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This will end in tears: Zeppelins to make tourist flights over London. (Via Airshipworld.)

Image source: from the front cover of Louis Gastine, War in Space: or, an Air-craft War between France and Germany (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1913). (OK, it’s Paris, not London — so I cheated.) The oldest paperback I own, incidentally.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The Honourable Kevin Rudd, MP, Prime Minister of Australia, apologises to the Stolen Generations, House of Representatives, Canberra, 13 February 2008:

Therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear, and therefore, for our people, the course of action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history. In doing so, we are doing more than contending with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public debate. In doing so, we are also wrestling with our own soul. This is not, as some would argue, a black-armband view of history; it is just the truth: the cold, confronting, uncomfortable truth — facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it. Until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people. It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification. We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied. We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments. In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation—from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that. Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing. I ask those non-Indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you. I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive. My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia. And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us.

Sometimes, history doesn’t need to be sought out. Sometimes it comes to you.

Sources: Parliament of Australia (text), trimba (image).

Weddings Parties Anything, “A Tale They Won’t Believe”:

I have previously explained the relationship of this song to aviation history (well, it’s pretty slender, to be honest), here.

Though the Weddoes split up a decade back, they’re embarking on a reunion tour around Australia, which is very exciting news — particularly since I’ll be seeing them at the good old Corner Hotel in April! They’re also playing, oddly enough, one show in London, on 25 April. They’re sensational live, so why not mark Anzac Day in true Aussie style (i.e., rocking your socks off and, optionally, getting simultaneously smashed)? All the details are here.

Chonk on!

I’ve recently come across what appears to be a new biography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Hugh Montague Trenchard, 1st Viscount Trenchard, 1st and 3rd Chief of the Air Staff, etc: Sylvia Andrew, Lord Trenchard’s Choice (Richmond: Mills and Boon, 2002). I say ‘appears to be’ because there are serious discrepancies with the received historical account of his life, which must call into question the accuracy of the author’s research.

Here’s an extract from the book, followed by a blurb (both from here, though I’ve nabbed the cover from here):

“You leave him alone, do you hear?” The voice rang out, high and clear. Ivo winced as the sound sent his head throbbing again, and slowly turned. The next moment headache, heartache, everything was forgotten as he stared into the muzzle of a pistol, which was pointing directly at his head, not ten paces away. It was in the hands of a boy that couldn’t be more than eleven or twelve. Ivo shivered as a chill ran down his spine. Guns in the hands of children could be fatal, and this boy looked angry enough to shoot him.

“You scum!” the boy went on without moving. “I suppose you mean to sell Star at Taunton, along with the others you have stolen.”

If it didn’t rile the mind of Ivo Trenchard, of the 7th Hussars and the most polished man in Europe, to be mistaken for a simple horse thief, finding that the urchin pulling a gun on him was a teenage girl certainly did! Joscelin Morley both dressed and lived her life as a boy in a futile attempt to please her father. Her future was clear: Marriage to her neighbor Peter was to join the two estates and they would settled down to care for the land they both loved. So where did the worldly Ivo, her godmother’s nephew and a terrible flirt, fit into the equation?

I admit that I’m assuming that ‘Lord Trenchard’ here refers to the 1st Viscount Trenchard (the title was created for him), and not to either his son or grandson — though they’ve both had worthy careers in their own right, and meaning no disrespect to them, neither seems to merit a biography. The 1st Viscount has already had one written about him (I’m reading it at the moment, as it happens) and is probably overdue for another interpretation. But I don’t think Lord Trenchard’s Choice can be it. I mean, he wasn’t called Ivo (unless that’s a nickname); he was in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, not the 7th Hussars; and as for ‘the most polished man in Europe’ and ‘a terrible flirt’ — well, that’s not any Boom Trenchard I’ve ever read about. That cover art is terrible, it looks nothing like him (and what’s with the Jane Austen getup?)

Still, don’t judge a book by its cover and all that — I should at least flip through its bibliography and endnotes first. (And Trenchard was in fact born in Taunton, so that reference looks right.) So who knows, perhaps there’s room for a feisty cross-dressing pistol-wielding Somerset lass in the Father of the RAF’s life.

