Australia was created 13.7 billion years ago on an otherwise uneventful Wednesday afternoon.
The Big Bang was crucial to the creation of Australia. It was a pyrotechnic display that left last New Year’s Eve cracker night in Sydney in the shade. Energy levels were produced that would have crushed a lesser universe. Afterwards the universe expanded and cooled while going through various chemical transitions which created matter – the building block of Australia.
No one from Stephen Hawking down can tell you what was going on before the Big Bang. There’s a general muttering from all astrophysicists about gravitational singularity. They do think it was dark. Probably.
No one is quite sure why it went off when it did either. There are some God-botherers among the folk in white coats who talk about a higher power lighting the wick on the thing while others babble about general relativity.
At first Australia started out as part of Africa, South America and the Middle East. Everyone seemed to get on pretty well but fearing a stink was inevitable, Australia politely severed all ties with its neighbours about 500 million years ago, shrugged off Antarctica and headed north where there was a lot of space and some very nice beaches.
The first Australians showed up about 50,000 or so years ago. Back then people used to walk a lot more than they do now. And so it seems they wandered over from South-East Asia. They may have even walked all the way from Africa. Or they could have arrived in taxis. No one is quite sure.
However they managed it, at some point the first Australians caught a glimpse of the jewel in the sea and thought to themselves, “Yes, this’ll do nicely.”
The first Australians eschewed farming after failed attempts to herd wombats but they learned to get a feed out of the place even in the most desolate deserts on earth.
They set fire to a lot of Australia. No one knows whether they did so in sadness or anger. They brought their dogs with them. They may have invented footy.
For the next 40,000 years Australia remained a mystery to all but our indigenous brothers and sisters. It was ignored by cartographers and clod-footed explorers appeared to go out of their way to avoid it.
That all changed in 1606, when Dutchman, Willem Janszoon, sailed south of Papua New Guinea aboard the ship Duyfken, lobbing on Cape York Peninsula.
Clearly no judge of prime real estate, Janszoon looked about and declared, “What a bloody terrible place for a country”, promptly pulled up anchor and sailed off.
In what may have been the greatest real estate debacle of all time, another Dutchman, Abel Tasman, circumnavigated Australia without actually seeing any of it – with the exception of a bit of southern Tasmania, which he mistook for something else. Exhausted and with his teeth falling out from scurvy, he returned to his master, Anthony Van Diemen, the governor-general of the Dutch East Indies. Collapsing at Van Diemen’s feet, Tasman reported, “If Australia’s out there, I’m buggered if I can find it.”
Always quick to leap on an opportunity, the British figured they’d sail up and down the southern oceans looking for Australia until they banged into something that seemed to fit the general description.
When someone did bang into it, that someone was James Cook and that something turned out to be Botany Bay. Cook (he was then a lieutenant and was promoted to captain upon his return to Britain so the rhyming slang would roll off the tongue more easily) liked the look of the place so much he bunged a flag in to the beach and declared: “I hereby proclaim this country in the name of whatever demented, syphilitic madman has assumed the throne since I left the place in what seems a lifetime ago.”
Keeping a look out, the locals replied, “Oh a country? Is that what it is? And here’s us thinking we were living in an existential vortex.” The British, who don’t handle sarcasm well, started shooting.
The Brits were awestruck by the beauty of the landscape and so immediately set Australia up as a prison. Convicts were dispatched to Australia to build the Cahilll Expressway, assemble breweries and place gigantic fibreglass fruits along the eastern seaboard.
Since then Australian history has been a doddle to grasp. Walter Lindrum, Phar Lap and the Don. That’s all you’ll ever need to know about modern Australian history and everyone knows what happened there. The Don got a blob in his last knock, Phar Lap got a hot shot and Walter Lindrum was hounded out of his sport by the rule makers of an arcane parlour game, too up themselves to realise greatness when they saw it.
The important thing to note is that right from the Big Bang, all that fuss was just a lead up to this one moment in time and this particular spot in the universe: Australia in 2014.
If you’re eyes are getting weepy and your knees are trembling now, well that’s only fit and proper. All the work’s been done. Australia has been served up on plate. So go ahead, stick your face in and suck the succulent morsals right up through your nostrils.
That Hazzard guy in NSW worries me. It really seems like he has lost the plot on the Newmarch aged care home now.
He bumbles on like an old fella dithering.
How can they sit back and just watch the residents succumbing every day?
They need to get them out of there and deepclean the entire property, FFS.
The dear old folk may not have wanted resuscitation in the event of a final illness but i’d guess they didn’t anticipate being sitting ducks and to die completely alone either. How awful for their family.
Unless my numbers are off, Newmarch has now lost in the neighborhood of 14% of their resident–and more will succumb. That’s unconscionable. (Note to self, die before stepchildren can put me in a home).
