What geologists think, part 1

A small note up-front: this is a sample from one of my coming attractions: completed or nearly ready works that don't suit my current publisher, and haven't yet been sold.

Note added April 2020, Not Your Usual Rocks is now Mistaken for Granite, and available as an e-book. In some markets, it is also available as a book.

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Beach pebbles, Gerringong New South Wales.

In my closing-out process, I am getting well into Not Your Usual Rocks. Here's a small taste of what is to come in the series.

Every cliff, every rock face, every pebble, will carry a story of the past written on it—if you know how to read it.

The rules of thumb we use to read the rocks are scientific geology, but science is variable in its quality and in its actions. Think of a grassy mat, sitting in shallow sandy soil on sandstone. 

In the middle, there is less struggle for life, but out on the fringes, the struggle is intense, because it’s drier out there, with less soil. Yet, if one grass runner reaches across to some neighbouring soil, the whole species will advance.

Science works in a similar way. For most of the time, most of the scientists in any branch of science agree, about most things, just as the grass in the middle of the mat agrees that all is well. Out on the fringes, we find patches of dead and decaying science.

Even in the centre not all scientists agree all the time, because every now and then, somebody does a bit of tweaking. They adjust a few of the assumptions for some purposes. Once in a while, a scientist does the equivalent of there must/might be better soil out there, somewhere.

The more general a scientific rule-of-thumb is, the more scientists agree about it. But no rule is sacred: if somebody finds even one contradiction, people need to think, and toss out a part, or even all, of the rule.

Sometimes, the two models rest happily, side by side. If we are sending rockets to another planet, the 330-year-old physics of Isaac Newton is good enough, but for some parts of physics, we need the more modern insights of Albert Einstein.

These days, the tweaking seems to happen less often, but it always remains possible that one of the foundations, one of the basic assumptions of geology may need to be altered or even discarded. The standard propositions that guide geological science are also principles that explain why the world looks as it does. 

Hawkesbury sandstone cliff, North Head, Sydney.

 How much story can you see in this picture? I can see lots, but then I was trained by clever observers and I’ve been looking curiously at rocks for six decades—and I know the things that geologists agree about, things like the following principles work well, because they explain the weird shapes that the earth we live on can take.

How do we explain this, without geological science?

Principle 1. We can see where the world has changed.

The world does not abide forever, even if, in our short life spans, the world really is fairly permanent. An occasional volcanic eruption or a massive earthquake can make a difference to what we see. 

Floods can move huge amounts of sediment as mud, and the occasional collapse of a delicate eroded arch may be seen, once the erosion goes too far or in a flood, but that’s about it for changes in the human lifetime.

On a larger time scale, continents shift around, pushing and jostling. As they do, they shove the Swiss Alps, the Himalayas, the Andes and all the other mountainous parts of the world up into the sky. At the same time, weathering destroys the rocks and erosion carries the remnants down to lower reaches. Without rocks being pushed up, there would be no mountains left.

Tilts and folds, Mt Pilatus, Switzerland.

Sometimes, land sinks deep beneath the sea, and new material gets washed in and laid down on top of it. Later, some of those new underwater rocks may be shoved back up into the air. All geological-scale things are slow, and we know this because we can work out the dates of the rocks.

Principle 2. We can tell the age of rocks.

Our various dating methods can give slightly different results, because geochronology, the dating of rocks involves inexact measures. Sometimes the assigned date relies on inference or assumptions, like the cases where we find fossils that come from a species that only lasted a short while, so we say that when similar layers in two cliffs contain that index fossil, they are the same age.

There are a few potential traps. We may have misidentified one of the fossils, or we may be wrong about how long that species lived. The good news is that we keep finding new methods and new data, so that over time, the picture becomes clearer. The good news is that the adjustments are generally small, because the different methods all give a consistent picture.

At times, we may use the half-lives of radioactive minerals, or other measures: once again all of the methods give consistent results. The order of formation given by different methods is the same, and over time, we have got much better at putting precise year-counts, on things. Our planet formed around 4.6 billion years ago, though the sandstone I walk on most days is Triassic in age, and roughly 200 million years old, but the sandstone won’t last forever.

