Tag Archives: History

‘Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization’ by Ed Conway

Posted on January 5, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 443 p. plus notes

When my son said that this was his favourite book of 2025, I took notice. When I told him that I had borrowed it from the library, he hedged a bit, saying that he didn’t know if I’d like it. He’s wrong: I loved it. I could barely put it down over the three days that I read it: sand, beach and grandchildren notwithstanding.

I’m not a particularly science-y person, but this book is far more than ‘just’ science. Like a Mark Kurlansky book (think Salt, Cod etc.) it combines science, history and travel, but it also packs quite a bit of political analysis as well. I’m writing this on 5 January 2025 as the reality of Trump’s bombing of Venezuela and imposition of US oil interests is sinking in, and Conway’s comments about autarky (i.e. the policy of being self-sufficient that underlies Trump’s ‘America First’ policy) seem particular apposite right now. Ed Conway is the economics and data editor of Sky News and a columnist for The Times (London), which are right-wing connections that do not engender my trust. However these contexts are not particularly apparent in Conway’s book, except perhaps for the ultimately optimistic viewpoint with which he ends the book. Quite apart from his politics, his journalist background equips him with the eagle eye for a good anecdote and the ability to bring the narrative back onto more general-reader territory when it threatens to wade into technologically and scientific details.

In the introduction he identifies himself as a denizen of what he calls ‘the ethereal world’:

…a rather lovely place, a world of ideas. In the ethereal world we sell services and management and administration; we build apps and websites; we transfer money from one column to another; we trade mostly in thoughts and advice, in haircuts and food delivery (p.13)

He distinguishes this from ‘The Material World’, which undergirds our everyday lives by actually making things work, often through companies whose names are unknown to us, but which are more important than the brands that use their output:

…operating stuff in the Material World….you have to dig and extract stuff and turn it into physical products…a difficult, dangerous and dirty business (p.14)

He chooses six raw materials – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium- which are not only important substances in the world, but are the primary building blocks of our world and have fuelled the prosperity of empires in the past. They are the very hardest to replace. These six materials form the basis of products several steps up the chain: sand, for instance, is the basis of silica which underpins optical fibre and the concrete and cement that makes modern high-rise cities possible. In analysing these materials, he traces back their ‘discovery’ to ancient civilizations, often by accident or through observation, before being intentionally created with processes that often form the basis of present methods. Concrete, for example, was ‘discovered’ three times: there is evidence of cement use in Neolithic ruins in Turkey that date back more than 10,000 years; the Bedouins created concrete-like structures in 6500BCE, and the Roman used a form of concrete in many of their buildings before the recipe was lost for hundreds of years following the fall of the Roman Empire. The discovery of On Architecture by Roman architect Vitruvius, and its translation into French and English, triggered the 18th and 19th century quest for new concoctions to replicate or surpass the Roman recipe (p. 75). Perhaps because he is a British journalist, he highlights deposits in the British Isles rather more than we would think of today, and both German and British ingenuity are highlighted, as well as American. Thomas Edison makes several appearances, but the complete absence of any women at all highlights the male-dominated nature of science and invention.

The structure of the book has a sense of symmetry that I find appealing: six raw materials examined in six parts, each with three chapters, an introduction to the book and a conclusion. I can’t vouch for the reliability of his information, but each time I exclaimed “Hey, did you know…?” to my much more scientifically-oriented husband, he already did know and what he knew aligned with the information in the book.

Unlike many in the media companies and publications he works for, Conrad does not deny the reality of climate change and the environmental degradation that occurs as part of the mining and extraction of his six materials. However, as he points out, the production of an environmentally harmful material was often prompted by the desire to replace an earlier, even more harmful energy source which would have brought about an even more devastating environmental impact. e.g. coal replacing wood, kerosene replacing whale oil, or polyethylene replacing gutta-percha from the rapidly disappearing Malaysian guttapercha tree. It is this pattern that contributes to his optimism about our ability to mitigate climate change in the long term, if we can overcome the short-termism of the political cycle and make financial and lifestyle sacrifices for an unborn generation- actions for which there is equivocal evidence so far.

However, he is not completely Panglossian. Australia, and Rio Tinto in particular come in for trenchant criticism over the destruction of the Juukan Gorge for the extraction of iron ore. As he points out, part of the luxury of living in the ‘Ethereal World’ is that we can shunt the environmental impacts of our lifestyle into the ‘Material World’ which often happens to be a third world country. Wealthier countries, like Chile and Australia to a lesser extent are starting to question the environmental costs when the extraction occurs in their country instead of someone else’s.

Despite the shift towards autarky promoted by Trump in particular, and turbo-charged by the world’s realization of the precariousness of supply chains during COVID, the story of these six materials is also the story of globalization. Here in Australia we see the shipping out of raw materials (especially to China), but the circulation is much broader than this, with the finished product integrating multiple processing steps from right across the globe. Such processes make the world more inter-connected than America/Australia/China first politicians might desire.