Hazzard is a hazard. Newmarch and Ruby Princess are our two biggest clusters–and NSW Health is the common factor.
I’ve told my kids in no uncertain terms, Dwight, that I will never set foot in one of those ”facilities”.
Just to take me to the vet and have me put down. Or Switzerland – my daughter asks if we can have a great skiing holiday prior – no problem!
I say Boa, I completely agree with you that minister Hazzard’s performance has been a total disaster writ large.
However, your linking Hazzard’s indecisive vacillation to “like an old fella dithering” is an ostensible self-contradiction. It is also an unfair impingement upon the state of social equilibrium and self-mastery of a valuable senior cohort within our community
I say, hands off the old fella!
For Bassy,
Funniest comment/moment of whole COVID saga for me was when NRL head lobbied Cth government for money and managed to come out straight-faced with the comment (paraphrased) that without Rugby League that is the end of Australian civilization!!
Got it Bald!!
A map that explains everything. Except the Big Bang bit. That needs a bigger map.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/pangea-with-modern-borders.jpg
Dang! We missed out on Chicken Korma being the national dish!
No bad thing. Imagine the mess that would make outside Bunnings on Saturday morning. Keeping it in the slice of bread would be a nightmare.
Nothing explains the Big Bang. Before I dropped out of uni (yeah, I went back) I was studying physics and astronomy. I love asking the question, “What happened in the 10 nanoseconds _before_ the Big Bang?
The upside of those years is that I had my coolest job ever. In the US, unless your parents are rich, you get a financial aid package. One part of mine was a “work-study” job. I worked for the university in addition to my studies. You can be assigned to the cafeteria, to the janitorial staff, to the groundskeepers, etc.
MY workstudy job was giving planetarium lectures! I would go into a dark room, project stars on the ceiling with the orrery and talk for an hour. How cool is that?!
“What happened in the 10 nanoseconds _before_ the Big Bang?”….
Well, the sphincter loosened, and then God farted. Bang. But he’s God, so it was a big bang. Probably fooling around with a bunch of mates playing the old party game of lighting farts and got the flame a bit too close.
That’s a pretty good job you scooped. The first thing I was given to do as an apprentice was changing badly made P-76 waterpumps at Leyland dealerships all over Sydney. The pumps were assembled at the Leyland plant at Zetland, but the guy who assembled them was a useless old guy who put the thermostats in wrong. They could have bought better pumps from the US more cheaply (both the 6 cyl and 8 cyl Leyland engines were licensed from Buick) but that would have put Brother Harvey out of a job and the Union wouldn’t hear of it. So I would go out and change the pumps before the cars were sold. I was an apprentice so it kept the cost down. The upside was I had to travel out by cab, and as I didn’t know much about Sydney, having just arrived from the bush, I learned my way around from the cabbies.
First job, when I was 15, was being the guy who brought the kegs into the bar from the truck on a beer route. The warehouse was just down the road, and damn, I remember his name, Floyd Lorbeski asked me to work with him on Saturdays.
God, 67,000 deaths in the USA is horrendous.
And yet I think Trump will get re-elected because he will convince Americans that it’s all China’s fault
Deaths per million:
Belgium 686.74
Spain 540.71
Italy 477.96
United Kingdom 427.83
France 371.18
Netherlands 293.42
Ireland 268.47
Sweden 263.08
Switzerland 206.89
United States 206.56
What this stat shows rather predictably is SARS-COV-2 transmits more easily and causes greater mortality in more densely populated areas. Belgium’s population density is 383 per square kilometre, Italy 206, UK 281, France 121, Netherlands 488, Switzerland 219. Sweden is an outlier for reasons most people would understand. That’s not to say they have got it wrong (there’s a lot of furphies about what they are doing) but they will have a higher death rate initially while having a better understanding of community infection. The US is 36 people per square kilometre. Not a terribly helpful stat that one because some areas of the US have been hit hard, others not. NYC has 26,000 per square kilometre. That’s the one to look at. There are other issues that go into the mix: date and length of lockdown, amount of reliable testing, access to health care etc. National population density is not especially helpful in countries like the US and Australia either because what C-19 comes in clusters of infection and mortality. But where those occur, you will see they occur in areas where people have gathered in large numbers.
Absolutely. Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, New Mexico and Idaho all have less than 20 people per square mile. Nebraska, Nevada and Kansas round out the bottom 10. They don’t have any real problems.
My home county in Wisconsin has no cases. 9,304 people in 2,709 km². Most of it is forest.
You know Dwight all those places sound beautiful to me. I thought Alaska was paradise 💚
Strangely Bella I have two uncles (on Mom’s side) buried in Alaska, and for a few years, my Father taught school in Skagway.
I’ve been through the Dakotas, Nebraska and Nevada. Think I’m up to about 40 states.
