Different lines: the spectroscope

 

This is what undergraduates
understood by spectroscope,
even in the 1960s.

In 1802, an English chemist named Wollaston noticed a number of black lines in the spectrum of the Sun. Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787 – 1826) saw the same lines in 1814 and mapped them in more detail. He found 570 lines, and named them, according to their prominence. These days, better instruments can detect thousands of Fraunhofer lines across the solar spectrum, and Fraunhofer’s D line can now be distinguished as three separate lines. The new and improved instruments are now usually called spectrographs or spectrometers, but they are still used to dissect and examine spectra. Newton would have given his eye teeth to access one of them.

Fraunhofer’s newly-discovered lines were regarded as gaps in the spectrum, but each line represented a subtraction from a continuous spectrum, the removal of a key wavelength. This mystery stood for more than 40 years before Kirchhoff and Bunsen sorted it when Kirchhoff saw a similarity: some of the ‘dark’ lines in the solar spectrum matched ‘bright’ lines of emission spectra.

Fraunhofer lines, wikimedia
curid=7003857

The terms ‘dark’ and ‘bright’ are relative: in actual fact, the dark lines are only dark in contrast to the rest of the spectrum, and may even be brighter in absolute terms than the visible lines of an emission spectrum. What happened next is best described in Kirchhoff’s own words:

While engaged in a research carried out by Bunsen and myself in common on the spectra of coloured flames, by which it became possible to recognise the qualitative composition of complicated mixtures from the appearance of their spectra in the flame of the blow pipe, I made some observations which give an unexpected explanation of the origin of the Fraunhofer lines and allow us to draw conclusions from them about the composition of the sun’s atmosphere and perhaps also that of the brighter fixed stars.

These lines were hard to see. In his Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage referred to the problems encountered by an untrained observer. The ‘Mr Herschel’ in the story was William Herschel’s son, who later became Sir John Herschel, a good friend of Babbage, who named one of his sons Herschel Babbage, who was later a minor explorer in Australia.

Conversing with Mr. Herschel on the dark lines seen in the solar spectrum by Fraunhofer, he inquired whether I had seen them; and on my replying in the negative, and expressing a great desire to see them, he mentioned the extreme difficulty he had had, even with Fraunhofer’s description in his hand and the long time which it had cost him in detecting them. My friend then added, “I will prepare the apparatus, and put you in such a position that they shall be visible, and yet you shall look for them and not find them: after which, while you remain in the same position, I will instruct you how to see them, and you shall see them, and not merely wonder you did not see them before, but you shall find it impossible to look at the spectrum without seeing them.”

Over time, the instruments improved, and by 1864, William Huggins took the spectrum of a nebula. Before long, Doppler shifts (get the book!) were being measured on photographs of spectra, and we were on the way to the notions of expanding universes, Big Bangs and much more.

William Ramsay studied chemistry in Germany under Robert Bunsen, and in 1894, tackled a problem Lord Rayleigh had found with nitrogen. When nitrogen is made chemically, it has one density, when it is prepared by subtracting the other known gases from an air sample, it is slightly more dense. Ramsay remembered that Henry Cavendish had seen the same problem a century earlier, when he tried to combine all of the nitrogen in air with oxygen, but found there was always a bubble of gas left over. Ramsay heated gas with magnesium to make magnesium nitride, but still found a bubble of gas left behind, which was more dense than nitrogen.

Ramsay and Rayleigh had access to the spectroscope that Bunsen and Kirchhoff had introduced, and this revealed a spectrum which fitted no known element. They named the element ‘argon’, meaning ‘inert’. But, they reasoned, if there was one new element to fit into the periodic table (chapter 6), there should be more, one for each row of the table. Ramsay began the search, and looked at a sample of gas from a uranium mineral, cleveite, and found that the spectrum was that of a ‘metallic element’ previously discovered in the sun’s spectrum by Norman Lockyer, who had named it helium.

But what were the lines? The best way to answer this is to first go sideways for a bit. Glass is mainly sodium silicate, and no chemist who has ever heated glass in the flame of a Bunsen burner would doubt the sodium part. Like common salt, glass gives what looks like a distinctive yellow colour to the flame. We know now that there are actually two colours, with wavelengths of 589.592 and 588.995 nanometres, but for now, we can treat them as a single colour.

Fraunhofer’s newly-discovered lines represented a subtraction from a continuous spectrum, the removal of a key wavelength. If you view light that had passed through a medium rich in sodium, the ‘sodium colours’ are absorbed, leaving a ‘line’. As we understand it today, sodium ions in the flame absorb energy of that wavelength. The energy shifts an electron from a lower-energy orbital to a higher-energy orbital, and according to some ideas that we will look at later, that quantum, that very precise packet of energy, the difference between the two orbitals, is associated with a particular wavelength and colour.

If light passes through a cloud of sodium ions, light of that frequency will be extracted and used to ‘excite’ electrons. Later, the electrons drop back down to a lower energy level, and emit light of exactly the same frequency, but most of it goes sideways, so we miss seeing it in the light coming our way. Kirchhoff then described other similar experiments in which flames ‘doped’ with either sodium or lithium act as either absorbers or emitters on limelight and sunlight.

I conclude from these observations that a coloured flame in whose spectrum bright sharp lines appear so weakens rays of the colour of these lines, if they pass through it, that dark lines appear in place of the bright ones, whenever a source of light of sufficient intensity, in whose spectrum these lines are otherwise absent, is brought behind the flame.
— Monatsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Berlin, October 1859.

Later, Anders Ångström would use spectroscopy to show there was hydrogen in the sun, Johann Balmer would explain the lines, and Norman Lockyer would find helium there as well, while William Crookes detected thallium without ever seeing it, by finding a green line in a spectrum from some residues in a sulfuric acid factory.

Jean Foucault, the inventor of Foucault’s pendulum (chapter 13 in the book), first discovered the way the emission and absorption effects are linked, but he failed to follow this through to a logical conclusion. Instead, it was left to Bunsen and Kirchhoff to reveal this discovery. And of course Bunsen and Kirchhoff used the heat of the Bunsen burner for their observations, but there was more to come, as readers of my book can see in chapter 10.

It cannot therefore be doubted that the extensive volcanic elevations constituting the high table-land of Armenia and the island Iceland have flowed from sources which were chemically identical… the mineralogical differences between those Caucasian and Icelandic rocks which present the same mean composition, are not less marked than those observed among other ferruginous rocks of plutonic origin.
— Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, Poggendorff’s Annalen, 1851, Scientific Memoirs, edited by Tyndall and Francis, 1853.

Now that was a difference!

Different light: Newton and the spectrum

This is the next sample from They Saw the Difference.

