Bingeing on science faction

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Ascension, by Nicholas Binge, Harper Collins

Pseudoscience stuff’s good clean fun, right?  Why shouldn’t the world’s crust just ripple up and accelerate the movement of land masses like Pangea, Gondwanaland and Pannotia to a couple of million years rather than the eons we thought?

Authors like Graeme Hancock, and more than few psycho creation scientists, will try to convince you it’s all possible, even true. The world’s fossils were all buried in Noah’s cloudburst of 2348 BC. Six days fair slog and a day off on Sunday, all that.

Others writers, like Ian Plimer, are lauded for eviscerating the God-botherer science revisionists with common sense but spurned for doing the same to climate zealots. Yep, science is all good fun until someone loses an eye. But colour its reason and evidence with politics, religion, activism, fraud or other shape-shifting and that’s what you’ll get. And worse.

Nicholas Binge, however, seems more bent on fun than mischief with his Ascension fable of a giant mountain that springs up in the Pacific Ocean, drawing an autocratic monied/warmongering/science-led expedition – it’s a little unclear which for a while – to investigate its singular peculiarities. And he’s having a lot of fun.

Singularity’s probably a better term because there’s a good bit of space-time continuum shape-shifting as Binge coerces a crew of physicists, anthropologists, medicos, biologists, ethicists, mercenaries and explorers onto the mountain and points them upwards.

Strange things are happening, as protagonist Harry Tunmore smartly learns. Old friends can see the future, predict card turns perfectly, amid a catatonia punctuating by ramblings about time, about watching the seconds.  But they self-immolate before exploiting their new skills in the casino.

And they’re the smart ones. So you imagine what the wild-eyed soldiers of fortune make of things as time moves back and forwards, dead people come and go before their eyes, unearthly life forms start as microbes before infecting everything, as alien creatures from beneath the ice attack.

Yep, here there be monsters, as the old cartographers cautioned of uncharted waters. And they’re getting into everyone’s brain as the mountain, a good bit taller than Everest incidentally, lures everyone higher.

Brutal cold, hypoxia, paranoia and open hostility colour the research mission as it moves painfully higher. And the body count mounts as Harry tries to fathom what the devil’s going on, why his personal life is a disaster, how to survive his own expedition members as much as the creatures and why on earth the mountain’s luring them all higher like a physical hunger.

But Harry’s sharp physicist grey matter nuts out what’s going on and how to traverse the monolith. In a fashion, that is, his road map’s an inter-dimensional thingo which leaves a lot to be desired. But like TV’s It’s About Time, never know if you’ll wind up in the Stone Age with Gronk or in New York City, still with Gronk.

The physics, existential philosophy and violence make for a good rollicking yarn. Just don’t ask why Harry’s abandoned his family yet happy to relay his deeply personal story in letters of extraordinary minutiae to his 14-year-old niece. Or why he’s constantly writing them while trying to escape death climbing up a mountain, for that matter.

It’s a mechanism, I suppose. You know the drum. Don’t let reality, let alone facts or science, get in the way of a good narrative. After all, what do those scientists know?

Take the Big Bang, for instance. That’s a once upon a time story if ever I heard one. Here’s a poser for you. What was there beforehand?

Please don’t tell me fairies ….

Head-shrinking as a political art form …

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WATCHING Parliament the other night got me to thinking of the Peruvian jungle, of headhunters and, given the cranial magnitude evident in Canberra, the Amazonians’ skills in shrinking heads.

Not the psychiatric head-shrinking, mind you there’s probably a job there, but the real thing _ the secret savage lore that’s fascinated everyone from anthropologists to horror film directors.  

Ghoulish practice that it is, head-shrinking’s a time-honoured, popular pastime which as recently as the mid-20th century was commonplace from Panama to Ecuador and Peru. Not Canberra, regrettably, but had the simple procedure for shrinking scones been better known … well, who knows?

It’s not so hard, really. When you’ve despatched your subject _ presumably an enemy of some species _ hack off his head as close to the body as possible. Slit the scalp from the crown downwards to the nape of the neck. Through the opening, flay out the skull, remove the flesh and skin of the face and scalp.

Still with me? Next, ditch the skull, unless you need a conversation-piece ashtray or somesuch. Stretch the skin over a wooden handle and immerse it a vessel of hot water to contract it a little.

