Falling stanards

This is recycled from another blog that is about to be withdrawn.  I thought I had already saved it to here, but apparently not.  I'm rather busy still, so here's some brain food.

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Yes, I know, that title...it's annoying when you see a typo like "stanards", but as we get older, we tend to fuss more about such things.  Rest assured: it was deliberate, a bit like running one's finger-nails down the blackboard (yes, I'm an old teacher, and I used to do that on hot Friday afternoons to get them (and me) awake).

I want to offer a set of newspaper clippings that I assembled, some little time ago.  I used to draft rude letters for an exalted personage, and we were always getting whinges about falling standards.

It occurred to me that I should employ a well-known quote, variously attributed to Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Cicero and others (if I had to choose one, my money would be on Cicero, but that's another story).  It goes like this, and the idea was to show that this particular line is ancient:

"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."

"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress."

If you are ever tempted to quote the stuff above, please be aware that it is almost certainly bogus. What follows, though is the Real McCoy.

1.  At a recent examination . . . only 40 per cent of those who presented themselves secured a pass.  This is a truly deplorable reflection of the examination system, which after all these years, and at the expenditure of an enormous amount of public money, has thus shown itself totally incapable of teaching the simple requirements of reading, writing and arithmetic . . . If the instruction imparted at our schools is so lamentably defective that it merely turns out pupils so shamefully inefficient that they are unable to undertake even humble clerical duties, what in the name of goodness is it that the scholars do to learn to equip them for anything better? 

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2.  Inspectors complain of the English which they do or do not find in the primary schools. Reading lacks fluency and expression; articulation is defective . . . Spelling has not reached a high standard . . . Grammar is the bugbear of most teachers and children . . . Even writing has not reached the satisfactory stage. "Back to the 3Rs" will be the necessary slogan if improvement does not soon show up. 

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3.  Half the girls leaving school nowadays can't wash up the breakfast dishes, cook an egg, fry a chop, or wash their own stockings. But they can turn out coloured drawings that would make a cow bilious, and can do eurhythmic stunts like a professional dancer. But they can't do three messages without making a mistake in the change, while an attempt to peel a potato drives their parents to tears.
And the boys - they can't break up a fruit case for the copper fire, knock in a nail to hang up a cheap calendar, or be entrusted with two orders for the butcher. But they can talk wireless like a scientist, discuss psycho-analysis, and play handball 14 hours a day.
A lot of expensive faddism has crept into our education system, and the things that they will be called upon to do every day of their lives, they cannot do. 

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4.  Can pupils who attend the primary and secondary schools of the State spell properly? Is sufficient time devoted to the subject, and are the methods employed effective?
Many people interested in the intellectual development of the rising generation maintain that, judging by the examples of spelling which come under their notice, the answers must be given in the negative. 

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5.  After the introduction of a spelling list into primary schools, there was considerable informal discussion of the effect on the standards of spelling. As objective evidence of any change would be of value to the Curriculum Committee, the Director-General (on May 1 1951) approved an investigation to compare spelling standards with those of five and sixteen years earlier. To summarise the views expressed there was a general, but not a unanimous, feeling that a drop in standards had occurred which was especially evident as mis-spellings in written expression. 

Now here are the sources:

1:         Truth, 9 September 1915.
2:         Brisbane Daily Standard, 4 October 1917
3:         Truth, 24 December, 1924
4:         Telegraph, 27 August 1930
5:         Research and Curriculum Branch, Bulletin No. 6, 1952

But wait, there's more!

Here are some more comments on how society is going to bits, items that I dug out more recently. This time, the sources are supplied, with hot links to the originals.

ALBANY BOYS'.

This school makes steady and satisfactory progress. More attention - has been paid, during the last year to the lower standards. The arithmetic of the second and third standards is still deficient. Very few scholars provide their own books, using instead the free stock originally intended only for children receiving gratuitous instruction. 

The Western Australian Times Tuesday 27 August 1878 

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BIG DECLINE SEEN IN MORAL STANDARDS
The value placed on chastity has undergone a bewildering change in our time; and promiscuity and pre-marital experiences were regarded "tolerantly by an increasing number of young people," said Dr. Irene Sebire, Child Guidance Clinic director, at Blackfriars, Sydney, speaking at the summer school of the, Australian Institute of Political Science.
"The family to-day is passing through a crisis-which many feared it might not manage to survive," she said. 

The Canberra Times Tuesday 30 January 1951 

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"I do not know whether something is wrong with our social standards, or whether it is because of defective education, but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that drink is, consumed in enormous quantities in excess of that required for refreshment." 

The Canberra Times Thursday 17 February 1927 

So next time a mate starts rabbiting on about the awful younger people, just remember that people once said the same about us!

The entombed miner

Well, it's been a month, and I have been frantically busy, collecting an award for the book that came out in May, a Whitley from the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales for Australian Backyard Naturalist, which they apparently liked, and then doing the publicity for the book that came out on October 1, Curious Minds, and then working on the next book which is straightforward Australian history for ages 7 to 14, a broad view of a few billion years.

So as a sop to my conscience, here is a story that I referred to earlier this year, the tale of a man who nearly drowned in a desert. For Australian readers who recall Stuart Diver at Thredbo, there are some parallels here, and that's not a weak pun on "diver", either.  The story kept a nation enthralled.  I won't have room for this in the current work, but I will get it into print some time.  You get to read it first.

* * * * *

A section showing the whole mine, to give a
 sense of perspective, and a portrait of
"the entombed miner".

For journalists, the story of Modesto Varischetti had everything. For starters, the man they called "the entombed miner" risked being drowned in a desert. He was a widower with children in Italy who had come to Australia to earn enough to keep them.

Best of all: the plan to rescue him with divers in special suits, rushed by train from the coast, 600 km away. They had drama, a risk of slow drowning, a man buried alive, children who would be orphans, and the hope technology would save him.