When I was three, my bedroom had the leadlight windows that were popular as a bit of middle-class poshness in the 1930s, when our house was built. These windows were made of small pieces of glass, held together between H-shaped strips of lead. Each window had one special piece of extra clear glass with bevelled edges, and these gave me one of the wonders of my youth.

The windows faced west, and at certain times of the year, when the low afternoon sun shone between the houses across the road, it hit these angled pieces of glass, and a small coloured patch appeared on my wall—my own private rainbow, captive in my room. 

Any triangular piece of glass will bend light, and the light is split because each of the colours is refracted by a different amount, because each colour has a different wavelength. If we want to see the effect well, it is best to use a narrow beam of white light, and pass it through a prism in a darkened room. Newton saw it, and wondered why the light was different.

A prism is just a solid figure that is essentially triangular in shape and made of a transparent material. Prisms are commonly used in physics to deviate or disperse a ray in optical instruments or laboratory experiments, or to deliver total internal reflection. Here is how Newton set up his investigation:

 

In this diagram, white light comes
from the right and is dispersed.

One thing is certain, this three-year-old was too late to make any original discoveries, because Newton completed his systematic study of the spectrum, long before I was born. In 1666 he saw the composite nature of white light while carrying trying to minimise chromatic dispersion in lenses, an annoying effect that had been known for about fifty years, when telescopes and microscopes gave images with coloured fringes. 

In 1672, Newton told the world how he had studied the ‘celebrated phenomenon of colours’. At the time, most people assumed that colour was a mix of light and dark, that the prism somehow added the colour. and Robert Hooke was one of the strongest supporters of this view.

With two neat experiments, Newton demolished Hooke’s ideas, and began one of the great feuds of science. (In case you don’t know it yet, science is driven by spotting differences, but there’s always room for personal differences, and many of the wildest brawls revolved around Newton. By comparison, Dart’s clashes with the Piltdown gang {see the last blog} were nothing!) 

In one experiment, Newton used a second prism to pull the colours back together again, and showed that the result was white light. Then he used a second prism and a slit to show that when a selected band of coloured light passed into the second prism, it passed on unchanged. Hooke’s theory was in tatters, and Newton had an enemy for life. Newton wrote no more on optics until after Hooke died in 1703. 

 In fairness to a rather peculiar man, Newton simply could not help bursting out with the truth, even if it got up people’s noses! Novelist Aldous Huxley assessed Newton this way: 

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

How Newton’s experiment
is often wrongly shown.

Newton’s experiment is often shown like this, upside down, with a triangular prism sitting on its base, the light coming from below, bending down as it passes through the apex and being directed further down on the other side. Newton used sunlight shining down (not up!) through gap in a window, and being bent through the apex of an upside-down prism to shine upwards onto a wall, 22 feet (7 metres) away. 

We know the sitting-on-its-base-prism picture is wrong, because of the angle of the incoming beam, and besides, the band at the top is ultraviolet (above violet), while that at the bottom is infrared, meaning below red. The prism had to be point-down. The room must have been darkened, with just one beam of light entering the room and throwing a pale spectrum onto the wall, red at the bottom, violet at the top. 

Newton called the colours ‘spectrum’, a Latin word meaning spectre or apparition, and he is said to have been the first to see a prism, but I wonder how many others had found their own private rainbows before him, given that he spoke of the ‘celebrated phenomenon of colours’. 

Those celebrated colours were just those of the rainbow, but how many were there? Almost everybody had their own version. In fact the spectrum contains an infinite number of colours, and the number we ‘see’ is subjective. Newton followed a Greek astronomer named Ptolemy who had said there were seven colours, and gave them the names we use today: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. 

 He said he could not separate any further colours from any narrow band of light selected from the spectrum, but his set-up would never have given monochromatic light in any selected band, because the rays from the Sun are not completely parallel. He should have seen further separation, but perhaps he intended his ‘result’ to be taken only as an idealised case. Or maybe he fudged his experiment: he stated correctly that different colours are refracted (bent) through different angles, both in prisms and in lenses, and that was the important part. 

What we now call visible light is just a small part of a much larger electromagnetic spectrum, but as we will see in chapter 5, this took time to find, and it is important to note that this is just the range that we humans see. There are many insects, bees for example, which are different because they can see ultraviolet light. 

So how do you see something that cannot be seen? In 1799, an astronomer named Sir William Herschel was measuring the temperatures associated with different colours. He had been using filters to view the Sun, but he saw how some filters that he used when examining sunspots let more heat through.

This led him to wonder if different colours had different amounts of heat, and he used thermometers to measure the strength of heating along a normal spectrum. He did this because his observations made him speculate that: 

 …the prismatic rays might have the power of heating bodies very unequally distributed among them…If certain colours should be more apt to occasion heat, others might, on the contrary, be more fit for vision by possessing superior illuminating power. 

Herschel found a higher temperature near the red end, and testing just beyond the visible range, found an even higher temperature, so he named this radiation ‘calorific rays’. He showed that these invisible rays behaved like visible light, being reflected, refracted and transmitted, the same tests Heinrich Hertz later applied to his radio waves. 

Herschel delivered a number of papers on the subject to the Royal Society in 1800, describing several hundred experiments on what he called “invisible light”, and since then, infrared astronomy has increased in importance as more sensitive instruments to detect infrared radiation have been developed. We will look more at infrared and infrared astronomy in the book. 

Johann Ritter tested the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, using silver chloride to detect radiation beyond violet. Photographers would later use the way light makes silver chloride go black, but Ritter found that there was an invisible band of radiation, even better than white light at blackening the silver chloride, which we now call UV. 

To sum up, the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, ranging in wavelength from approximately 3.9×10-7m (violet) to 7.8×10-7m (red) (corresponding frequencies 7.7×1014 Hz and 3.8×1014 Hz, respectively). 

As Aldous Huxley reminded us, Newton was unpleasant. He mistreated Stephen Gray, he quarrelled with Robert Hooke over the inverse square law and his theory of colour, with Gottfried Leibniz over the invention of calculus, and with Christiaan Huygens over his theory of light. 

Even so, any one of Newton’s achievements would have been enough to ensure his fame, even without the apple. But did the apple really fall? We will never know now, but the tale was made popular by Voltaire, and Newton’s biographer and friend, William Stukeley, claimed Newton told him the story, so maybe there was a day when the apple fell, and made Newton wonder why it should be so. That is Newton’s greatest gift to us, that he asked why as often as he did, even inspiring poets like Paul Valéry and Alexander Pope, who wrote: 

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said ‘Let Newton be.’ and all was light. 

