Monthly Archives: May 2024

History Listen (ABC) Section 71 The Hindmarsh Island Bridge Affair Part 2 Times changed. Robert Tickner lost his seat in the 1996 election, and John Howard was now Prime Minister, voted in promising “bucketloads of extinguishment” of Native Title. In December 1996 the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Bill before Parliament specifically ruled out Doreen Kartinyeri’s cultural heritage challenge to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge proposal. The May 1998 case before the High Court challenged the power of the Federal Government to make laws using the ‘race powers’ of the Constitution against Aboriginal People. Kartinyeri’s case was not successful, with a 5-1 judgment against her. The developers of the bridge, the Chapmans, claimed $20 million compensation, and it went back to court. This time, in 2001, Justice John von Doussa of the Federal Court rejected the claims for malfeasance and was not satisfied that the restricted women’s knowledge was fabricated or that it was not part of genuine Aboriginal tradition. Since then, the panic among miners and pastoralists over Native Title has abated (although not gone away completely). In 2002 bones were found on Hindmarsh Island and a formal apology was issued by the local Alexandrina council. The bridge is still there.

Emperors of Rome Episode CIX Saturnalia. In Roman mythology, Saturn was the father of Jupiter, and he ceded his power to him. Saturnalia marked the end of the sowing time, before winter set in and was celebrated around 17 December, but the length of the celebration varied. Nonetheless, it was the longest festival that the Romans celebrated. It’s hard to tell exactly what they did as part of the celebrations. Fifth century sources tell us that there was a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, but other than that, it’s hard to work out. There may have been an element of topsy-turviness, with masters serving their servants- or maybe not.

History Hack and Little Atoms. I have just finished reading Sarah Churchwell’s The Wrath to Come (my review here) and so I though that I’d listen to a couple of podcasts interviews with the author. In the The History Hack podcast the author points out that Mitchell’s grandmother had seen the burning of Atlanta, and that Mitchell grew up with these stories, supplemented by a reading diet of plantation romances. GWTW is the ultimate rich-poor-rich again Cinderella story valorizing survival and resilience, with a strong female anti-hero. The Little Atoms episode covered much of the same territory, and she explains about the Lost Cause, and emphasizes that the book and the film is revisionist history.

Three Million BBC Episode 3: The F-word What really struck me about this episode is how closely it reflects what is going on in Gaza today. As with the Israeli/Western governments today, there was a real squeamishness about the word ‘famine’, and the British Government was using its wartime censorship powers to censor the letters passing between Indian soldiers and their families. In the end, even the British censor (based in India) felt very uncomfortable about the suppression of knowledge of the famine. Aware that the optics of people dying in the streets of Calcutta could be used for propaganda purposes by the Germans and Japanese, the Bengal Vagrancy Act was passed in July 1943 to get the bodies off the street. Stevens, a British journalist and editor of the English language Statesman newspaper in Calcutta, knew that any text would be censored, but he realized that there was a loophole which would allow photographs to escape censorship. So he sent out a team of photographers, and the following week was emboldened to write an editorial condemning the lack of action. By October, it was being raised in Parliament, and the BBC was drawn into conflict with the government over the “India Food Question” (they still couldn’t say ‘famine’). Then a book called ‘Hungry Bengal’ was published which showed sketches of starving Indians. Of course, it was banned, but there is one copy in the British Library and here a starving man actually gets a name. Three million didn’t.

Things Fell Apart Episode 7 You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll Be Happy The theory of ‘The Great Reset’ which has been protested by people caught up in the sovereign citizen movement was centred on the idea that the World Economic Forum had plans for a radical reordering of society, expunging private property and restricting people’s movement to a small geographical area. It drew on several individually innocuous proposals: a suggestion of bus lanes; a business of ‘sleep pods’, and especially a thought experiment piece presented to the World Economic Forum speculating on the implications of products being turned into services (I guess, in the way that DVDs and CDs which we used to own are now streaming services). These ideas became weaponized, and their proponents demonized in a way that they never anticipated.

I’m trying to resist the temptation to think that this book was written to order: ” This’ll attract sales -how about a book about aging women that book groups can discuss!?” It certainly felt as if it were aimed at an educated, older female audience of readers. Aging, women’s friendships, betrayal… all set in a beachside setting over the Christmas weekend on the central coast of NSW.

Jude, Wendy and Adele, all in their seventies, have been going to Silvie’s beachside house for Christmas for years, and they head there again. But this time it is different: Silvie has died, and they have come to clean out the house for sale. The 1970s house has seen better days despite its ocean views, with its creaking inclinator (i.e. lift) obviating the need to scramble up the steep cliffside driveway, and it is full of the greasy, musty, scurf and accumulated detritus of a long residence. Jude, successful restaurant manager, has arrived to work; widowed public intellectual Wendy has brought her sick, old, mangy dog Finn, and washed-up actress Adele has come as an escape from her female partner who has been quite insistent that their relationship is at an end. They are all well aware that this phase of their life and friendship has come to an end.

They have been friends for over forty years, and I guess that in that time you could accumulate a long list of slights and peeves. They are judgmental of each other and hold secrets and deceptions from each other. Jude is the long-term mistress of the married Daniel, with whom she spends a week a year at the beach-house after the other women have gone home. Rather implausibly, these long-term friends have never met Daniel, although they are aware of his existence. Wendy is in the final stages of her academic career, but she feels that she still has one final book in her. She had two children, now adults, with her husband Lance, and after his death her friend Sylvie brought her the puppy Finn, who by now is a blind, deaf, incontinent and confused dog, who should have been put down long before. Adele has not worked for some time, but still dresses in skin-tight tops to reveal her cleavage and takes pride in her athleticism. However, years of sporadic theatre work have left her financially distressed and she has not worked in a long time, even though some other actresses her age have continued to do so.