Principle 3. We can see that rocks break down.

Geologists know perfectly well that rocks don’t abide forever: they are by no means everlasting. Their minerals break down, mainly under the combined effects of water and air, and the rocks come apart under the mechanical effects caused by heat, cold, grinding rocks carried by rivers and glaciers, and even from sand-blasting in deserts when strong winds blow.

Then there are the biological influences on the rocks—and I don’t exclude my walking on sandstone from this. Tree roots grow into cracks in rocks and expand, splitting the rocks, while at the other end of the plant scale, some mosses can drill neat holes in quartz, one of the toughest of minerals.

An echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus, North Head Sanctuary, Sydney, Australia, about 10 km from the centre of Sydney.

Burrowing animals from ants to echidnas drag grains of partly-weathered material to the surface where the grains are more exposed to sun, water and rain. On the surface, large grazing animals make pads. These are tracks along the sides of hills, pushing sediment down and providing a path for water to run off downhill when it rains, carrying surface sediment away, In bulk, the Earth abideth well, and nothing is ever lost—it just bobs up in a new hat.
 

Principle 4. Geology involves reusing old material

None of the material coming from rocks is ever wasted. Calcium from basalt will eventually be dissolved and carried to the sea, where corals, snails and other marine life will extract it and use it to make skeletons, shells or something else.

Later, these dead animals may fall down and over time, their shells become limestone. Sometimes, the shells just dissolve once more, and over time, the limestone dissolves and washed down to the sea. Sand becomes sandstone, mud becomes shale, and so on.

If rocks get buried deeply enough, they may be changed by heat and pressure, so sandstone becomes quartzite, limestone becomes marble, and shale becomes slate. If the rock is covered enough, it may end up as molten lava that spews out onto the surface of the earth again. Rocks aren’t all “just rocks”, because the world’s rocks have different origins.

Principle 5. Rocks come in three main types

You may have missed it, but in the last paragraph, I touched on the three different sorts of rock: the ones made from sediments, the ones shaped by heat and pressure, and the ones that were melted before they formed rocks.

Sedimentary rock: Triassic sandstone, Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

Sedimentary rock forms when sediment (bits and pieces of almost any sort) falls to the bottom of a lake or sea (or sometimes the bottom of a vast sand dune). Later, it is buried and a complex combination of pressure, water washing through and maybe mild heat, turns it into a rock. Sedimentary rocks are the ones that sometimes contain fossils, though a few deformed fossils can be seen in slates, while many show up in marble.

Weathered granite, Freycinet Peninsula, Tasmania. Obviously granite, if you are trained!

Igneous rock is any sort of material that was once a liquid, because at high temperatures, all rocks will melt. Granite is laid down, far below the earth’s surface, and only shows when a whole load of other rock erodes and weathers away. Granite cools slowly enough for big mineral crystals to form. Basalt, on the other hand, is oozy stuff that flows and spreads. Some basalt comes out of volcanoes as lava, some gets out and flows across the land, making a flat sheet that cools fast, so the crystals are very tiny.

North Bondi, Sydney, contact metamorphism: a volcanic neck erupted through the sandstone here, changing it to quartzite.

Metamorphic rock (the name comes from Greek, and means changed shape) forms when another kind of rock is subjected to heat and/or pressure. Large metamorphic regions are usually formed by extreme heat and pressure, and this is called regional metamorphism.

When melted basalt flows over other rocks, or when a volcano pushes through other rocks, the heat may travel a few metres or tens of metres, producing contact metamorphism. That is what happened at Bondi, and you can read all about it here.

In short, there are very few inexplicables when it comes to looking at the rocks, because in the end, the rocks are attacked and wiped out. Still, you can tell when an inexplicable shows up, because the scientists start flapping their hands until they work out an explanation.

Part 2 is about explaining.

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Coming attractions

This is an advisory for publishers who sometimes think outside the slush pile. Note please that I win awards for my writing, and I have had some 60 books translated into seven languages other than English. In fact, any publishers looking around here probably know about my most recent prize in early September.