The Material World is – well, material- but it has political implications. While the rest of the world panics about China’s dominance of the battery supply chain, China panics about its reliance on the rest of the world for its raw materials- hence China’s Belt and Road strategy. Particularly in relation to the production of advanced silicon chips, security is uppermost in the attempt to prevent industrial espionage and to make sure that China does not gain this ability. Ironically, China is unlikely to develop the hyper-pure silicon from which the silicon chip ‘wafers’ are made because the crucibles to melt it are available (so far) only from a single site at Spruce Pine, in North Carolina, operated by only two companies, Sibelco (Belgium) and the Quartz Corp (Norway). This raises the unsettling question of the effects of a landslide on the road that winds to Spruce Pine, or the malicious spraying of the mines with a particular chemical. But this single source is unusual: there is usually another source or another product to take the place of a threatened material. His six materials highlight the international reach of companies based in one country, and the diversification of such companies into new processes as part of the evolution of products and materials.

This evolution of products and materials lies at the heart of the optimism of the book. We have worked out how to turn complex products into commonplace and increasingly cheap items (for example solar panels and semiconductors). Although he has chosen six materials for his analysis, they are intertwined: batteries are just as reliant on copper as they are on the lithium inside them; steel inside concrete is a better building product than either alone. Even though we need to keep extracting materials to make the very ambitious transition to net zero, with solutions like hydrogen and wind turbines requiring huge amounts of energy, there is one major difference. In the past we used fossil fuels to burn, but now we are using them to build.

For years, people assumed that it would be impossible to make iron and steel at the scale we can today. Rediscovering the recipe for concrete seemed like a pipe dream. Scientists doubted that we would ever be able to tame extreme ultraviolet light, let alone use it to mass produce silicon chips. Will we look back in a decade or two and wonder why we ever fretted about producing enough hydrogen to back up the world’s energy grids, or why we struggled to generate copious power from the hot rocks deep beneath the earth?…If there is one lesson you should take from our trip through the Material World, it is that with enough time, effort and collaboration, these things usually happen….Humankind has, since its very first days, left a visible imprint on the earth. There is no point pretending otherwise. It is part of our story. It has allowed us to live longer, more comfortable lives than ever before. It has enabled us to fill the planet with more individuals than anyone could have imagines, with 8 billion brains and 8 billion sets of hopes and dreams. We are also capable of living far more sustainable, cleaner lives, diminishing our destruction and contamination and living in closer harmony with the planet. We will do so not by eschewing or dismissing the Material World, but by embracing it and understanding it. (p. 443)

I hope he’s right.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 December

Posted on December 28, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Global Story (BBC) The Death of Reading This episode was based on a recent essay by James Marriott ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’ which can be found on his Substack here. Both the essay and this discussion go back to the mid- 1700s when the spread of reading beyond the elites meant that power no longer had to be performed visually, but could be disseminated and reinforced by the written word. Marriott draws on Neil Postmans work ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, and argues that beyond the concern about the decline of reading in the 1990s, the spread of the smart phone from 2010 onward has led to a steep drop in educational standards. With the rise of TikTok and Instagram, we are returning to the primacy of visual display – a sort of counter-revolution in thinking and perception.

Journey Through Time Episode 48: The Paris Commune: Can the City of Light Govern Itself? After the uprising over the cannons on Montmatre, the radicals took over, but with no leader, they split almost immediately. Auguste Blanqui would have been the leader, but he was in prison (as indeed he was for whole decades of his life). Supplies were allowed in, but Paris was still lunder siege. Napoleon III’s column was pulled down, although it was later re-erected. Elections were held with 4 days to give the leaders legitimacy with the result that there was an anti-nationalist government but otherwise, the movement splintered. The new government started issuing executive orders (and don’t we know about THEM!) to separate church and state, provide rent relief and soldier pensions, provide free secular and compulsory co-education, cap salaries, and give workshops to co-ops. So far, all normal socialist fare, but also they imposed decimal time (10 day weeks, 10 hour days etc), banned night baking as a labour market reform for bakers, and banned croissants (can’t remember why). They treated legitimate and illegitimate children equally and had same and equal pay for teachers. The army was a citizen’s militia, and army discipline broke down almost immediately. 150,000 people per day fled Paris, where there was constant violence but no terror as such (in Revolutionary terms). From afar, Marx was interested but because he didn’t support the French International, he waited a while before writing about it. Women were influential in organizing, but they were not inspired by feminist or suffragist ideals. To get Auguste Blanqui released from prison, they took hostages which backfired on them. There were small mini-communes in the rural towns, but essentially Paris was on its own.

