A cretinous critic: William B Palmer

William B Palmer is about to learn that making outrageously untrue statements about my work carries a cost. I have granted myself permission to make manifestly true statements about him and his pathetic excuse for "work".

On the evidence set out below, he is a clown, a fool, a drivelling idiot, of that, there can be no doubt.

I don't look much at reviews of my books, so this 9-year-old review of The Speed of Nearly Everything has only come to my attention now, as I prepare a second edition.

You can see what it will look like, on the right, but I will have more to say about that later. Here's the most offensive part of Palmer's misleading review:

Note his first claim: the botfly is not in the index. Let's test that, with a small sample from my index: let's see what we can see...

Well, now, the moron didn't look very hard, did he? But it gets worse, when he says there is no "further explanation". Is this true?

Not really. Take a look at pages 17, 18 and 19, as indicated in the index. What a pity he didn't read this, instead of demonstrating his scintillating research skills by looking in Wikipedia.

That stupid, incompetent, illiterate and misleading review is featured by Amazon as its "top review", and there appears to be no way that I can respond, or contact Amazon to have these arrant lies taken down.

This same farrago of nonsense will no doubt be attached by Amazon to my new edition, and that is unacceptable.

His blunders are inexcusable, I want the whole load of dreck gone. As my friends know, and my enemies recall with regret, I am a scorched-earth person.

So I am going after this galah's head. He lives in Brighton Victoria, says he is a "retired university science lecturer", and this appears to be his mugshot.

Until such time as I get a grovelling apology and a complete removal of his damaging clumsy and stupid untruths, this stays up.

He lives in Australia (or did in 2020, when he posted his most recent review). If any of my Australian friends know him, please direct him to this, and tell him he's got a large load of crow to eat.

Here's a link to the offending review.

Australian history

The past 18 months of pandemic bungling have seen me staying closer to home, and pondering stuff. I'm not getting any younger, so I have been getting my back-burner cleaned up and tidied. Basically, I don't want to fall off my perch without saying quite a few things.

I'm not an historian, even if lots of people call me one: I am an enquirer after facts who writes accounts of history, and there are tiny minds out there who are fearful of the truth. Good: I like frightening tiny minds so they shrink and blink out.

Conservative politicians whine that standards are dropping, that children are no longer taught the important dates and names (meaning the names of those same conservative politicians). They want unquestioning and regimented learning of the names of lots of dead white males.

If you push them to define Australian history, their version comes down to Bushrangers and Convicts (all scum, of course), Diggers (the military ones), Explorers (brave openers of untamed wilderness), Farmers (who turned the sterile wilderness into riches at no cost) and Gold (ours by right of conquest). I call this the BCDEFG model of Australian history.

If you question these politicians about their favoured categories, they may be able to name three of the more than 2000 bushrangers who once flourished (Ned Kelly, Ben Hall and Thunderguts, usually); their understanding of the convict’s lot is pitiful; they could not locate a single battlefield on the world map; they would be lucky to name more than four explorers worthy of note (and no, “Captain” Cook and Burke and Wills don’t count); they have no notion of the harm done to country by agriculture; and their “history” of gold is codswallop.

So their BCDEFG history of Australia is a set of worthless scribbles, and only one in fifty of them will amend that to the ABCDEFG, because the ‘Aborigines’ don’t come into it for most of them—and don’t confuse the poor dears by amending it to a more polite IBCDEFG. Mention the role of Indigenous Australia in our history, and they will look at you like a Speewah back paddock bull that’s just run at full tilt into Crooked Mick of the Speewah. (Yes, I've done a book about him, as well.)

Then I had a brainwave and adopted Inga Clendinnen's name that she gave the original custodians in Dancing with Strangers. I call them Australians, so now I have my ABCDEFG, all stitched up, though I also look at the  homes we made, immigration and journeys, so I guess it's really ABCDEFGHIJ, but I have drawn the line there. Until I work out how to wedge in kaolin, liniment and medicine...

The sort of history I write is about How Things Worked, based heavily on contemporary descriptions. In my works, you learn about the things that don’t get mentioned in school, almost all of them things that happened after the white invasion in 1788, and from a legal point of view it WAS an invasion.

I like to explain how all the early Australians swam naked; wrote dreadful poetry; played strange sports; were fooled into believing in bunyips; feared foreign invasions (French, Russian or American); how convicts came to Australia; how free settlers travelled in the days of sail; what they ate, drank and wore; what the shops were like; town life and bush life; what diseases they got and how they treated them; how they used animal, wind and steam power; how they travelled across the land; coaches, trams, omnibuses and bicycles; ferries and ships; inns and pubs, and we’re only just half-way.

I look at how “explorers” followed established foot tracks (they called them “native roads”); how farms got started; how homes were made and managed; how society worked; how justice worked (not very well); punishment; race riots; the coolie system which exploited Indians, long before the Chinese were here; how Indigenous people were treated; newspapers, telegraphs and communication (some early Melbournites used smoke signals, and Port Arthur had a semaphore station!).

Getting the bit between my teeth, I look at education, democracy and science in a colonial setting; the people who visited, the plants and animal pests that came in; bushfires, floods, droughts and storms; the materials the early settlers used; the minerals they dug up (including the real story of gold in Australia, which is very different from what the school books say).

I also romp through the rogues, scallywags and conmen, and examine the armed forces and wars that changed Australia and the Australian myth.

