Blogging the 2010s — 13 — February 2010

Now we are anticipating some quite decent rain in Eastern Australia. The Queensland town of Stanthorpe is currently relying entirely on trucking in water, not having had rain for three years! Stanthorpe is not in the desert! It is well known (usually) for apple and other fruit production. Nearer here in NSW in Wollongong we have had rainy periods over the past few years, but well below the average. Nationally the Bureau of Meteorology’s annual climate statement notes that 2019 was the nation’s warmest and driest year on record. “The national rainfall was 37mm, or 11.7%, below the 314.5mm re corded in the previous driest year in 1902. The national average temperature was nearly 0.2C above the previous warmest year in 2013.”

Now we are being warned about the possibility of flash floods over the coming week…

Leaving all that, let us return to representative posts from the past decade, starting at February 2010.

SBHS, Science, certainty, climate change

No doubt about it: Sydney Boys High has produced some very distinguished people, and even more less distinguished, myself being one of that majority. Looking at that list I find I actually taught, or knew from my teaching days there, ten of them, all more distinguished than I am.

In my first three years as a student there I leaned, as I had through primary school, towards Science, until the realities of Senior Chemistry and poor mathematical skills hit me, but I have always maintained an interest. Right now, for example, I am reading Chris Stringer’s totally fascinating Homo Britannicus (2006). There’s a review here.

…On, next, to evidence from a rich Neanderthal site in Norfolk of renewed habitation in that part of Britain a mere 60,000 years ago. To speak again in thousands of years before the present: the Neanderthals perhaps managed to cling on until 30 – often keeping warm, it seems, by burning bones for fuel – but then they disappeared for ever. As a peak of climatic severity gradually approached, the tall and modern-looking Cro-Magnons began to move in, the people known best today for their cave art in France. Homo sapiens they may have been, but at 25 the British weather defeated them, and not until 15 did they return. Their cave art at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire and their suspected “nutritional cannibalism” in Somerset’s Cheddar Gorge are memorials to their time here, which lasted until a final purge by ice at 13. Only from the time of their last return, about 11,500 years ago, has life in Britain been reasonably continuous, with a climate kind enough to support, in the course of time, farming and urbanization.

So much for the bare bones of the story. Anthropologists are not afraid to stretch their canvas back to such remote periods, although few calling themselves archaeologists do so, and even fewer who think of themselves as historians, with the consequence that our gestalt view of the past is highly blinkered. Broaden your canvas to picture ice north of the Thames a mile thick, and all the fine detail of later world history suddenly seems less important. Stringer gathers the views of climatologists as to what is in store for us. Though they cannot agree on whether there will be a “super-interglacial”, warmer than anything for the past 50 million years, or a freezing over of the North Atlantic and the continents flanking it, this is small comfort, since they do appear to agree that change, when it comes, may be rapid, sweeping away communities in less than a human lifespan. Politicians should read the relevant chapter of Homo Britannicus carefully, for it will cut more ice than all that windmill nonsense…

Back to SBHS. Here is the distinguished scientists list:

  • Ronald N. Bracewell — Lewis M. Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emeritus of the Space, Telecommunications and Radioscience Laboratory at Stanford University
  • Graeme Milbourne Clark AC AO — pioneer of the multiple-channel cochlear implant; founder of the Bionic Ear Institute; Fellow of the Royal Society
  • Professor John Cornforth — Nobel Laureate for Chemistry (1975)
  • Lord Robert May of Oxford — former President of the Royal Society, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government (1995-2000)
  • Sir Grafton Elliot Smith — anatomist

To that I think we should add Andrew Goodwin (1996), or will do so in the near future.

Lord May you have met here before. There is an article about him in the latest New Scientist blog.

…Should scientists have a special voice when it comes to deciding government policy?

Last night Robert May, the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser, set out his views. The answer? No.

May, a former president of the Royal Society, reckons that the job of scientists is to lay out the scientific facts and – importantly – the uncertainties. After that, it’s up to the public to decide what to do about them.Scientists can and should make their opinions clear – but only as citizens. Being a scientist doesn’t give you the right to lord it over the rest of the population…

…here’s the uncertainty principle: scientists mustn’t give in to the pressure to deal in certainties.