A recent post on the new science fiction blog io9 (which I’m enjoying, but is it really so hard to put in spoiler warnings?) claimed that the Vickers Velos was the ‘ugliest and most worthless plane in the world’. Sure, it’s not pretty, but I’ve seen plenty that were uglier — fuglier, even. But there were a couple of links to lists of other ugly aircraft, which are always fun to browse. The first one had some bizarre nominations (the Dragon Rapide should never be on such a list) but I thought I’d found what may be the single ugliest aeroplane ever made, the three-engine variant of the Farman Jabiru airliner (it’s French, naturellement). I was going to write this post about it. But then I clicked through to the second list.

That is where I first saw the Vedo Villi.

I can’t take my eyes off it. I honestly can’t decide whether it’s ugly or beautiful. But it is somehow deeply, fundamentally, disturbingly, horrifyingly wrong. It is eldritch. It’s like something H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up, if he’d been an aircraft designer and wanted just the thing for the airminded cultist to nip down from Arkham Aerodrome to the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh for the weekend.

There is a photo of the Villi below. Read on — if you dare.
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Yesterday (New Year’s Eve), the temperature here in Melbourne reached 41 degrees Celsius (that’s just under 106 Fahrenheit for those of you in the United States and Belize) — the hottest day of 2007, as it happens. The overnight minimum was 30 degrees (86 for those of you etc), which I think is higher than all but a few days I experienced in the northern summer just past. Today is predicted to be another 40 degree day, though at least a weak change is predicted for the afternoon. Even now (a bit after 11am), it’s nudging 38 outside. Inside, my little flat at the top of my building is disgustingly hot and I can’t think, so I’m going into town to work at the State Library instead, which should be nice and cool. (I do have a sadly-neglected desk in the department, in an air-conditioned room, but they’ve changed the building entry codes or something and I don’t think I can get in.)

But what of the future? All else being equal, as global warming begins to take hold, and the average temperature rises, we will see more days like today and yesterday, and hotter days too. So more and more poor postgraduate students like me, who can’t afford to live somewhere cool, will tend to gravitate towards the SLV. Eventually, a point of no return will be reached: so many postgrads will have gathered there that the mass of the combined SLV+postgrads aggregate will be enough to form a black hole. Then, even if they do finish writing their theses, how will their examiners read their theses? If Hawking is right, they’d have to wait until the black hole had evaporated before the outside world could know what they had written, which of course is no use to them anyway.

So, ultimately, as far as the outside world is concerned, the number of new PhDs being produced will drop to zero. This pattern will recur all around the planet. Australia and other hot countries will succumb first. Countries with colder climes will last longer, but they will fall too, eventually. So historical research will one day grind to a halt. This is the tragedy of global warming!

See, told you I can’t think in this heat. I’m off to the library.

I’m not sure what happened, exactly,¹ but email wasn’t getting through to me yesterday, for a period of — I think — about 8 to 10 hours. Sometimes there was a bounce back to the sender, other times it just vanished into a black hole. It seems to be back (with a flood of extra spam), so if anyone has sent me an email in the last day — I apologise but please send it again!

1. First response of tech support was: um, what was the problem again, because we can’t be bothered reading what you wrote the first time around? Oh and give us your email passwords will ya. Er, no, you don’t need them and you shouldn’t be asking.

Songs of Australia: the landscape, the country and the city.

Icehouse, “Great Southern Land”.

Standing at the limit of an endless ocean
Stranded like a runaway, lost at sea
City on a rainy day down in the harbour
Watching as the grey clouds shadow the bay

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For a long, long time, there was only Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls: the poster. Then there was ZvP: the movie mashup, followed by ZvP: the cartoon mashup. And now there’s ZvP: the webcomic, along with ZvP: the t-shirt!

I obviously wasn’t responsible for creating any of this. I wasn’t even the first to blog about ZvP. But through the stochastic wonders of the blogosphere, my post about it was picked up by blogs more popular than my own, which then spread the word to a much larger audience, with the results that you see above. So I do feel as though I can claim a very modest share of the credit for this ZvP revival!

And I may just have to buy the t-shirt …

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Please adjust your watches accordingly.

Around Easter, I happened to have a camera on me when an airship was passing overhead, and managed to take a couple of pictures before the camera batteries died. But they didn’t look quite right, and eventually I realised that it was because the airship was too red. Everybody knows, at least subconsciously, that airships are always silver grey; in fact, they probably should be photographed in black and white. So I used Photoshop to turn the airship into grey and the photograph into black and white. It looks much better now!

The black line could almost be a bracing wire on some Sopwith biplane, straining to reach the raider. Sadly, it’s just part of the tram power distribution system.