If you’re a purist, like me, you’d then sew a ring made from a vine into the neck to keep it open so you can drop hot stones inside.

Add hot sand to the pebbles and keep the head in constant motion, swinging it about, to allow the heat to apply to all the parts uniformly. When things cool, tip the sand out, reheat it and repeat the process.

Gradually, the head will dry out and become smaller. Remember to knead the features with your hands, pinching and moulding the face to retain its natural appearance _ even its natural expression.

That’s it. Simple, really.

If you were ambitious, mind you, you might care to shrink the whole parliamentary carcass. Peru’s Jivaro folks abbreviated one particular Spanish officer, an old conquistador supposedly searching for El Hombre Dorado _ the Golden Man _ reducing him to just a shadow of his former self. From five feet nine inches to just 31 inches.

According to Robert Ripley, of Ripley’s Believe It or not fame, he’s located in the National Museum of the American Indian as best I can establish and possible relocated from New York to Washington in recent years. He sports a rather grand moustache for such a little bloke.

Funny but he looks a little like the late defence minister Jim Killen to me, which is odd _ he was one of the least big-headed figures to grace parliament.

The once wildly-popular Ripley has been resurrected by folks at Five Mile Press in a colourful scrapbook entitled Search for the Shrunken Heads and other Curiosities. It features everything from a bloke with a full-on horn growing out of his head to pink polar bears and ancient talking Egyptian statues.

But it’s the shrunken heads that are the stand-out curiosity. And Ripley, true to form, offers an intriguing insight into the custom.

“The taking and shrinking of human heads is an ancient rite with the Jivaros, and one which has not vanished with modern times.

“It has, rather, been stimulated by the demand of tourists for specimens of the head-hunters’ skill as souvenirs and all the laws against the practice that have been passed by the South American republics are of no avail.

“While there are traders to pay a price, and tourists to buy, the sale of human heads will probably continue.

“The method of reducing and shrinking the heads remained a secret for many years and it is comparatively recently that anyone has witnessed the actual process.

“Friends of my mine in Quito (Ecuador) told me of a German scientist who ventured into the unexplored Pongo de Seriche _ the land of the Jivaros _ in hopes of learning their secret, and six months later a shrunken and mummified head with a red beard and light hair was offered for sale.”

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser

Trying to stop courting disaster

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Never fail to be appalled by the time-worn old adage that you get the kind of justice you can afford.

Should never be that way but time and time again we see justice dispensed like an insurance company’s write-off car crash assessment. Too much to fix, car’s not worth that much, cut your losses all round. In jurisprudence-speak, just settle.

See it all the time. The cost of defence is going to be too much, cut your costs.

Lots of people happy to do it, too. Bordering on scam. People who might sue for defamation, for instance, for the supposed loss of their reputation among friends and colleagues. They’re happy to forego that sorry loss for filthy lucre instead.

Makes you wonder what a reputation’s worth if you can buy it back with a court order. You can’t, of course.

You can trick up the legal system in other ways, too, if you’re short of cash for legal fees.

Vocal accusations, untested police charges, the rabid court of public opinion and the cesspool of social media are terrific ways of buying the justice you want for next to nothing.

If you’re on the attack, that is. If you’re happy to see your target vilified, harassed, ridiculed, thrown out of work without a fair hearing. If you don’t subscribe to notions of a fair trial, innocent until proven guilty, the rule of law or the annoying notion of justice not only being done but being seen to be done.

If you’re on the defence, it’s a different matter. No amount of money can stave off this kind of out-of-court barrage. You can be done right over no matter regardless of any court outcome.

Which is why the Federal Court is restricting media access to various legal documents. To avoid undesirable consequences by non-parties, viz, reporters.

It means journos can’t report on untested initial applications and claims as soon as they’re lodged with court. They have to wait until the case has its first hearing.

There was a time when sub-judice meant something to reporters. The idea was that you wouldn’t potentially influence any juror, or judge for that matter.

The Federal Court is basically trying to restate that kind of legal protection, by guarding against a level of digital public discussion way beyond what a paper/radio/TV might once have prompted.

Media outlets are filthy on it. Chiefly because, I’d suggest, they’re worried social media has a massive jump and audience on them. They’re claiming the Fed Court has a fundamental misunderstanding of journalism, free speech and democracy.

I’d suggested they’ve got a pretty good idea.