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‘The Shortest History of the United States’ by Don Watson

Posted on December 27, 2025 | Leave a comment
2025, 266 p plus notes

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the ‘Shortest History’ part of the title of this series of books published by Black Inc dealing with world history, many written by Australian authors. Declaring to be the shortest history seems rather definitive and pugnacious, and almost a challenge to later authors to become even shorter. The blurb for the series claims that the books can be read in an afternoon -something that I doubt, in this case – but certainly they are a work of concision and discipline on the part of the author, in being able to confidently assert a fact or event in a single paragraph instead of hedging with qualifications, nuances and debates. Of course, much is elided in such an approach, but there is also a bracing forthrightness about a sweeping history that needs to tie together so many small details into an overarching narrative.

Don Watson comes to the task as a historian in his own right, political speechwriter, and a commentator on current-day American society and political culture. As well as his American Journeys published in 2008 (my review here), he has been a regular contributor to the Black Inc./Schwartz stable on American politics with three Quarterly Essays: No.4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America (2001), No 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the time of Trump (2016) (my review here) and most recently in 2024 with No. 95High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink, which I reviewed here. With The Shortest History…. he is writing as an outsider, and a long-term, well-informed watcher as well.

His outsider status is most apparent in the opening chapters of the book, where he makes clear that there were competing European powers – England, France, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden- that put ‘boots on the ground’ on what was to become American territory. Drawing the distinction between the 1776 establishment of the United States, and the history of ‘America’ starting in 1492, he goes even further back 20,000 years to the first peoples, and the early introduction of enslavement that followed early European ‘discovery’. In what, perhaps, might be characterized as ‘black armband history’, he continues to turn the spotlight around onto First Nations and Black experience as the narrative of United States history marches forward…always forward.

The book progresses chronologically, but the chapters are thematic. In his introduction Watson notes that:

While the history of the United States is to an uncommon degree a history of ideas, it is equally the story of men and women testing the truth of those ideas against experience: in politics, in churches, on frontiers, in cities, in industries, in battle, in homes, in schools, in Hollywood, in literature and in music. (p. xiv)

Watson places strong emphasis on ideas: on the intertwined Puritan ideas of harsh punishment and discipline set against competing ideals of individualistic self-reliance, which in turn existed alongside traditions of social justice, education, communitarianism and democracy. He notes the influence of Enlightenment philosophers and the scientific revolution in providing an intellectual framework for their grievances and the language to express it through the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and the Federalists papers. He puts his historian hat on to discuss Turner’s Frontier thesis on the ‘freedom’ of the frontier in the popular imagination and he notes the recurrent waves of religious ‘awakenings’ and the struggle between order and chaos-‘ the American id and the American superego’ (p 58). Challenging these were the ‘maniacal appetite for wealth’ whetted by the financial opportunities following the Civil War, and especially during the ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1890s which pushed aside “the restraining influences of conscience and religion, or the egalitarian principles implied in the country’s democratic creed” (p.94) The Civil War, in his telling, had a long advent of compromises on the part of the North, which was well aware of the incompatibility of slavery with the ideals espoused in the republic’s founding documents.

Although we know the political landscape in the United (huh!) States today as being Republican and Democrat, the meaning of both words has changed over time. To be ‘republican’ was to champion the idea of the American republic, and it was not necessarily democratic. The nature of the parties changed over time, with the immigrant influx between 1890 and 1920 shaping the cultural and political evolution of urban America:

The Democratic Party evolved into the party of both the burgeoning multiethnic cities and the reactionary South, while the Republicans remained the voice of white Protestant provincial America. (p. 112)

Looking at the policies of Presidents over time, particularly in the Progressive era, it is not easy to distinguish to which party the president belonged. For example Woodrow Wilson was a southerner from the Democratic Party, and a progressive as well as a segregationalist. Kennedy did not like Martin Luther King, and he had little interest in domestic politics. Nixon was mad, but he was the most liberal republican of the century excluding Teddy Roosevelt (p. 187). Some Presidents receive more attention than others. Probably because of current-day parallels, President Andrew Jackson receives more attention than he might have in a book written 30 years ago. For a former speechwriter for Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, I was surprised that he was so critical of FDR. It seemed to me that the emphasis on presidential personality and actions received more emphasis in the latter part of the book, within the time of Watson’s own memory, I would guess. Interestingly for a historian, he ascribes ‘luck’ as an important factor that determined a President’s actions and reputation.

This is not just a political history because Watson interweaves popular culture, including music, Hollywood and literature, as well as broader social movements including Communism and anti-Communism, evangelical religion and protest movements. However, the political emphasis does mean that it is a predominantly male history, with political actors Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton receiving more attention than other women in his narrative. As the book moves on, the early emphasis on indigenous and Black history is muted and where it is mentioned it is mainly in political terms. Particularly in the post-WW2 years, he integrates conformity, consumerism and commercialization into the “American Dream”, which was very much restricted to white America:

Nothing spoke more eloquently of the American dream than the bustling heartland towns, their Main Streets lined with mom-and-pop stores, barber shops, diners, ice cream parlours, theatres and movie houses, with Fords and Chryslers and De Soto Coronados parked in rows; and, just beyond them, unlikely numbers of regularly attended churches, schools, sports stadiums and public swimming pools (p. 154)

Watson started his book in the introduction, with the attack on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. At first, I thought that this reflected Watson’s own expertise and reputation as a commentator on American affairs, but when he returns to 6 January at the end of the book as part of his argument, it is as a historian.