Mark Connelly has written several very fine books on British military history. He also has an amusingly self-referential Wikipedia entry (emphasis added):

Mark Connelly is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of History, at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

He is also the author of a book on the Second World War and the British home front called, We Can Take It!, as well as other books and essays. He also detests Wikipedia and regards it as an unreferenced, unreliable and generally very poor source of (reputable) information. However, this entry would appear to be factually correct.

Well, I LOL’d anyway!

Digging a bit deeper, the last two sentences were added by user Rcarolina, who has made a grand total of 2 Wikipedia edits, the other being an earlier version of the same entry (’He regards Wikipedia as the work of the devil’). Another user, Timrollpickering (who Jack and Dr Dan might know, as he’s a history PhD student at QMUL) quite rightly asks whether Connelly’s opposition to Wikipedia is notable, so the laughs may not last — which is why I’m preserving them for posterity.

… all those years of habitually talking like a pilot to the consternation of all and sundry, then somebody goes along and organises The First International Talk Like A Pilot Day and I go and miss it! It was yesterday, 19 May 2007. Wizard idea though, what — absolutely spiffing. Next year I’ll be there with bells on, and top button carefully undone.

They also provide a link to The Aircrew Dictionary, which purportedly describes how real RAF aircrew speak. Well, maybe Douglas Bader and Guy Gibson used such foul language, but I’m sure Kenneth More and Richard Todd would never have!

(Thanks to Jeremy Boggs for the tip.)

By the ever-brilliant XKCD.

You know, not once in my entire time as a history student have I been given advice on how to deal with Godwin’s Law. Not even in a subject on comparative fascism! I think this is a clear example of academia failing to adapt to the new realities of the Internet age.

One of the pleasures of reading period newspapers and magazines, as I am doing now, is chancing upon reviews of old films I know and (usually) love. Here’s what Graham Greene (yes, that Graham Greene) had to say about The Wizard of Oz:

The book has been popular in the States for forty years, and has been compared there to Alice in Wonderland, but to us in our old tribal continent the morality seems a little crude and the fancy material: the whole apparatus of Fairy Queen and witches and dwarfs called Munchkins, the Emerald City, the Scarecrow Man without a brain, and the Tin Man without a heart, and the Lion man without courage, rattles like dry goods.

After rubbishing the tastes of the former colonials in this fashion, Greene goes on to tell us that

the Wizard of Oz who sends the dreaming child with her three grotesque friends to capture the witch’s broomstick turns out to be a Kansas conjurer operating a radio-electric contrivance.

After reading this, I was retrospectively enraged on behalf of the filmgoers of 1940! How rude. As he died in 1991, Greene never got the chance to review The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense, which is probably just as well …

It wasn’t all bad: he thought the songs ‘charming’ and the witch suitably repellent; in particular, he noted that

Miss Judy Garland, with her delectable long-legged stride, would have won one’s heart for a whole winter season twenty years ago

And I must agree with Greene when he protests at the adults only certification given the film by the British Board of Film Censors:

Surely it is time that this absurd committee of elderly men and spinsters who feared, too, that Snow-white was unsuitable for those under sixteen, was laughed out of existence? As it is, in many places, parents will be forbidden by the by-laws to take their own children to The Wizard of Oz.

What can the censors have possibly objected to? Domicular homicides? Airborne primates? Saccharine overdoses? Weird.

The review is from the Spectator, 9 February 1940, p. 179.

WE ARE ALWAYS pleased to learn of a new post on Professor Palmer’s most interesting blog, the Avia-Corner. It is the first place one would turn in order to learn about the often murky world of Soviet aviation. However, his latest rant — there is unfortunately no other word for it — caught us by surprise, for it is aimed squarely at Airminded itself. It seems that the good professor has taken exception to our previous post, which happened to refer to one of his in what was by no means an unfriendly spirit. As the reaction is out of all proportion to the supposed offence, the suspicion occurs that it is officially inspired. The possible motivations for this scarcely need explaining, but a reply must here be given.
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It’s always interesting to see echoes of the golden age of aviation in today’s pop culture. At the Avia-Corner, Scott Palmer ends an update on the search for Amelia Earhart with a related music video: Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear, by The Handsome Family. Well, I’ll see his ‘aviatrix lost at sea, never to be found’ and raise him the ‘mother proud of [a] little boy’.