“So many of the problems we have to worry about have substantial uncertainties associated with them,” May said. “Science is a useful way of asking the right questions, but it doesn’t always have the right answers.”

That’s why scientists have to frame the debate with their results – all of them – then step back.

It’s worth taking May seriously because he has a pedigree in this. He managed the UK’s approach to using stem cells, and encouraged the scientists involved to simply lay out the facts and let the politicians do their job, rather than lobby for a particular outcome…

By contrast Lord Monckton, recently in Australia as an apostle of climate change scepticism, is a man of no mean certainty, as befits someone whose scientific credentials are very similar to my own — except that I would rather take note of the spirit of a real scientist, such as Lord May, and accept that when people like him express a 90% degree of certainty on the subject of climate change they do not do so lightly.

Here’s a rare beast indeed: a politician who in fact was also a scientist:

…Mr President, the environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.

We should work through this great organisation and its agencies to secure world-wide agreements on ways to cope with the effects of climate change, the thinning of the Ozone Layer, and the loss of precious species.

We need a realistic programme of action and an equally realistic timetable.

Each country has to contribute, and those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.

The work ahead will be long and exacting. We should embark on it hopeful of success, not fearful of failure.

I began with Charles Darwin and his work on the theory of evolution and the origin of species. Darwin’s voyages were among the high-points of scientific discovery.

They were undertaken at a time when men and women felt growing confidence that we could not only understand the natural world but we could master it, too.

Today, we have learned rather more humility and respect for the balance of nature.

But another of the beliefs of Darwin’s era should help to see us through—the belief in reason and the scientific method. Reason is humanity’s special gift. It allows us to understand the structure of the nucleus. It enables us to explore the heavens. It helps us to conquer disease. Now we must use our reason to find a way in which we can live with nature, and not dominate nature.

At the end of a book which has helped many young people to shape their own sense of stewardship for our planet, its American author quotes one of our greatest English poems, Milton’s “Paradise Lost”.

When Adam in that poem asks about the movements of the heavens, Raphael the Archangel refuses to answer. “Let it speak”, he says,

“The Maker’s high magnificence, who built
So spacious, and his line stretcht out so far,
That Man may know he dwells not in his own; An edifice too large for him to fill,
Lodg’d in a small partition, and the rest
Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known.”

We need our reason to teach us today that we are not, that we must not try to be, the lords of all we survey.

We are not the lords, we are the Lord’s creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged today with preserving life itself—preserving life with all its mystery and all its wonder. May we all be equal to that task.

Thank you Mr President.

Didn’t like her social philosophy much, but three cheers to Margaret Thatcher for those prescient words from 9 November 1989: “Speech to United Nations General Assembly (Global Environment)”.

Some January 2010 pics

Selected from my photo blog of ten years ago.

I have been like most of us meditating this new year on what the Noughties have been like. Today I post some personal images.

Me, 2002 and 2009

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My place, 2002 and 2009 – yesterday in fact

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Aside from the fact it wasn’t quite as sunny yesterday, you’ll see the undergrowth has overgrown.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse. — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles Chapter 21.The city from Elizabeth Street Surry Hills 6 am

Ray Christison sends a welcome gift

I already knew that my cousin Ray Christison had published Shapeshifter: the strange life of John Hampton Christison, Professor of Dancing 1858-1923 (2017), in fact had read an earlier draft. In various places on my blogs, especially here, I had myself tackled the story. See also these posts. Over Christmas Ray got in touch and arranged to send me a copy — once I had told him my exact postal address! It arrived yesterday.