Currently, I have the fourth edition of The Big Book of Australian History and a new book, Australian Survivor Kids, headed for the printer. (ASK doesn't have its own page yet, but it's about how to stay alive in dangerous situations like being lost, floods, fires, eruptions, dangerous seas...) These are both for the National Library of Australia, both were commissioned.

A lot of the time, my books are commissioned, and they tend to do well with the critics, the buyers and the judges. At other times, I write a book because I can and because I think it needs to be written. At times, I have trouble selling these, probably because I'm now an "old" gaffer.

Old? OK, I am a mid-septuagenarian but look at me! I still climb volcanos and work as a volunteer "visiting scientist" in my local school. I am also a bushwalker and bush regenerator, so I'm by no means ready to get up on the cart. That said, I plan ahead I'm not going to have anybody throw away some of my best material when I fall off my perch: some of these items will go straight to e-books, but some of them have a place as dead-tree books.

These are the works that I have that are almost complete or totally complete, sitting on my back burner, plus a few that I tried self-publishing through Amazon POD. My usual publisher is the National Library of Australia, but these do not fit with their mission plan.

I am open to offers!

1. Not Your Usual Rocks
Written for adults, the basics of rocks, the wonder of rocks. Probably 60,000 words, at least 350 high-res colour pics, needs a fair amount of work, but I am on it. This was the basis on which I wrote my acclaimed kids' book Australian Backyard Earth Scientist.

2. Looking at Small Things
This is about microscopy and engaging with nature. It began as a pro bono job for a small South Australian start-up, and they are handing it out as a PDF that you can get here. I have since improved it and written it as a book for kids 8 to 18 and their adult friends. 75,000 words and 700 pics, mainly colour photos. Easily trimmed.

3. Playwiths
This 70,000 words and 300 pics, mainly colour photos. This is STEAM on steroids, and is being looked at by a favoured publisher at the moment.

The book is based on a now out-of-date web site on sciences, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics that has pulled in 4 million views in the past 20 years: it meets a real need.

4. Australia before Plastic: How our grandies got by
I am a recognised champion in the popular Australian social history field. It combines the best of half a dozen books, now out of print, all of the research I left out. I wrote it as a long-form version, planning to cut it to 90,000 words, but it is now 270,000 words and looking really good. I would prefer to do a long-form version. It is half-way through the second-last edit, and will be ready in mid-October, when I will probably send it to e-book, on account of its size.

Note that I am discussing a 30,000-word version for younger readers with the National Library

5. Not Your Usual Science.

This is the result of 25 years as a writer of popular science. It needs some trimming and patching (a couple of months worth): it is currently at 461,000 words.


And my three Amazon POD books:

These can be withdrawn on a moment's notice

1. Sheep May Safely Craze
This is a novel, packed with lunacy. Check the link.

2. Not Your Usual Treatments
A history of quacks, quackery and seriously peculiar medicine.

3. Not Your Usual Gold Stories
This one was published by Five Mile Press, and released in a slip-case with Not Your Usual Bushrangers, but some sort of internal wranglings led to the remnants being dumped, and never released as a single volume, so I took it back.


Now here's some stuff about me that I lifted from the back of Playwiths.

About Peter Macinnis

This caricature is to be used in my new book
for the National Library of Australia,
Australian Survivor Kids, out in 2020.

Peter Macinnis took seven years to get his Bachelor of Science, because he was intent on getting an education. He then became a secondary science teacher before being hijacked into the Department of Education’s administration, where he completed a Master’s degree in statistical jiggery-pokery.

Unwilling to seek a cushy refuge among the Refugees from the Classroom, he behaved outrageously, calling out the parasites and became a regular contributor to ABC Radio National’s science programs. This unusual creativity alarmed his superordinates who bundled him up to Prinicipal Education Officer, whereupon he was told he now had to behave himself.

Dismayed by this prospect he ran away to join a circus called the Powerhouse Museum, setting up their education division before being headhunted to work in fraud detection. Then he became an educator at the Australian Museum before a lustrum back in the classroom again, before being headhunted as a science writer. Since 2005, he has been a full-time writer, winning many awards for his writing for children.