I did that through four editions of The Big Book of Australian History, an exercise in truth telling for younger readers, published by the National Library of Australia, but the NLA seems to have fallen silent on a fifth edition, and I have, in any case, moved on to write for a more adult readership.

Update mid-September 2021, there may still be a new edition...

That brings me to my most recent effort, where I have cut loose from the apron strings of traditional print publishers, because I can do the job faster and cheaper. You Missed a Bit is a large collection of stuff I have written over the years in a number of books, all pulled together in one volume. On the left, you can see the cover of the ebook version.

And on the right, the cover of the necessarily more pricy print version, both available from the link above. At 813 pages and 1.4 kg, it's almost two inches thick (46.7 mm, if you want precision).  This is in-your-face history, boots and all, warts and all history. I have taken in stuff from this blog on occasions, but also from many of my earlier and now out-of-print books. This is a conscious effort on my part to keep the inconvenient truths out there for people to find.

Please, shed the word.

One hundred questions for Book Week

 Yes, I notice that the answers aren't here. This will, I am sure, annoy a few clever children. When I was a student teacher, more than fifty years back, my former history teacher told me I would have no problems, because "Whatever they try on, you've already done it, and better than they could."

Here's a literary clue that may or may not help.

The answers are hidden in plain sight.

Multiple choice format

1.  How many lines are there in a limerick?
            (A) 5
            (B) 7
            (C) 8
            (D) 6

2.  What kind of bird is Hedwig?
            (A) an owl
            (B) an eagle
            (C) a hawk
            (D) a parrot

3.  When the princess slept on twenty mattresses, what could she feel under them?
            (A) A pumpkin
            (B) Her shoe
            (C) A cat
            (D) A pea

4.  Who created Miss Marple?
            (A) Leslie Charteris
            (B) Agatha Christie
            (C) Adam Dalgliesh
            (D) Ellery Queen

5.  Which writer created the fictional character Black Beauty?
            (A) Emily Bronte
            (B) Anna Sewell
            (C) Charles Dickens
            (D) Anthony Trollope

6.  Who wrote the play 'Hamlet'?
            (A) Henrik Ibsen
            (B) Ben Jonson
            (C) William Shakespeare
            (D) Christopher Marlowe

7.  Who wrote the poem 'Bell-Birds'
            (A) Breaker Morant
            (B) C. J. Dennis
            (C) Henry Kendall
            (D) Dorothy Wall

8.  What language did Julius Caesar most commonly speak and write in?
            (A) Latin
            (B) Romany
            (C) Greek
            (D) Etrurian

9.  Who created Sherlock Holmes?
            (A) Ian Rankin
            (B) Agatha Christie
            (C) G. K. Chesterton
            (D) Arthur Conan Doyle

10.  Who wrote 'The Man from Snowy River'?
            (A) Breaker Morant
            (B) C. J. Dennis
            (C) Hugh Ogilvie
            (D) Banjo Paterson

11.  Who wrote 'Fox in Socks', 'The Cat in the Hat' and 'Green Eggs and Ham'?
            (A) Dr Seuss
            (B) Charles Dickens
            (C) James Joyce
            (D) Aldous Huxley

12.  Who created Noddy and wrote about 'The Famous Five' and 'The Secret Seven'?
            (A) Charles Dickens
            (B) Enid Blyton
            (C) Mark Twain
            (D) John Galsworthy

13.  Which poet created the character Hiawatha?
            (A) Henry Longfellow
            (B) Rudyard Kipling
            (C) Leigh Hunt
            (D) A. E. Housman

14.  What book which describes Gallipoli was written by Albert Facey?
            (A) My Fortunate Career
            (B) A Fortunate Life
            (C) 1915
            (D) On the Beach

15.  Which poet created the character Gunga Din
            (A) Tennyson
            (B) Rudyard Kipling
            (C) William Wordsworth
            (D) Shelley

16.  Which Australian artist also wrote novels and a children's book, but was best known for his nudes?
            (A) Sir Russell Drysdale
            (B) Norrman Lindsay
            (C) Pro Hart
            (D) Tom Roberts

17.  Which Andersen story is commemorated by a statue in the harbour of Copenhagen?
            (A) The Ice Maiden
            (B) The Little Mermaid
            (C) Thumbelina
            (D) The Little Match-Seller

18.  Who wrote the story of Robinson Crusoe?
            (A) Thomas Hardy
            (B) George Eliot
            (C) Daniel Defoe
            (D) Rudyard Kipling

19.  Who wrote the story of Peter Pan?
            (A) James Barrie
            (B) Rudyard Kipling
            (C) George Eliot
            (D) Thomas Hardy

20.  Which writer created the fictional character Oliver Twist?
            (A) Rudyard Kipling
            (B) Charles Dickens
            (C) Mark Twain
            (D) William Shakespeare

21.  What sort of an animal is Hairy McLary?
            (A) a dog
            (B) a spider
            (C) an angora goat
            (D) a caterpillar

22.  Colin Thiele wrote a book about a boy on the Coorong with an unusual animal friend. What was it?
            (A) an eagle
            (B) a shark
            (C) a pelican
            (D) a dolphin

23.  What sort of animal was Blinky Bill?
            (A) a hopping mouse
            (B) a koala
            (C) a possum
            (D) a kangaroo

