy, we turned back

Some of my friends are a bit crazy, and when we went looking for alleged fossil trees near Box Head, one of them felt the need to get close to the ‘trees’ to act as a scale. I just took shots, angling them so as to make it look more dangerous than it was.

Basically, my geologising involves temporary obsessions, but tilted strata and folded rocks are always high on my agenda.

We went to Switzerland for several reasons, and the geology was high on the list, but I also needed to go to the Reichenbach Falls, because there is a comic fantasy novel lurking in the wings, and it opens when the hero is saved from drowning by Sherlock Holmes, returns to Australia and invents most of 20th century science.

Why would I do this? Well, at one stage in my mixed career, I conned some violent frauds into giving me the evidence I needed to convict them, after one colleague had been injured, and another had been shown a handgun.

(I have a strong concern about honesty: in December 2025, I am pursuing an insurance company that tried to rip me off for miserly sum. I suggested to them that they Google The Battle of The One-Armed Sculptress to see what level of determination I bring to bear: it isn't the money, it's the principle, you see.)

Now back to the violent villains: I played the role of Mr Bean so well, they sniggered at me and handed over damning papers to the idiot they saw. I wrote a very interesting report.

Then again, I once spent three days displaying two savages in a cage as an art event/hoax. I write history most of the time, and all of the history will be good, but severely misrepresented and invaded by fictional characters.

The falls are close to the town of Meiringen, claimed to be the place where meringues were invented. People who know their Holmes canon will recall that Holmes staged his death at the top of the falls: anybody who visits Meiringen cannot avoid the connection because there are images, signs, statues and more, celebrating Holmes.

I concluded that I could rewrite the area’s geography to meet my needs, and I realised that after Holmes disappeared, he accompanied our Australian hero to his home and laboratory, somewhere on the NSW coast, and reverted to the geology. It remains a legitimate expense for taxation purposes!

We went up Mount Pilatus for the rocks, strayed into the wilderness of Heidiland, where I found a perfect setting for the Reichenbach Falls sequences. There was just one danger: the area was completely deserted, and the bus out had been empty, but when we went to board the last bus back, geriatric Switzerland had emerged from the woods and crammed the bus to overflowing. In the end, we fitted in, albeit poked by walking poles, but that was the closest we came to danger in Switzerland.

We came home, and for a while, we concentrated on rocks that push in, making dykes and sills. That isn’t too dangerous: you just have to clamber over them, but often the best exposures are on rocky seashores, and that means looking out for blue-ringed octopuses (or octopodes, if you must have a classically correct plural), gaps in the rocks, and waves (plus seals if one is in New Zealand).

It is a curious fact that in Scots English, a dyke can be either a wall or a ditch, but igneous dykes take both those forms, and we chase them. Only once have we found one where the weathering of the dyke had kept pace with the surrounding rock.

The other danger that I have faced in the quest for material is eating local foods. On one occasion, as a representative of the Australian government (long story), I was constrained to eat part of a dog that I had heard being killed while one of my colleagues made a speech. Diplomacy often adds challenges.

After that, it was a downhill run, and in the past two years, I have eaten foal steak, llama, alpaca and guinea pigs, but I will only be happy when I have tried camel, which is recommended by several early Australian travellers.

You don’t have to be crazy to be a writer, but having crazy temporary obsessions, pursuing crazy ideas, makes your writing more interesting.

 

Not to be mistaken for granite

This is lifted from the book I am currently about to sign off on. I hope it will be published under the title What On Earth?

* 

In 2017, I went to Sri Lanka to look (among other things) at the site of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Stopping at Polonnaruwa, I saw several massive statues of the Buddha, all carved from a local rock, often called a “banded granite”. While I was trained as a botanist, I once studied a bit of geology, and worked with geologists, so I smelt a rat. To my aging botanist’s eye, the rock was gneiss, one of the metamorphic rocks. That meant that it was no sort of granite.

Reclining Buddha carved from local rock, Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, with a close-up. 
Yes, it was gneiss.

Some 60 km away by winding road, there is a large rock called Sigiriya, a name derived from the Sanskrit Sīnhāgiri, meaning Lion Rock, rather like Sinhapura, the Sanskrit for Lion City, which is now Singapore. About 1500 years ago, a time when blue body paint was the height of fashion among my ancestors, an advanced Hindu culture established a fortress on top of Sigiriya. As tourists do, we climbed to the top, and so I saw the rock, close up.