Varischetti's position

Dry places can be dangerous when it rains, because the rain runs across the dry ground in a muddy, rocky torrent. Around 4 pm on Tuesday March 19, 1907, heavy rain fell for two hours near the Westralia and East Extension mine, north of Coolgardie.

The run-off flowed towards the pit head, and plunged down the shaft. Other mines in the area also took in water, but this mine was hit hardest.

The first the miners knew of the problem was when a torrent of mud and debris hit them, but twenty of them were rescued, hauled up the shaft in skips, metal bins on cables. Only one miner was left, and the missing man was soon identified as Varischetti.

Zeroing in on levels 9 and 10, this is the position Varischetti was in when the water stopped pouring in, and before baling started.
The mine was divided into levels, each 100 feet, some 30 metres, deep. Level 9 was 270 metres down, level 10 was 300 metres below ground. The water filled the mine almost to level 9, and Varischetti had been on a drive, a horizontal tunnel, on level 10.

There seemed no hope for him, but he was in an air pocket in a blind vertical shaft, above the level 10 drive. When water filled the shaft, the air was compressed, but it held the water back so the trapped man did not drown. He sat back, and waited to be rescued.

People cheered when they heard that Varischetti was alive and tapping the rock in the shaft. At least he now had some hope, because the men above him had signalled their level with nine knocks and he had replied with ten. They knew where he was, but they had to get the water out of the way.

Pumping water from 270 metres down is difficult. The only way was to lower skips from the surface, haul them up, and tip the water somewhere away from the shaft. After some repairs, seven hours after the flood, water was being dragged out.

It was going to take at least ten days, and a different rescue method was needed. The young son of the local mining inspector, Josiah Crabb, came up with the answer. "Why don't you use a diver?" he asked. Enter Diver Hughes, as he was called. Frank Hughes was a former professional diver who had gone mining, so he knew mines and diving, but he had no diving suit or other equipment.

This was the age of the telegraph and the express train. Telegrams to Perth had a train rushing to the goldfields, with diving equipment and extra divers. It was a special train, with one coach, a brake van and an extra truck of coal as ballast to stop the train swaying, and it made the trip in record time.

Hughes planned to take in a second diving suit, put Varischetti in it, and bring him out. First he had to take in food, water, writing materials and an electric torch while baling continued. When the water dropped enough, Hughes walked through the drive, keeping his mouth close to the roof, without a diving suit. He made several trips as the water fell slowly, before Varischetti agreed to walk along the drive with him—though Hughes had to carry the exhausted man part of the way.

Late in the afternoon of March 28, the entombed miner left the shaft, 9 days and 2 hours after his ordeal had started. The excited crowd had been warned to stay quiet so as not to upset him, but spontaneous cheers broke out for all of those concerned. Worked up to a fever by the press, they cheered a great victory.

Frank Hughes and Thomas Hearne, another diver who helped, both received awards, medals and commendations, as well as the cheers of the mob. Even the Minister of Mines, who had done no more than have his staff meet the demands telegraphed from the goldfields, was decorated by the King of Italy. Nobody minded, because the humans had beaten nature.

Varischetti went back mining, and died at Kalgoorlie Government Hospital in 1920 of 'miner's phthisis', a dust disease of the lungs. He was just 46, and we soon forgot him.  Nobody commented on the irony of the man who nearly drowned dying of dust on the lungs.

Without telegraphs and express trains, the rescuers would have been too late. Without the telegraph lines that spanned Australia and the world and the steam presses and steam trains that delivered the news to a fascinated public in Australia and Italy, there would have been no wonder and nowhere near the level of celebration.

Modesto Varischetti would have just been another anonymous casualty of human greed.

If you want to know more about the history of gold in Australia, you could do worse than use this link which takes you to most of my research sources.

An unexpected change of direction

Any careful reader of this blog will realise that I sometimes diverge into history.

I am not an historian: I am a story-teller, but in history, there are just so many stories to tell.

Right at the moment, I have been side-tracked. With a new book due out in eight days, my publisher has thrown a "quicky" at me.  The history of Australia in about 120 chapters of 750 words each, before the New Year.  I am now busily writing my way into this by tackling one of the most difficult portions, the story of Australia in the Great War, or World War I.

Now I do military history fairly well: I even get awards for it, from time to time, but I'm not that keen on doing it, because there are too many sad stories to tell.

Today, I an working on the 1915 'Coo-ee March' from Gilgandra to Sydney, 320 miles, 500 km.  It started out with 30 bushmen and ended with 263 young men when they reached Sydney.

I have just clipped one bit from a newspaper story: you can see it on the right or you can read it in The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate (Parramatta), Saturday 13 November 1915, 11.

This is why I am not that keen on writing military history.

Mind you, I made that pretty clear when I blogged about a poem called My Son, some months back.

Am I being discourteous to the memories of those I write about?  I don't think so, because I believe that they went to war to make the world a better place for later generations.  If we know what went on, perhaps we can make some improvements without people having to die.

Oh, and for those who have been asleep, here's the new book, out in all good bookshops on October 1!  This one is written for Big People. but it is a spin-off from Australian Backyard Naturalist, inspired when I saw all the mouth-watering stuff at the National Library of Australia that wasn't usable in ABYN.

And now, I will replace my nose on the grindstone.

I'm back on deck

Just that: I haven't slipped between the cracks or fallen off my perch.  I'm just a bit busy.  Something more substantial in a day or two.

This is a nice wasp from Vanuatu, which is completely irrelevant, but which may distract you from my lack of activity.

Nasty-looking, isn't he?

Keeping snails and slugs away

A large land snail, found on club moss
under a banyan tree on Tanna, Republic
of Vanuatu on the Pacific Ocean.

A land snail from Margaret River,
Western Australia.

Are you fed up with slugs and snails?