He is a grandfather who plays the role of ‘visiting scientist’ in his local primary school. He lists among his hobbies chatting to telemarketers in Latin, walking up small mountains slowly, and sitting on top of small mountains, wondering how to get down again.

He says that education, teaching, training, wisdom, knowledge, learning, understanding and erudition are not the same thing. If we target all of these with joy, enthusiasm and culture, we will have done a good thing.

He recently said: “Education has three legs: literacy, numeracy and curiosity”, but then added “and joy”. Within a few minutes, he added ingenuity, creativity, enthusiasm and culture. There he stopped, puzzled that education had thus been shown to be an arachnid.

Afterword: my sense of wonder

Me looking for spiders in the Sahara.

In 1962, I was an aspiring journalist on the University of Sydney student newspaper, honi soit. The editor, later a famous political correspondent, had decided to interview the TV sensation, Julius Sumner Miller, a physics professor from California, whose simple (and wickedly unexplained) demonstrations of physics had entranced Australians that year. The editor asked me to come along, as I was enrolled in the science faculty.

I had just decided to transfer to the Arts faculty, but I said nothing, and we went along to Sydney airport with a (then) novel portable tape recorder. “I can give you two minutes,” Miller said, but when the tape ran out, 20 minutes later, he was still going, and I had resolved to be an Arts student who cared about amazing things, a student with a sense of wonder.

Three years later, with my plans to become a pre- and post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese historian shredded by outside events, I took up botany (as one does), and the rest is history, just not of the pre- and post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese kind.

I later became a science teacher who enjoyed wonder, and I always had some curious rig or other on the front bench, a thing I refused to discuss in class, dismissing it as merely something I was trying out.

The mystery might be a home-made eucalyptus oil extractor; a Masonite and plastic bag hovercraft powered by a vacuum cleaner; a square wave generator; a pill-bug farm or a gas discharge tube. Another day, it might be a long cardboard tube that boomed when placed over a Meker burner; bent-wire bubble-makers; a water-driven sediment separator; a Berlese funnel or a Baermann funnel (for nematodes); a dead sparrow being boiled down for its bones in a one litre beaker; or leeches.

I did my best educating with my sideshows. A self-selected gang of students stayed behind, demanding details—and getting them, then they started suggesting improvements.

In my world, education involves all of teaching, wisdom, knowledge, learning, culture, training, understanding and erudition, but above all we must foster enthusiasm, wonder and curiosity.

And that explains my books. Buy one of them, and I come along in the parcel.

Tickets of leave and pardons

This is one of a series of pieces that may or may not ever see the light of day in a book: it is more likely than not that I will be self-publishing my Colonial Concerns, from which this is taken, as an e-book: it turned into a huge opus (a quarter of a million words of Australian history) that frightens print publishers. If and when the e-book happens, I will edit this to indicate where it can be obtained. In the interim, this is available to students of all ages, complete with sources. Some of this text also appears in my Five Mile Press book, Not Your Usual Bushrangers, (2015).

Convicts were given sentences of seven years, 14 years or life, but there were ways to get free before that time, and there were ways that a sentence could be extended. The well-behaved and obedient convict could hope for advancement and a degree of freedom.

On the other hand, the sulky, disobedient or lazy convict could expect punishment. It was the “carrot and stick” model. Sadly, convicts found the model more the sort of thing that donkeys encountered, where the carrot is dangled on a stick attached to the donkey. As it moved forward, so did the carrot, so the reward was always out of reach.

There were stages for an assigned convict. Step 1 was a ticket of leave, which gave the prisoner, while still technically a prisoner, the right to live free and earn wages, or to work in a trade or to start a farm, but only within a particular district. A format for a ticket of leave was published in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser in 1806, after this introduction:

THOSE Male and Female Prisoners who remain under Sentence of the Law, and have been indulged with Permission to get their own maintenance on Tickets of Leave, and who have not appeared according to the Order of the 8th instant, will be put to Government Labour if they do not give their Names in on or before the 31st instant, when Tickets of Leave, according to the following form, will be given to those whom the Governor may consider deserving a continuance of that indulgence:

Spaces to be filled in on the printed form included name, the English court the person was sentenced at, the ship he or she was transported in, the date on which the sentence expired, and the date of issue. The tickets were all numbered.