24.  What sort of bird said "Nevermore" in a poem by Edgar Allen Poe?
            (A) a raven
            (B) a parrot
            (C) a macaw
            (D) a dodo

25.  Who wrote 'Storm Boy'?
            (A) Colin Thiele
            (B) May Gibbs
            (C) C. J. Dennis
            (D) Dorothea Mackellar

26.  Who wrote 'Mrs. Dalloway', 'To the Lighthouse' and 'A Room of One's Own'?
            (A) Virginia Woolf
            (B) Enid Blyton
            (C) Charles Dickens
            (D) F. Scott Fitzgerald

27.  Who created D. I. Rebus?
            (A) Agatha Christie
            (B) G. K. Chesterton
            (C) Leslie Charteris
            (D) Ian Rankin

28.  What was the real name of Henry Handel Richardson?
            (A) Mark Twain
            (B) Miles Franklin
            (C) George Sand
            (D) Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson

29.  How did Captain Hook lose his hand?
            (A) A crocodile ate it
            (B) Peter Pan cut it off
            (C) He lost it in a shipwreck
            (D) He lost it in a fight

30.  Who wrote 'The Triantiwontigongolope'?
            (A) John O'Brien (Father P. J. Hartigan)
            (B) C. J. Dennis
            (C) Henry Kendall
            (D) Dorothy Wall

31.  Which famous poem contains the line "He stoppeth one of three"
            (A) Casey at the Bat
            (B) The Charge of the Light Brigade
            (C) The Ancient Mariner
            (D) How the Melbourne Cup Was Won

32.  Who wrote the story of Anna Karenina?
            (A) Leo Tolstoy
            (B) George Eliot
            (C) James Barrie
            (D) Charlotte Brontë

33.  Who wrote 'Possum Magic'?
            (A) May Gibbs
            (B) Mem Fox
            (C) Manning Clark
            (D) Norman Lindsay

34.  Tiny Tim has the last words in a famous Christmas story. What does he say?
            (A) Bah, Humbug!
            (B) I want some more!
            (C) God bless Us, Every One!
            (D) Merry Christmas!

35.  In Rudyard Kipling's 'The Jungle Book', which animals brought up Mowgli?
            (A) monkeys
            (B) tigers
            (C) wolves
            (D) bears

36.  In a famous cricket poem, 'Vitai Lampada', where was there a breathless hush?
            (A) on the green
            (B) around the ground
            (C) in the stands
            (D) in the close

37.  Which writer created the fictional character Jeeves?
            (A) P. G. Wodehouse
            (B) G. H. Hardy
            (C) H. G. Wells
            (D) P. D. James

38.  Who were the three men collectively known as the Three Musketeers?
            (A) Aramis, Porthos and d'Artagnan
            (B)  Athos, Aramis and d'Artagnan
            (C) Porthos, Athos and d'Artagnan
            (D) Aramis, Porthos and Athos

39.  Who wrote the play 'The Club' and 'Don's Party'?
            (A) Ray Lawler
            (B) Tom Stoppard
            (C) David Williamson
            (D) Louis Nowra

40.  Who wrote 'It was a Lover and his Lass'?
            (A) William Shakespeare
            (B) Lennon and McCartney
            (C) John Donne
            (D) Robbie Burns

41.  How many lines are there in a sonnet?
            (A) 5
            (B) 14
            (C) Between 8 and 12
            (D) 24

42.  What is a clerihew?
            (A) a verse of four lines
            (B) a type of garment
            (C) a type of animal
            (D) a disease of cattle

43.  What was the Mabinogion?
            (A) a collection of Welsh legends
            (B) a horde of gold in Rhiw
            (C) a Druidic ritual
            (D) a train near Blaenau

44.  In a famous children's book, Dot had a friend. What was it?
            (A) a kangaroo
            (B) a possum
            (C) a pelican
            (D) a hopping mouse

45.  Who met Mole on the river bank and took him for a boat ride?
            (A) Rat in 'Wind in the Willows'
            (B) the white rabbit in 'Alice in Wonderland'
            (C) Bunyip Bluegum in 'The Magic Pudding'
            (D) a kangaroo, in Dot and the Kangaroo

46.  Who wrote 'Emma' and 'Jane Eyre'?
            (A) Enid Blyton
            (B) Aldous Huxley
            (C) Mark Twain
            (D) Charlotte Bronte

47.  They were philologists and linguists, but we recall them for their fairy tale collections. Who were they?
            (A) Brothers Karamazov
            (B) Blyton sisters
            (C) Brothers Grimm
            (D) Brontë sisters

48.  At the start of 'A Christmas Carol', we are told that somebody is dead. Who is it?
            (A) Marley
            (B) Scrooge
            (C) Bob Cratchit
            (D) Tiny Tim's sister

49.  Who wrote 'Crime and Punishment'?
            (A) Eugene Onegin
            (B) Boris Pasternak
            (C) Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
            (D) Count Leo Tolstoy

50.  Who wrote 'The Selfish Gene'?
            (A) Richard Dawkins
            (B) Gregor Mendel
            (C) Francis Crick
            (D) James Watson

51.  Who created the first true English dictionary?
            (A) George Bernard Shaw
            (B) William Shakespeare
            (C) James Boswell
            (D) Samuel Johnson