This is a pbi, a partly-baked idea, suitable for somebody looking for a science project.  That means you need to do most of the work!

You can get rid of snails and slugs with bare copper wire, several dry cells (torch batteries—or flashlight batteries if you are American), or a small power pack (transformer-rectifier) and to test it, you will need some live slugs or snails.

Get some advice on connecting the batteries or the power pack to the wires. Look up <electronics components site:.au> for local suppliers and enter <battery holder> to find what you need. (That works in Australia, Americans may need to vary that wording.)

Old power packs from discarded phones or other gadgets will do, if they deliver 3 volts or less.

The idea is to make an electric fence to keep snails out of a seedling bed. The best design is two parallel wires, each connected to one terminal of your power supply.


You will need to work on insulating the wires from each other and the ground. I suggest using small pieces of polystyrene foam, cut from waste packaging and pushing the wires through, so as to keep the wires apart and out of contact with the ground.


Questions worth asking:

• How many volts does it take to repel a snail?

• What voltage do you need to keep slugs out?

• If they leave slime across the wires, does this conduct electricity and "flatten" the battery, or waste electricity? 

Some ancient history:

Now here is an old version of the electric fence, based on the way two different metals will generate a small current by forming a "galvanic couple", a sort of simple battery, presented by Septimus Piesse.

It was written up in English and American science journals before the end of 1863, so it is now a very old idea, first published in Scientific American in 1863. The image below comes from that journal.

How to set out the zinc and the copper. 
Scientific American May 2. 1863, p. 276. 

Having a few pet plants which slugs and snails are particularly fond of as food, I have devised the following simple and efficacious mode of protecting them against their and my enemies; and as this plan may be useful to some of your readers, I herewith send you a description of my galvanic circle.

Procure a flat ring of zinc, large enough to encircle the plant; make a slit in the ring after the manner of a keyring, so that it can be put round the stem of the plant and then rest upon the ground.

Now twist a copper wire into a ring very nearly of the same circumference as the flat zinc ring, and putting it round the plant, let it rest upon the zinc, as in the illustration.

No slug or snail will cross that magic circle; they can drag their slimy way upon the zinc well enough, but let them but touch the copper at the same time and they will receive a galvanic shock sufficient to induce them at once to recoil from the barrier.

A bit of simple introspection and research should lead you to the conclusion that the three volts mentioned in my design was massive overkill.

Death and the Rhinestone Maidens

And now for something completely different: an instruction in opera appreciation in one act, 'twixt the Cab Sav and Cav and Pag in the Café Mozart.

Death and vengeance, that's the stuff

A statue of Hans Sachs in Nuremberg. He appears in
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (which is German for

The Sound of Mucus).

Demanded by the opera buff —
They don't care who does the deeds.
So long as someone sings and bleeds.

They're not content with minor strife,
They have to see some loss of life.
One more thing: the operatic
Kind of death must be dramatic:

Make it that, and they won't gripe
If cause of death is trash and tripe.
A thrown-down gun, a fallen dagger
Will do to make the player stagger,

Sing and fall down on the left
While all the cast sing they're bereft.
In Wagner's operas, deathly pallor
Pays the entry to Valhalla –

Opera deaths are rarely cool,
And most are prone to ridicule.

Casting call: young Irish hoofers who don't quite understand what
Lohengrin is all about. It isn't actually an opera about a contented

cow, at least not the Wagner one. TheTossini version was, but who
has heard ofTossini today?

In Cavalleria Rusticana,
The hero's stabbed by a green banana.

And after that, it's all downhill
There's lots of sillier ways to kill:
Pagliacci dies a death more mean,
Crushed by a falling aubergine;

And in some opera by Rossini,
The murder's done by ripe zucchini.
If you think that's a weak libretto,
You haven't yet seen Rigoletto.

So that's the story, mark my word:
In opera, death is quite absurd.
If you're a star then one thing's certain:
You'll bleed before the final curtain.

Now off we go, the opera's on
But don't ask why they're all called "Don"
We've had our meal and it was filling
So let's avoid an off-stage killing.

This is dedicated to all those people who haven't realised yet that an opera is just a musical in which the story (called a libretto after the great writer Antonio Libretto) is much more complicated.

Caution: this post may contain traces of nuts.
That said, all facts contained herein are of equal reliability.

There is a new book on the way

I got back from Vanuatu (of which more later) on Wednesday night, and on Thursday morning, a courier arrived with a box from what is now my alpha-publisher, the National Library of Australia.

It's miserably wintry here, so I donned a windproof jacket and slipped out into the watery sunshine where Chris took a series of shots, most of which featured me squinting and blinking, but we achieved this one.

For those who know me best as a children's author, this is the other side of the coin, a serious look at the naturalists and natural history artists who visited (or in one or two cases were bred and raised in) Australia.

In many ways, this is a spin-off from Australian Backyard Naturalist which came out in May and which is drawing very pleasing reviews. That is most definitely a children's book, showing younger readers how to bother and enjoy the hidden life that is all around them.  (You can see some of my other books on the National Library bookshop's site.

Illustrations of an alleged bunyip skull,
drawn from the Sydney Morning Herald
by way of Trove.

The idea, when you write for an institution like the National Library is that you seek to showcase their collections. Libraries these days are far more than musty collections of old tomes: they have digital arms, collections of maps, paintings, real objects and more, and the library's staff are excellent at helping me pick the eyes out of what they have and want to flaunt.

Another side is that I get into the Trove digitised historical newspapers, and I show readers, in passing, just what gems can be found there.  On a personal note, I was interested to discover an engagement notice for my father to a lady whose name was mentioned once or twice with gritted teeth by my mother. This was before he met my mother, but there's some history there that I never knew: so you never know what will turn up.

For example, one of my upcoming books nails down a little-known conspiracy which was undertaken to get Australia's gold rush started.  More of that later, but it's a fascinating example of PR and social manipulation in colonial Australia. (There's more about that in the post before this one.)

