Selected Quotations

...The largest trees were eucalypts: red gums, angophoras, scribbly gums and a dozen others. Until the late eighteenth century no European had ever seen a eucalypt, and very strange they must have looked, with their strings of hanging, half shed bark, their smooth wrinkling joints (like armpits, elbows or crotches), their fluent gesticulations and haze of perennial foliage. Not evergreens, but evergrays: the soft, spatially deceitful background color of the Australian bush, monotonous-looking at first sight, but rippling with nuance to the acclimatized eye. ...Thus the destruction of the Australian Aborigines was rationalized as natural law. "Nothing can stay the dying away of the Aboriginal race, which Providence has only allowed to hold the land until replaced by a finer race," remarked a settler in 1849. But the first white Australian settlers were so conspicuously unfit for survival in the new land that they lived on the edge of starvation in the midst of what seemed natural abundance to the Aborigines. They had practically no idea of what they could eat or how to get it. Most of the First Fleet convicts had not moved ten miles from their place of birth and had never seen the sea before they were clapped in irons and thrust on the transports. They were lost in Australia as an Aborigine would have been lost ion a London "rookery." The tribesmen they encountered were probably higher than that of most Europeans in 1788. To the whites, convict and officer alike, Sydney Harbor was the end of the earth. But to the Aborigines it was the center. Te landscape and its elusive resources, not yet named by whites, stood between the two cultures, showing each group its utter unlikeness to the other. ...Doctors tended to side with their class allies, the factory-owners, and went on record again and again with their considered opinions that cotton lint, coal dust and phosphorus were harmless to the human lung, that fifteen hours at a machine in a room temperature of 85 degrees did not cause fatigue, that ten-year olds could work a full night shift without risk of harm. ... The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes

It occurs to me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Chuck

I am always thrilled after an Upload how wonderful it is to see it on-line and so easily searchable. You should take great pride in how easy and efficient the searching is in IdeaBank. There is certainly nothing else like it on the Internet. Charles Francis of IdeaBank

Canberra

"Our Nation's Capital"

Nell

My mum salvaged an X-ray machine they were about to throw away at Yale and has managed a brilliant career thanks to her tenacious devotion to this little machine called Nell. ( three more ~ 256kb )