Back again after a little podcast-less sojourn in Cambodia. With that chaotic traffic, there was no way that I was going to walk around the streets with earbuds in! Now I’m back to walking the safe footpaths of Macleod and the tranquil surroundings of Rosanna Parklands and so I can listen to podcasts again.
History Extra The Huxleys: How one family shaped our view of nature. I wasn’t sure listening to this whether it was “our” (i.e. Australia’s) Alison Bashford being interviewed about her book An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family (Penguin, 2023)– but it is. You might straight away think of Aldous Huxley, but this interview focuses on Thomas Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog and his grandson, Julian Huxley who like David Attenborough, was important in bringing natural history into the popular media. She says in this podcast that she essentially came to think of grandfather and grandson as one man, who spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Rest is History Episode 351 Amsterdam: Miracles, Money and Mud. In this episode Tom and Dominic head off to Amsterdam, sponsored (as they tell you a hundred times)by Wise credit card. Talk about selling your soul- their spruiking really detracted from the podcast! However, it was fitting that it should be an episode about Amsterdam, which profoundly shaped capitalist history. They follow Dan Snow’s technique of wandering around Amsterdam, stopping at various places, to explain the connection of the place with their narrative of the city’s development. They started off in Dam Square to talk about the construction of dykes and dams in 1250-1275 to mitigate flooding after disastrous floods one hundred years earlier. Their second site was the rather twee Amsterdam Dungeon which was the site of an earlier chapel commemorate the 1345 Mirakel van Amsterdam, where a dying man received communion but vomitted up the host, and unsure what to do with it, they tried to burn it, but it wouldn’t burn. The chapel was a site of Catholic pilgrimage, at a time when the city fathers turned a blind eye to the Calvinist refugees who flooded in during the Reformation. With “The Alteration Act” in 1578 Amsterdam decided to become Protestant- just like that. The next site was the The Begijnhof, a women’s refuge, run by Catholic nuns, who hid their catholicism in plain sight. The fifth site was the headquarters of the United East India Company, built in 1606. Amsterdam decided to follow Portugal’s example i.e. in ships, shipbuilding and money. But unlike the Portuguese, they sold shares in the company itself, not in the expedition- and the Amsterdam citizens were inveterate gamblers on anything- like tulips!
History Hit Achilles featuring Professor Alastair Blanshard from the University of Queensland (doesn’t sound very Australian!). You know, I’ve never read The Iliad of Homer. It starts with a reading by Lucy Davidson, which tells the story of Achilles’ refusal to fight. This episode looks at Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus and asks whether they were gay, or is just that we lack a term for their relationship. It’s fairly explicit in placesAnd how did it inspire one of the greatest military generals in history: Alexander of Macedon? I’ve been inspired too- and I’ve started listening to The Iliad.
New York Times. There’s no end of podcasts recently about Hamas and the Gaza Strip, but I was interested in Israel’s Plan to Destroy Hamas which features Steven Erlanger, the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe for The New York Times. He’s not particularly optimistic about the outcome.
New Books Network Latin American The House on G Street. In this episode the interviewer’s voice is very scratchy, but fortunately the interviewee is not- which is just as well. She is interviewing historian Lisandro Pérez, who has recently released his memoir The House on G Street which integrates his family history with a broader history of Cuba, which he left as a child in 1960. He was not able to return until 1979, and he was fascinated by the places that he remembered from a nostalgia-hazed childhood. He says that he didn’t want to write a family history but it certainly sounded that way in this interview, which is full of ‘my great-grandfather’ etc. as he tries to keep all sides of his family tree under narrative control. I usually like it when historians write family history, because they have the span to identity the exceptional from the mundane, but I don’t know if he represented the book very well in this interview.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 