Anyhow, back to Curious Minds, I was searching for illustrations from the NLA collections for Australian Backyard Naturalist, and having to pass up lots of delicious stuff that I knew well, involving people I knew well.  I fired off a casual email, suggesting to Susan Hall that there was probably a book there.  Equally casually, she asked for a rough outline, and just as casually, I slapped it together, suggesting that she put it in her backburner file, her bottom drawer, for later consideration.  I was in no rush, and thought it needed twelve months of good solid research.

Back came an email saying it was "go" and could I submit in six months?  I said it needed twelve months, but I was cajoled into working twice as hard and getting 12 months' work done in six.

The outline changed a bit as I found other people who merited greater discussion and I cut one or two out because there was no real interest. They were not people with curious minds.

My business card describes me as a freelance curious mind.  This levity is a cunning filter, because the po-faced, the prim and proper, the boring people I would never wish to work with, shy away at my informality, and good riddance.  The term "curious mind" first came into print when I had to write a blurb for a book, and I recalled an exchange with an old friend where he commented on my productivity and asked how I did it.

"I have a curious mind," I told him.

"Yes, I can see that," he said—but the meaningful way he said it showed that he was playing with the words.

I needed no more than that, and so the blurb read something like "Peter Macinnis finds that his friends and his detractors all agree (with differing intonations) that he has a curious mind."

This is one illustration that didn't fit, which is a shame. Only a
Frenchman like Charles Lesueur would give the male kangaroo

  such a lascivious eye. Click on this image to see a larger version.

And now it's a book title.  And a book, which I have in my hands.  It weighs 1050 grams, it looks beautiful (that's why I like working with the NLA: they do superb design work), and now I have another task on my hands: to clean up and redesign the information page about the book. Right now, it's sloppy and messy.

I took three mss away with me, and worked through half of one of them, so now I need to make many, many changes to the Word file, I need to finish working through that ms, and I need to get onto two others. I have a radio talk to record next week, and I always tweak my scripts up to the very last moment, and I am giving a workshop for Australian Backyard Naturalist in Canberra on August 23 (scroll down in the link) and I have some more fieldwork coming up. I will, I hope, be a little more forthcoming with fun stuff for the younger reader.

That said, I owe this blog a piece on writing for younger readers, and why Martin Amis was a prat when he suggested that he would only write for children if he suffered brain damage.

Two blocks of silence

I have now fallen silent for a week.  The reason is simple: I have been finishing off the manuscripts of two new books and pitching a third.

Now "finishing off" is relative, and "pitching" doesn't mean the product is finished.  Nothing is ever finished, and even when it is, I still come back and look again, and suffer from the writer's special Hell, an exquisitely refined version of esprit d'escalier, the great ideas that erupt too late.

Anyhow, one of these, the one I am pitching is my version of Crooked Mick of the Speewah. There are two of my tales visible on the Interweb in a sort of late beta form: Crooked Mick Builds a Railway and The Great Speewah Flood.  It doesn't fit into neat categories, and I may end up I may end up releasing it as an e-book, without the help of a publisher.

This is not the route I would usually follow, but this is a niche genre, tall tales and folk lore, common to many cultures, but told with an Australian bias.  The stories are highly polished, because they have been shared and discussed and in many cases, presented live, in character.  I know they work, but I can't get marketing people to see it.  So just for once, I may break one of my golden rules and self-publish.  We'll see.

The other two works are history.  Now I have a beef with history as it is served up to the young: it's a boring set of dates and name—or it's a regurgitation of some earlier book.

Well, I'm trying to provide some new material to derail the present discourse.  Case 1 is the gold rushes, where my line is a somewhat iconoclastic one: Edward Hammond Hargraves, far from discovering gold in Australia, entered into a conspiracy to foment a gold rush that the authorities couldn't stop.

That's him on the right. His co-conspirator was one Enoch Rudder, who later founded the town of Kempsey. He's there is the second shot, seen as a venerable old gent.

From there, I go to look at what creates a gold rush, and a lot of extra practical stuff, but the main thing is: lots of people found gold first, but these two knew how to manipulate people to get a gold rush started.

I have a brief for the prosecution: these two outfoxed the colonial authorities with a vengeance, and this is a Good Yarn.

That's what history should be about: good yarns that show you how things work.

Case 2, which I will talk about in a day or two if I have time, is called Curious Colonists, and it's about some of the less usual suspects, including a young man who preferred to hang over coming to Botany Bay, but time is running out before I go off to climb volcanoes and dive around coral and stuff.

We are leaving our son to mind the house (sorry, those burglars who were silly enough to think writers have money!) and heading off with two tablets loaded with e-books, one netbook and three hard copy mss to read through.

So this may, or may not, be the last blog for a couple of weeks.

Collecting engravings

Acacia sp.

Here in Australia, our "winter" is almost at an end, according to the flowers.  That said, the sun is low in the sky, even at noon, and that make this the ideal time to get out in the bush around Sydney, looking for Aboriginal rock engravings.

Today, my wife and I were taken by Matt Hunt to see some we didn't know, not far from home, within cooee of Oxford Falls and within earshot of radio-controlled model aircraft.

During the morning, I counted the following in flower:

• 7 wattles (Acacia sp.)

Acacia longifolia.



Boronia sp.



• 2 daisies,

• 1 Hibbertia,

• 1 Grevillea,

• 2 flannel flowers (Actinotus sp.),

• 1 Woollsia,

• 1 Boronia,

• 1 Leucopogon,

• 2 Epacris species,

• 1 Eriostemon,

• 1 pea, probably Hardenbergia,

•  1 Banksia.

Boronia sp

 We also saw wallaby tracks, counted a dozen or so birds, and got to a rather wonderful collection of Aboriginal rock art.

