I Heart Archaeology

I heart archaeology, combining as it does the two things I love most; studying history and digging holes.

And truly, the practitioners of the art/science/scienceart, those fine, proud archaeologists, are the greatest; a noble, honourable, arcane bunch, admittedly given to well dodgy hats. I venerate the ground they walk upon – even when that ground has been disturbed by teeny, tiny, itty-bitty little spades.

An archaeologist hunched over a remarkable artefact known as Google Earth recently discovered a bunch of ancient sites in Saudi Arabia. He had to do it this way because there is a problem conducting field research in the desert kingdom. The rulers are “hostile to archaeology.”

Hostile to archaeology!!! The cads.

Apparently, there is little respect for ancient buildings on the peninsula. According to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, “90 per cent of the archaeological treasures in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina had been destroyed to make way for hotels, apartment blocks and parking facilities.” Who knew this would become a feel-good story? To wit: in the ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ stakes, it turns out that the good citizens of Skinny City and the Saudi people have much in common. Well, one thing at least: they both love the unbridled joy that comes from bulldozing old buildings. Our built heritage is a thing to be obliterated to the maximum extent possible.













meet


















Oh, look the truth is that historians become historians because they want to whinge about how much better things were in the past and they hope to get paid for it.

Meanwhile, we step up our endeavours to bridge the cultural gap. A committee of local plenipotentiaries has been waiting patiently in Riyadh to see one of the minor royals. It’s only been six months and I’m told they have already been absolutely promised a meeting with a brother-in-law of one of the second tier functionaries to a junior prince of the House of Saud. It’s very exciting. There is much we can teach one another in the ways of flattening old things.

Decoy Britney! Again!

From the news wires, via The Age newspaper, i learn this:

"Britney Spears' publicist has dismissed rumours a body double was used in the video for the new single Hold It Against Me because the pop star hadn't learned the complicated dance routines."

By the way, newswires, it's "Spears's": don't be afraid of the second 's' with the possessive singular. But that's hardly the point here.

The point is that Decoy Britney (of whom i have written previously, here http://perineum-wa.blogspot.com/2009/11/decoy-britney.html and here http://perineum-wa.blogspot.com/2010/01/update.html) continues to make her redoubtable presence felt.

BORING:




















INTERESTING:














Allegedly, this is Decoy Britney leaving rehab.

Rehab!

Why has Decoy Britney been in rehab? Has she been decoy drinking? Is it for decoy drug abuse?

Clearly, Decoy Britney lives a far more interesting life than does Ms Spears herself. I would like to offer my services as Decoy's biographer. I know she reads this blog - i'm awaiting the call.

Dorothea's lament

Dorothea Mackellar’s famous (and totally Oz) poem is oft-cited, but it is always the second stanza that is quoted, the first four lines being imbued with a jingoistic fervour the truth of which Australians, even living a far more urban and coast-hugging life than myth allows, are constantly reminded:

“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding plains.”

Dear old global warming is merely entrenching these erratic patterns of torment. The English, the first non-Indigenous inhabitants of this continent, took a long time, if at all, to adjust to their new physical surrounds. Mackellar loved the place, but her references to the ‘pitiless blue sky,’ ‘The hot gold rush of noon’ and the ‘thirsty paddocks’ are all revealing. The English came here, and they pondered, and mostly they cursed the place for not being England.

Mackellar’s poem contains a first verse that has been largely erased from the national recollection. She chides her fellow colonials for clinging to fond memories of the Mother Country’s gentle climatic ways:

“The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft, dim skies –
I know but I cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.”

Underneath it all, the English brought with them a language that is now used to describe this country, but which is eternally inadequate, and often wrong. A fine example can be given in the application of the word ‘river.’

Here’s a river:










It flow steadily and prettily from gently rain-soaked slopes to seaside.

Now, here’s an Australian “river,” in this case the Ashburton, in the north of Western Australia:












Forty nine weeks of the year, it lies a dry sandy bed, then a cyclone passes by the upper reaches, and in three weeks it empties an equivalent amount of water as sixty-two Sydney Harbours into the Indian Ocean (for those not metrically-inclined, this can also be explained using Planck’s Number: a shit-load of liquid to the power of three):













The word ‘drought’ is another misnomer. It means, obviously, the absence of expected rains, but when the rainfall pattern is by nature erratic, as it is across much of Australia, rain cannot confidently be expected, so how can there be ‘droughts?’