The United States was born with one foot in the Christian church and the other in commerce. It might equally be said that it had a foot in the high ideals of religion and the Enlightenment and a foot in the frontier philosophy of whatever it takes. The loathing felt for the liberal elites, and for intellectuals in general, was an old one, and the failure of liberals and intellectuals to understand either the people who loathed them or the degree of their loathing was just as old. The ‘Washington swamp’ was not new [and] …the coonskin hats and the shaman’s horns in the Capitol building were as if lifted from a picture in my childhood Davy Crockett book…All these gestures to contemporary grievance connected to threads of belief and myth, and patterns of ideological dispute, that are as old as the country itself. Extraordinary, even ‘unprecedented’ as the insurrection of 6 January 2021 seemed, it occurred in the same grindhouse of uncrossable divides and undying fixations.” p. 261

I guess that only time will tell if Watson’s decision to start and finish the book with Trump was a narrative framing, or whether it is a historical analysis in its own right. Only in coming years will we know whether Trump II marks a whole new phase, or whether as Watson suggests in 2025, the Trump presidency reflects a continuity that flows across the United States’ history. By its very nature, a ‘short history’ with its abridgments and encapsulation, is probably best placed to provide an answer.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: review copy from Black Inc.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 December 2025

Posted on December 26, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History Episode 580: The Irish Civil War: The Assassination of Sir Henry Wilson (Part 1) In this week’s episode, Tom and Dominic are joined by historian Ronan McGreevy, to discuss the pivotal assassination of Sir Henry Wilson, whose death launched the tumultuous Irish Civil War. Sir Henry Wilson was the MP for Northern Ireland, and an Irish Unionist. He had served in the British Army, and as a leading figure in the British Army he urged the British government to crack down on the IRA, a group which he saw as a military problem, rather than a political problem. On 22 June 1922 he was scheduled to open a memorial at Liverpool St station, which he did. On his return home, three men waited for him and shot him six times on his own doorstep. The gunmen escaped by taxi, but were surrounded by a mob. Two of the assassins were ex-soldiers themselves and part of the Irish diaspora. Meanwhile an election held in Ireland led to acceptance of the Treaty, but the anti-Treaty dissidents took over the Four Courts, where they were issued with an ultimatum by the (Irish) government to remove themselves. Among the dissidents, the issue was not so much partition, but the Oath that parliamentarians would have to pledge, not in words but in the level of independence that an Irish parliament would have. The IRA itself split, but the majority was anti-Treaty. Sectarian violence increased in Northern Ireland, and Wilson became the public face of the Unionist stance. So who ordered the assassination? Historian Ronan McGreevy, the guest on the podcast, has argued that it was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret oath organization from 1858), headed by Michael Collins. The two assassins were hanged after a 1-day trial and the anti-Treaty dissidents were removed from the Four Courts. The Civil War had started.

Journey Through Time The Paris Commune: The City that ate its Zoo (Episode 2) With the so-called Government of National Defence negotiating with the Prussians, Paris now saw itself as the defender of France. One of the first things to be done was to hold an election, to affirm the legitimacy of the leaders. And who should be elected as Mayor of Montmartre but Georges Clemenceau, who was to end up as Prime Minister of France. Perhaps his anti-German sentiments during and after WWI sprang from this early experience with the Prussians. However, despite the stance taken by the Parisians, in the rural villages people wanted peace at any price so a divide sprang up between Paris and its surrounds. As the Prussians increased the siege, people ate first their horses, then their pets, rats and the zoo animals excluding the hippopotamus (too hard to kill and cut up) and the monkeys (too much like us). As with Gaza today, there was disease and incessant shelling, and eventually in January 1871 the Government of National Defence capitulated. Ruinous reparations were imposed on France as part of the surrender, and the Prussians would continue to occupy until the reparations were paid. Meanwhile the German Empire settled in at Versailles, just to rub salt into the wounds, and their insistence on parading through the streets angered the Parisians even more. Elections were held, and the rural/Paris split continued. The 300,000 armed guardsmen in Paris refused to surrender so the National Government at Versailles decided to confiscate their weapons. The Guardsmen and the parisian crowds moved the cannons onto Montmatre (the Sacre Coeur church wasn’t there then- it was a very poor neighbourhood) and in March 1871 the women rushed to Montmatre to stop the seizure of the cannons by the National Guard troops.