Most of this has been almost completely untouched since white people arrived in 1788 with diseases which killed off most of the custodians and severed the spiritual and mythical links between the engravings and the culture that sustained them and was sustained by them.

Click on any of the engravings shots to see larger versions.  Note that no copyright
claim is made on these: they are all Creative Commons attribution shots, but note also
that larger (and unenhanced) originals are available on request for any good cause.

They have been there for 224 years, almost untouched, except when they are harmed by vandals or fools. Sadly, we have a few of those.

The figures are all placed on flat slabs of Triassic Hawkesbury sandstone, most of them on high ridges, and when I was young, I was taught that this was so women and uninitiated boys would not see them, or because it seemed closer to the spirits/gods.  It is more likely that the most suitable stone is that with a high silica content, which is more resistant, and so ends up staying where it was, up high.  I definitely know of sites which can be looked down on.

The figures include humans, food and other animals, and sometimes, spiritual beings—we think. Nobody can be sure, because proper knowledge was only passed down to young men when they were initiated, and the culture shock of white arrival broke those chains of knowledge. We are left guessing.

For a quarter of that time, since 1956, I have been visiting and sometimes finding these sites. It's my way of paying homage to the people we displaced.  I didn't do the wrong thing, but I have benefited from others who did wrong, and that wrong can never now be righted. We can, at least, recognise that wrong was done.

These are probably three eels.  Note that you will often see feet in the photos, as a way of getting a scale: you will never see those feet on any of the lines. We walk softly, respectfully and carefully, because these are fragile works of art, more than two centuries old.

The figure nearest the pool is one of a number which have been stupidly scratched by somebody who hadn't a clue, and who has often gone off the line. You can see something of the same effect below.

Note that male figures are usually identified as such by a rough depiction of a penis, though sometimes male figures are recognised by a line at the waist, representing the hair belt worn by am initiated man.  The eel with the bands (above and below) is a puzzle: is it wearing multiple hair belts?  It was probably important in passing on a teaching legend.

 This fish, for example, has been scratched over by an idiot: it isn't overly clear, but the line of the body cuts across the pectoral fin.

 In the shot below, look at the fin on the right. On the left, just in front of the pectoral fin (lower down the picture), notice how the scratcher has gone outside the line.

Below, several fish, something that may or may not be a bird, and some mundoës, which are supposed to be footprints showing a path to be followed.

This is a shark, something which those with zoological training can tell by looking at the tail, which is heterocercal: it has two unequal lobes. Sharks have negative buoyancy and no swim bladder, and they get lift in the water by the sculling action of the lower lobe, which the more rigid upper lobe drives the shark forward: that means that by angling its pectoral fins, the shark gets lift there as well.

The idiot who worked on this made a mess of the tail, and brought is closer to the homocercal tail of bony fish, as well as missing the line of the upper lobe, which is on the left in the photo.  The idiot also chopped off the fin on the shark's right.

If I am right, this is a wobbegong shark, but whatever it is, the head is seen from above, while the tail is seen from the side: the Australian Aborigines had different criteria on accuracy, and this depiction communicated better to its audience.

If you need to photograph engravings, use water, like this:

We went to a second nearby site which has unusual mundoës with toes.  Or toës.

Now the first rule is to get the sun as low in the sky as possible: winter is better than summer, early or late in the day is better than noon.  Then you need water: compare the shot above with the two below and see how splashing a bit of water around, with the right choice of angle, the detail comes out.

So if you go looking for engravings, take along a few spare litres of water.  After all, these things have been rained-on for more than two centuries now.

Reminder: no copyright claim is made on the shots you see here: they are all Creative Commons attribution pictures, but note also that larger (and unenhanced) originals are available on request for any good cause. The photographs seen here have all been digitally fiddled to improve the clarity.

Leech-wrangling, a grand-daughter's mantis, and vacuumed trees.

Writing a book has its fun bits, mostly when I am planning the chapters. This is followed (for me, anyhow) by exhilarating bits like banging out the first draft. That is the equivalent of getting a block of marble and marking up the outlines on the block and doing a bit of rough-hewing.

Then the drudgery starts, polishing, tweaking, working through the logic and the sequences, double-checking the text, cleaning up sloppy wording, eliminating the bits that only got in because I was brimming over with bubbliness when I wrote that chapter—not to mention looking at the safety aspects that come into suggesting projects that involve sharp tools and live things that may bite sting or be plain antisocial.

If you write professionally, you can't afford to resent the needed time and trouble, because effort like that makes a book work. The same goes for the finicky double-checking of references, finding pictures, writing captions, proofing and the like.

Talking of proofing, I have a cunning trick, which is to convert the text into mp3 files using software that I bought quite cheaply, from TextAloud. You need to train the software to handle technical terms, and it has a few problems the words like lead and read which have more than one correct pronunciation. That's easy to deal with.  Once my file is created, I play them while reading the text. It's dull, but essential.

Equally, the changes recommended by editors, the cuts dictated by design needs, are essential parts of the process. (Secret hint: it's the great editors and excellent designers at the NLA that keep me loyal. With them at your back, getting a beautiful book is a doddle.)

Late in the piece, as the last of the less-fun bits pile in on me, I keep promising myself that next time, I will write fantasy, where I make the stuff up as I go along. No more fact-checking, no more emailing researchers to find out where they found that weird beetle next time, I tell myself.

Instead, I will write about a bunch of sheep who wear Viking hats so people will mistake them for mad cows and not eat them: no research needed there. The sheep are planning to "borrow" one of the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London: no research needed there, not if the sheep are time travellers who saw the Tower being built, so they know about a secret tunnel. Definitely no research needed there…

Not quite: you see, I had to set the date of the heist in a period before video-cameras, and chose 1951, on the second day of the Festival of Britain, a date was chosen because research told me the Beef-eaters would be tired that day, then one of the Tower ravens stowed away and joined the cast of characters, and that meant more research—and on it went.