The inadequacy of the English language to describe the Australian environment is best illustrated with the continuing reference to the Northern Hemisphere seasons. ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ are words regularly invoked here as though they had some rational meaning. In truth, ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ are both dry and hot-but-not-quite-as-hot-as-mid-summer. They are not, respectively, times of gentle showers and budding flowers, nor of softly falling leaves. In the South-West of Western Australia, the Nyungar divide the year into six seasons, based in part on temperature and rainfall, but each defined by a wind direction (when one lives between the desert and the ocean, one really, really ought to pay particular attention to wind direction). The Nyungar season equating with mid-winter is Makuru, when the cold fronts begin crossing the coast further and further north, bring increased rains (right now, it's Bunuru; nasty hot and scorching north-easterly winds).

Well, that’s how it was. Our old friend G. Warming has caused the Makuru cold fronts to retreat further and further south. The south west of Australia, known as a great producer of wheat and wine, is now, seemingly, in the permanent grip of ‘drought.’ In the continued endeavour to make the Australian environment more English-like, some of our finest politicians have proposed solutions like a building a canal to bring water down from the north. It harks back to the great nineteenth century notion of turning the rivers inland (cf, oh, I don’t know, some article or other about the great nineteenth century notion of turning the rivers inland).

Check this out, in reference to the cold fronts retreating southward: it’s today’s weather chart (oh, BTW, last winter was the driest on record &c.):
















See that front sweeping south of the South West? Wasted rain.

The answer is clear: we need to move the continent about 200 kilometres to the south. Shouldn’t be too hard – this state is home to a populous of the finest diggers of holes ever assembled in human history.














Politicians, are you listening?

totally Oz

The game of ‘what if’ took another turn recently, when a colleague opined the desirability of going back in time and putting a premature end to the life of a certain mid-century bureaucratic tyrant, to the purported benefit of the nation’s Indigenous peoples.

It got me thinking.

To make a real change to Indigenous history it would be necessary to take out the explorers.

Willem Jansz, who may or may not have made landfall on Cape York but nevertheless saw much he wanted to report, arrives back at the overly gilded offices (don’t blame them – they invented the stuff) of the Dutch Admiralty, 1606, in a state of high excitement:

“Your excellencies, I found a…”

BLAM!

“Mijn god! What? What just happened?”
“Verdomme! He’s dead. Shot. But by whom?”

Seventeen years on, Jan Carstensz stands before the captains of the Dutch East India Company:

“Sirs, you won’t believe it, but south of Batavia there’s a huge…”

BLAM!

Abel Tasman, 1642:

BLAM!

And on to the British. William Dampier, 1688:

“Your worships, I don’t know how the Dutch missed it, but I have discovered…”

BLAM!

“I say; what on earth?”
“He’s been shot, poor chap.”
“But who; how???”

And so on and on. The whole continent and its inhabitants remain a secret.

Until, of course, Google Earth is invented. And then, Seattle, 1996:

“Holy shit, come look at this. Wha’ the fuck?”
“Jesus H. Christ. Look at that fucker. It’s enormous. Get me a coffee.”

The times they are a changin'

There is much gnashing of teeth and wonton lamentation at the demise of the Hydey as an alternative music venue. In its stead stands a discount liquor supermarket. Surely this is a fair swap: when the equivalent dens fell by the wayside in the 1980s and 1990s they did so in far less fortuitous manner. The Shents – remodelled as a home for the elderly; The Shaftesbury – demolished; The Grosvenor and the Old Melbourne – yuppified; Canterbury Court – demolished. And so it went.

The Hydey rubs it in by displaying posters for gigs gone by (the posters are suitably frayed and torn – tres Rock’n’Roll). One such flyer brought to mind a show I managed to attend, an unexpected delight, a fine gig. Throughout the course of the evening, I was personal witness to at least eight patented Rock’n’Roll moves. The exact number is uncertain, in part because it remains a matter of great dispute whether 6 is distinct from or merely an extension of 5. This argument dates back to the early 1970s when Lester Bangs and Robert Christigau came to blows over the very topic at a rock writers’ convention the two were attending in NYC. There was of course no appearance of move 11, which to the best of my knowledge has been used but once, by Ronald S. Peno of the Died Pretty.