Mind you, Sir John Collings Squire would later add:

It did not last: the Devil shouting ‘Ho, 

Let Einstein be.’ restored the status quo. 

Newton told Hooke that if he had seen further than others, it was because he had stood on the shoulders of giants. This may have been a snide dig at Hooke, but a similar remark had been made by many others, centuries earlier. Robert Merton has even written a whole delightful book (On the Shoulders of Giants), on the subject, tracing the earlier history of the aphorism.

It was once cited with this brilliant typo: 

Merton, Robert K., On the Shoulders of Grants: A Shandean Postscript, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1965. 

—Max Charlesworth, Lyndsay Farrall, Terry Stokes, David Turnbull, Life Among the Scientists, Oxford University Press, 1989, bibliography, 295.

Next, we'll look at the spectroscope and what it can do.

A Different Brain

 This is the first part of They Saw The Difference, announced here.

Dart’s original illustration of
the Taung child, 1925.

I have always told my students that the best actors go into law, the next best become teachers, and the leftovers go to stage and screen. The reader may justly conclude from this that when I teach (or write) I’m putting on a show.

About 1992, I prepared for work each day by slipping the fossilised toe-bone of a giant kangaroo into my shirt pocket, a child’s brain into one trouser pocket and its skull into the other.

<SFX> Brakes screech, voices off, shouting “Wha-a-at?”

To clarify, the skull and brain were fossils, 2 to 3 million years old, plus or minus a bit, and if the kangaroo toe-bone was real, museums around the world make casts of their best and rarest examples to sell to other museums, so what you see in a glass case or a lecturer’s hand is usually a copy, cast in resin from a mould of the original, and painted to resemble the original, which is somewhere safe. No matter, just having casts of the skull and part of its brain in my pockets allowed me to tell their story, as well as if I held the genuine relics.

Raymond Dart was an Australian teaching in South Africa in the 1920s. In 1924, he received two boxes of rocks on a morning when he was supposed to be getting ready to act as best man to his friend, Christo Beyers. Peeking into one of the boxes, he saw the cast of a brain lying loose, and in that, he saw something important.

Soon after the brain’s owner died, mud partly filled a skull, and this mud later hardened to rock. Technically, it was an endocast, a copy of part of the inside of the skull which closely reflected the brain, but it wasn’t any old brain—it was special, because of its small size and the position of its brain stem.

Interpreting fossils is an art and a science. Experts must know anatomy, how the parts work together, what small differences mean, and they work with those small differences. The position of the large hole in the skull where the spinal cord leaves the brain, the foramen magnum, was immediately obvious in the shape of the brain. Any animal with a brain stem like that had to have walked upright.

We cannot be certain how the Taung child died, but clearly the skull had ended up on its side in a lime-rich deposit, where the brain case was slightly more than half-filled with the mud which became the cast.

Dart saw that it fitted into a block of stone in the case, so a major part of the brain owner’s skull was probably there as well. He was a medical man, but fascinated by fossils, and he knew that this was important.  So was his friend's wedding, but afterwards, he itched to get back to his find.

The covering rock had to be carefully removed before the face could be examined, but a quick look at the cast was all Dart needed. The brain said this animal had a skull which attached to a vertical spine, lying directly below the skull, rather than behind it, as in chimpanzees and gorillas. The owner walked upright, like modern humans. Here is how Dart worked it out:

I was also convinced from the earliest period of my investigations that these creatures had placed great reliance on their feet for walking and running and that, consequently, their hands must have been freed for other tasks. This was implicit in the globular form of the skull which was obviously balanced on a more vertically placed type of backbone than that of a gorilla or chimpanzee. The improvement in the poise of the head implied a better posture of the whole body framework, since there must have been a relative forward displacement of the foramen magnum (the hole in the base of the skull which links the brain with the spinal cord).
—Raymond Dart, Adventures with the Missing Link, 1959, 11.

The people who interpret fossils work like Sherlock Holmes at his best. To those who can read, a glimpse of a document can be enough, but those who can read fossils can gain just as much from a single glimpse of just the right hint. At this point, Dart made a political mistake.

Even in the 1920s, a careful observer would have seen that the British Empire was already in decay, and there were few careful observers around, but there was a cast-iron rule: London is always right. When Dart reported his find in Nature in 1925, London came down on him like a ton of bricks.

His find (known as the “Taung child”, from where it was found and its obvious youthfulness) was small-brained and most British scientists were certain that any small-brained thing was no ancestor of theirs. Piltdown Man was the human beginning, they said: he had a big brain, and best of all, he was found in Britain! (There’s more on Piltdown in the Afterword, but you'll have to get the book to read that.)

Today, we might think Dart’s name for his find, Australopithecus (“southern ape”), was not the best name for an upright-walking individual, even one with a small brain, but Dart was trying not to draw too much fire upon himself. It didn’t work, but in the long run, the brain stem evidence held up and Piltdown was eventually shown to be a fake.

The true status of the Taung child lay hidden inside its jaw until 1987. In both humans and the other apes, the “adult” teeth emerge in a specific sequence. There is one order of appearance in humans, and a different order of tooth eruption in the other apes. Concealed inside the Taung child’s skull, teeth were erupting, and their pattern of development would tell us what the Taung child was, either human or ape. As there is only one Taung child, you cannot slice it up, just to see what is inside. You could take X-rays, but there is too much other material in the way, and the things we are looking for are much too faint.

For many years, it seemed as though we would never know what was inside the jaw. Then in 1987, Glenn Conroy and Michael Vannier had a bright idea. Instead of cutting the skull into thin slices, they made a series of virtual slices with X-rays, and fed the results into a computer, and used back projection to build up a three-dimensional picture of what was inside. Seeing how the Taung baby’s teeth were erupting would give the answer.

The researchers took their X-ray shots, just 2 mm apart, in three different dimensions: vertically, from front to back, vertically, from side to side, and horizontally. (They called it the sagittal, coronal and transaxial planes, if you prefer the technicalities.) The method is less important, but the answer was delightful:

…the Taung ‘child’ is not a little human, but just as important, it is not a little ape…
— Glenn C. Conroy & Michael W. Vannier, Nature 329, 625–627, 21 October 1987.

The whole answer was told in the differences: the Taung baby is a betwixt-and-between, a half-and-half, a missing link if you wish, and we would never have known if the two researchers had not decided to give it a CAT scan! Sadly, we had to wait another sixty years to find out what it was.

The story I told, over several years at the Australian Museum, was about how Dart saw a difference, and recognised a new scientific truth. This was just a few years after Conroy and Vannier had confirmed the role the Taung child’s people played in our origins, but there was more: I had human and gorilla skulls, that toe bone of the giant kangaroo and the matching bone from a horse. Always, it was about differences.