That said, there remain some serious shortcomings to the idea of keeping jurors in the dark about defendants, notably about prior offences and all sorts of evidence that might be deemed inadmissible by our courts.

Jurors are basically treated as dummies. Not smart enough to weigh evidence without stuffing it up. Maybe there’s a case, if you consider how some people react to social media campaigns.

But the one-sided, bias confirmation indoctrination that activists rely on, and web giants happily exploit, is not what justice and the courts are meant to be about.

What we increasingly have these days is pure kangaroo court stuff. Like the old cowboy movie line: Sure, we’ll give you a fair trial, then we’ll hang you.

Jurors need full information, not just some biased information – and definitely not finessed, prejudicial information – if they are to make the same fair and accurate rulings/reports that journalism is obliged to present.

Situation’s pretty simple, really. Anything else and the media’s just embarrassing itself like the targets it too often seeks to lynch with public opprobrium.

 

 

Fear and loathing in the court of the kangaroo

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Remarkable to see the angst, stupidity, arrogance, and vengeful and avaricious behaviours attached to the Higgins/Lehrmann rape case.

Not to mention the miserable failure of the judicial system to uphold either itself or the individual’s basic rights.

Feral. The whole lot of it, start to unresolved finish. Nothing in there to really flatter anyone involved in the entire brouhaha.

Any semblance of innocent until proven guilty out the window. Might as well be in China, Iran or any other totalitarian state you can think of, including America of course.

Any semblance of courts or lawyers looking to uphold the fundamental rule of law – that philosophy that portends that people are accountable to the law – has been tarnished, sullied, compromised, bent or straight-out ignored.

Neither plaintiffs nor their supporters care a jot for the idea of pulling their heads in for fear of prejudicing a fair trial. As sub judice and contempt of court laws demand. Also as their lawyers and even the judge have advised. But there’s no penalty.

There are, instead, ratings, circulation, awards, notoriety and the next contract to always consider. No such thing as bad publicity.

The media don’t really care. They’ll publish whatever they think they can get away with. Calculated risk, as their lawyers advise. Or they might not publish what they suspect their audience might not like.

Some jurors don’t care. Even when they’re told 17 times not to undertake their own research. And again, no penalty. Mind you, more seriously, there’s no structure whatsoever to check on the behaviour of jurors. Who guards the guards? Been a problem since Roman days.

It’s all grist to the mill in the great Land of the Fair Go. A land buttressed by an adversarial judicial system drowning in a maelstrom of activism and entitlement, derailed media and legal ethics, politicking and political interference.

The Higgins case has been shonky from the go-get. Nothing’s been done properly. Vital evidence-gathering never happened. On-off police dealings, no-show medical appointments, book deals, media interviews, Press Club and Logies performances, electioneering, even a bizarre prime ministerial apology – plus a long-running media commentary heavily fixated not on any regard for Lehrmann’s right of innocent until proven guilty but on the outrageous injustice visited upon Higgins.

Allegedly, of course. Not that the word ‘allegedly’ carries any weight anything legally. Anyone not living under a rock knew of the Higgins claims. Jurors included.

What mechanisms were in place to ensure jurors might effectively cast any pre-knowledge of the case from their minds? Or do a bit of their own digging about on the side?

Nix, your worship.

As it unfolded, a court cleaner accidentally knocked a folder off a desk and spotted something that shouldn’t have been there. And that’s the best security the court can offer a defendant against prejudicial jury deliberations?

Talked about the system being stacked against a defendant.

We know the system’s stacked also against rape plaintiffs, too, of course. An appalling percentage are unsuccessful and the mental anguish and humiliation attached to physical and evidential demands, court appearances and cross-examination can be withering.

But at least the plaintiff’s identity is protected. Rape claims can be pursued in court in anonymity unless they prefer otherwise. Like Higgins.

The accused doesn’t share the same privilege. The defendant, however, does have the right not be cross-examined. Which might be seen as taking the fifth, not incriminating themselves – the guilty’s so-called defence.

But this also protects the defendant against prosecution fishing expeditions. And, just to be clear, it’s not the defendant not making the allegations. If the prosecution doesn’t have a case, it shouldn’t be there in the first place.

And of course allegations need to be tested in court. As much as the plaintiff might not like it.

The system might have its drawbacks, and considerable drawbacks at that, but it’s better by a country mile than any lynch mob nut jobs pretending to render justice honestly and fairly.