52.  By what name is Mary Ann Evans better known?
            (A) Henry Handel Richardson
            (B) George Eliot
            (C) George Sand
            (D) June Bronhill

53.  From which Shakespeare play did Tom Stoppard lift the line "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead"?
            (A) King Lear
            (B) Julius Caesar
            (C) Macbeth
            (D) Hamlet

54.  Who wrote 'Robbery under Arms'?
            (A) Rolf Boldrewood
            (B) Henry Lawson
            (C) Ruth Park
            (D) Marcus Clarke

55.  Who wrote 'Moby Dick'?
            (A) Herman Melville
            (B) Dr Seuss
            (C) Henry Lawson
            (D) Mark Twain

56.  Who wrote the poem 'Said Hanrahan'?
            (A) Henry Kendall
            (B) Breaker Morant
            (C) Michael Massey Robinson
            (D) John O'Brien (Father P. J. Hartigan)

57.  Who wrote a short story called 'The Loaded Dog'?
            (A) Miles Franklin
            (B) Henry Kendall
            (C) Banjo Paterson
            (D) Henry Lawson

58.  Which poet created the character Nicholas Nye
            (A) Leigh Hunt
            (B) Henry Longfellow
            (C) Walter de la Mare
            (D) Percy Shelley

59.  Which famous poem contains the line "the boy stood on the burning deck"?
            (A) Drake's Drum
            (B) Casabianca
            (C) Tom Bowling
            (D) The wreck of the Hesperus

60.  Which country had playwright Vaclav Havel as its leader?
            (A) Yugoslavia
            (B) USSR
            (C) Poland
            (D) Czech Republic

61.  According to Ray Bradbury, what is the flash point at which paper ignites?
            (A) 451 degrees Fahrenheit
            (B) 100 degrees Celsius
            (C) 451 degrees Celsius
            (D) 911 degrees Celsius

62.  What sort of an animal was C. J. Dennis' Triantiwontigongolope?
            (A) a three-legged horse
            (B) a giant rabbit
            (C) a spider
            (D) a caterpillar

63.  Who dictated The Jerilderie letter?
            (A) Ned Kelly
            (B) Dan Kelly
            (C) Black Caesar
            (D) Ben Hall

64.  Which two Australian poets played the lead roles in the 'Bush Controversy'?
            (A) John Neilson and John Shaw Neilson
            (B) John O'Brien and Father P. J. Hartigan
            (C) Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson
            (D) Breaker Morant and Adam Lindsay Gordon

65.  Which Australian poet won the 1996 £5,000 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry for his Subhuman Redneck Poems?
            (A) Mark O'Connor
            (B) John Tranter
            (C) David Campbell
            (D) Les Murray

66.  Dr Dolittle had a talking dog.  What was his name?
            (A) Crab
            (B) Lassie
            (C) Jip
            (D) Fido

67.  Which writer created the fictional character Tarzan?
            (A) Edgar Rice Burroughs
            (B) Rider Haggard
            (C) H. G. Wells
            (D) Fenimore Cooper

68.  Which American author went by train over the Blue Mountains and said the coffee was like sheep-dip?
            (A) Washington Irving
            (B) Mark Twain
            (C) Harper Lee
            (D) Ernest Hemingway

69.  Which writer created the fictional character Major Major Major?
            (A) Henry Lawson
            (B) Ian Fleming
            (C) Enid Blyton
            (D) Joseph Heller

70.  Which famous poet used the line 'Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!'
            (A) William McGonagall
            (B) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
            (C) William Wordsworth
            (D) Henry Lawson

71.  Which poet wrote the poem that includes the lines "At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them"?
            (A) John McCrae
            (B) Henry Newbolt
            (C) Laurence Binyon
            (D) Rudyard Kipling

72.  Where did fictional cracksman Raffles commit his first robbery?
            (A) outside Melbourne
            (B) in Perth
            (C) in central Sydney
            (D) in Adelaide

73.  Who wrote several geology books, including The Antiquity of Man, and inspired Charles Darwin?
            (A) Erasmus Darwin
            (B) Josiah Wedgwood
            (C) Jeremy Bentham
            (D) Charles Lyell

74.  Which Australian naturalist wrote 'The Future Eaters'?
            (A) Jared Diamond
            (B) Isaac Asimov
            (C) Jeremy Bentham
            (D) Tim Flannery

75.  When Muslims speak of 'the children of the book', which other religions are they referring to?
            (A) Judaism and Hinduism
            (B) Hinduism and Buddhism
            (C) Christianity and Judaism
            (D) Christianity and Buddhism

76.  About when was the Book of Kells created?
            (A) Early 9th century
            (B) Late 12th century
            (C) Mid-16th century
            (D) Mid-4th century

77.  Gradgrind and Squeers are both evil schoolmasters. Which two books do they appear in?
            (A) Oliver Twist' and 'Hard Times'
            (B) 'Hard Times' and 'Nicholas Nickleby'
            (C) 'Nicholas Nickleby' and 'David Copperfield'
            (D) 'David Copperfield' and 'Oliver Twist'

78.  Which of these authors is or was really a man?
            (A) P. D. James
            (B) Henry Handel Richardson
            (C) George Eliot
            (D) H. G. Wells

79.  Before Robert Louis Stevenson started publishing, what was his family famous for?
            (A) Building lighthouses
            (B) Mucking byres
            (C) Distilling whiskey
            (D) Stealing cattle