Over the years, the system evolved, but a set of proposed rules for granting a ticket-of-leave, published in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser in 1826 will give you a sense of the uphill battle that convicts faced, and how the struggle was used to set them against the bushrangers.

Basically, a prisoner sentenced to 7 years’ transportation had to serve four years with one master, or five years with two masters. A prisoner sentenced to 14 years must have served six years with one master; eight years with two; or ten years three masters. A lifer needed to have served eight years with one master; ten years with two; or twelve years with three.

There were safety nets of a sort. Where a change of service was not due to any fault of the convict (for example, the death or departure of the master from the colony), this first requirement could be worked around. Prisoners assigned to “government work” were treated as if they had been assigned to a master.

Informers and villain-catchers could jump the queue. A convict who caught two runaways who had been absent not less than forty-eight hours; or one recognised bushranger or felon; or one who turned in a receiver of stolen property, gained a credit of six months’ faithful service. Several captures might even be enough to produce an instant ticket.

Convicts seeking a ticket had to apply to the nearest Bench of Magistrates at stated periods. Character references were required, but only from the local magistrates If the prisoner’s master thought the prisoner undeserving, he could say so, but there was no longer requirement for a master to certify the prisoner as deserving.

Tickets applied to a single district, the one covered by the bench of magistrates granting it, and ticket holders were to be mustered, either quarterly or half-yearly by the nearest Magistrate. The Governor’s permission was required for any ticket holder wanting to move to another district. Magistrates could, however, give passes to allow travel out of the district for up to one month.

Ticket holders who caught runaways, or bushrangers, or gave information leading to the conviction of receivers of stolen property, or of persons harbouring prisoners, were to be rewarded by an extension of their tickets to two or more districts.

Ticket holders had to attend church every Sunday if they lived within four or five miles of a place of divine worship and offenders could lose their tickets. Even if you managed to win your ticket, there were many, many ways to lose it again, as we can see from a surviving list of cancellations.

 In one 1841 list of cancellations, there were eleven cases of drunkenness, two of drunk and immoral conduct and one each of being drunk and disorderly and being drunk and assaulting a constable. Another gave rum to a prisoner, while two forged letters saying that their wives had died in England, documents that would have allowed them to marry in Australia. Others stole horses, went missing, gave shelter to bushrangers or escaped prisoners, or were found to have been involved in assault, or improper or disorderly conduct.

The second step was a conditional pardon, which made the convict free, but not allowed to return to England or Ireland. A ticket of leave holder could get a conditional pardon after six years, but only after furnishing “… the most satisfactory testimonials of uninterrupted good conduct for a period of six years …” from the date of his ticket.

Absolute pardons allowed the former prisoner to leave Australia, though these pardons were usually only granted after an act that their fellow prisoners would regard as treachery. There were all sorts of requirements in the way of gaining that reward.

By 1813, the demand for conditional pardons was so high that Governor Macquarie announced in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser that applications for pardons would only be accepted on the first Monday in December. Each application had to be accompanied by certificates of good character from the local clergyman and principal magistrates.

That wasn’t the end of the story: in 1816, Governor Macquarie wanted a lot of public works completed: the colony needed roads, bridges, churches and public buildings, so he announced that there would be no tickets of leave granted that year, because all the convicts were needed for public service.

Of course, if the governor decided to reward a convict who delivered up one or more bushrangers, that was still a choice he was free to make, but there was only one way out of the penal system — obedience. Life as a convict was far from pleasant.

Grog and tucker

This is the intro to chapter 5 in the same large project.

Some people think tucker is an Indigenous word, but its first recorded appearance in Australia (in the food sense) was in early 1856, on the Bendigo goldfields.

There are a number working on Sydney Flat, some very successfully, but the majority are just making what they call ‘tucker.’ [1]

The tucker-bag itself showed up in print in May 1865, but it was probably in use before that. On the other hand, grog is a venerable English word. It comes in a roundabout way from a cloth known as grosgrain or grogram, a coarse cloth, favoured by Edward Vernon as a boat cloak. He was a Royal Navy captain at 21, and a rear-admiral at 24, and the men called him ‘Old Grog’, on account of his cloak.