The Rest is Politics US edition I listen to this podcast every week, but there’s no point documenting it because things change so quickly. But Episode 132 The Mistakes that led to Trump is more historical, looking at the economic decisions that led to the populism that brought us The Orange One. (Just to ensure that I will never be admitted to US). The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement emphasized stability in the post-WW2 international economy, but in August 1971 Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard, which at that time was a lowly $31 per ounce! The globalization and off-shoring mantra was that a rising tide lifts all boats, and China was admitted to the World Trade Organization as an emerging market, something that Donald J Trump opposed even then.

The Economist The Weekly Intelligence: Operation Midas. Wow. This podcast really got me thinking. It involves the corruption scandal in Ukraine, which led to the dismissal of President Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, Andrei Yermak. The police force in Ukraine is so corrupt that an alternate corruption watchdog structure was established, comprising the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). These were the two bodies that Zelensky was trying to get rid of, until such huge public and Western government pressure forced him to leave them alone. NABU and SAPO uncovered a huge corruption crisis where officials skimmed off millions from the state nuclear energy commission with scant regard to the effects of decaying and damaged infrastructure on the population. Why? Zelensky claimed that it was to get rid of Russian influence, but was it just to protect himself. I’d thought of Zelensky as one of the ‘good guys’ but perhaps there are no ‘good guys’ here. I’m sure that this destabilization is just what Russia wants, but is there a real and continuing problem of corruption in Ukraine?

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 9-16 November 2025

Posted on December 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History Episode 578 The Irish War of Independence – Bloody Sunday (Part 3) As with the previous two episodes, Dominic and Tom are joined by Irish historian Paul Rouse. I knew about the 1972 Bloody Sunday, but not about the Bloody Sunday that took place on 21 November 1920. It started with the IRA targetting about 19 men in Dublin, shooting 15 dead in 8 locations. It was personally ordered by Michael Collins himself. Not all the victims were intelligence officers, and not all were English. That afternoon there was a football match at Croke Park. The football authorities were warned to cancel it, but they decided to go ahead because the park was already half-full. At 3.30 trucks, and 15 minutes after the game began, trucks arrived. Shooting began from the outside (this is important because the British claimed that the shooting began from inside), and there was a stampede and crush. There was blowback in England with acts of violence, followed by reprisals against the IRA, who found it hard to get arms. Finally a ceasefire and truce was announced, and negotiations began.

The Human Subject (BBC) This is the final episode in the series. If the second-last episode about deep-brain stimulation seemed a bit ho-hum, this one certainly made me angry. The Trauma Victims and their Blood tells the story of Martha Milete, who was shot in 2006 when masked men invaded her house. Without ever giving consent, she found herself part of an experiment into Polyhaem, a form artificial blood which would certainly be a boon to emergency medicine, but which initially caused heart attacks in all of the first ten subjects, with two of them dying. These terrible results caused the product to be shelved but in 1996 a change in the FDA regulations meant that there was no need for individual consent from trauma patients- which is how Milete found herself part of the experiment. Instead, Polyhaem had to gain ‘community consent’, which they interpreted as giving a Powerpoint presentation at the hospital, and the initial provision of blue bracelets that had to be worn 24 hrs a day opting out (they soon ran out and it took a year to replenish them). Appalling.

Witness History (BBC) I love this program. Ten minutes- enough time for a walk home from the station- and really interesting. Orson Welles Broadcasts War of the World has interviews from various people who were involved on the radio program broadcast on the night before Halloween in 1938. I’d forgotten that H.G. Well’s short story ‘The War of the Worlds’ was set in England. When Howard Koch wrote the radio play, to be performed as part of a weekly program, it was a very boring show. So it was decided to set it in a real location in New Jersey, and to present it as a live broadcast which had interrupted the programming for the night. Up to six million people tuned in, unaware that they were listening to a radio play, and it prompted mass panic. There’s an interview with Orson Welles himself, as well as with the script writer and the producer John Houseman. Really good.

Rear Vision (ABC) America’s Radical Left Part I and Part 2 looks at the history of the left in America. Part I looks at the religiously-driven radicalism of early America and the failure to create a dedicated ‘labour’ party in United State. This failure was tied up with other competing ideas about colour and ethnic identity, and the Republican and Democratic parties were canny enough to co-opt some of the Left’s ideas- enough to undermine support for a minority party which might not gain power. Part 2 looks at the effect of the Soviet Union on Left politics, McCarthyism and the rapid re-emergence of Left ideas under the Black Power movement. The election of Zohran Mamdani to New York mayor and the persistence of Bernie Sanders shows that the Left isn’t dead yet.

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Heather Cox Richardson on Thanksgiving

Posted on November 29, 2025 | Leave a comment

Thanksgiving Day in America has just passed. We do not celebrate it, or anything like it, here in Australia, although as it happens I participated in a Thanksgiving lunch with American and Australian friends last Saturday. Historian Heather Cox Richardson posted a video about Thanksgiving which she was undecided about leaving up, so I’m posting about it now while it’s still there. You can find it here:

In this video, she returns to one of the primary documents, Mourt’s Relation to describe the First Thanksgiving, and it’s quite different to the story as I understood it. There’s no starving Pilgrims here: instead they were surrounded by food:

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain [Myles Standish] and others.