Well, that could be my next book, but it might not be, because I'd miss out on a lot of fun. I used to be a science teacher, and my students always knew me as a fiddler who had some sort of gadget on the go: a home-made 4-metre gas discharge tube; a hovercraft powered by a superannuated vacuum cleaner; a kerosene-tin eucalyptus oil still; a water-powered mineral-sands concentrator; a slow-gain feedback loop using a tuning fork and an old telephone earpiece; or a culture of tiny crustaceans.

We all used to have fun with these things. The gadgets might get a brief mention in class, but to really get to take a close look and find out all about it, students needed to drop in at recess or lunch, or before school. A major part of my cunning plan was that many of the simpler ideas were portable—and they won hearts and minds.

Anybody who reads my books will probably realise that this leopard hasn't changed his spots, because the books offer simple gadgets anybody can make. And when people make and use them, they will learn. So I'm still out there, catching hearts and minds, but by itself, that wouldn't be enough reward. I need the adventure, the shared discovery and the amusing moments. I will offer one example of each.

You can't experiment with the sheep in Viking hats as you can with leeches. I was fortunate that my wife Chris is a brilliant leech magnet, so even on high, dry, Hawkesbury sandstone ridges, if we stood still for a minute, one or two lean and hungry leeches would appear, looping along like "inch-worms", hurrying to reach her shoe, aspiring to reach her ankle.

They never did. Leeches aren't very bright, and if you hold an open jar in their path, they will go right in. Then, when we get home and need to photograph them, my tame leech magnet comes along and puts her hand where it needs to be to draw them into the camera's range. I often put animals I was snapping on a dry platform in a large dish of water, but guess what? Leeches can swim. I learn, so I win!

After that, mantises were easy to find at home.
That's always the way, it seems!

The mantises were different. There had been none at home, but I found one when we visited our grandchildren, and being an opportunist, I grabbed it to photograph. And again being an opportunist, I shared my find with my grand-daughter, who was then 4. The upshot was that the mantis became her new pet and a couple of days later, we took some mantises from her garden to her kindy, and a whole class was made mantis-aware. I win, again!

The amusing item is different. I have to apologise to the lady who was walking her dog quietly along a bush track and came upon a ragged character who probably resembled Spike Milligan on a bad day, who was busily running a portable vacuum cleaner up and down a tree.

She probably ended up with a good tale to tell, but she fled before I could explain that I was merely validating a method I had read about for gathering very small animals, especially tardigrades, from a tree's bark. It was slightly embarrassing to me, and apparently quite alarming to her, but I got a great story to dine out on. So I guess I win again. Maybe she got a great story as well.

Pay attention please, you sheep in Viking hats: if you want my help to get you transferred onto the printed page, you must offer chances for me to have fun and to win. Otherwise, I think I'll go back to rummaging around in the undergrowth, looking for unexpected and curious life forms. I just know I can always have fun there!

The next entry will emerge from stuff I put together for a talk I gave at the State Library of New South Wales in their 'Scholarly Musings' series.  I am doing a lot of writing for younger readers at the moment, and I have been giving it quite a lot if thought. Talks like that, and the actual writing are the main reasons why I have been less active here.

Flatworms at a glance

Yes, been busy again.  The other day, though, I found a land planarian, so I thought I would dig out a section of the book that was cut, mainly because flatworms or planarians can be hard to find unless you know where to look. The one on the right is the type that lives in water,

These are just very small flat worms, and more common in fresh water than you may think. In the wild, flatworms that live in water avoid the light, so they are usually found attached to the under-side of stones or twigs, and they will often be in groups. They typically have a pointed tail-end and an arrow-shaped 'head' end, with two very primitive eyes, little more than two light-sensitive patches. Most of them are less than 10 mm long.



A land planarian looks sometimes looks like this, with a sort of "shovel" head. For some odd reason, people don't call them "land flatworms".  Posh people call them terrestrial planarians. (I put that in there for the search engines).

Land planarians have a much longer body, up to 300 mm long. They also have a shovel-shaped head, and they travel on a layer of slime like a snail or a slug. The slime is amazing stuff, because it hardens, and if a land planarian goes over a drop, the one species I have played with is able to lower itself down on a thread of hardened slime, like a spider descending on its web. The body gets much longer when it is stretched by gravity as it dangles. On the flat, they are about a third as long.


Land planarians will eat earthworms so they can sometimes be a problem in worm farms (which means you may find them in a worm farm!), but they also eat a wide range of other garden 'meat', including slugs. If you leave a small piece of meat in some leaf litter, inside some sort of cage to stop larger animals getting at it, you may attract a land planarian, though this has never worked for me. This one was on a brick wall and quietly consuming a small millipede. For scale, the picture covers a space about 10 mm high.

Notice the slime here (if you click on the picture, you should see it full-size). I think this is how they digest their food.

The last reliable count that I have seen, made in 1999, showed 822 species of terrestrial flatworm around the world. The world's greatest variety is seen in mainland Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand.

But why are flatworms flat? Probably, so they can breathe! With no lungs, blood or circulation, oxygen has to diffuse in through their skin to reach all of their cells, but the gas is all used up before it gets more than about 0.5 mm from the surface, limiting their thickness.

Flatworms will regenerate (grow back missing bits) if you chop them in halves through the middle with a sharp razor blade. It is also possible to split the "head" lengthways between their primitive eyes, and produce a two-headed flatworm. This requires a sure hand, and it is unkind. Both ends of a cut worm will grow the missing end, and both ends of a trained worm were once supposed to recall a lesson taught to the whole worm, though most people no longer believe this.