The density may be a factor, but HK has higher density and more mass transit users than NYC, and four deaths from 7.5 million.
The difference might be the lessons learned from Sars, one of the earlier Chinese viruses. Hygiene.
I love NYC, but it sure isn’t a clean city.
But strangely, San Francisco, which is literally an open sewer nowadays, is doing better than LA.
If their past behaviour is anything to go by, expecting NRL players to behave themselves re quarantine etc is nothing but fantasy. Testerone mixed with a few stubbies throw caution to the winds
I see a NZ player failed a screeening test at the airport and was not permitted to board the flight to Oz. This could get interesting.
Testosterone and beer is a dangerous combination–and thankfully there are few photographs of me in my youth when I was combining them.
I would have noted that Collingwood was an allochthonous mass that drifted in from Paradise
I always thought of it as a malodorous swamp, filled with noxious industries myself
Toxicity and noxious substances that rolled, swam and crawled down the hill from Carlton! 🙂
Twaddle. There was an as yet undiscovered pre-existing proto-civilisation centred on Preston, and known as the Valley of the Mesozoic Kebab Shops. Their King was Eddidawanka and Collingwood was their landfill site.
Jack, just a question mate.
As even the NYT is now piling on poor old Joe, do you think the DNC are doing a number in him to replace him with a more wining candidate?
Or will they just insist he appoints HRC as his deputy and let the inevitable accident or illness take it’s course?
The Hill ran a speculative Op-Ed that Obama and Hilary might take his place. I think that’s a bit odd. Trump had a very good poll over the weekend – Gallup nationwide has him at 49% approval. Again I find that a bit odd.
There was that Op-Ed in the NYT that called for a “plan B”. The editorial board, on the other hand, called for an “independent” investigation by the Democrat National Committee, I kid you not.
Jack, a good laugh mate.
Boa, a very happy birthday to you,
Dwight, Centerlink with classrooms, thank you , that will get plenty of use.
It’s a delight to see so many old friends and sort of foes back again.
cheers to you all from HK
Thanks jack! Although another year older is never a celebration for me!! I pretend it’s not happening.
It is indeed good to have the blog back
Cheers
Boa
Hey jack!
Although most of them were already wearing masks, do democracy rioters have to maintain social distance?
I only ask because we might be seeing some democracy riots in Victoria soon.
jack, I said something like that in a meeting the last time I was in charge of all of our master’s programs. There was a prolonged period of silence.
I note in passing Jack, professor Pascoe recently published a non-fiction version of our history. Unlike yours, it wasn’t widely reviewed in academic journals and it was seemingly not regarded by a number of critics as being any where near as factual as your own.
By likes of Andrew Bolt, who apparently has not read it.
Rick Morton:
“‘In correspondence with The Saturday Paper, the News Corp columnist was asked three times whether he has read ‘Dark Emu’ . Each time, he evaded the question.’”
E tu, Carl?
I’ve read it. It is rubbish.
Mitchell et al – their journals are rubbish? I suppose they were lefty cultural warriors too.
At best he took a very very broad view of their journals. At worst he just made stuff up. The bloke has zero credibility vis a vis his ancestry.
His ancestry is actually irrelevant to whether the book is accurate or not. I haven’t had time to look into it myself but when the conservative world writes the whole thing off instantly as bogus then there’s probably fire beneath the smoke. I’m interested in corroboration and the actual texts of the journals. I’ll get to it, because I think that, if true, it’s very important stuff.
I believe that he’s answered the ancestry question too, but meh, Obama was born in Kenya, wasn’t he?
That would be about the number of times Professor Bruce has evaded questions about his ancestry.
Notwithstanding that it is now a school textbook and treated as an unimpeachable source at the ABC. Surprise!
Well I’ve never been able to get my head around the ”big bang”. And I really want to know what’s beyond the furthest galaxy. What happens when one gets to the edge of whatever?
But I never cease to marvel at the wonderful diversity of nature – bloody awesome. Yet we seem hell bent on destroying it.
My birthday today – geez, what a boring one. Bloody awful weather here too. Wind and rain interspersed with sunshine. Must say, Dwight, I cracked a glass of rose at something like 10am. I mean, why not? It is my birthday after all!!
Happy Birthday Boa! I too cannot get my head around the infinite universe concept, never have. Teacher at school told me it was beyond human understanding.
A Belated Happy Birthday, Boa! I waited ’til 2:00 yesterday so I could have that Skype beer with my friend on the NSW south coast. He moved to Oz a week after I did and we bonded over a six pack–and that was in 1997. *laugh*
Sorry it was so boring. If you need company for an early beer, just let me know. Got a delivery from the craft brewery yesterday.
Happy birthday and cheers, Boa! Hope you had a good one.