At other times, I talked to my audience about Edward Tyson (1651 – 1708), one of the unsung heroes of science, who persuaded Robert Hooke to pay seven shillings and sixpence for a 43 kg porpoise from a London fishmonger, so Tyson could dissect it. Back then, even experts like John Ray called the porpoise a fish, but Tyson’s Anatomy of a Porpess, published in 1680 showed the danger of judging a book by its cover. He said: “If we view a Porpess on the outside, there is nothing more than a Fish, but if we look within, there is nothing less.”

Tyson later dissected an infant chimpanzee which had died after being brought to London from Angola. While he referred to it as both a ‘pygmie’ and an ‘Orang-Outang’, the drawings show a chimpanzee, but Tyson’s book, filled with illustrations, showed for the first time just how close humans were to the other animals, and how they differed.

If Copernicus had removed the earth from the centre of the universe (something I describe in chapter 10), Tyson and his assistant, William Cowper, helped to remove Homo sapiens from a central position in creation. This change tied together humans and the whole of ‘lower’ creation. Tyson had taken one of the crucial steps towards recognising that evolution happened.

Next, back to Newton again…

They saw the difference

 I am, first and foremost, an historian of science, and I'm going to talk for the next month or so about my new e-book, soon to be a print-on-demand book, called They Saw the Difference. The thing is, I've been busy getting our block of townhouses repainted and rejigging a couple of older titles. so for now, here's the introduction to They Saw the Difference.

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When,
And How and Where and Who.
—Rudyard Kipling, introduction to ‘The Elephant’s Child’ in the Just So Stories.

Differences, seeking, cultivating and studying them, make our civilisation work. The art of noting and celebrating differences bloomed in Renaissance Europe, and detecting differences shaped modern science and technology, but the habit was there long ago.

The early hominin who saw that this rock was better than that rock for forming tools, or observed that wood burned and rocks did not, the one who noticed that water ran downhill and not up, these were the ancestors of modern scientists and technologists.

My granddaughters
seeing the difference
an echidna makes.

As the subtitle says, this is a social history of science, concentrating on the why and the how, with a good dollop of what, and something of the who, where and when, along with regular bursts of something completely different. This book compulsively pursues puzzles to their ends.

For example engineers and physicists, hunting for scraps of literary icing to decorate their published work often quote these words of Paul Ambroise Valéry (1871 – 1945): “One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn’t fall.”

If the quoters offer a source (most of them don't), it has a date of 1970, which is well after the poet’s death. By enlisting the burrowing skills of Project Wombat, I know that their 1970 source is volume 14 of Valéry’s posthumous collected works, but the quote was first published as “Il fallait être Newton pour apercevoir que la lune tombe, quand tout le monde voit bien qu’elle ne tombe pas,” in Mélange, Grandeurs, 384, Oeuvres, t. 1, La Pléiade, in 1939. I sweat the details to get the backstory.

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

Valéry knew what was going down when Newton’s apple fell. He didn’t imagine crazy young Isaac, sitting under a tree, thinking “apple, falling: that’s odd!”. Newton was differently equipped, mentally speaking, but he knew his apples. To him, the odd thing wasn’t the falling apple, it was the curious way the moon failed ever to reach Earth. That was his dog that didn’t bark in the night.

He saw that the moon’s orbit involved a fall that went on forever (in our time frame), the descent always cancelled out by the satellite’s forward motion. That was the difference he saw, a whole branch of science sprang from it, and Paul Valéry could see that. We will return to Isaac Newton again soon, because he could see differences, and he also made a difference.

I chose to follow, not the broad highways of science, thronged by the famous and important, but rather to stray down the alleys and dusty tracks, where the interesting people and the curious science lie in wait for us. I have enjoyed making this work, written for the child I once was and still am: I hope you find some of the same joy.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken.

Back in the saddle

 Well, the past three months have been a bit of a rush. I finished editing and compiling Old Grandpa's Book of Practical Poems, mainly for my grandchildren, and that was going to be it, but there was an old ms, lingering on my hard disc, a novel with the working title Sheep May Safely Craze. That is now (as of this morning) locked up and being submitted.

No sooner had I got into the sheep than I attended a kid's lit function, and before I go on, I need to comment. An over-rated novelist once said in a radio interview that he might write for children, “but only if I had brain damage”. This got right up the noses of children’s writers everywhere, because those of us who write for the young know that our craft is far more challenging than writing for adults.

True, the occasional B-grade royal or C-grade celebrity may “write a book for children” (usually meaning they had it ghost-written), but the sales of “their” fulsome drivel will usually relate only to the alleged author’s notoriety.

Such works are stereotyped, devoid of intellectual commitment or literary value. No matter, we serious and devoted scriveners keep on engaging young minds, turning on the lights, although I sometimes take a break and write a book for adult readers, if there’s a story there that will feed older minds. The book I describe below is just such a case.

The trapped echidna

Still, I am best known as a writer of non-fiction for children, and it was in that role that I spoke last December at a kids’ lit function, where I described the adventutes I had while rescuing an echidna from a locked drain (the details are set out in chapter 12, but briefly, it involved kneeling on a steel grille, handling a heavy echidna that was grimly gripping a steel ladder, putting me at risk of toppling head-first into a water-filled sump).

The freed echidna

Over coffee afterwards, three friends asked me, separately, and within the space of a couple of minutes, if I was doing a book on echidnas. My answers were, respectively, “Naaah”, “Maybe” and “You betcha!”

My third interlocutor started out by assuming I would say yes, and before I could answer, she had reminded me that most children’s books about echidnas are cloying, saccharine tales of how an anthropomorphic Eddie the echidna couldn’t play with balloons. Those books aren’t about echidnas, they’re about overcoming disabilities, and while that’s socially useful, those books don’t advance understanding or inspire curiosity.

I had already decided that editing a poetry anthology for youngsters and completing a social history of science for oldsters would see me ready to hang up my pen and retire to gardening, leavened by watching noisy action movies and reading Proust, Joyce, P. D. James, Andrea Camilleri and other quality murder mysteries. Instead, I succumbed to peer pressure and launched into this

(Literary social climbers will be pleased to know that Proust and Joyce return in cameo roles in chapter 10, though this may be seen as a cunning ploy to convert certain library costs into tax deductions.)