The story is set over just a couple of days, and it felt rather like a play. I read this immediately after reading Demon Copperhead, which was such an exhilarating experience that this felt particularly jejune in comparison. It was a particularly ‘interior’ book, with lots of backstory and cogitation, revolving around relationships and choices and responses to aging and loss. She did capture the setting well: I could ‘see’ the house, and even the characters, in my mind’s eye, and there was a veracity in the complexity and ambivalence in their relationship together. I was surprised that Wood herself is ‘only’ 58 because she wrote well about aging women’s bodies and the indignities that they subject us to. But I can’t help feeling that she was writing to a particular audience- me- and perhaps the stereotypes she held up were just a little bit too close to home.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: CAE bookgroup

There seemed to be a spate of books a few years back with a noun, followed by a subtitle that made a claim to greatness (“a world history” or “the fish that changed the world”). Nicholas Crane, who presented documentaries like ‘Coast’ or ‘Great British Journeys’, takes a similar approach in the title to his book. In this case, though, there is an element of truth, as the significance of latitude is that it does tell us the shape of the world, and in the 1700’s that was a big question. They knew that the earth wasn’t a perfect sphere, but was it stretched at the poles, or as Isaac Newton suggested, did it bulge out in the middle? To answer the question, the French government dispatched two expeditions, one to the Arctic Circle led by Maupertuis in 1735, and another to South America that same year, in order to compare results. Latitude is the story of the South American expedition.

In 1735 South America was part of Spain’s colonial holdings. The Wars of Independence would not occur for another 90-odd years and South America had not been divided up into the countries that we know today. After a voyage that took them to Martinique, Saint-Domingue (now the benighted Haiti), Cartegena de Indias and Panama, they finally made land at Guayaquil and headed towards Quito in what is now Ecuador. There were ten men in the French Geodesic Mission to the Equator, attended by four servants. They were headed by three members of the French Academy: Bouger, La Condamine and Godin. They were supported by Jean-Joseph Verguin, the principal surveyor, Jean-Louis de Morainville, an artist, a clockmaker technician, Theodore Hugo (whose role became increasingly important as their equipment faltered) and Joseph de Jussieu, doctor and botanist. The three final men in the French contingent were “a mixed bag of mates and favours” (p.11) – cousins, nephews of friends, a surgeon. However, having a French expedition on Spanish land was diplomatically tricky so, in order to encourage Spain’s co-operation, the French government offered services in measuring the longitude and latitude of key locations on the coast of Peru and the inclusion of “two intelligent Spaniards”. They were Jorge Juan y Santacilia and Antonio de Ulloa and de la Torre-Guiral, both graduates of the Academy of Navy Guards and trained in mathematics, astronomy, navigation, trigonometry, cartography and firearms. (p. 17)

There were lots of egos in amongst this group, and several of them were curious scientists who were perfectly happy to go off on frolics of their own to undertake their own experiments. The expedition split up, came together, split up again as personalities grated and egos clashed. Their main purpose was to undertake a geodesic survey which, despite Crane’s best efforts, I never really quite understood (don’t bother explaining it to me- I really don’t care). I gather that it involved the placement of triangles on high peaks with a clear sight line between them, measuring, then lots of computation. This tied in with astronomical surveys as well, undertaken using a zenith sector which required the observer to lie on the floor beneath the eyepiece of an immensely long, precisely aligned telescope erected in an observatory with a hole in the roof and a pendulum clock on the wall. There were also experiments about the speed of sound which I didn’t quite understand.

The trouble was that these high peaks were the Andes, with all the attendant perils of altitude sickness, frostbite, avalanche etc. There was a lot of scaling mountains, completely dependent on indigenous porters (as colonial mountain-expeditions always are )and the scientists were typically boorish in their dismissal of local knowledge about safe altitude levels. The triangles could be erected, then knocked down by wind or snow, requiring them to be put in place again. They took readings, but found discrepancies and so would repeat the measurements again, adding year after year to their expedition. Meanwhile they continually ran out of money, got involved in a brawl that led to murder, and they seriously insulted the Spanish contingent.

And what did they have to show for it, ten years later? Well, not all the men returned, but those who did not only proved Newton right, but they also undertook ground-breaking research on rubber and malaria, completed the first detailed survey of an Inca site, described platinum, took thousands of measurements and made thousands of botanical observations. But, as the final chapter which wraps up ‘what happened next’, several of them seemed infected by travel-restlessness (a pre-existing condition which had probably prompted them to go on the expedition in the first place), while others returned to France to die of amoebic dysentery, experimental hernia surgery (always the scientist), falling from scaffolding repairing a church or just old age.

This book is told in a rollicking narrative style, and the different characters are well-differentiated. What I couldn’t understand though, is why a book about geography, written by a geographer, had only two maps with minuscule writing located at the front of the book. I was flipping back and forth constantly, squinting trying to read the writing on the map. If only there had been legible maps tracing their journey placed appropriately within the text, I am sure that I would have followed their voyage more easily. Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable read which demonstrates both men’s (because they were all men) endurance and determination, and their selfishness, self-aggrandizement and inability to work together for ten whole years.

My rating: 7.5

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library. And why?- a beautiful cover and it looked interesting.