And it’s better than justice dispensed by patently conflicted interests going out of their way to create their own narrative about what constitutes justice.

That’s pure kangaroo court stuff.

 

 

Justice denied in court of woke entitlement

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It’s a while back now but I can still well remember when I spent almost every working night talking with media lawyers.

Checking stories for potential defamatory comment, police and court reports for sub judice and contempt of court issues, suppression orders. Might need to check every so often that weren’t scandalising parliament. Yeah, it’s apparently possible, believe it or not.

Ran up a fair old bill, if memory serves right, but that might have been a lot more had things gone belly-up. Which was always a possibility, even with the best efforts of sharp journos.

Information tendered to the media might be incorrect. Comments might be false. Right of reply might not be sufficient. Other things could aggravate a bung story. Story positioning in the paper was important, page one carries more risk than down page on 26. Headlines needed to considered carefully.

You didn’t want to be too cautious, though. You were selling news after all and trying to keep the reading public aware of what happens on their turf. So you often weighed calculated versus unacceptable risk. Public interest, fair and accurate reporting and all that.

Odd thing about defamation, to my mind, was that people who argued their reputation had been ridiculed, vilified or otherwise mangled up by some report could always be appeased with a public apology and a fat monetary payout, with the emphasis on the latter.

Saying sorry was good but money was better. Which raise the obvious question of what a reputation is worth if you think you can buy it back again after it’s been damaged beyond repair. It’s a conundrum,

Bit of the same, again to my mind, in the way courts deal with sub judice. The idea is that prior convictions and information relating to an offender/offence should not be detailed before a court case. Juries might be Influenced.

Okay but judges would never own up to such shortcomings themselves. Mind you, you could still find yourself in strife if you crossed the line in a judge-only case.

It’s an odd system, Australia’s court system. It actively works to prevent juries knowing too much about a defendant’s background. Each case has to be viewed in isolation.

It’s different in some European court systems where juries get all sorts of information to digest: prior convictions and hearsay, for instance. Lawyer theatrics aren’t allowed. The idea is that the more information they have the mire accurate a ruling they’ll come to.

It’s a throwback to the Napoleonic era and some Aussie lawyers pooh-pooh it with contempt. Others again, however, argue the Aussie system treats jurors as dummies so thick they can’t distil evidence, patterns, background information – and so they’re kept in the dark.

What you may have noticed in recent years is that Aussies papers have been stretching the limits of what they think they can get away with reporting. The George Pell case is a prime example.

The $1 million penalty dished out for contempt of court – for breaching a suppression order – highlighted the risk of playing your circulation booster versus coughing up potential fines. There’s no denying the media knew what they doing, and that they paid the prosecution’s cost, but their apology was slammed for lacking remorse and contrition.

Makes you wonder about the Logie performance of TV’s Lisa Wilkinson, which carefully distanced itself from anything and everything in Journalism 101. I thought for a bit she was trying to get the bloke off by banging on about the case in front of some 800,000 viewers.

Might sound at odds with everything else she’s done with the story to date but if you wanted to get the case shut down, that’s pretty much how you’d do it. Tell me how this bloke’s meant to get a fair trial in our peculiar judicial system. Wilkinson had been warned as much, and had even earlier tweeted to that effect herself.

The Australian’s cartoonist Johannes Leak wrapped  things about as clearly as many of Wilkinson’s critics will see the matter. As he might not be far off the mark.

Whatever way you want to look at it, now the case is months off again. Fair case of justice delayed becoming justice denied I’d suggest.

In the meantime, we’re stuck with the case being adjudicated in that lynch-mob court of public opinion where media lawyer advice isn’t worth two-bob. But it’s certainly where the entitled woke brigade are happy to accept a kangaroo court ruling.

Rhyme and verse, and a little worse …

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Was a time when poetry was the last thing held any interest for this word-mangler.

Too esoteric, too flowery, concepts too emotional and hard to plumb. More times than not, too cathartic and revealing. Hadn’t poets something better to do than sit around all introspective, navel-gazing and self-pitying? Who needs need to know their innermost ruminations?

But then, that’s not all poetry. And it’s okay, really. Plenty of people probably do need to know, if not stroppy journos. Besides poetry’s actually lots of other things too, even the outrageous limericks I once made a mission of committing to memory. Blokes named Bates and Bings, blokes from Kilbride and Kent … grand silly stuff.

