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The Earth From Above
White Haven Beach at high tide, Queensland, Australia (S 20°17'-E 148°59').
Whitsunday Island is one of the 74 islands of the Whitsunday Island group off the east coast of Australia. The island owes its name to Whit Sunday 1777, the day Captain Cook reached the archipelago. Today it is uninhabited, but Aborigines appear to have lived there from the beginning of the Neolithic period, when sea level was lower and the island was still part of the mainland. White Haven Beach, fringed with mangroves, has sand of a rare quality: at 98 percent silica, it is said to be the purest in the world. The few swimmers who visit (tourism is strictly controlled) rub shoulders with manta rays, saltwater crocodiles, turtles, and schools of dolphin. The islands are part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which stretches for 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) along the Australian coast. About 20 percent of the reef’s coral has been damaged by growing numbers of a species of starfish, a fierce predator. In fact, almost all the world’s coral is in poor health, which is gradually leading to a loss of biodiversity in the surrounding waters – a process similar to desertification on land."
Yann Arthus Bertrand
He who took these beautiful pictures of our planet.
Thank you, from all of us down here.
www.yannarthusbertrand.org
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Eureka Stockade Diary for Auction
In December 1854, in Ballarat, on the Goldfields outside Melbourne in Australia, Gold-rush miners took a stand against a corrupt and oppressive administration and the Victorian Police that enforced their orders. The Miners, known as "Diggers", built a wooden stockade and burnt the hated licences that the Governor required them to have on their person at all times, or be subject to a large fine.
On Sunday December 3rd, 1854, In the cold dark before dawn on that Australian summer night, Red-coated Troopers attacked the Diggers' Stockade and massacred anyone they could find.
As dawn broke on the field after the massacre, a young English Schoolteacher, Samuel Lazarus, walked the ground and recorded in his journal what he saw that morning. With a sense of horror at the act, but with a sharp judicious eye, he recorded the sight of the dead and dying bodies of the Diggers, and others caught in the attack, and knew that his sense of English honour, held dear by him and all Englishmen, was betrayed that morning on the field of the Eureka Stockade. The Troopers had fired indiscriminately and slaughtered all in their way without regard - protesters, innocent law-abiding miners, and even women and children. It was a black day in Australian history. Even unto today the Eureka Flag, sewn by the miners' hands and raised by them above the Stockade in defiance, is recognized by all Australians and flown by those with a bone to pick with Authority. To this day Australians are often referred to as "Diggers", and will greet friends with "G'day Digger".
Samuel Lazarus's Diary, a hundred and fifty two years later, is on the Auction Block. This is the only near-eye-witness account of an important moment in Australian history - the only time ever that Australian has fought Australian. I hope that after the auction (held by Australian Book Auctions), the buyer will let it reside in the State Library of Victoria, where everyone can read it, and learn how awful is the use of violence by any Government against an aggrieved people.
The auction can be viewed here, as Lot 106.
http://www.australianbookauctions.com/sale_23/sale_23.pdf
For those interested further, there is more detail about the Eureka Stockade story and about Samuel Lazarus in the Australian Book Auctions notes. The Australian Book Auctions article notes the construction, type and size of the journal in which Samuel Lazarus wrote.
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They've been playing...
The Blogmasters who run 20six have been mucking about with their software to improve this site. But my pictures are no longer attached, so I'll have to work out how to do that...
More soon.
Stephen
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Favourite Pens
I always have a pen in my pocket - always. Without my pen I feel like I've left my watch off, or something...
A favourite pen has to have only three main attributes:
1. One must like the way it writes;
2. It must be identifiable by others as Yours and Special (i.e. it is not a stationery-cupboard issue pen);
3. It must not be irreplaceable or hugely expensive ( It's with you always - what if you lost it ... !? )
Beyond that, it can conform to all your personal tastes in a pen.
But a pen chooses you as much as you choose it:
For a pen is a friend, an extension of your personality, and it is your confidant, your secretary (as in secrets), the keeper of your thoughts, your intelligence, and your ideas, in a way that a pencil, a keyboard or a PDA can never be.
Your pen holds in its silent, gentle barrel the words that you will write, and it holds them secretly and carefully until the time comes for you to choose them and loose them onto the page. It writes your name (even on a credit card chit) with love and care, in the way you wish to appear to the world. It makes the notes you want to make; sometimes the notes you wish you could make. It does what you wish your hand to do. It makes you feel as you wish to feel.
Choose a pen that does this as you wish, as you would like, as you would wish to be and be seen. Choose a pen that flatters you.
Whether a G2 or an Ici Et La, choose your pen wisely.
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Australia Day 2006
This is Australia Day 2006. In Melbourne, the temperature will be 38ºC (over 100ºF).
From the hillside above my house, the morning sky to Melbourne's east is hazy and golden because of smoke from the bushfires to the north. The Mountains, starting forty miles away and stretching eastwards, are like a watercolour landscape - fading violet lines rising to the horizon. Even this early, soon after sunrise, the air is warm and there is a north breeze that later today will be a hot wind. These pictures are from The Age
So far this year, there have been 439 bushfires in Victoria this season, and there are 11 still burning dangerously - four of which are still out of control.
Welcome to Australia Day.
(Images now added)
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Captain William Bligh's Logbook
Captain William Bligh, Captain of the Bounty in Tahiti in 1789, was cast adrift in the middle of the South Pacific in an 18-foot longboat by mutineers lead by Fletcher Christian. He and his remaining loyal seamen sailed nearly four thousand miles in that longboat, from near Tahiti in the South Pacific, to Java in Indonesia, where he reported the mutiny to the authorities. In spite of Bligh's shortcomings of character, this is still recognised as a feat of seamanship unsurpassed by any since.
This Logbook was written by Bligh in the longboat, during that voyage. The smears and smudges caused by the weather can still be seen as you turn the pages.
Bligh's Logbook (& turn the pages by hand)
Bligh, martinet though he was, had made one of the most incredible voyages in seafaring history.
Fletcher Christian sailed his mutineers back to Tahiti, where they gathered up the Tahitian girls they had wanted, and who had wanted them, and sailed to the ends of the Earth, where they could make their paradise - Pitcairn Island. Their Paradise failed.
Bligh, after his arrival at Java and his return to England, was given the post of Governor of Australia. He learned nothing from his treatment by the mutineers about men's limitations, and in 1808 was dragged from under his bed in Government House, Sydney Australia, where he was hiding from more provoked and mutinous Troops, who put him on board a Ship for England, in disgrace, to face those who had appointed him Governor of Australia. From then on, the British Government only appointed Governors who had the interests of the Australian people at heart.
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After the Yacht Race
"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by."
John Masefield
Yachtsmen furl their sails in the late afternoon sunshine at Blairgowrie Yacht Club, on Port Phillip Bay south of Melbourne, Australia
March 2005
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