Blog – words & images

The early colonial period in Northern Australia

canoes in mangroves
Aboriginals and Canoes at Cooktown ca 1900 by James Cossar Smith

This post was triggered by the wonderfully evocative old photo above. It comes from the Fryer Library, University of Queensland, part of a large collection indexed here.

The page will gradually grow into an anthology-style post like People in Australia before Europeans arrived and The European colonisation of Australia but covering specifically the early colonial period in northern Australia, roughly 1850 – 1930 and anywhere north and east of a line from Bundaberg to Darwin. Like those two, it will be a collection of items that deserve to be remembered, from various online sources.

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What they don’t tell you about retirement

  • A few thoughts for new retirees from someone who has been there and done that recently enough to recall some unexpected challenges and rewards.

Relevance deprivation

Your job is a very large part of your identity. For years, a key step in getting to know people has been asking each other, “What do you do for a living?” and the answer was often, “I am a [teacher chippie engineer gardener].”

Note the “I am.”

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Magical London – Gaiman, Stross and Aaronovitch

Finding a good new-to-me writer and series is always a delight and I’m celebrating my discovery of Aaronovitch and The Rivers of London by putting them in the context of some books I’ve known much longer.

Charles Stross: The Laundry Files

A mash-up of Fleming – Deighton – Le Carre spy novels and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos? Why not? And some cubicle-life workplace humour for light relief? Sure. The result won’t be to everyone’s taste but some of us will find it to be great (gory, gruesome) fun.

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Notes for a dictionary of dispossession

Language shapes our thought. Examined carefully, it reveals our attitudes. For both reasons, looking at the language around the arrival of Europeans in Australia is worthwhile.

wordle for a dictionary of dispossessionThese are notes for a dictionary, a collection of words and concepts arranged somewhat logically. English is a rich and flexible language. Where we have multiple choices for an idea, as we usually do, each of them has a slightly different meaning and cluster of connotations. Teasing them all out is slow, patient work.

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Breath

Breath by James Nestor - coverBreath, the new science of a lost art

James Nestor, Penguin 2020.

Nestor, a science writer, explains in the introduction to Breath that he was alerted to the possibilities of breath-based health therapies (conventional and not) when his doctor sent him to a yoga breathing class to fix up his own chronic poor health. It worked, and sent him on an intermittent quest  (he wrote another book along the way) to learn more.

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