Slowly, the old grey matter warmed to the possibilities of poetry – via song lyrics. Slow because I was more interested in the music side of things. Introspective stuff was rife but occasionally you’d find some inspired material, evocative stuff. Social documentary, political commentary, voices left behind but heaving with everything from love and persecution to anger, cynicism and humour.

The best stuff, so I thought, blended these peregrinations with words that jumped off the page. Words that shocked, words that looked odd, words that mightn’t garner much airplay otherwise, words with an artistic aspect to them. Typography is a thing, of course.

It’s a quair thing writing in unfamiliar areas. Like songwriting, for instance. You can write thousands of journo yarns but opening yourself to a song’s lyrics is a very different creature. Eventually, though, I thought I’d have to have a crack at some sort of poetry, even if it was just brain salad slosh. Not knowing what you’re doing in might be handy, who knows? It’s not a blood sport,  I’d venture, but I could be very wrong.

Recently, I pulled together the following brain-spit to a theme raised by a poet mate down the Surf Coast: Can you buy the ocean? Can you buy the land? If nothing else, it was fun playing with those weird little characters and their finials, bowls and shoulders, their apertures and strokes, and their spines and serifs and ligature.

So here goes, best of luck figuring out what I’m on about. There was some sort of rationale to it, if I remember rightly …

CUSTOS …

Fisherman, monger, trawler and troll,

Say the kraken will take a grown man whole,

Neb full of salt, breeches of piss,

Spirit him down a perpurean abyss.

 

Sad, sullen fate for a jack of the brine,

But not minus merit, for the best of mine,

A crab needs to scuttle, a squid to squeeze,

Amoeba shape-shift, hyperborean freeze.

 

The djinns of the seas offer baleful trust,

Abstruse, symbiotic, misfortune, unjust,

White horses, maelstrom, storm and squall,

Dreams rent beyond hope from their chalice of gall.

 

But yo ho, on Jack goes, all belligerent plunder,

Sirens of vainglory and greed hauling him under,

Fates and muses, they can plot and inspire,

But Jack Tar still fuels his own funeral pyre,

 

So whaler, the poets sing, quell your daughter’s hunger,

Ambergris, candlewax, won’t hasten your slumber,

Poseidon’s all bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,

Hug the land instead, to your fortune redouble.

 

But hold, terra’s a blight, conniving and craven,

Its beauty a snare, its lustre no haven,

A mercantile magnet of thirst and lust,  

Mammon underwritten In God We Trust.

 

So tread ware as you grift, you huckster and spiel,

Grounds shift and they tremble, oscillate like your krill,

Lords, lairds, liens of the land, caveat emptor,

Dangers deep as the sea, no call to plumb more. 

 

ⓒ copyright Noel Murphy 2022

 

 

Island thriller skips to double-Dutch

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The Island, by Adrian McKinty, Hachette Australia

Takes a fair leap of faith to convince yourself the premise for this story might reasonably be able to happen. It’s far-fetched and unrealistic but if you think people like Ivan Milat and Bear Grylls can exist then the leap into its treachery, cruelty and heroics isn’t so difficult.

That said, the plot’s a fast-paced affair about an American orthopaedic hotshot, Tom, in Melbourne as a conference keynote speaker. His two kids are badgering him to find some koalas in the wild. They drag him and Heatherm his young second wife – the first died from an unusual fall down the stairs – off to ‘Dutch Island’, out in Westernport Bay just spitting distance from the mainland.

Despite multiple warnings and ominous comments, they insist on driving across the private property in search of the native herbivorous marsupial. But Tom hadn’t been able to get the top-line Porsche Cayenne hire car he’d ordered and he’s sooking in a slightly cheaper Porsche.

So when a deaf cyclist fatally jumps out in front of him as he’s speeding across the island, it’s all the car’s fault. Didn’t have the accident avoidance system he’d ordered. The island’s hillbillies, the dead girl’s in-laws, don’t buy it for a second. But they’re happy to let Tom off the hook for the lazy half million he offers.

And the deal’s going swimmingly, until the dead girl’s husband fronts up and starts shooting. Tom cops it and after a nasty half-strangled incarceration Heather and the two entitled brats manage to hit the track. It’s 100 degrees in the shade, water nowhere to be found, the kids are whinging their precious butts off, the landscape’s rough scrub offering no shelter and a veritable scourge of drunken, shotgun-wielding uber-bogans are hot on their tail.