80.  The three writing Bell sisters were better known as what?
            (A) The Brothers Karamazov
            (B) The Brontë sisters
            (C) The Brothers Grimm
            (D) The Weird Sisters

81.  Who was the British poet-laureate who wrote detective novels under the nom-de-plume Nicholas Blake?
            (A) Adam Dalgliesh
            (B) Alfred, Lord Tennyson
            (C) Robert Graves
            (D) Cecil Day-Lewis

82.  Which Welsh poet lost a foot while 'jumping rattlers' in the USA?
            (A) W H Davies
            (B) Dylan Thomas
            (C) Ann Griffiths
            (D) Dafydd ap Gwilym

83.  In which Charles Dickens novel does a character keep "a copper-coloured woman in linen, with a bright handkerchief round her head, to serve her Tiffin"?
            (A) Oliver Twist
            (B) David Copperfield
            (C) Barnaby Rudge
            (D) Nicholas Nickleby

84.  Near the home of the wombles, there is a windmill, in which a famous book for boys (and girls) was written: what was the book called?
            (A) Beau Geste
            (B) Treasure Island
            (C) Swallows and Amazons
            (D) Scouting for Boys

85.  Who wrote a short carol: 'May all my enemies go to hell, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel'?
            (A) Robespierre
            (B) Ebenezer Scrooge
            (C) Hilaire Belloc
            (D) G. H. Hardy

86.  What was Giraldus Cambrensis discussing when he said "... you might believe it was the work of an angel rather than a human being"
            (A) Trinity College
            (B) The Book of Kells
            (C) Gallarus Oratory
            (D) Guinness

87.  Who was the famous brother-in-law of the author who created Raffles?
            (A) Charles Dickens
            (B) Somerset Maugham
            (C) H. G. Wells
            (D) Arthur Conan Doyle

88.  Which poets, father and son, took out the senior and junior prizes for poetry in an Australian Natives Association competition in 1893?
            (A) Pixie O Harris and Rolf Harris
            (B) Henry Lawson Sr and Henry Lawson Jr
            (C) Surgeon John Harris and Pixie O Harris
            (D) John Neilson and John Shaw Neilson

89.  Long John Silver was based on an editor and poet. What was his name?
            (A) W. E. Henley
            (B) Leigh Hunt
            (C) Samuel Johnson
            (D) Henry Newbolt

90.  What disease was running riot at the time of Boccaccio's Decameron?
            (A) mumps
            (B) measles
            (C) tuberculosis
            (D) the Black Death

91.  What disease is mentioned in the title of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez?
            (A) poliomyelitis
            (B) porphyria
            (C) cholera
            (D) tuberculosis

92.  Mr. Micawber became a magistrate: where did he take his place on the Bench?
            (A) Port Esterbrand
            (B) Port Middlebay
            (C) Port Arthur
            (D) Port Macquarie

93.  At the start of 'Bleak House', what creature does Dickens picture, waddling up Holborn Hill?
            (A) A megalosaurus.
            (B) An elephant.
            (C) Queen Victoria.
            (D) A wildebeest.

94.  Who was the murderer in Dickens' 'Hunted Down'?
            (A) Uriah Heap
            (B) Smike
            (C) Slinkton
            (D) Sykes

95.  In 'Pickwick Papers', Mr. Pickwick has written a paper about Hampstead Ponds and
            (A) cricket bats
            (B) numbats
            (C) wombats
            (D) tittlebats

96.  Which writer correctly predicted that Mars would have two moons, 100 years before they were seen?
            (A) Jonathan Swift
            (B) H G Wells
            (C) Charles Dickens
            (D) Jules Verne

97.  Which Australian poet died in an English poorhouse after being deserted by her husband?
            (A) May Gibbs
            (B) Jennings Carmichael
            (C) Dorothea Mackellar
            (D) Dorothy Wall

98.  Who wrote the play 'The Sport of My Mad Mother'?
            (A) George Bernard Shaw
            (B) Ann Jellicoe
            (C) Christopher Marlowe
            (D) Arthur Miller

99.  Before he became famous, Joseph Conrad met another future author in Adelaide in 1893.  Who was it?
            (A) Mark Twain
            (B) Rudyard Kipling
            (C) H. G. Wells
            (D) John Galsworthy

100.  Who was given two cows by Governor Macquarie in about 1819 for his services as colonial "poet laureate"?
            (A) Henry Lawson
            (B) Manning Clark
            (C) Michael Massey Robinson
            (D) C. J. Dennis

 