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Merely as social history, even apart from the family connection — John was Ray’s and my great-grandfather, the book is well worth reading. Given that Ray is a trained historical archaeologist with a longstanding fascination with history Australian and Scottish and more, the book is very professional in presentation and in literary style. It is also very well illustrated, not least with photos of John, who would have had a whale of a time in the age of Instagram. Oddly though, this one is missing:

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So here we have a man who may have danced before Queen Victoria at Balmoral, who once had a vineyard in the Hunter Valley next to the more famous Rosemount Estate, who was a bastard of a husband and father at times, more than a touch Byronic*,  but also apparently in later life a teetotaller, was a serial evader of debts, but who was wounded in action during the Boer War. Ray included a photo of his Boer War medal, now in Ray’s possession. Once when I was about 14 my grandfather Roy Hampton Christison started to tell me something of his father, who had died 20 years before my birth but was never spoken of anyway. My grandmother Ada put a stop to that with a pronouncement worthy of Queen Victoria: “There are some things that are better not talked of!”

  • *Euphemism alert!

Ray, fortunately, has not hesitated to talk of them. The result is the portrait of a complex, obviously very gifted and interesting character — who just happens to be our great-grandfather. Ray, being the historian he is, puts the story in historical context, both in Scotland and Australia. John’s career encompassed both countries. In Australia in his lifetime he was in Newcastle, in the Hunter region, in Sydney, in Mittagong, in Tasmania, in Melbourne, and indeed for a while was a station-master in Coolgardie WA! He taught dancing and organised highly praised parties all over the place. What a man!

Not so easy for my grandfather and his siblings though, or for my great-grandmother Sophia Jane, whom I actually remember! My one quibble, Ray, is that the photo of the family including her and my brother Ian on p.58 is said to be taken at Flora Street Sutherland during the 1940s. No, it was 61 Auburn Street — phone LB2271! (Fancy my remembering that last detail; perhaps I was made to learn it in case I ever wandered off and got lost!) Uncle Eric and Aunt Gwen — the former also in that photo — lived in Flora Street in the 1940s. By the way, despite the subsequent home-uniting of Sutherland both that Flora Street house and 61 Auburn Street are still alive and kicking!

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Here is another of Sophia Jane (or Jean) Christison in her 90s. Apparently she decorated that cake herself!

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If you are intrigued, Ray’s book is available here.

A letter from Sophia Jane, on the death in 1948 of my grandfather Thomas Daniel Sweeney Whitfield:

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Oh and another thing. In listing instances of Christisons in Scotland’s past (p.7) Ray does not mention another John Christison who figured in the Scottish Reformation back in the days of Mary Queen of Scots. To quote Andrew Lang, John Knox and the Reformation (1905 and on Project Gutenberg):

But, sometime in April 1558 apparently, a poor priest of Forfarshire, Walter Myln, who had married and got into trouble under Cardinal Beaton, was tried for heresy, and, without sentence of a secular judge, it is said, was burned at St. Andrews, displaying serene courage, and hoping to be the last martyr in Scotland. Naturally there was much indignation; if the Lords and others were to keep their Band they must bestir themselves. They did bestir themselves in defence of their favourite preachers—Willock, Harlaw, Methuen; a ci-devant friar, Christison; and Douglas….

After Parliament was over, at the end of December 1558, the Archbishop of St. Andrews again summoned the preachers, Willock, Douglas, Harlaw, Methuen, and Friar John Christison to a “day of law” at St. Andrews, on February 2, 1559. The brethren then “caused inform the Queen Mother that the said preachers would appear with such multitude of men professing their doctrine, as was never seen before in such like cases in this country,” and kept their promise. The system of overawing justice by such gatherings was usual, as we have already seen; Knox, Bothwell, Lethington, and the Lord James Stewart all profited by the practice on various occasions.

Mary of Guise, “fearing some uproar or sedition,” bade the bishops put off the summons, and, in fact, the preachers never were summoned, finally, for any offences prior to this date.

Tram, Shakespeare and a pause in the bushfires

So yesterday I took the train to Sydney to have lunch with M in Surry Hills — and to ride the tram. I took with me for sentimental reasons this:

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The last time I rode a tram through Surry Hills/Moore Park I may well have had that with me! Now, about the new tram — and here I am on board:

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It is a tad slow, but that is probably better than running over people or crashing into cars. Indeed at one point yesterday a car came through an intersection as if the moving tram wasn’t there. The tram driver sounded his horn — not a bell, notice. However, while well aware of the costs that have been involved in the build, I give the tram the thumbs up! It isn’t the line to nowhere after all. Yesterday it delivered quite a few to the cricket — sorry about that, Kiwis! Then it has two well-placed stops for Randwick Race Course, ditto for the University of New South Wales, and the Randwick line ends right in the midst of the medical offices, cafes etc., that are part of the Prince of Wales Hospital precint. I can see a lot of use for the line as time goes on.