Mourt’s Relation was a document published in 1622 to reassure investors that the colony was a successful (and that they hadn’t ‘done’ their money) and to encourage others to come. There is another similar document called Of Plymouth Plantation written between 1630-1651 CE. Of Plymouth Plantation doesn’t have any starving Pilgrims either:

They began now [fall of 1621 CE) to gather in the small harvest they had, and to prepare their houses for the winter, being well recovered and in health and strength and plentifully provisioned; for while some had been thus employed in affairs away from home, others were occupied in fishing for cod, bass, and other fish, of which they caught a good quantity, every family having their portion. All summer there was no want. And now, as winter approached, wild fowl began to arrive [and] they got abundance of wild turkeys besides venison. (Book II.ch.2)

HCR (ie. Heather Cox Richardson) points out that there is a difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans although they are often conflated in the public imagination. The Pilgrims were separatists, who wanted to leave the Anglican Church, whereas the Puritans were prepared to stay in the church and transform it from within. The Pilgrims went to America from Leiden in the Netherlands, where they had escaped in the hope of establishing their own independent congregation. However, when their children were not doing as well as they hoped, they headed off for America as a form of ‘tough’ love to turn their grumpy adolescents into god-fearing responsible young people.

She also points out that the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to arrive in New England. English cod fishers had been plying the New England coast to avoid competition in the North Sea, and they had established relations with the local tribes, as well as exposing them to contagious diseases that plunged the indigenous population into crisis.

What really interested me were the parallels and differences between the early contact in New England and in New South Wales. The fishers were followed by explorers, like George Weymouth, who was struck by the straight pines which he immediately saw as potential masts for the British navy – a very early hope with the NSW settlement as well. The Pilgrims were struck by the ‘park-like’ appearance of the land, which as in Australia, had been managed by firestick farming by the local tribes. ‘Park-like’ was a common description of the Australian explorers as well. The difference was that the Pilgrims saw this as proof that God had prepared this new land for them: Australian explorers just saw the commercial potential. And in both cases, the spread of disease decimated indigenous populations and de-stablized their politics.

HCR recorded this for an American audience, but this Australian listener found it fascinating.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-8 November 2025

Posted on November 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

Let’s just jump ahead, shall we? I have been listening to podcasts between September and November, but many of them have been current affairs podcasts, which just come and go.

The Human Subject (BBC) The Gay Man and the Pleasure Shocks From the website:

This is the story of patient B-19, a 24-year old who, in 1970, walks into a hospital in Louisiana troubled by the fact that the drugs he’s been abusing for the past three years are no longer having the desired effect. He claims he is “bored by everything” and is no longer getting a “kick” out of sex. To Dr Robert Heath’s intrigue, B-19 has “never in his life experienced heterosexual relationships of any kind”. Somewhere along the way, during the consultations, the conclusion is drawn that B-19 would be happier if he wasn’t gay. And so they set about a process that involves having lots of wires sticking out of his brain. Julia and Adam hear from science journalist and author, Lone Frank, author of The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor.

Actually, I wasn’t particularly shocked by this episode. It was the 1970s after all, time of ‘Clockwork Orange’, and brain stimulation and operant conditioning was all the go. While most of us wouldn’t see being gay as something that had to be ‘cured’, I do wonder if truly deviant behaviour that would otherwise see a person incarcerated for life (an inveterate child abuser?) might not still turn to methods like this?

The Rest is History Episode 606: Enoch Powell Rivers of Blood With Nigel Farage on the loose, it seems appropriate to go back to revisit Enoch Powell and his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. As Dominic and Tom point out, Enoch Powell is better remembered than a lot of Prime Ministers are, and he influenced Thatcher and inspired the Brexiteers. He was born in Birmingham in 1912 and was a precocious child who seemed destined to be a classics scholar. He had no interest in women, but he was obsessed by Nietzsche. He was a Professor of Greek at Sydney University by the age of 25 (I didn’t know that!), but he really wanted to be the Viceroy of India (as one does). He fought in WW2 but not in a combat role. He was a Tory, but he was often critical of the party, and championed English nationalism in Parliament in his hypnotic droning voice. He decriminalized homosexuality, was anti-Vietnam, anti-US but economically very dry. Despite the influx of Windrush and British/Pakistani immigrants in the late 1940s, immigration was seen more as a regrettable necessity rather than a national issue. At first Powell did nothing about the reported ‘white flight’ from areas like his electorate of Wolverhampton, but by 1964 it was recognized that immigration had to be controlled to avoid the ‘colour question’, a question supercharged by television of unrest in Montgomery and Alabama in the US. Why did Powell change? He argued that he was representing the views of his electorate, and he held up an ideal of the English people and became more radical as a way of distinguishing himself from Heath. In 1967 there was an influx of Indians from Kenya after Kenyatta expelled them and an Act was passed to restrict immigration. The Labour government introduced a Racial Relations Bill in 1968 which prohibited racial discrimination in areas like housing. When the Tories decided to quibble over the details but accepted the principle of the bill, Powell was furious and this was the impetus for the ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’, which was publicized beforehand, so television crews were there to record it. He was sacked as Minister for Defence, but he had strong support on the streets. He never distanced himself from violence, but he was wrong- there were no rivers of blood. And until now Tories wouldn’t touch the issue again.