Going home on the ferry, I started making notes, and I soon realised I would have to read a lot of technical stuff, but there was a story there, waiting to be told, and young readers would like it. Echidnas, spiny anteaters, porcupine anteaters (or Tachyglossus aculeatus if you have my sort of training), have odd quirks. My notes, my initial thoughts, included the following headings, all later went into my planning spreadsheet, and here they are:

* spiky, not at all cuddly;
* not really warm, lay eggs, suckle young:
* many scientific names;
* mainly solitary;
* good diggers (claws!);
* fossils, platypus relatives, Zaglossus;
* Sydney 2000 Olympic mascots: echidna, platypus and kookaburra;
* five-cent coin, postage stamp:
* echidna trains;
* do they drink water?

Over the next fortnight, my plan began to change, because in one week, Christine and I saw four different echidnas, and in the five days around Christmas 2020, we saw three more, and different, echidnas. Then when I started looking at the scientific literature, I realised the really good story was too complex for young readers.

My initial plan for an intellectually honest, stereotype-free, factual book for youngsters had to go on hold. Having declared to friends and family that echidnas (working title) is to be my Last Book, I may still come back to do a simpler version for youngsters, because we still don’t have all the answers, and that’s a good thing for young people (of all ages) to know.

In this book, you will find heaps of technical stuff about physiology, chromosomes, parasites, embryos, membranes, teeth and more. I promise one thing, though: as a children’s writer, I take all the facts, one at a time, and make each give a sound account of itself, but there will only be facts. There will be no flights of fantasy like one I found in Blazing Passion, the book a friend from Project Wombat passed on, complete with this blurb:

…a breathtaking romance that races from the turbulence of nineteenth-century England to the sweltering penal colonies in the Australian jungle…

The book in question was published by Playboy Books, and ‘Stephanie Blake’ is in reality two men who clearly know very little about Australia (“sweltering penal colonies in the Australian jungle”?), but, one assumes, given their publisher, know lots about erotic fantasy. Should you want a copy, Blazing Passion came out in 1978. To save your time, here’s a sample of what passes for dialogue there:

“I’ll fix you up a proper feast. Platypus eggs. Bacon. Sausage and pancakes. And real coffee …”

Actually, I do offer one flight of fantasy later on in the book, but it is clearly fanciful. Finding it is something I leave to the reader, but it’s not the bit about socks full of sea urchins. Those are totally real, and also rate a mention in Sheep.

But that's another story.

Actually, what is a whole 'nother story is that I am resuming control of my out-of-print works and republishing under the Amazon Print-on-demand system.

More on that, later...

I aten't dead yet

 If you haven't heard of Granny Weatherwax, that will make no sense.

This is just to say that I'm still here, I've been working flat out, and the new book is now complete, and the second, adverted to below, is marinating, so normal service will be resumed shortly, once I have got the pitching worked out.

Some bits and pieces will show up here, and I will now offer some hints about the subject matter of the second book.

Yep, that's right. The topic is kidneys, or something sounding a lot lot like that. I wasn't going top do it, but I succumbed to peer pressure.

They saw the difference.

My recent silence has been because I have been selecting a wide range, 140,000 words to complete this book. My cover illustration, if you can't work it out, is one of Charles Babbage's difference engines. (My covers never end up going on the book, but because I've done a passable job, the designers make an effort.)

I'm fairly happy with the text, and it's being shared with friends this weekend. In a week or so, I will start pitching it to a couple of print publishers, getting in before Christmas. A social history involves looking mainly at why people did things, but adding something of how they did it. 

Why is this necessary? Because the fun bits are the background gossip, like my story of how Darwin was inspired by a false belief and the way Becquerel found radioactivity because the weather was bad. Again, most of us have no idea what Heinrich Hertz was up to when he discovered radio waves, or what Balmer was doing when he explained the lines that show up in the spectrum.

I mentioned Balmer six years back, when I wrote about the fraudulent work of Dulong and Petit, but I never dealt with it here, so here's a taster for you.

Balmer’s lines

Do you remember the spectroscope/spectrograph in chapter 1? By the mid-1880s, spectroscopy had come a long way. The lines in the absorption spectrum had been pinned down, one by one, so the exact wavelengths of the hydrogen lines could be identified. That left a major puzzle: why did the lines appear where they did in the spectrum?

Johann Balmer set out to make sense of a jumble of numbers. In this, he was like Bode, or Dulong and Petit with their mathematical rule tying specific heats and atomic weights together, or even Maria Goeppert Mayer (next), who found certain ‘magic numbers’ of neutrons and protons that were associated with very stable nuclei.

In the real world, laws do not leap out at you. They usually start when somebody goes data-snooping. That means making lists of measurements, and poring over them to see if there is any pattern to offer a hint about a rule lying beneath the measurements.

Balmer found a relationship linking four of the hydrogen lines in the visible spectrum. He decided there should be another hydrogen line, right on the edge of the ultraviolet, a line of which he had no knowledge. He checked, and the line was there, as predicted, so Balmer’s rather odd little equation was confirmed. Score one point to data-snooping.

Balmer had some trouble reconciling the values reported by different observers. With hindsight, probably the observers were looking at stars with differing degrees of red shift? As we will see later, the red shift was important, once people detected it and chased it down. To find his formula, Balmer found a common factor, deduced from Anders Ångström’s measurements on the first four hydrogen lines, which gave him a value, b = 3645.6x10^-7mm. Here, in translation, is his explanation of how b fits in:

The wavelengths of the first four hydrogen lines are obtained by multiplying the fundamental number b = 3645.6 in succession by the coefficients 9/5; 4/3; 25/21 and 9/8. At first sight, these coefficients do not form a regular series; but if we multiply the numerical values in the second and the fourth numbers by 4, we see a consistent regularity appearing [the series becomes 9/5, 16/12, 25/21, 36/32] and the coefficients have for numerators the numbers 3², 4², 5² and 6² and for denominators a number that is less by 4 [than the numerator].

For several reasons it seems to me probable that the four coefficients which have just been given belong to two series, so that the second series includes again the terms of the first series; and so I am able to present the formula for the coefficients in the more general form m²/(m²-n²), in which m and n are whole numbers.

That is to say, the wavelengths of the hydrogen lines are given by l=b(m²/(m²-n²)). Now back to Balmer:

For n=1 we obtain the series 4/3, 9/8, 16/15, 25/24 etc., for n=2 the series 9/5, 16/12, 25/21, 36/32, 49/45, 64/60, 81/77, 100/96 etc. In this second series the second term is already in the first series but in a reduced form.

Balmer compared the first four hydrogen lines as measured by Ångström with calculated values. In Ångström units (10^–10 metres), the values for the lines are:

Alpha line: Balmer: 6562.08, Ångström: 6562.10, difference: +0.02

Beta line: Balmer: 4860.8, Ångström: 4860.74, difference: -0.06

Gamma line: Balmer: 4340, Ångström: 4340.1, difference: +0.1

Delta line: Balmer: 4101.3, Ångström: 4101.2, difference: -0.1

Clearly, the model is a very close fit to reality, but Balmer went looking for his fifth hydrogen line: this was the acid test. He calculated that it would be at 49/45x3645.6 = 3969.65 Ångström units.