At this point, we’re moving into spoiler alert territory so clear out if you like but I’ll try not to wreck things wholesale. What you probably want to know, apart from the ending – which I’m not exposing, I’ll leave that little surprise for you – is that this game of cat and mouse turns very nasty. Inventively nasty, too. The atrocities will appeal to those of a horror genre bent.

The guerrilla warfare that Heather and the kids cook up, despite various ridiculous frustrations from a German couple also on the run, is cunning, courageous, lucky and for the main part effective. It drives a thrilling, action-packed narrative that will keep you flicking the pages faster than you really should. There are curious things to learn in the quieter moments.

Mind you, one or two encounters just aren’t right. Up there with the pantomime-level “He’s behind you!” stupidity. Why the editors didn’t rein these in is anyone guess but they’re flaws that undermine an almost, almost, possible story.

There’s also some mile-kilometre, Fahrenheit-Celsius explanations, obviously for dumb Yanks, that just grate. And for Aussies reading about a former prison island at Westernport called Dutch Island, well, that’s equally weird. Why not just call it French Island? No-one’s going to tie you to a bed of red-ants … if you’re lucky.

Back to the future with a fossil-led recovery …

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Okay, so what came first, the chicken or the egg?

How about the dinosaur?

Well, so science seems to suggest, and largely the fault of a cute little critter jackhammered out of cliffs near Apollo Bay 30 years back.

This came to mind when I learned an ancient Jan Juc whale is in the running for the Fossil Emblem of Victoria title. The dolphin-sized Janjucetus hunderi lived 25 million years ago and was discovered in bits at Bird Rock and Bells Beach over the last couple of decades. It’s somewhere between a spear-tooth dorudon, whatever that is, and a blue whale.

Eight candidates are vying for the fossil gong, including the dinosaur Leaellynasaura found at Apollo Bay’s Dinosaur Cove and whose big eyes helped rewrite palaeontological thinking. Around 105 million years old, Leaellynasaura amicagraphica was only 30 cm high. Looked a bit like a potoroo, according to Tom Rich, who found and named it after his daughter Leaellyn .

Leaellynasaura’s penetrating orbs enabled her to function in the winter darkness of the Cretaceous southern polar region where Apollo Bay once was. Rich contended if she was active in the dark and the cold, she was warm-blooded – not a cold-blooded reptilian dinosaur. The idea led to talk of dinosaurs being related to birds.

Curious stuff, especially with scientists like Abzhanov and Gorman claiming they’ll build you a dinosaur if you give them enough cash and chickens. I can see a KFC bronto-burger on the horizon already

Dinosaur Cove was an antediluvian menagerie full of velociraptors, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, oviraptors, ancient crocodiles, turtles and upright relatives of echidnas and platypuses, platypi or whatever the plural is of Ornithorhynchus paradoxus. A veritable Flintstones zoo.

While Leaellyn’s little dinosaur rewrote history, even won celebrity status on the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs, the jury has since gone out on her. Thinking is now that her large eyes weren’t so much about adapting to low light as simply the over-sized peepers of a juvenile; nature’s cute factor, designed to stop parents throttling their offspring.

But worse. Now, her history’s being re-written again. This competition for the official fossil emblem of Victoria title is usurping an unofficial crown Leaellynasaura already held.

In 2005, Victorian schoolkids voted for their favourite fossil, from a list nominated by Museum Victoria’s head of sciences, palaeontologist John Long. Her bug-eyes snaffled her 978 votes ahead of nearest rival, a sea urchin Lovenia woodsi, on 590.

No surprises there, maybe, but her halo has mysteriously slipped since. Museum Vic simply says there’s no fossil emblem. We’ll find out who’s who again soon enough, I suppose.

Interesting prospect about all this, to me anyway, is the fact the Surf Coast and Otways host an extraordinary palaeontology footprint that also includes dinosaur burrows at Knowledge Creek, a spine lizard dinosaur and chicken-like therapod also near Cape Otway, dozens of dinosaur footprint fossils – bung them in with the other weird and wonderful drawcards of the southwest and you’d reckon they’d make a fair complement to the region’s Covid-ravaged tourism.