Free response format

1.  How many lines are there in a limerick?

2.  What kind of bird is Hedwig?

3.  When the princess slept on twenty mattresses, what could she feel under them?

4.  Who created Miss Marple?

5.  Which writer created the fictional character Black Beauty?

6.  Who wrote the play 'Hamlet'?

7.  Who wrote the poem 'Bell-Birds'

8.  What language did Julius Caesar most commonly speak and write in?

9.  Who created Sherlock Holmes?

10.  Who wrote 'The Man from Snowy River'?

11.  Who wrote 'Fox in Socks', 'The Cat in the Hat' and 'Green Eggs and Ham'?

12.  Who created Noddy and wrote about 'The Famous Five' and 'The Secret Seven'?

13.  Which poet created the character Hiawatha?

14.  What book which describes Gallipoli was written by Albert Facey?

15.  Which poet created the character Gunga Din

16.  Which Australian artist also wrote novels and a children's book, but was best known for his nudes?

17.  Which Andersen story is commemorated by a statue in the harbour of Copenhagen?

18.  Who wrote the story of Robinson Crusoe?

19.  Who wrote the story of Peter Pan?

20.  Which writer created the fictional character Oliver Twist?

21.  What sort of an animal is Hairy McLary?

22.  Colin Thiele wrote a book about a boy on the Coorong with an unusual animal friend. What was it?

23.  What sort of animal was Blinky Bill?

24.  What sort of bird said "Nevermore" in a poem by Edgar Allen Poe?

25.  Who wrote 'Storm Boy'?

26.  Who wrote 'Mrs. Dalloway', 'To the Lighthouse' and 'A Room of One's Own'?

27.  Who created D. I. Rebus?

28.  What was the real name of Henry Handel Richardson?

29.  How did Captain Hook lose his hand?

30.  Who wrote 'The Triantiwontigongolope'?

31.  Which famous poem contains the line "He stoppeth one of three"

32.  Who wrote the story of Anna Karenina?

33.  Who wrote 'Possum Magic'?

34.  Tiny Tim has the last words in a famous Christmas story. What does he say?

35.  In Rudyard Kipling's 'The Jungle Book', which animals brought up Mowgli?

36.  In a famous cricket poem, 'Vitai Lampada', where was there a breathless hush?

37.  Which writer created the fictional character Jeeves?

38.  Who were the three men collectively known as the Three Musketeers?

39.  Who wrote the play 'The Club' and 'Don's Party'?

40.  Who wrote 'It was a Lover and his Lass'?

41.  How many lines are there in a sonnet?

42.  What is a clerihew?

43.  What was the Mabinogion?

44.  In a famous children's book, Dot had a friend. What was it?

45.  Who met Mole on the river bank and took him for a boat ride?

46.  Who wrote 'Emma' and 'Jane Eyre'?

47.  They were philologists and linguists, but we recall them for their fairy tale collections. Who were they?

48.  At the start of 'A Christmas Carol', we are told that somebody is dead. Who is it?

49.  Who wrote 'Crime and Punishment'?

50.  Who wrote 'The Selfish Gene'?

51.  Who created the first true English dictionary?

52.  By what name is Mary Ann Evans better known?

53.  From which Shakespeare play did Tom Stoppard lift the line "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead"?

54.  Who wrote 'Robbery under Arms'?

55.  Who wrote 'Moby Dick'?

56.  Who wrote the poem 'Said Hanrahan'?

57.  Who wrote a short story called 'The Loaded Dog'?

58.  Which poet created the character Nicholas Nye

59.  Which famous poem contains the line "the boy stood on the burning deck"?

60.  Which country had playwright Vaclav Havel as its leader?

61.  According to Ray Bradbury, what is the flash point at which paper ignites?

62.  What sort of an animal was C. J. Dennis' Triantiwontigongolope?

63.  Who dictated The Jerilderie letter?

64.  Which two Australian poets played the lead roles in the 'Bush Controversy'?

65.  Which Australian poet won the 1996 £5,000 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry for his Subhuman Redneck Poems?

66.  Dr Dolittle had a talking dog.  What was his name?

67.  Which writer created the fictional character Tarzan?

68.  Which American author went by train over the Blue Mountains and said the coffee was like sheep-dip?

69.  Which writer created the fictional character Major Major Major?

70.  Which famous poet used the line 'Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!'

71.  Which poet wrote the poem that includes the lines "At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them"?

72.  Where did fictional cracksman Raffles commit his first robbery?

73.  Who wrote several geology books, including The Antiquity of Man, and inspired Charles Darwin?

74.  Which Australian naturalist wrote 'The Future Eaters'?

75.  When Muslims speak of 'the children of the book', which other religions are they referring to?

76.  About when was the Book of Kells created?

77.  Gradgrind and Squeers are both evil schoolmasters. Which two books do they appear in?

78.  Which of these authors is or was really a man?

79.  Before Robert Louis Stevenson started publishing, what was his family famous for?

80.  The three writing Bell sisters were better known as what?

81.  Who was the British poet-laureate who wrote detective novels under the nom-de-plume Nicholas Blake?

82.  Which Welsh poet lost a foot while 'jumping rattlers' in the USA?

83.  In which Charles Dickens novel does a character keep "a copper-coloured woman in linen, with a bright handkerchief round her head, to serve her Tiffin"?

84.  Near the home of the wombles, there is a windmill, in which a famous book for boys (and girls) was written: what was the book called?

85.  Who wrote a short carol: 'May all my enemies go to hell, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel'?

86.  What was Giraldus Cambrensis discussing when he said "... you might believe it was the work of an angel rather than a human being"

87.  Who was the famous brother-in-law of the author who created Raffles?

88.  Which poets, father and son, took out the senior and junior prizes for poetry in an Australian Natives Association competition in 1893?