Sigiriya Rock, Sri Lanka, but what sort of rock is it?

Sigiriya is built on three layers of gneiss, but many web sites say the stone is granite, and a few assert that it is a volcanic plug—which would make it basalt! I had looked this up before going there, and found that the many contributors to Wikipedia dodge the issue, simply calling Sigiriya “a massive column of rock nearly 200 metres high”. I knew in advance that I needed a closer look. 

Now clearly, ‘granite’, without any doubt an igneous rock, forged and assembled in the planet’s fiery depths, means different things to different people, especially those with little in the way of geological training. It really isn’t rock(et) science, though. 

To a poet, any hard rock is granite, while a stone mason calls any rock with visible crystals granite, but geologists divide those big-crystal rocks up into granite, granodiorite, diorite, gabbro and more. The poet’s granite and the mason’s granite may not be granite at all, and a friend (not a geologist) says he once read that most Australian “granites” are really a relation, granitic porphyry.

On top of Sigiriya rock, I recalled having written a story about the Rosetta Stone while wearing my science journalist hat, some fifteen years before my climb. The tale began with an Australian quiz show causing a bit of fuss and bother after somebody found an apparent error that had been made a year earlier.

The Rosetta Stone: what sort of stone is it? 
Could it be mistaken for granite?

A contestant had said the Rosetta Stone was made of obsidian, but the quizmaster, looking at his cards, ruled that it was in fact basalt. The producers later conceded that it was “really granite”, and said that the contestant should have another chance to win the big money. The three named rocks are quite different, so what was going on? The Rosetta Stone was carved in 196 BCE, and it carries three inscriptions, saying the same thing in Greek, in Egyptian demotic script, and in hieroglyphics.

The content of the three texts is fairly boring, a list of taxes repealed by Ptolemy V, but the use of three languages made the stone very exciting when it was found in 1799 by French forces fighting in Egypt in the Napoleonic Wars. When the French lost a major battle, the stone became a prize of war, handed over to the victors, and placed on display in the British Museum in 1802, where it remains. Nobody seems to have asked the Egyptians what they thought (or think, now) about that… 

The Rosetta Stone, the key to decoding hieroglyphics, was described by its original French finders as ‘une pierre de granite noir’ (‘a stone of black granite’), but these were not geologists speaking. When Egyptologists called it “black granite”, they just meant a dark, fine-grained granodiorite from Aswan. 

A geologist’s granite has large and very obvious crystals of quartz, orthoclase and other minerals like mica. Forming at a great depth, it cools very slowly, leaving enough time for large crystals to develop. Granite is typically 40% quartz (silicon dioxide), and that means it is normally pale in appearance.

Basalt, on the other hand, is black to medium grey, and while it may contain a few larger bits of the minerals olivine and plagioclase, it is typically aphanitic, a term geologists use to indicate igneous rocks in which the grain size is small (less than 0.5 mm), so any grains or crystals cannot be seen with the naked eye.

That leaves us no further forward: why was a piece of granodiorite labelled basalt? Granodiorite is similar to granite, because it has quartz and plagioclase (with no orthoclase), but it also contains biotite and hornblende. It is typically darker than granite, but still a long way from basalt.

British scientists always called the Rosetta Stone basalt, and probably nobody gave the geology much thought, because it was the text cut into the stone that mattered, not the rock itself. When the stone was cleaned in 1998, it was found to be covered with black wax, printer’s ink, used to obtain contact-prints of the inscriptions, finger grease and dirt, with white paint in the incised lettering to make it stand out. 

Calling the blackened stone basalt made some sort of sense, maybe.
Andrew Middleton and Dietrich Klemm saw that the cleaned stone was not basalt at all, and they published their findings in 2003. In chemical terms, they said, the stone is more like tonalite (that lost me as well, so don’t worry!).

If you want to be precise, the Rosetta Stone is made of granodiorite that has probably been exposed to some extra heating. It definitely isn’t basalt, but neither should it be taken for granite—nor mistaken for granite, either.

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.

Australianisms

Update April 2026

This book is now avaialble as an e-book, through this link.

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).