Happy Birthday Boa! I hope you made yourself a cake & blew those candles out anyway….😄🎂😉😍 Txx
My birthday was a couple of weeks ago, I went food shopping just so I could get out😄
Have a nice drop of something, happy birthday
A belated happy birthday Tracy ! 😊
Happy Birthday, B!
Happy Birthday for yesterday Boa.
If it is any consolation to you, and it probably isn’t, where we are 500 metres up in the Adelaide Hills, we have winters that are both colder and wetter than Hobart. Most people don’t expect that of anywhere in South Australia, but it is true.
There’s a lot that people don’t know about SA
Belated happy birthday ; weird mine will be Monday.
Celebrated early on Saturday as the boss can cook : half dozen scallops in bunt butter each; then half dozen each NZ scampi (WA not available at favourite fishmonger); then vitello genovese (veal in parley butter and touch of garlic onn bed of rice) followed by brandy snap biscuits with chestnut montblanc… washed down with Dom Perignon 2002, Vat 1 2001. Jack Mann 1995 and St Henri 1994….. slept just fine but golf was not so good today!!!
Eat, drink & enjoy for who knows what the future holds…. certainly little intercontinental travel without restriction for some time…..
cheers for another year ( & let it be a better one)
Was the Vat 1 a Tyrells Vat 1 Semillon Voltaire? My favourite white wine in the world!
Razor,
Tyrells Vat 1 semillon: Hunter valley’s gift to teh vinous world but drunk too young (battery acid) by too many. In good vintages it lasts a LONG time – and improves dramatically even under cork: drank my last 1993 (fabulous vintage for HV semillon but not much else) earlier this year.
Main HV semillon competitor is Brokenwood ILR: the 2000 is drinking brilliantly with another good decade ahead….. and an honourable mention to McWiliams Lovedale (who knows what will become of them).
Aside from lesser Tyrells, at a lower price point for HV sem you should look out for Meerea Park Hell Hole, Tulloch and Thomas but alas the truly great Lindemans HV semillons (labeled variously Chablis, White Burgundy & riesling) are no more as that which emerges is a very pale shadow of what we saw in the 60s, 70s & 80s from them (even the1993s which were the last with the misnomers were very very good)
I’ve got onto Rieslings in a big way in the last couple of years Voltaire. We eat a heap of fresh seafood and I just love the match. I will try some of your suggestions. Now here’s one for all the wine buff’s on here.
As a cheap quaffer or something to throw around the table if you have a bit of a crowd around; Fat Bastard Chardonnay! I kid you not, that’s its name. A Californian drop, nice and buttery and will only set you back about $15. May be a little down market for your tastes Voltaire but it’s the best $15 bottle of plonk I’ve had in a long time.
I recall the Houghtons white burgundy of the late 90’s. A now retired work colleague and my good self took up with two of NSW’s finest at an Asian restaurant in Sydney for a snappy lunch. Several Toohey’s and 7 bottles of the white burgundy later we were a little disheveled……. JTI in fact know’s the lad’s from NSW.
Happy birthday to you too, Voltaire. What a scrumptious banquet. You’re a lucky boy!
Cheers
B
Ooops. Gapoy should read Happy. Wretched phone changes things when I’m not looking 🙄
Seems you may need to talk to a particle physicist re the big bang questions Boa. I think you’ll find that if you travelled to the edge of the universe and poked you head through the curtains, as it has sometimes been described, you would be back to where you began. Apparently the cosmos bends. The average human lifespan equates to well over 650,000 hours, so a young chic like yourself has plenty of time to give it a crack. Let’s know how you go.
Groan……Carl. I don’t understand infinity either. As for all the equations the gurus churn out that they claim proves it…….🙄 i mean really, how could something exist from nothing? I give up.
Belated birthday wishes from me, Boa. Hope you had a great day. And to Voltaire as well.
Thanks Jack!
There’s a strong body of evidence that beyond the Universe there are more universes. Our universe has four big dents in it, and this suggests collisions with other universes during or just after the Big Bang while things were still getting going. Only another universe could put a dent in ours. I find the possibility intriguing, and more so after a few rums. The greater the volume of rum, the greater the level of intrigue. Unfortunately I always nod off before reaching a conclusion.
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-universes.html
Belated Birthday Greetings. Hope you had a blinder even in isolation.
I wouldn’t call it “evidence”, but the mulitiverse theory makes the math work, and explains why gravity is weaker than what we would expect. Then there’s 11-dimensional string theory, but that makes my head hurt.
11 dimensional you say? I couldn’t afford that much rum.
If we move on to dark matter – I have a theory that it can be explained away by the amount of stupid propagating from the Earth these days. I ran this idea by Brian Schmidt but he didn’t seem to think it worthy of a reply…they’ll recognise my brilliance when I’m gone though, mark my words.