89.  Long John Silver was based on an editor and poet. What was his name?

90.  What disease was running riot at the time of Boccaccio's Decameron?

91.  What disease is mentioned in the title of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

92.  Mr. Micawber became a magistrate: where did he take his place on the Bench?

93.  At the start of 'Bleak House', what creature does Dickens picture, waddling up Holborn Hill?

94.  Who was the murderer in Dickens' 'Hunted Down'?

95.  In 'Pickwick Papers', Mr. Pickwick has written a paper about Hampstead Ponds and

96.  Which writer correctly predicted that Mars would have two moons, 100 years before they were seen?

97.  Which Australian poet died in an English poorhouse after being deserted by her husband?

98.  Who wrote the play 'The Sport of My Mad Mother'?

99.  Before he became famous, Joseph Conrad met another future author in Adelaide in 1893.  Who was it?

100.  Who was given two cows by Governor Macquarie in about 1819 for his services as colonial "poet laureate"?

Revisiting lawn, 12 years on

 The problem is that publishing is no longer a profession for gentlemen, or if you wish, for ladies. The industry is full of nervous nellies going me-too, gimme whatever sold last year. 

Now any wannabe author will say something sour about publishers who lack vision and gumption, but I've got runs on the board. I have published over 60 volumes in seven languages (I count USian as a separate language) and I have a stack of awards for doing beautiful books, but when my books go out of print, that's that as far as they're concerned, and when I want them to consider something completely different, they shriek and hide in the cupboard.

The book shown above went well with Pier 9 in 2009. It won no awards, but people liked it because it was different. In fact, just this year, I have had a number of media requests (a documentary is in the air, an interview with a major journal, requests for articles and students getting in touch to work on projects). It has proved to be a solid and workmanlike piece, but now it was hard to obtain.

Now because I have been dealing with cloth-eared lumps of anteaters' phlegm in various publishing houses, I have become a dab hand at knocking up book-length ideas into e-books, and more recently into print-on-demand, using the services of Amazon.

There are people out there who need my ideas, the benefit of my knowledge and research, and in a bit under five days, I have taken my old manuscript, edited it and written new bits, and redesigned it, using my own illustrations and photos that I took to use in the original book. 

It's now up there and running, $5 for the e-book (which has colour) and $20 for the book with pages that have no colour, unless you colour them in. The ideas and the words are the same, and here's a sample. The dinkus in the break shows Edwin Beard Budding, demonstrating his prototype lawnmower, in 1831. Read on, and try not to dream, tonight, of the horrors of grass sports before the mower came into use.

Go here for more information on the book.

And by the way, The Speed of Nearly Everything is almost complete as well. 

Sample: How civilisation died

Nobody set out to deprive us of our hard-won weekend leisure, to divert our conversations from philosophy, literature and science to anterior cruciate ligaments, groin injuries and all the Grand Guignol of sports played on lawn. It just happened — and the lawn mower done it, when it changed the sports.

In olden times, “sport” meant cockfights, bear-baiting, bare-knuckle fighting and public executions, to nominate just a few of the gentler pastimes of yore. Football, when it happened, was a barely subdued form of warfare, generally played between competing mobs of unspecified size, following Rafferty’s Rules over unmade and unmowed ground. Most sports were not played by gentlefolk or gentle folk.

In its early days, cricket could be brutal or even fatal. As we will see, in March of 1751, Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, (the father of King George III), died of an internal abscess. This was caused by a blow from a cricket ball some months earlier. George III took the throne in 1760 when his grandfather died, thanks to a cricketing death that may have changed history, because the young king was probably too immature to deal with the American question.

Consider the fearsome (though perhaps mythical) tales of the fast bowler Brown of Brighton. Born in Stoughton in 1783, George Brown’s arm in the early 1800s was as thick as a normal man’s thigh. A professional, he played for Sussex and generally bowled to two long stops, one of whom always padded his chest with straw. Once, legend says, a nervous long stop held a coat out in a desperate attempt to halt a Brown delivery. The ball went through the coat and killed a dog on the other side.

For most people in the early 1800s, sport meant huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. Robust team games were largely the province of muddied and bloodied oafs. Those were different days, but soon after Brown of Brighton died in 1857, many sports blossomed and acquired rules, officials, respectability and even a degree of social approval. Sport, in fact, became quite the vogue in the 1860s.

Grass and lawn had become popular, and so had events played out on lawn. The idea of lawn wasn’t new, and there had even been tennis-like games played on grassy surfaces in the time of Good Queen Bess, but these amusements simply hadn’t caught on with the mob. Something was going on in the late 1850s and early 1860s to make lawns more approachable, more acceptable for sport and leisure.

I thought I had found the answer when I was researching a history of the changes that happened around 1859, the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Most of the heavy work for New York's Central Park was done in 1859, and then I read about a sheep being struck by lightning in London's Hyde Park in July, 1859. Remember the sheep for a moment, because we'll come back to it later on.

I recalled that Amsterdam's Vondelpark opened to the public in 1865, and I thought I had the link, that a fad for public parks in the 1860s must be behind the change in attitude. That notion died when I discovered that London's Hyde Park was there in Oliver Cromwell's time.

Grand folk had lawns at the start of the 1800s, others had grass or meadows. Stately homes, palaces and university colleges had been lawn places even longer, but now the new rich wanted lawn as well, though only the richest could afford them at first. George Washington’s deer trimmed his grass, but they were kept away from the house by a ha-ha, a fence concealed in a ditch. Closer in, skilled servants trimmed the deer-free grass with scythes, but even a skilled worker might slip with the scythe and produce uneven surfaces, unsuited to putting practice, lawn bowls or croquet.