I knew nothing of such a fifth line, which must lie within the visible part of the spectrum...and I was compelled to assume that the temperature relations were not favourable to the development of this line or that the formula was not generally applicable.

On reference to Professor Hagenbach he informed me that many more hydrogen lines are known which have been measured by Vogel and by Huggins...[and] he was kind enough to make a comparison of the wave lengths thus determined...

There was something going on here. This sort of close fit has to have a reason behind it, but for the time being, all people could do was look out for a cause.

In time, they would find it, and so did Maria Goeppert-Mayer, but while that's what comes next in the book.

 

The girl who hated poetry

From the case notes of Dr 'Harry' Truman, counsellor.

Eliza D came to see me in despair. "It's Henry," she said. "We're engaged to be married. but whenever I want to talk of love, he starts spouting poems..."

"Which poets?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said, "but he called me his 'bright star' the other day..."

"That's Keats," I said. "I think he loves you."

"Another time, he said 'My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you' but he never touched me."

"Keats again," I told her. "I think you're going to be fine. Marry him!"

"I don't know," she said. "The other day, I decided to test him out by taking off my clothes, but when he should have been getting interested, he sat back and started babbling about unclasping my warmed jewels..."

"That's also Keats," I said. "The Eve of St Agnes, very romantic..."

"You might think it's romantic, but I think he's made of stone, and it's sending me round the twist!"

I stopped her there. "Eliza, old thing, if you can't stand the Keats, get out of the hitching."

Being an Australian writer

The perceptive reader may have noticed a hiatus. the reason will be explained shortly. I now do a monthly column for a CBCA newsletter called iRead, but as it may not be accessible to all, I plan to follow up with a release here, a couple of months later. This is the first.

There’s a game I play overseas, and you can play it as well, once we can get away. Sit in a coffee shop in Riga, a wine bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps, a Greek café in Banff, a chippie in Glasgow or a restaurant in Reykjavik, and say “G’day!” with a carrying voice, with vowels as flat as a goanna B-double roadkill. Then watch the Australian heads swivel, seeking an unseen compatriot who may have news from home. That single “G’day!” reminds them of where home is, but they never find me.

I knew from a tender age that I would be a writer, and an Australian writer at that, because Australia has always been my home. I may speak the rounded vowels of Received Pronunciation, but when I write and play games, a streak of larrikinism oozes out.

My early role models were Norman Lindsay with his Magic Pudding, Dorothy Wall, who wrote Blinky Bill to kill off the koala-shooting trade and Leslie Rees, whose ‘Digit Dick’ books and some of his Oz wildlife stories resonated. It was Henry Lawson who set me going with a short story His Country—After All, where an Australian in New Zealand smells the smoke of a fire made of gum leaves and gum twigs, and gets all nostalgic for home.

The catch: you can’t write smells, though Lawson gave it a good go. If you want to give a book an Australian flavour, you need the right words, from the right period. For the past decade, I have been nailing down Australian words, where they came from, and when, using the National Library’s Trove collection of digitised newspapers.

I started on this, thinking I might one day write some historical fiction, even though my day job has been writing straight-out history. I think it began with an idle thought about when the billy came into use. A search on (and note the wording!) fulltext:"quart pot" AND "tea" will show that the humble billy was a quart pot first of all. The billy was a Tasmanian coinage, I think.

With some distress, I traced the earliest use of “two bob” back to Charles Dickens, and what could be more Australian than “true blue”? Alas, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser mentioned in a filler in 1827 that the term was in use as early as 1737, in England. Struth, Bruce!

So what about that quintessentially Oz term, ‘larrikin’, which I define as calling “g’day” in foreign places? Well, ‘larrikin’ emerged without warning in Melbourne’s The Argus in 1870. We had paddocks and sheoaks before 1810, and sly grog by 1825, though it seems people didn’t shout drinks until the 1850s.

Squatters were around from 1825, but back then, they were shady characters, while until 1805, bushrangers weren’t even thieves, they were just bushmen. Being an Australian writer has its pitfalls!

My researches are online at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/early-language.htm

Food and drink in 1859

This is the last of a series of entries are drawn from chapter 7 of my book, Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World, and they all deal with life in that era. For background on the book, see the first entry in the series, Life in 1859, but if you just want to see the others, use the tag 1859, which appears at the end of each entry.

They were about to be food hogs as well, going on a later account in Scientific American which said customers at the Handel Festival ate 1600 dozen sandwiches, 1200 dozen pork pies, 400 dozen Sydenham pastries, 800 veal and ham pies, 480 hams, 3509 chickens, 120 galantines of lamb, 240 forequarters of lamb, 150 galantines of chicken, 60 raised game pies, 3022 lobster salads, 2325 dishes of salmon mayonnaise, 300 score of lettuce, 41,000 buns at a penny each, 52,000 twopenny buns, 32,249 ices, 2419 dozen ‘beverages’, 1150 dozen ale and stout, 403 Crystal Palace puddings, 400 jellies, nine tuns of roast and boiled beef, 400 creams, 350 fruit tarts, 3500 quarts of tea, coffee and chocolate and 485 tongues. 

“The consumption of wines, which was enormous, had not been ascertained when our account was made up”, it concluded.

In some parts of the world, people may have been starving, but London was not the only major city that did very nicely. In 1858, New York city’s inhabitants accounted for 191,374 beeves, 10,128 cows, 36,675 veals, 551,479 swine. Each week, a thousand beeves came to New York from Illinois alone. Lake Superior farms exported 7 million tons of corn and oats and more than 3 million bushels of wheat in 1859. Ten years earlier, it had been a mere 1400 bushels of wheat, said Archer B. Hulbert, who had looked into the matter.

Feeding habits changed quickly. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, London had only half a dozen restaurants listed in a guide for visitors, all of them pricey. By 1859, restaurants were becoming common around Soho, where many of them were opened by foreign immigrants. Their leader, if they had one, must surely have been Alexis Soyer, who started out as the second cook to Prince de Polignac at the French Foreign Office. During the July revolution of 1830, he left Paris for London and took the post of chef at the Reform Club, where he cooked for a number of English aristocrats. On the morning of Queen Victoria’s coronation on June 28, 1838, he served breakfast for 2000 guests.