Think the Great Ocean Road, the Surf Coast, Shipwreck Coast, Dinosaur Coast, Whale Nursery Highway, floating islands, Stony Rises, crater lakes, giant ferns, spotted tiger quolls, exquisite waterfalls, subterranean caverns, bunyip bones, tales of sealers and Aborigines, attacks on Aborigines, secret wartime airbases, early discoveries by China and Portugal, UFOs, mysterious disappearances, WW2 German submarines ….

No need to thank me but if that’s not enough to set off a new South by Southwest Tourist Trail I’m not sure what is.

Meanwhile, though, I’m keeping an eye on a bioscience mob called Colossal that’s keen to insert ancient woolly mammoth DNA into elephants and build a hybrid elephant-mammoth. Very Jurassic Park. What could possibly go wrong?

Coco-lossal’s probably more fitting. Who knows what can slip out of a laboratory these days?

nasaura

The Bismarck Sea: A battle-worn and weary warning …

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The Battle of the Bismarck Sea, by Michael Veitch, Hachette

Difficult to think, from 80 years distance, just what a terrifying threat Japan once was to Australia. These days, it’s a nation more renowned for its sophistication, high-tech and extraordinary good manners.

Mind you, it does upset some quarters with its whaling operations. Which might not be flash but it’s a far cry from the horrific catalogue of terror it had under its belt in the years immediately prior to and into World War Two. Think wholesale rape, murder and atrocities visited on the Chinese – thousands of bayonet rapes, killing contests ­– the murder of unarmed prisoners and civilians in Malaya and Rabaul, the execution of nurses, nuns, Dutch and other colonial girls, women and men, abominations on Papuans, prisoners of war, beheadings, tortures, mutilations, starvation, deliberate hunting of Red Cross vessels … evil incarnate stuff.

Humans being what they are, it’s understandable that a seething vengefulness – over and above normal protective urges – might infect those armed forces up against Japan as the Nippon military descended on New Guinea in early 1943 with Australia square in its sights.

The Battle of the Bismarck Sea, the one-sided rout by Australian and American air forces of a heavily-escorted Japanese troops and supply convoy heading for Lae, is arguably the most significant engagement in starting the repulsion of Japanese military ambitions on Australia. It was a slaughter the US saw as payback for Pearl Harbour as much as anything else. Australia’s part in the attack was absolutely key. It wouldn’t have happened without Aussie-designed skip bombing.

When it comes to war crimes, which we hear so much of today, it’s intriguing how the deliberate slaughter, next day, of Japanese survivors in the water and in rescue vessels was viewed as a rational and necessary action against aggressors who would otherwise simply return to the field as soon as they were patched up. They undoubtedly would have been so ordered and so ‘Every Japanese killed is an Australian saved’ was basically the Allied catchcry. The slaughter didn’t sit well with some, but not many. Sympathy for the brutal Japanese wasn’t running high.

As Michael Veitch writes in The Battle of the Bismarck Sea, even under overwhelming attack, the Japanese “bizarre cruelty was on full display”.

“Contrary even to the most basic military logic, professional Japanese fighter pilots broke off an attack on an enemy bomber to slaughter men bailing out in parachutes whose fate was almost certainly already sealed,” he writes. “By early 1943, few Allied servicemen still tried to understand their enemy’s motives, or come to grips with the levels of diabolical cruelty to which they seemed to so easily, and quickly, descend. In the absence of understanding, only cold, hard anger was left.”

Veitch’s account is car-crash compelling. You just can’t look away. The cast of players seems almost fictional, and the displays of hubris and ignorance unbelievable yet so familiar, especially in contemporary times. Counter balanced, however, with rebels, genius-like misfits and ridiculously courageous characters, the outcome seems almost fated.

It’s ironic that Australia’s sovereignty today might seem equally or moreso at risk. You only have to glance over commentary by the likes of Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith to get a fair idea. Military build-ups are one thing; for starters, you can easily see them coming. Economic warfare is easily recognisable too, cyber-attacks perhaps not so readily but they’re commonplace and biological assaults seem an inevitability. Nukes in the hands of hostile or terrorist actors is another unnerving thought.

Any combination of these get free reign and the Rape of Nanking – twisted, mediaeval and expansive as it was – could look small potatoes. Then again, when you have monsters like Mao, who killed 60 odd million of his own people, it is small potatoes. Be that as it may, Veitch’s Bismarck is a timely reminder of how easily even those we regard as the good guys can all too easily morph into monsters when in the employ of fear, anger and retribution.