Animals made smoother surfaces, but there was a drawback. Imagine the feelings of a footballer who was tackled and landed heavily face-planting into a fresh cowpat or the leavings of a scouring sheep. Imagine the anguish of the slips fieldsman, similarly sullied as he dived for a low ball, or the dismay of a lady seeing her hem becoming mired in it. Feel, if you will, with a tennis player, facing a serve that splashes through a fresh plop. No, the lawn was better admired at a distance, back when animals were in charge of trimming it.

This brings us to Edwin Budding, who, as we will see, modified and enlarged a cloth-trimming machine to mow grass. Budding’s patent expired in 1855, bringing in a golden period for cylinder mowers in Britain between about 1856 and 1863. The lawn mower changed our world forever, but lawn could only emerge when people’s properties offered enough space for lawn to fit. Californian and Australian gold funded a new and enlarged middle class, a mob with social ambitions.

So people acquired lawns, but because display for display’s sake was a bit undignified, they needed to be seen to be using their lawns. They needed croquet, lawn tennis, clock golf, lawn darts, lawn billiards, archery and other lawn amusements and games now lost to collective memory. But they were naturally competitive, these lawn-owners, or they would never have been lured onto the lawn treadmill.

So it is hardly surprising that sporting associations and sets of rules were swiftly created, and ground was set aside for tourneys and competitions for these lawn games, but this all came after the lawn mower revolution of the 1860s. In a related change, around 1860, all true Britons concluded that the best way of turning boys into men is through games with maximal violence and close contact with mud, sweat and grass to ready them for a life of blood, sweat and tears, shed for the glory of the British Empire. Croquet, a game of repressed viciousness and brutality, trained future imperial overlords in the art of one-sided diplomacy.

By the 1860s, lawn games were plentiful, but croquet seems to have been the domestic leader. It came to England from Ireland in the early 1850s (though a variant was played by Languedoc peasants in the 1300s). From England, it then transferred to both Australia and the USA and took off in the 1860s, once the lawns were good enough and safe to walk on. Soon the croquet lawn was considered an essential possession for the civilized English-speaking family.

In golf, the first British Open was played in 1860, and before long, the wild Scottish golf links, clinging on in salt-sprayed dunes had become the sedate golf course of the rest of the world. The first Melbourne Cup, still one of the great horse races in the world, was run in 1861. The Football Association was formed in Britain in 1863, though the first inter-club match of football, the game known to heathens as “soccer”, was played at the end of 1860. The Rugby Football Union was formed in 1870. None of this could have happened if the playing fields had still functioned as part-time sheep and cow paddocks.

Most popular spectator sports seem now to be those played on carefully prepared grassy fields, or on artful surrogates for turf. Almost all major team games began on blemished grass surfaces that we would now dismiss as cow paddocks (which they were!). Without the lawn mower and the tireless pursuit of smoother, truer playing surfaces, modern sports would not exert their hold on us. No scythe, no sickle, no herd of animals could deliver the greens, courts and fields that we now expect for our games.

I regret the passing of the flocks of sheep. I cannot consider the start of the luncheon interval in a cricket match without seeing in my mind’s eye, groundsmen opening the gates at the northern end to introduce a flock of sheep to give the outfield a quick trim, with perhaps a posse of sheepdogs guarding the wicket. Perhaps I have a perverse mind’s eye to dream of an ovine Oval, but it could easily have been like that. A modern Brown of Brighton might risk killing the odd recalcitrant sheep which refused to be ejected at the resumption of play. Stand at deep fine leg, sheep, and one snick could make you mutton, just like that!

By 1898, professional players had started dividing up the gate takings between them, sports journalists and writers were hard at it, making allegations of match fixing and other wickedness. There were already more watchers than players and the onlookers were scathed for their indolence, their drinking and their betting on what the critics saw as degraded ghosts of Roman gladiatorial contests. The phenomenon of the Golf Bore was noted, and the Golden Age of sport was over, declared the pundits.

Away from the playing fields, seedsmen, makers of lawn sprays, fertiliser, watering devices, weeding devices and other lawn-tending tools and impedimenta were conspiring to divert the leisure time and wallet of the sports-watcher or even the player to pursuing the impossible dream of the truly ideal lawn. In suburbia, those who could no longer compete on the playing fields struggled to produce the finest green swards.

As humanity greeted the 20th century, lawnsmanship emerged as the new sport for the non-sporting. Independent, democratic and anarchic grass was oppressed by the mower to make servile lawn. Francis Drake probably played bowls on a daisy-strewn camomile lawn, now it was played on manicured monocultures of a boringly uniform green.

While we weren’t looking, before Queen Victoria died, we lost the struggle to have a restful weekend of quiet enjoyment, absorbed in a good book and intelligent conversation. Civilisation-as-it-might-have-been was snuffed out, and the killer is easy to find. The means, opportunity and motivation are all there. The lawn mower done it!

The book on Darwin? That's another title that is in my sights for revival. Mr Darwin's incredible shrinking world is its name, and it is the only book I know of that discusses crude oil before oil wells; seahorse teeth; eating moles, lions and pumas; an opera written by Charles Dickens; getting relief on trains before they installed toilets; testing fireproof safes and treating diphtheria.

Publishing may no longer be a profession for gentlemen, but this gent is about to bust into it. There's an e-book from the publishers, but the dead-tree market is wide open.