This aviatrix is Amy Johnson; I’ve written about her in relation to this song — The Golden Age of Aviation by the Lucksmiths — before. But I like it so much, it deserves a second airing.
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Chain letters are a kind of meme, but not a good kind — inane, threatening, pointless. They are surprisingly venerable and ubiqitous, however. Many past cultures had some form of chain letter, generally claimed to be communications from a god. In medieval and early modern Europe, these “messages from heaven” seem to have been fairly common. Here’s part of a letter written in English by Jesus Christ himself in 1795:

And he that hath a copy of this my own letter, written with my own hand, and spoken with my own mouth, and keepeth it without publishing it to others shall not prosper; but he that publisheth it to others, shall be blessed of me, and though his sins be in number as the stars of the sky, and he believe in this he shall be pardoned; and if he believe not in this writing, and this commandment, I will send my own plagues upon him, and consume both him and his children, and his cattle.

And here’s one which I found the other day in the Spectator of 20 May 1922, p. 621:

GOOD LUCK.

Copy this out and send it to 9 people to whom you wish good luck. The chain was started by an American officer, ‘Buddie,’ and should not be broken. It should go three times around the world, and whoever breaks it will have bad luck. Do it within 24 hours and count 9 days, and you will have great good luck.

According to a detailed analysis of chain letter evolution by mathematician Daniel VanArsdale, there was a deluge of these (or very similar) “good luck” chain letters in 1922 — another British one from the month before is reproduced here. The above example was sent in by T. Herbert Bindley of Denton (apparently a translator of Christian apologetics), who — having received three examples in the previous few weeks — despaired that `there is still a number of idiots at large who, out of sheer superstition, are unable to refrain from perpetrating and perpetuating an imbecility’ such as this. He thought it a sign of ‘intellectual degeneracy’ in an age of ‘waning faith’.

Well, that was then — this is now. Luckily I’m not an intellectually degenerate idiot, and so won’t be helping this bad meme to propagate.

Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl show me the Universe and its history. From Empedocles and the water-thief, to the discovery of volcanoes on Io; from Lowell’s dreams of Martian cities dying beside canals choked with dust, to Wolf Vishniac’s death in Antarctica while paving the way for the search for life on Mars; the Big Bang, the Tunguska Event and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I can’t have been much into double digits when I first watched Cosmos, if that; heady stuff indeed for a young boy. His own joy in the search for knowledge was palpable, infectious, inspirational — to the extent that I cannot understand how anyone could ever feel any differently. Here’s a short clip from one episode of Cosmos, “The edge of forever”: more metaphysics than physics, but if you’ve never seen it before, it will give you an idea of his style; and if you have seen it before, it will transport you again. It still sends shivers down my spine.

Not only did I adore Cosmos the series, and Cosmos the book, I also inhaled his other books: The Cosmic Connection, Broca’s Brain, The Dragons of Eden; and later, Contact, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Demon-haunted World. Carl hugely influenced my basic worldview: rationality is our best tool for understanding the world, secular humanism our best antidote for the fact that we can never be perfectly rational. We are not at the centre of the Universe, which is anyway indifferent to our presence; but we are sentient, and that is a precious thing, or ought to be, to ourselves and perhaps to others.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.¹

Carl’s love for astronomy also helped steer me into pursuing astronomy as a career. From about the time I saw Cosmos on, I had a burning desire to become an astronomer and explore the Universe too. I nearly did too; I started a PhD and was nearly a year into it when I realised that (a) I wasn’t very good at it and (b) I wasn’t enjoying it very much. That’s not Carl’s fault, of course, but astronomy was such a hard thing for me to let go of, having made it a part of me for so long, and that’s partly a testament to his eloquence and his passion. To cut a long story short, I switched to an MSc as a sort of consolation prize, while pondering what to do next. And it was during this time that I learned of Carl’s illness. He continued to work and to write. A friend, a fellow astro postgrad, saw him speak at a conference in Hawaii and reported that he looked distressingly ill.

Ten years ago today, I sobbed like a child into my girlfriend’s arms, and I must confess that I am tearing up even now. (Having Vangelis’s “Heaven & Hell Part 1″ playing in the background probably doesn’t help.) Carl Sagan is gone, and he is sorely missed, but his influence will remain — at least for as long as I live, and I suspect for much longer than that.

Other memories of Carl which have crossed my personal blog horizon: Bad Astronomy Blog, Centauri Dreams, Respectful Insolence, Cocktail Party Physics, Butterflies and Wheels, a great one from Larvatus Prodeo, and most poignantly of all, from his wife and collaborator Ann Druyan. These are all part of a larger blog commemoration effort (the results of which can be seen here), and the blogless can join in too.

Image source: Wikipedia.

1. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 4.

This sticker is in the back of a book published in 1940, originally part of the collection of the Public Lending Library of Victoria (itself a part of the Public Library of Victoria, as the SLV was then known). I was struck particularly by no. 4. Were books considered possible vectors for infectious disease — TB, perhaps? (If so, then obviously the best idea would be to get those books back into circulation as soon as possible.) Or maybe the Chief Librarian was worried that if everyone in the house was sick, their library books wouldn’t be returned on time, even despite the THREEPENCE fine for every three days or fraction thereof that they were overdue. (I can just imagine the Librarian glaring at the hapless late returner and spitting out the words “That will be THRUP. PENCE.”) I also like the way in which books are treated like people: they are not to be “detained” or “injured” (as a bibliophile, I’m always in danger of the former habit but completely agree with their firm stance on the latter). But I’m dying to know what Lending Library Rule 6 was. If there are any former patrons still around they could probably tell me — given the familiarity they were expected to have with the Lending Library Rules it’s probably burned into their minds. And can you imagine your embarrassment at waking up the day after moving house, and realising that you’ve neglected to notify the Librarian without delay?

From here, we can see that the reign of terror of Wm. C. Baud and C. A. McCallum, Chief Librarians, ended in 1960. We can be thankful that we live in more enlightened times: since August last year, I’ve accumulated $13.50 in overdue fines at the university library (about 5s in 1940s terms), and they don’t seem to care in the slightest. Viva la revolución!

I’ve previously mentioned the Holden airship. At the moment it is at Brisbane, and there are concerns that it will be flown over the Gabba during the first Ashes test next month.¹ The problem is that Holden isn’t paying Cricket Australia anything for the privilege of flying a billboard over the cricket ground, where it might well catch the eye of 40000 spectators bored with Australia’s on-field drubbing of the puny English team. So the Queensland state government is planning to introduce legislation to ban such overflights of major sporting events, along with skywriting. Otherwise, the downfall of Australian civilisation could result, or something.

Now, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there’s no need for legislation here. It would likely just impose a fine for infractions, anyway, which might not be an effective deterrent to a sufficiently determined advertiser. A FAR more effective solution would be a belt of anti-aircraft guns around the Gabba, along with a squadron or two of Sopwith Camels and a system of sound locators and ground observers in surrounding suburbs. It worked in the First World War; it can work again.

Of course, the enemy advertisers may adapt, seeking to overwhelm the defences with masses of airships, or to escort the raiders, perhaps with trapeze fighters. Maybe the blimp will always get through, in which case a deterring counter-advertising strategy might well be called for — holding a force of airships in readiness to instantly fly over sporting events sponsored by the opposition, should they dare to use their airships in a hostile manner. Perhaps the ultimate solution is the international control of all airships, which would then only be used over stadiums as directed by the League of Nations — I mean, United Nations.

At any rate, I’m available, for only a moderately immoderate fee, to consult with any sporting venues wishing to develop a state-of-the-art-c.-1918 air defence system.

1. Note to journos: outside of a few not-notably-successful experiments, blimps AKA airships do not rely upon hot air for lift. This one has 5 million litres of helium inside it.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Mark Grimsley has an interesting post up at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age / Cliopatria asking people how they would fill out a history department of 15 full-time equivalent positions. I thought it would be fun to try this exercise for an Australian history department.

Rather than trying to specify both (a) the period/region and (b) the historical approach employed by each staff member, I see these as mostly independent variables — so having a political historian of 20th century Australia and a military historian of early modern Europe is just as satisfactory as having a military historian of 20th century Australia and a political historian of early modern Europe.
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Some years ago someone invented a gramophone needle that would last for decades. One of the big gramophone companies bought up the patent rights, and that was the last that was ever heard of it.

That’s Big Grammo for you, I guess. (Or maybe not …)

Source: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989 [1937]), 192.

A report from the 14th annual conference of the National Federation of Hairdressers, which opened at Blackpool on 31 May 1915:

A Swansea delegate said the trouble was not now. The trouble would be when the war was over, because men who had enlisted would have been trained to shave themselves. The result would be that hundreds of hairdressers would be thrown out of employment.

Source: Manchester Guardian, 1 June 1915, p. 8.

I just tried out Bruce’s Australian Name Generator (well, it’s alun’s, really). Being an actual Australian, I was expecting something special, and I got it:

Brett Holman
from this day forward you will also be known as:
Airborne Bruce the Great Galah

That’s almost uncanny.