Vernon served successfully for many years until (according to his admirers) he was forced out because he was right too often. By then he had won many famous battles, but none so famous as his battle against sailors’ rum. He said too many Jack Tars went aloft with too much good Jamaica rum under their belts, lost their footings, and fell to their deaths.

In 1740, drunkenness was still killing sailors, so Vernon ordered that the rum be watered before it was issued. The daily allowance of one pint of rum per man was mixed with a quart of water in a scuttled butt, a barrel with one end removed and kept for that purpose.

This mixing was done on deck, supervised by the lieutenant of the watch, to make sure no man was cheated of his proper allowance. The sailors said Old Grog was depriving them of a life’s essential, and called the watered rum “grog”. The word came to Australia, where Bowes Smyth heard it used in the earliest days of the colony. The storm he refers to below is the one that produced the animal-killing lightning bolt mentioned at the start of this book.

The Sailors in our Ship requested to have some Grog to make merry wt. upon the Women quitting the Ship indeed the Capt. himself had no small reason to rejoice upon their being all safely landed & given into the Care of the Governor…The Scene wh. presented itself at this time & during the greater part of the night, beggars every discription; some swearing, others quarrelling others singing, not in the least regarding the Tempest…. [2]

This was the way the colony would go, and the nation followed in the footsteps of the colony. At first, people just wanted the oblivion rum brought, to shut out the harshness that surrounded them, as Reverend Johnson observed on November 15, 1788, looking on his flock with disappointment.

They prefer their Lust before their Souls, yea, most of them will sell their souls for a Glass of Grogg, so blind, so foolish, so hardened are they. [3]

Seven years on, things had improved very little, Johnson said on 27 November 1795.

Numbers of people have become settlers. The careful & industrious do well, but by far the greatest part spend in drinking, their crops, as or even before they become ripe. Hope this abominable Traffic will be checked, if not abolished by the present change of Govt. [4]

Part of the problem in the early days came from the sailors. According to David Collins, there was a lack of supervision as well, but grog was the worst part:

Petty thefts among themselves began soon to be complained of; the sailors from the transports, although repeatedly forbidden, and frequently punished, still persisted in bringing spirits on shore by night, and drunkenness was often the consequence. [5]

In the 1840s, Louisa Meredith found that drunkenness was all too common among the servants, especially at Christmas:

I have heard of a Christmas-day party being assembled, and awaiting the announcement of dinner as long as patience would endure; then ringing the bell, but without reply; and on the hostess proceeding to the kitchen, finding every servant either gone out or rendered incapable of moving, the intended feast being meanwhile burned to ashes. Nor is this by any means a rare occurrence; as the crowded police-office can bear ample testimony. [6]

It wasn’t just the convicts, either, as she had seen the same thing among free people, like the wife of a turnpike-keeper near Homebush, who collected the tolls on the Parramatta road.

One day Mr. Meredith was driving a friend to the races at Parramatta, and on reaching the turnpike, this engaging female was discovered seated at a table by the door, with a cup and a half-gallon bottle of rum beside her, the effect of which was already evident; she offered Mr. Meredith a ticket, which he told her was not required, as she knew him so well from his passing constantly—“Oh, sir, you’d better take it, for I shan’t know anybody by the time you come back!” [7]

Australians learned early to make Christmas dinner an outdoor picnic.

William Westgarth saw drunkenness on the way to the diggings in 1852: two men “transferring the weight and contents of a bottle or two of their baggage from the outward to the inward man”. [8]

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[1] The Age, 18 January 1856, 3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/154859885

[2] Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal, 1787 – 9, 6 February.

[3] George Mackaness (ed.), Some Letters of Rev. Richard Johnson, 1954, part 1, 24.

[4] George Mackaness (ed.), Some Letters of Rev. Richard Johnson, 1954, part 2, 11.

[5] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 1798, 7.

[6] Louisa Ann Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, 128.

[7] Louisa Ann Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, 58.

[8] William Westgarth, Victoria, Late Australia Felix, 213.