The Rest is History Episode 577: The Irish War of Independence: The Violence Begins (Part 2) After their largely ceremonial electoral victory in 1917, Sinn Fein established an alternative shadow government which had cabinet positions, courts and issues a Declaration of Independence. It wanted to attend the Paris Peace Conference, but it didn’t get a seat at the table. The IRA was recruiting heavily, but the majority were more involved with logistics and protection rather than firing guns. The conflict hotted up in the early 1920s when the IRA began attacking police barracks and courts. There was a mass resignation of police, and they were replaced by ex-army soldiers, the notorious ‘black and tans’ and auxiliaries. In 1921 the Flying Columns and IRA intelligence ramped up, with localized violence. But this violence was not necessarily a sectarian war, but it certainly had sectarian aspects.

In Our Time (BBC). Apparently Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from In Our Time after 26 years. He is 85, after all, and he was starting to sound a bit quavery. So, they’re dipping back into the archives and they replayed an episode on Hannah Arendt from 2017. She was born to a non-observant Jewish family in Hanover in 1906, a family that was so non-observant that she was surprised when she found herself singled out as being Jewish. She had an affair with Heidegger, but then he became a Nazi. She was a classicist, and she maintained this interest throughout her life. She escaped to America in 1941 as a refugee, where she developed English as her third language. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she warned of a new sort of atomized evil, like a fungus, and she saw Eichmann as thoughtless, rather than evil. Actually, I hadn’t realized that she was anything other than a political writer: she was just as focussed on the human condition as politics.

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‘Homegoing’ by Yaa Gyashi

Posted on October 25, 2025 | Leave a comment
2016, 300 p.

Despite its modest 300 pages, this book covers a huge scope, covering three hundred years over two continents: Africa and America. It opens in Ghana in the mid 18th century, with two half-sisters who are unknown to each other. One sister Effia, of Fante tribal heritage, is coerced into marrying a white British officer sent to oversee Cape Coast Castle, a staging post for enslaved Africans prior to being shipped across the Middle Passage. Living in luxury at the Castle, she is oblivious to her half-sister Esi, of Asante tribal heritage, imprisoned as “cargo” in the basement holding pens, before being shipped to America. The two family trees bifurcate at this point as Effia’s line stays mainly based in Ghana, with the ongoing effects of colonization affecting the life events of generation after generation. Esi’s line is based in America, spanning slavery, Jim Crow legislation, the Harlem Renaissance and drug-fuelled urban life.

The opening pages of the book have a time line, tracing the generations in two distinct branches. The narrative alternates between the two branches, in a series of fourteen separate but linked short stories. They could be read separately because each one in effect starts again in its opening paragraphs, although there are small familial references that allow the reader to place the character within their familial context. In many ways this disjointed narrative reflects the dislocation of slavery and the rootlessness of not knowing where you come from. It was a rather jarring reading experience: you would come to be invested in a character, only to have the narrative whisk you across the ocean and time into a new story.

Running through the book is the theme of betrayal and complicity. The coastal Fante tribe capture and sell the Asante people to white slavers. In Harlem Renaissance New York, a black man who ‘passes’ as white leaves his wife to marry a white woman. Step-mothers are cruel to their step-children; families shun their gay children. There is also the theme of severance: two half-sisters growing up on different sides of the globe; and particularly in the American part of the narrative, severance between parents and children, one of the tools of enslavement, but which recurs from generation to generation. This severance lies at the heart of identity and reflects the title of the book: one of the characters, speaking of the Back to Africa movement says “We can’t go back to something we ain’t never been to in the first place. It ain’t ours anymore.”

A rather heavy-handed motif of the book was a pair of gold-flecked stones, one each given to the two half-sisters by their mother Maame. Esi’s stone was soon lost, buried in the mud of the holding cell at Cape Coast Castle, while the other stone was handed from generation to generation. I was dreading a rather mawkish resolution of the two stones at the end of the book but fortunately Gyasi was an astute enough writer not to fall to such an easy trope.

I enjoyed the book, with the equal weight given to the Ghanan and American experience, a weight judiciously and scrupulously meted out. I did find myself thinking of Alex Haley’s Roots which took a similar generational approach but from memory, there was not the bifocal approach of both African and American stories in that book.