You’d be naive to think, especially with the US in a humiliating Afghan retreat, the drums of wars aren’t beating loud. Ironic, too, that Australia’s best defences right now might lie in a coalition with, among others, those it annihilated in the Bismarck Sea.

Truganina, Truganini: destiny, disease, disaster …

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Touch of irony to the latest Covid outbreak epicentre at Truganina, again, and the sad story of the so-called last full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal, Truganini.

Always been curious about Truganini because my grandmother grew up in the tiny rural hamlet that Truganina once was, out the back of Werribee half-way to Melton. Her French-born dad, old anti-vaxxer he was, was fined for refusing to inoculate his kids back in the fin de siècle early 1900 days. Not sure just what he was fighting so virulently against. Told the court he had scruples.

Plenty of whooping cough and measles outbreaks back then but concern was fairly widespread also about the new smallpox vaccine supposedly injecting all sorts of other diseases into your carcass. Not so different to today. Fortunately, his scruples haven’t been passed on through the family – well, not to me, anyway.

Rough country out Truganina way. Rocky volcanic terrain, rugged creekbeds, sparse groundcover, few trees and they’re gnarled, twisted things. Bitter westerlies in winter and blistering northerlies in summer. Great grand-pere’s beautiful two-storey bluestone homestead, named Remiremont for his native Alsace digs, burnt down in the 1969 fires that blitzkrieged the place.

Bit of a blitzkrieg at the moment also into the remains of Truganini’s confrere William Lanne, also known as King Billy, who was hacked apart and whisked away by researchers and collectors after he died in 1869. They might have gone to London, possibly elsewhere in Tasmania, some of his skeleton was long thought to be buried in Hobart. One story suggests the remains were destroyed by Nazi bombs in WW2. New evidence suggests they stayed, mainly, in Tassie, but the jury’s still out.

Probably shouldn’t do so but it reminds me of the movie On the Nose with Robbie Coltrane, who you’ll know as Hagrid, along with Dan Aykroyd and Aussie Tony Briggs. It’s probably a bit on the nose these days, PC-wise, as it has Coltrane stalling Briggs from repatriating the head of an Aboriginal leader that’s been preserved for 200 years in glass jar at a Dublin medical college.

Outlandishly, Coltrane discovers the head rotates in the sunlight, so he calibrates numbers around the jar which, as an inveterate gambler, he seizes on to pick winning racehorses depending where the proboscis is pointing. On the nose, get it? Anyway, things get complicated because Coltrane needs to win the Grand National or somesuch to get his kid into Trinity College … all very silly but it picked up an Audience Award at the 2002 Newport Beach Film Festival.

Comedy, non-PC or whatever, it’s interesting for its allusion to repatriation problems if not, more specifically, to some of the brawling over extracting DNA from old bones that might differentiate opposing cultural interests in Tassie. In a nutshell, some people have been arguing they’re more Tasmanian Aboriginal than others. Not especially pretty, the whole thing.

Truganina’s ties to Truganini’s sad story, and that of her Parlevar people, grew in my mind with Robert Drewe’s book The Savage Crows. Later, I learned that by 17 her mother and her husband-to-be were murdered, her uncle shot, her stepmother kidnapped, her sisters abducted and she herself raped by whites.

She came to Victoria at one point with Chief Protector George Robinson but was involved in several raids around the Dandenongs and Westernport. She and four others were charged with the murder of two whalers at Portland Bay – two men were hanged, the three women sent to Flinders Island. Her later husband, warrior Wooraddy, who wasn’t in the Portland Bay affair, died on the return trip.

Not surprisingly, she despised European society. She demanded her body not be desecrated on her death but sure enough it was exhumed by the great minds of  the Royal Society of Tasmania and, later, put on public display from 1904 to 1947 at the Tasmanian Museum. In 1976, a century after her death, her ashes were spread in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

Frontier wars were largely responsible for the deaths of some 15,000 Tasmanian indigenous people before the deaths of William Lanne and Truganini. But there was another insidious enemy that killed many very early in the piece – disease. Disease of numerous varieties for which there was no vaccine, no defence and no recourse to compensation, JobKeeper, justice or anything of that nature.

So there’s an irony to Truganina’s latest Covid outbreak. There’s also a pretty clear message: do yourself, and everyone, a favour: Get vaxxed.