Soyer was a Victorian celebrity chef. In 1847, he wrote to the press about the famine in Ireland, and went to Dublin at the government’s request to set up kitchens to serve soup and meat at low cost. He also wrote a sixpenny book, Soyer’s Charitable Cookery, and gave the profits to charity. He resigned his Reform Club position in 1850 to open his Great Exhibition restaurant, but took a loss of £7000. 

He spent the next four years promoting his various books and also his “magic stove”, a spirit burner which could be used at the table.

In 1855, he wrote to The Times, proposing to go to the Crimea at his own expense to advise on feeding an army. While Florence Nightingale changed the way the sick were treated at Scutari, Soyer changed the way soldiers were fed, beginning with the hospital diet sheets. For the healthy soldiers, he designed an ingenious field stove which the British army only stopped using recently.

When he died in 1858, times had changed. If Soyer had opened a restaurant then, he probably would have had more luck than he did in 1851. He was famous enough after his death for his name to be evoked across the Atlantic by Scientific American in an engineering context:

Soyer always maintained that there could be no good cooking where the scales, the watch and the thermometer were not in constant reference. These instruments are as essential to steam-engineering as to cookery.

Isabella Beeton was another celebrity of her age. Mrs Beeton, as we recall her today, died of puerperal fever in 1865, having made herself famous with her books on household management, which appeared in print when she was barely 22. Her recipes appeared first in her husband’s magazine, The English Woman’s Domestic Magazine, which ran for the three years from 1859 to 1861, then her book Household Management followed in 1861.

Like the magazine, it marks an era when women who could read, still had to manage their households: literacy was filtering down the social ladder. Contrary to folklore, she offered no recipe for cooking rabbit beginning “First, catch your rabbit . . .”, but the format she adopted for her recipes is still used today.

In fairness, Mrs Beeton was not the first, just the most successful of her kind. Elizabeth Ellet produced The Practical Housekeeper; A Cyclopaedia of Domestic Economy in 1857 (a man of his times, her husband, William Ellet spent his final years as a chemical consultant for the Manhattan Gas Company until he died in 1859). Eliza Acton wrote a number of recipe books, including Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845 and The English Bread Book in 1857 before she also died in 1859, the year in which Mrs. M. H. Cornelius published her The Young Housekeeper’s Friend in Boston.

“Poverty and oysters always seem to go together” said Sam Weller. “ ...the poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters.” By the 1850s, natural oyster beds were almost depleted in many places. Notwithstanding Sam’s view, a meal of fried Olympia oysters and eggs was usually the most expensive on the menu in California, making it the meal lucky miners would order when they struck gold. The dish gained the nickname “Hangtown Fry” after a condemned man asked for the dish as his last meal — or so the legend runs.

There was a new condiment for the daring to try: in 1859, a Colonel White made his first batch of hot sauce from “Tobasco” chillies and offered bottles of it for sale. A slightly different formulation was patented in 1870 as “Tabasco”, benefiting those who think wasabi tastes bland on its own.

The demand for oysters, with or without sauce, was such that the oyster beds near Ceduna in South Australia, an area only settled and exploited after 1836, were already under threat from over-harvesting. Around the Bassin d’Arcachon on the coast of France, southwest of Bordeaux, a place where wild oysters had been taken since Roman times, the locals were forced to start farming oysters in 1859.

At the end of the year, a plan was announced to use a diving bell to harvest oysters from the bottom of Long Island Sound, and it was suggested that parties would be able to go down in the bell, collect their own oysters, and consume them at a depth of 6 fathoms. Scientific American offered an explanation for not eating oysters when there was no R in the month. English oysters, said the reporter, spawn for about six weeks, starting around June!

“Refrigerators” were on sale in 1859 but these were just ice boxes, used to make drinks cooler. Francis Bacon had died in 1626 of a chill, said to have been triggered by experimenting with a chicken stuffed with snow to see if it would keep longer, but refrigerators were rarely used to stop food going off. All the same, ice was a useful commodity in the mid–1850s. Ice ships loaded up in Massachusetts and rounded Cape Horn to make sales in Australia.

James Pimm was the landlord of an oyster bar in London’s financial district. He sold his gin-based Pimm’s No 1 Cup from the 1840s. With backing from some of his customers, he began bottling and selling it in 1859. Beer and ale were still preferred as safer than water, with coffee and tea, even later in the century when water supplies improved. Water was feared as tainted and impure, and in most cases, rightly so.

Even supposedly safe alcoholic drinks carried risks, and Scientific American listed tests for adulterants. Copper in beer could be detected by evaporating the beer down to “the consistency of an extract” and then burning it, treating the ash and looking for a blue trace that became darker when ammonia was added. Lead in beer could be detected by adding sodium sulfate and looking for a white precipitate, and the article went on to explain how a large variety of other adulterants could also be detected by chemical tests on beer extracts.

The water was full of germs and no good, the food was full of adulterants and no good, the air was full of poisons and noxious: it was enough to make you sick. Then again, in 1859, there ever so many ways to make people sick.

Young Dark Emu and Bruce Pascoe's Eve Pownall Award

Today, the Children’s Book Council of Australia announced that Bruce Pascoe’s Young Dark Emu was the winner of the Eve Pownall Award for information books. Earlier this year, bigots associated with a magazine called Quad Rant (or some such) started a withering fire, directed at the CBCA for daring to shortlist the book for the prize. It was wrong, they said, without evidence, so it wasn’t an information book. Keep this unsupported allegation of a dearth of evidence in mind, as it’s common practice among bigots to make claims like this. It seems that if they disagree with something, it isn't evidence.

The CBCA must withdraw the shortlisting, they demanded. Now it has won the top prize, I imagine they will be foaming at the mouth. At the back of their complaint was the fact that author Bruce Pascoe says, from the viewpoint of an Indigenous man and scholar, that the life of the first Australians was a lot more complex than we had been led to believe by the spotty Europeans who had invaded this land. But Pascoe wasn’t expressing opinions about what was right and what was wrong: he looked at what the whitefellas had reported, and dealt with facts, whitefella facts, recorded by whitefellas.

That's hard to get around, and in the Culture Wars, bigots don’t like that. They call people like me “Black-Armband-Wearers”, but that’s OK: we say they’re all wearing white blindfolds, so the honours are even. The other, and nastier side is what they don’t dare say up-front: Pascoe looks like a whitefella, so he can’t be a blackfella.

I’m clearly a whitefella, albeit one of mixed race, and I’m a trained biologist so I know quite a bit about race and culture. I also write Australian history, so I know a lot of things that get left out of Australian history in our schools, like the items Pascoe has dug out, so I’m well-placed to examine his evidence, and see if it stacks up.

School history is commonly a matter of learning lists of names, dates and bullet points. School history as it relates to explorers rarely mentions the Indigenous men, women and boys who accompanied the explorers, except when they can be cast as “faithful servants”. School history never mentions that most of the explorers followed what they called “native roads”, and how many people know that this began in February 1788?