These musing brought to mind the Claisebrook Tavern, also a great venue of the 1980s, and host to the greatest gig ever, a Kryptonics show that deserves a post of its own.

drinking; not drinking

Through this last ‘winter,’ certain state government bods deemed it a good idea to try to encourage the citizenry to holiday in their own backyard. The Central Wheatbelt, a vast area of undulating, dry, salt-affected wheat-and-sheep farmland, was one of the fine destinations posited. Then just last week, as Skinny City celebrated some milestone or other, one of the main city streets, St. Georges Terrace, was festooned with banners also exhorting the proud regions of rural W.A. And which one did I espy first: you guessed it, that for the Central Wheatbelt. The banner itself seemed to be made of a hessian bag and featured a picture of… wheat sheafs and sheep.

Now, no one loves the Central Wheatbelt more than I do, but surely the state government needs to exercise a duty of care here. What none of this promotional material mentions is the evil that lurks ’neath these images of lusty wheat and wholesome sheep. You see, the good people of the Central Wheatbelt hide a dark secret: they don’t want you to drink.

Like so many of the stories that provide structure in this part of the world, it all started about a hundred years ago. And, again like so many stories in this part of the world, it’s mostly your fault. No doubt you’ve been told many times how your great-grandfather Bert was sent packing to the Wheatbelt in the early 1920s, where he met your soon-to-be great-grandmother Lillian.

Lillian was a god-fearing Methodist. She was all astir back then on two issues: first, the church being proposed for a site on the river next to the new bridge – one of the congregation had heard of a new building material called asbestos that would not burn and would keep out the heat and the cold (Praise be to the Lord for his bounty); second, the increased incidence of drinking and dancing. Great-grandmother Lillian didn’t brook either.

Now, it’s hard to police dancing – just ask the British troops in Ireland – but drinking, well, that’s first and foremost an economic transaction and Lillian knew this well. She and her cohorts fought the good fight for years, and in 1926 they succeeded in getting a temperance vote placed on the ballot in Western Australia.

It was, in hindsight (ah, hindsight), ludicrous, quixotic, dumb-arsed: there was never any chance it would succeed. As expected, the heavily populated areas of Fremantle and the Goldfields – rows of terraced-housed, blue-collar, beer-lovers through and through – voted by wide margins against the drink ban. The attempt to introduce prohibition was resoundingly defeated.

Yet, one region of Western Australia was strongly in favour. Uh huh: the Central Wheatbelt. Nearly six in ten adults there affirmed their opinion that neither they nor anyone else should partake of the demon drink.

Thanks goodness, in those days rural, unrepresentative minorities did not have the power to hold the whole country to ransom.

Could the fifty million of you please, please be quiet

The Town of Vincent – almost certainly the 14th finest local government jurisdiction I’ve ever lived in – recently sent us our rates assessment. I note that our reference number is something like 000000203857.

From this, I deduce a couple of things. Firstly, it suggests there are a little over two hundred thousand residential and business units in this fine part of Skinny City. I haven’t counted every office, shop, house and flat, you understand, but this tallies with my estimation. If one then deducts the commercial properties, but allows for more than one occupant per residential unit, it is clear that the reference number equates to the number of residents (for the mathematically inclined, the formula I’ve used is {∂⅞ x 4.86Ω + √ 6∑ ≠ ∞↓ less a derivative of 7Δ/13 x 0.0056θβ}).

So, there are about 204 000 people residing in the Town of Vincent. 'bout what I would have said.

The second point is that, ever the forward thinking local government (did I mention it is nearly the 14th finest local government jurisdiction I’ve ever lived in?), the Town has allowed for future population growth. The twelve digit reference number shows that the Town of Vincent expects that at some point in the future it will be home to a thousand billion people.

Cool.

This works out as approximately 4.8 million people per building (commercial and residential – and don’t you worry about the maths I’ve used here; it’s impeccable). Again, I’m down with that, though I expect that for my part I may have to remove an internal wall or two. I shall be applying for planning permission rather soon.