Flatworms are photonegative (light-avoiding) so they need to be kept in opaque containers with covers. With the water ones, change the water regularly, feed them once a week on chopped raw beef liver or hard-boiled egg yolk, and take out the left-over food with a pipette after a few hours. Apparently they do not often reproduce sexually in captivity, but do occasionally produce orange "cocoons" that hatch out a month or so later. They also reproduce by fragmentation, even when nobody chops them up.

I have caught aquatic planarians in the past by scooping up some drain mud and putting it in a white dish, then waiting for the mud to settle, at which point, they leave tracks in the mud that you can see. Happy hunting!


* * * * * * *
This blog covers quite a few different things, so I tag each post. I also blog about history, and I am currently writing a series of books called Not your usual... and the first two have been accepted by Five Mile Press, The offcuts appear here with the tag Not Your Usual... . For a taste of Australian tall tales, try the tags Speewah or Crooked Mick.   For a miscellany of oddities, try the tag temporary obsessions. And language us covered under the tags Descants and Curiosities, while stuff about small life is under Wee beasties.

Rashomon times 2 (or 2 plus 1)

OK, there was a bit of a hiatus there, mainly because I have been busy with Other Stuff.

In particular, I have been concerning myself with Australian history, in a work for younger readers. It's actually one of a series, written with the view that even complex issues can be handled by young minds, given the right presentation.

In Akiro Kurasawa's classic film, Rashomon, one story, about a murder, is told by four people: the bandit, the wife, the samurai and the woodcutter.  It is fictional.  Each version is different.

Well, I have a similar multi-version story, but it's from real life.  It involves an incident where nine versions are given by eight people, and they are all subtly different about the number and type of animal, the date (some are less specific) and in some cases, the owner(s) of the stock which were killed by a lightning strike, not long after the first white people came ashore in Sydney in 1788. The animals were in a pen (or shed) under a tree, and it seems they all perished: this was a bit of a disaster.

We are taught to pay attention to primary sources, but what are we to make of these discrepancies in first-hand accounts, written on the spot?  Perhaps some of it was due to editing or the careless making of "fair copies"?

I have done some colour-coding in the text to help you spot the variations.

In February, the weather was sultry, with lightning, thunder, and heavy rain; this sort of weather continued for a fortnight, with few and very short intervals of fair weather; a flash of lightning fell one night near the camp, and struck a tree near to the post of a centinel, who was much hurt by it; the tree was greatly rent, and there being at the foot of it a pen in which were a few pigs and sheep, they were all killed. 

John Hunter: An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, chapter III

Ere we had been a fortnight on shore we experienced some storms of thunder accompanied with rain, than which nothing can be conceived more violent and tremendous, and their repetition for several days, joined to the damage they did, by killing several of our sheep, led us to draw presages of an unpleasant nature. 

Watkin Tench: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, chapter XV.

The month of February was ushered in by a very violent storm of thunder and rain. The lightning struck and shivered a tree, under which a shed had been erected for some sheep, and five of those animals were at the same time unfortunately destroyed by it. 

Arthur Phillip, The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay, chapter VII.

2nd February. This morning five sheep, belonging to the lieutenant-governor and quarter-master, were killed by lightning under a tree, at the foot of which a shed had been built for them. The branches and trunk of the tree were shivered and rent in a very extraordinary manner. 

John White  Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales.

Abt. 12 o'Clock in the night one severe flash of Lightg. struck a very large tree in the centre of the Camp under wh. some places were constructed to keep the Sheep & Hogs in: it split the tree from top to bottom; kill'd 5 Sheep belonging to Major Ross & a pig of one of the Lieuts. 

Arthur Bowes Smyth, A Journal of a Voyage from Portsmouth to New South Wales and China - in the Lady Penrhyn, entry for February 6.

On the First Day of this Month, We had a vast deal of heavy Rain. Thunder & Lightning, and the next morning 5 Sheep, 1 Lamb. & 2 Pigs, were found dead, lying under a Tree, which was riven in a violent Manner by the Lightning... 

George Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, entry, Tuesday 5th February. (SEE NEXT!)

We have reason to apprehend that much Mischief may be done by Lightning here. Indeed we have experienced its fatal Effects since we have been here, for one Night 6 Sheep 1 Lamb, & 2 Pigs that were lying under a Tree, were all killed and the Tree violently riven. 

George Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, 'Climate'.

In the night of the 6th February, six sheep, two lambs, and one pig, belonging chiefly to the lieutenant-governor, having been placed at the foot of a large tree, were destroyed by the lightning. 

David Collins: An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1, chapter I.

Thursday 7 where I went to Supper being ask my God how it did thunder and Lighting - was very much frightened for the Centinell before Majr. Ross markee while we were at Supper was knock down with it - I thought at first that he had been Struck by the lighting as he came running and making a great noise and fell flat dount at my feett but he was not hurt but I am Sorry to find that by the very hard clap of Thunder the lightning Struck one of the Trees near where we were at Supper and Kild Six Sheep 2 Labms and one Pigg belonging to Major Ross…

Ralph Clark, Journal.

Before you ask, Major Ross was the Lieutenant-Governor.

The spelling, especially in Clark's case, represents what the writers wrote.  People didn't have the same hang-ups about spelling back then.

I think there are some interesting conclusions to be reached from studying this, but probably not in a book for 10-year-olds, so I am sharing it here.  If you are a teacher, please feel free to use this, any way you like.

Technical and teacherly matters
There is no copyright on any of this.  If you want to view good copies of the journals, most of these can be sourced from the University of Sydney's SETIS site.  Select the Browse—All link on the left, and then look for the ones where a PDF is available, and either read or save it.

Another source that I have used is Project Gutenberg. That has given me:

• Arthur Phillip, The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay;
• John Hunter: An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island;
• David Collins: An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1;
• David Collins: An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2;
• Watkin Tench: A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson;
• Watkin Tench: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay;
• John White  Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales;
• George Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon.
• Ralph Clark, Journal.