Those who have read my works of history will know about this sort of thing. My books have been published at various times by Allen and Unwin, Murdoch Books (Pier 9), Five Mile Press and in the last decade, the National Library of Australia.

I began my working life, fully intending to be a pre- and post-Islamic Mediaeval Javanese historian, but when the 1965 coup in Indonesia banjaxed my hopes, I became a botanist instead (as one does), but I retained the synoptic viewpoint of the historian and carried it into my scientific work.

As a writer (I don’t call myself “an author”, it’s too pretentious), my writings have mainly dealt with either science and technology, or with Australian history. If people are going to criticise the Eve Pownall judges’ decision in Young Dark Emu, because somebody claims the judges lack historical training, I must be considered well-equipped to assess both the work, and the judges’ decision. Quick answer: I endorse both, totally.

I have a policy of not arguing with creationists, climate deniers, anti-vaxxers or bigots, because life’s too short to waste trying to rescue sub-humans who cannot connect their other neuron or express themselves clearly. This is a statement of fact, and what follows is a set of facts, not opinions.

The Eve Pownall awards are for information books, and they come from the Children’s Book Council of Australia. I know a fair amount about these awards, because I won one in 2010, I was runner-up in 2007, and I have been “long-listed” a number of times since then, including this year, when I missed the short list. I didn’t mind missing out, because the book I saw as the pick of the crop, Young Dark Emu, was there.

I’m a harsh critic of bilge, and my other main professional skill is in spotting fraud and dishonesty. Because I have written in great detail about Australian history, I was more ready than most to assess Young Dark Emu, and I did so early this year, knowing that assorted Quadrant gibbons were hurling lumps of whatever gibbons hurl.

I attacked his sources and the premises as a conscientious Devil’s Advocate, even though I agreed with Pascoe’s general position. He and his book passed my audit with flying colours, and I have a spreadsheet that demonstrates this. I will share my spreadsheet with supporters and critics of Pascoe, but I will require proof of professional standing from the critics.

I say this because the lead stirrer in this matter seems to be a Queensland housewife (a dismissive pejorative that I stand by) who claims to be a retired teacher, although looking at some of her letters to the Canberra Times in the 1980s, when she appears to have sold dinghies, I am inclined to doubt this. She does not engage in reasoned debate—consider this 2018 letter she fired off to The Australian (a newspaper for which I worked, 30 years earlier):

‘Dave Sharma says “like most Australians, I accept the evidence for man-made climate change” (“The swing with a sting in its tail: why Wentworth was such a painful lesson”, 27/10). The assumption that most Australians agree with him is unsupported.’

Some two thirds of a century ago (yeah, I’m approaching advanced middle age), I was a debater, and enjoyed nothing more than massacring the sort of idiot who relied on assertions that red was blue. They follow this up with a truculent “So there!”, and try to change the subject: this may work in schoolyard bullying, but rebuttal-by-thuggish-denial fails dismally in intellectual circles.

Hackett calls herself “an author” on the strength of a single book, a travel memoir, published in 2002 by New Holland, a reputable publishing house. Apparently she has also self-published six booklets of local history.

Riffing on Martin Amis’ infamous comment about writing for children firmly, I suppose if I were brain-damaged, I might write a local history, though even then, I would draw the line at letters to the editor, or writing for Quadrant. I want the 50-odd books I have had published to be my memorial, not some vile drivel in a hate mag funded by shady sources.

Hackett does not engage in scholarship of any sort: rather, she takes in the washing of others. She cites somebody called Russell Marks who (according to her) criticised an account of an event involving Charles Sturt: the objection is about ascertaining the latitude and longitude of an event. Pascoe had credited two friends with identifying the location, but the Quadrant gnomes didn’t like it, because it struck them as unnecessary.

‘His [Sturt’s] journal also records that the incident took place on the 3-4 November, as anyone who had actually read the journals would know. These details can be verified on pages 70 and 71 of Sturt’s Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia. Put another way, there is no way that Pascoe’s researchers could not have stumbled upon the fact that Sturt had done their work for them.’

The event is described on Sturt’s page 76, the location was identified on page 70 (not “pages 70 and 71” as stated), and more to the point, if you are going to play the nit-picking pedant game, you need to win your spurs first. Sturt's Narrative was in two volumes,  the text referred to here is to be found in volume 2! (Now do you see why I don’t waste time on these people?)

While we are at it, the Marks objection, as cited by Hackett, is said to be to a footnote to a statement on page 98, but it isn’t a footnote at all: what they cite is plain text on pages 100 – 101. Any Year 8 of mine who made a hash of citations like that would soon be set straight, but why did Pascoe’s friends determine a date and place for Sturt to be fed on roast duck and bread in the first place?

Marks is clearly unfamiliar with Sturt’s eminently readable but slightly sprawling style. Items which are six pages apart in the journal, like (a) the estimated position and (b) Sturt’s feast might have been near each other or not. That was the way Sturt wrote, and I know, because over several years, earlier in this century, I read all of the published explorers’ journals, and even some of the unpublished ones. I created a massive database, and that allowed me to assess the content of ‘Dark Emu’.

The simple fact is that most of the early writers didn’t ‘get it’. ‘Blacks’, they thought, were savages who did nothing and knew nothing. The “dispersals” (killings) went on, as Emily Creaghe noted in 1883:

‘Mr. Watson has 40 pairs of blacks’ ears nailed round the walls collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks.’

As a scientist, I am aware of the shortcomings of the Australian biota as agricultural material: without imported plants and seeds, farming as we invaders know it wasn’t possible, but land management was, and Pascoe reminds us of just how far this went. It was far more than firestick farming: there was careful cropping, and even planting in places.

Of course, what we are ignoring is the elephant in the room: Pascoe doesn’t ‘look black’, they say, so he must be a fraud! I am 25% Scots, but I have a Scots name, and my heart lifts to the skirl of the pipes, because I was brought up that way. Culture is learned at the parental knee, not inherited in the DNA.

My father knew an Indigenous piper whose party trick was to play ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. My party trick was to sit at my Scots/Welsh father’s feet at Hogmanay, as he warmed up the pipes. I’m a bleepin’ Scot and I’ve got a sgian dubh for your black heart if you say otherwise!

Now just to play the Hackett bluff-them-with-denial game, she says: “No qualified scholars or reputable academics agree with Pascoe’s claims. The accepted scientific and academic view is that the Australian Aborigines were hunter-gatherers.”

This qualified scholar says “bollocks”. So there.

Please feel free to share this.