Mind you, it is true the bus is faster… But not as comfortable.

Then back to Surry Hills, and the glorious old Shakey — the Shakespeare Hotel of such happy memory. There I met M, who was in fine form. And the food was excellent — I had the Shakey Pie, a beef and vegetable job in a real home-made pie shell, not a lump of premade pastry on top of a ramekin. M had a steak; he said it was excellent. And price? Much the same as City Diggers in Wollongong — under $20 each dish. You could have had a chicken schnitzel special for $10! The drinks are on the dear side, but not outrageous.

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And the Surry Hills tram stop is ideally placed for visiting the Shakey.

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Picture by James O’Brien

Travelling in cooler weather yesterday to and from Sydney I closely observed the bush as we passed through. Tell you what, toss a match in there and all hell would break loose. Wollongong and the Royal National Park have truly been lucky so far — but there is very possibly two months to go. The heat returns at the end of this week. And as soon as I write that I know some are going to mutter “hazard reduction” and others will start muttering “Greens!” Yes, there are arguments worth having around all that, but to quote one expert: “It’s simply conspiracy stuff. It’s an obvious attempt to deflect the conversation away from climate change.”

On Sunday night I phoned my last remaining aunt, in Sutherland — she’s 82 — knowing that my cousins from Bundanoon were sheltering there, having evacuated. I spoke to one of those cousins. It seems that their Bundanoon house is safe, though covered in ash. That at least was all she knew on Sunday. We talked for some time. We haven’t talked for a very long time, in fact, using Facebook to keep tabs instead. We found ourselves on exactly the same page about climate change being the deep cause behind all the proximate causes (such as fuel loads) of this present fire season.

Wollongong rides its luck again!

Yesterday’s day from hell passed relatively quietly, but that was not true of so many places near here and further away. Fancy Penrith, west of Sydney, being the hottest place on earth at almost 49C!  Luckily West Wollongong reached just 35C.

Today I just want to illustrate some of the scope of these fires simply by sharing from my own relatives! I avoid full names for privacy reasons, and have also eschewed link addresses.  NOTE: if any of you want a photo or reference removed, please let me know.

First, my sister-in-law and a niece in Milton/Ulladulla NSW.  Here is a view from my sister-in-law’s home a few days ago:

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The most recent post on Facebook: “M***** and her mum have been evacuated to mollymook beach, it got bad in uladulla, she is trying to reserve her battery on her phone.”

Now a cousin who, interestingly, I have only just become aware of through the internet, though we are the same age. James lives in Tahmoor. This photo — and he is an excellent photographer — was taken at little place called Balmoral which was virtually wiped out just before Christmas.

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Finally, two cousins — sisters — L and H, who live at Bundanoon. A few days ago L posted: “What does a tired RFS Deputy Captain do when he finally has some off truck time? Well if it is Tim ******** he drives down to the Southern Highlands and spends four exhausting hours in the heat on the roof of his aunts’ house clearing gutters and cutting back overhanging branches to make us safer as fires move closer. You are a legend Tim and we love you heaps. xx”

Sadly, just in the last day Bundanoon has been hit. Eleven hours ago H posted: “My little town of Bundanoon is on fire, houses are being lost right now. We are safe at mums with our animals but our hearts are breaking. Simply devastated.”

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I am planning to go to Sydney for lunch tomorrow, to Surry Hills in fact. I will have in my backpack — as indeed I do now — this computer, its charger, my phone charger, and all my medication. Why? Wollongong has been lucky. We all know very well that Wollongong has been cut off from Sydney by fire before today!

See my post of August 16 2019, at the very beginning of this long bushfire season.  Complacency is not an option.

Again from October 2013, from my window:

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