I have cleaned all of these up, using macros in Word, and pasted them into a single file. Then I added these journals in whole or in part from transcripts on the State Library of NSW site: those may be copyright, but my copies are purely for personal research.

• Smyth  (from State Library of NSW);
• Bradley (part, from State Library of NSW);
• Easty  (part, from State Library of NSW);
• King  (part, from State Library of NSW);
• Nagle  (part, from State Library of NSW).

These journals and extracts are all in the one big MS Word file (1300 pages, almost a million words).  Each volume has a Heading 1 header, the chapters are Heading 2, and extra markers (for example, when somebody reaches Rio) are Heading 3. This allows me to navigate using Document Map.

And search. The trick is, when I search on some key word like Wilson*, sheep, lightning or salt, I can quickly find the stuff I want.  I had noticed that there were several versions of the lightning strike, but I never expected NINE of them!

I am hoping that with this hint, I may get a few people using IT in a cleverer way to make genuinely new discoveries.

Anyhow, that's why it's been a while (there's also another rather different book in the works, but I'm not discussing that just yet—unless I mentioned sheep wearing Viking helmets so people will mistake them for mad cows and not eat them—shhhh!).  Next week, I'll get back to posting some off-cuts from Australian Backyard Naturalist.

————————————

* Wilson, or Bun-bo-e was a convict who, when his time expired, went to live among the Aborigines and became an initiated man. I am exploring his story at the moment as well.

Thinking about slugs and snails

Rule 1 of being a naturalist: the most interesting questions are your own questions!

These are some random thoughts about snails that were left over from the book.  Waste not, want not!

Snail home.

Slug home.

I was inspired by the fact that I have had a snail living in a jar on my desk since the start of the year.

If you read my book, Australian Backyard Naturalist, you will learn that the shot on the left is of a slug that lived in that jar for ten months, given regular feeds of lettuce, spinach and bok choy, before I let it go. The photo on the right shows a snail with a damaged shell that has been living in the jar since the start of 2012.

I don't want to let it go, because, with a big panel of shell missing, it won't last long, so I am waiting to see if it can repair its shell.  I don't think it can.


You may like to try conducting some snail races.

You might like to try using light or dark to get snails to go in a single direction, or you might like to see if snails can be attracted by a favourite food—assuming you can identify the favourite foods of snails!

Some foods you might like to try: basil, lettuce, almost any young and tender seedling shoots. Try planting three or four types of seed in a single tray. After a week, when the seedlings are shooting nicely, add several snails, cover the tray, and then come back the next morning to see which seedlings were eaten first.

Be careful not to jump to conclusions until you have tested a few other possibilities!

I have a theory that some hairy or spiny leaves may be less attractive to snails and slugs. Can you test that?

Are snails faster than slugs?


Snails come out when it rains
This makes them excellent for rainy day investigations like these:

• To observe snail movement, put a snail on a piece of flat glass, and hold it up to look from below.

• To record snail trails, you will need a snail, a clean sheet of paper, and a supply of pepper. Put your snail in the middle of the paper, and leave it alone. After a while, the snail will start to travel across the paper. If there is a slime trail, sprinkle pepper on the trail before the slime goes hard.

• Can you invent snail art?

• How do snails react when they cross the slime trail of another snail? Does the age of the trail make any difference to the way they react?

• How long does it take for a slime trail to go hard?

• How many days does a trail last?

• Where does it disappear to?

• You may care to see whether you can get a slime trail like those of land snails from slugs and marine shellfish. I have never tried this: I predict that marine shellfish do not make a slime trail, but that slugs do. Perhaps you might like to work out why I think this, and then test it.

• What use would a snail trail be to a predator? From this, can you make some predictions about the smell or taste of the slime trail? How would you test your predictions? Do so.

These shells were all attacked by predators that bored the shells.

• You will need a large supply of bored shells of one species of seashell. Examine the shells to see whether the boring predators go for any particular part of the shell in a given prey species, or if they just bore at random. You will need to think about how you analyse your data.

• As a follow-up, you may need to study the anatomy of the selected species to see what the borers aimed at. Some of the victims are bivalves, shellfish with two shells, which are more distantly related to the snails. Think about where the muscle is thet holds the shells together.

• When a garden snail is threatened, it pulls back into its shell and often produces bubbles of mucus. My guess is that these bubbles taste bad or are poisonous, but I have never tried a taste test, and I don't recommend the experiment! Incidentally, snails are edible, but don't eat garden snails, in case one of your neighbours is using some sort of snail poison.

Just watching a snail move can be fun. This one is from the
Margaret River area, and I shot it in late afternoon sun.

• Why do so few slugs get eaten? One way to find out might be to try eating a slug, but this is not a good idea. What if it has just eaten snail and slug poison or makes its own poisons (and how can you be sure?). What effects would these poisons have on the wildlife in your garden?

• By the way, at least one sea slug, found on New Zealand beaches, carries a deadly poison, tetrodotoxin, but no Australian deadly sea slugs are known. Tetrodotoxin is the same poison found in the Japanese fugu fish and the deadly Australian blue-ringed octopus.

These land snails were all gathered on the Swan River at
North Fremantle.  Take a close look, and see how many
different species I found. I think there are three or four.
By the way, if you click on any picture, you see a larger form.

• How does a snail's speed vary with size and weight? Does it go faster at a certain temperature or humidity?

• Put ten snails in the middle of a black plastic sheet at night, and make a circle of bricks, with 5–10cm gaps between them, all round the snails. The next morning, check for trails and decide whether snails can see or not? Run the same test during daylight and compare the results. If you learn nothing, does that tell you something?

• What senses do snails have? Do they react to sights, sounds, smells, or touch? How can you tell the difference between a snail reacting to the touch of a puff of air and a snail reacting to the smell carried in that puff of air?

• If people worshipped the Giant African Land Snail, would this be an escargot cult?

• Why don't people worship writers who make bad puns?