It is particularly impressive that this is a debut novel, as the author has such control of a tightly structured dual narrative. The structure did feel a bit like a straitjacket at times, and not all characters were as fully developed as others. But it is a good exploration of slavery, colonialism, inter-generational trauma and the intersection of colour, class and gender- in many ways a book of its time, despite its historical focus.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection. I wish that I had written this review soon after reading the book, instead of waiting weeks. You’d think that I’d know by now.

Sourced from: Readings paperback.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 September 2025

Posted on October 24, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History Episode 576 The Irish War of Independence Part I. The Rise of the IRA Between 1909-11 Britain wanted to give Home Rule, but the Northern Irish unionists didn’t want it. World War I froze any progress on the question. Then, during the war, in 1916 the Easter Uprising took advantage of the opportunity of Britain being otherwise distracted, but it was quickly crushed, leading to the arrests of between 1000-1500 people. 187 were imprisoned, and 14 were executed, including Roger Casement. The Nationalists used the deaths for propaganda purposes in the midst of UK apathy. The Unionists, who constituted about 30% had influence in the British cabinet butBritain was taking an each-way bet as Sinn Fein became more prominent. Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, worked as a printer, and organized boycotts and agitation and stood for by-election. Michael Collins was a military organizer within Sinn Fein, not just a gun runner. He emerged when the other leaders were jailed in 1917. De Vallera was the President, and Griffith was the Vice-President of Sinn Fein and they accepted the aim of an independent Irish Republic. In December 1918 there were elections held in the UK and Ireland with an enlarged electorate, with 70% of electors voting for the first time. It yielded a Sinn Fein victory.

The Human Subject The Man With the Artificial Windpipe was Andemariam Beyene, an engineering student from Eritrea studying in Iceland. In 2011 he was desperate for a cure for the large tumour that had been discovered in his trachea. He had tried surgery and radiotherapy and nothing had worked.Dr Paolo Macchiarini, Karolinska Institute’s star surgeon presented himself as Andemarian’s best and last option. He proposed an experimental treatment – but one that had never been done before on a human being. Andemariam would be the first. Unfortunately, he agreed to it. Macchiarini was a good publicist, and published the results of the surgery soon afterwards- too soon, because Andemarian died, as did all three patients who had this surgery. Macchiarini ended up being jailed for 2 1/2 years, and his papers were retracted.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 September 2025

Posted on October 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

History Hit The Surrender of Japan In the broadcast to mark the surrender of Japan on August 15th, 1945 Emperor Hirohito’s voice crackled over Japanese airwaves to announce the unthinkable – the surrender of Japan. It was the first voice recording of him, and there would be many Japanese who had never heard him before. This episode, featuring Dr. Evan Mawdsley, points out the Allies wanted regime change because they distrusted the deepseated militarism of Japanese society. Technically, there was a neutrality pact between Japan and USSR signed in 1941, but on 9 August 1945 Russia entered into the Japanese arena, which meant that Japan could no longer defend Manchuria. Days later, the nuclear bombs were dropped. In a bit of what-if history, the podcast goes on to explore what would have happened had Japan not surrendered.

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 12 The Cambodian Civil War Begins Part 2: A Revolution Waged with Empty Hands Time Period Covered 1967-1968. In November 1967 Jackie Kennedy visited Sihanouk (in fact, I saw photos of her at the Raffles Hotel in Phnom Penh when I dropped by there one day). Sihankouk was convinced that there was a communist insurgency in his own country, surrounded by Communist countries, so he began looking increasingly to the United States.

Meanwhile, in November 1967 Pol Pot went to the north eastern base of the CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea), which was supported by local tribespeople, but poorly armed. Both Vietnam and the CPK planned to have uprisings at New Year in 1968, but there was little support from the Communist parties in other countries: China discouraged the uprising because it was preoccupied with its own cultural revolution, and Vietnam ignored the Khmer pleas for help when skirmishes were being quashed. On January 17th and 18th the CPK attacked army and police depots in order to seize their arms, and the uprising began. It started in Battambang (over near the Thai border), where 10,000 villagers joined in, and moved into the jungles. With no support from China or Vietnam, the CPK went it alone, identifying itself as the vanguard of the revolution, and Pol Pot set himself up as leader. He lavished high praise on China, especially the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward (despite the reality) and the Chinese Student Association emulated the Big Character posters of the Cultural Revolution. All this pro-China action was too much for Sihanouk, who withdrew his ambassador from China. In January 1968 Sihanouk cracked down on the Battambang uprising, blaming everyone. He brought back Lon Nol, who undertook a scorched-earth approach against the uprising. Yet Sihanouk continued to support the Viet Cong and the Vietnamese communists who were in Cambodia, just not the home-grown ones. The United States was aware of the border camps and the Pentagon was even considering invading Cambodia, which was officially neutral, but the State Department put the kibosh on the plan. Sihanouk said that he couldn’t prevent crossings from Vietnam over the border, so he couldn’t object to the US engaging with them. He said he would shut his eyes to any American bombing. Did he know? Did the bombing start under LBJ? Meanwhile, the Tet offensive was under way in Vietnam.

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