Mapping Australia’s history, in a .gif

Interesting .gif from Wikipedia:

Political boundaries in Australia, and their changes

I like using such .gifs in PowerPoints, just one more way to add some interest and a lot more information to a session of “direct instruction.”  Do you know of other .gifs that could be used for U.S. history, or other history courses?  Please list them in comments.

Especially let us know if you find errors in this one.

Or errors in this one, which covers deeper time:

History of Autralian political boundaries, from discovery by Europeans

Last one in the water . . .!

Sign on an Australian beach. Photo by Laura Hale

Tip of the old scrub brush to Laura Hale.

Monckton’s profiteering: Climate denialists rake in the money

Bizarre as it may seem, the imagined profiteering of environmentalists has becoma favorite complaint of global warming deniers.  Ignoring the fact that he’s on the board of Apple Computers and a very savvy investor, and ignoring the facts of his donation of proceeds he gets from lectures, deniers claim Al Gore has gotten rich off of warning people about global warming.

They even complain when researchers get grants to study the stuff, as if the researchers were buying Maseratis and taking vacations to the Caribbean on the money.

How could they think that?

Might it be because the deniers really are pulling in high dollar, luxury fees to campaign against the science?  Christopher Monckton, warming denialist extraordinaire, is touring Australia.  Comes this little slip of public relations:

During this tour, Lord Monckton will be chaperoned by wealthy mining consultant and geologist Professor Ian Plimer. Lord Monckton will also be getting a fee of $20,000 and all his travel and accommodation – somewhere in the region of $100,000 – will be paid for.

Who might be paying for Monckton’s tour?* China?  India?  We don’t know, but following Monckton’s lead, we might hope that the western intelligence agencies are investigating Monckton to see just what he’s up to.

$120,000 to make up political smears that damage national policies and science?  Mencken would be ashamed.

More:

• Read Quiggen directly, at Crikey

_____________

* It’s a paraphrase of Monckton, who evilly worried about funding for climate research and ill-funded environmental groups, “Goodness knows where they get it from!  Foreign governments, possibly!  I don’t know!  I haven’t looked.  But it’s certainly an alarming question:  Are the environmental movements being backed by China or India so they won’t have to compete with us for natural resources because we will have shut our industry down.  It’s a question that the security services, I hope, are looking at, because it certainly worries me.”

DDT nutcases

It’s spring, and nutcase fancies turn to thoughts of slandering Rachel Carson and making unholy noises toward environmentalists.

Here’s one nutcase who engages in that peculiar nutcase practice of completely rewriting posts of commenters — claims to be Graeme Bird; is he really running for office?  His claim is that lack of DDT is causing the spread of dengue in Queensland, Australia.  He won’t be swayed by reason or fact (of course — his avatar is a photo of confirmed liar Joe McCarthy).  He asks “how many have died,” but is unhappy with the official answer (one, but that’s not clear — an older woman in poor health).  Nor does he appear to have any sense of irony that drought-stricken Australia has a plague of mosquitoes due to recent rains.  Nor does he appear to understand that dengue is an imported disease in Australia, imported by a traveler, it appears.

Australian officials ask people to drain water from pots, old tires (“tyres” downunder), rain gutters, or any other small pool, which is where the vector mosquitoes breed and mature.  The nutcase appears unfamiliar with the concept of simply preventing the mosquitoes from breeding, in his rush to poison Australia.  Nor do alternative effective techniques for fighting the disease appear to be on his radar.

Alas, there are a lot of these lone nutcases loose.  Watch for updates here for a week or so.

• Commenter “Jake” at a Wall Street Journal site
• An odd Canadian site (another site that censors dissenting comments)
• Peter Foster hyperventilates about Al Gore, at The National Post (Canada)
• Commenters at Listverse take up the erroneous meme
• Commenters at Michelle Malkin’s site (of course — would you expect reason there?)
• Bogus science at Creative Minority Report
• Block Rants
• And, speaking of hyperventilating rants . . .
• Adirondack Musing
• Let’s not forget our old carbuncle, Steven Milloy
• Wake Community Network, with the old “genocide” hoax
• Doug Ross @ Journal, adding a 75% fact-free promise to his snark-free pledge
• Blogger News network

I wonder if it’s a virus that makes them censor any fact or opinion contrary to their own, or whether they simply are complete cranks.  I mean, even Bush’s Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne got  DDT right.

(Bird’s blog is on WordPress, which will automatically post a link from this post to his blog.  Anyone want to wager on whether he has enough cojones to let the trackback stand?)

Typewriter of the moment: Australian journalist Ron Boland, OBE

1930s era typewriter that accompanied Australian journalist Ron Boland through his journalistic career, a Remington Portable - State Library of South Australia (on loan from Jasin Boland)

Ron Boland played an important role in the expansion and maturation of Australian newspaper journalism in the 20th century – in the era before Rupert Murdoch, mostly – though Boland worked for Murdoch and could be said to have created the style that made Murdoch rich — in an era when newspapers still set the pace of the Information Age.  He retired in 1977, the year Altair was a top computer name, the year RadioShack almost got the TRS-80 to market, the year Jobs and Wozniak started work on the Apple II (before Macintosh).

For nearly 50 years, this typewriter was the peak of technology, for a world class journalist.

Boland’s life and timeline could make for some interesting projects or study assignments — see Boland’s campaign for topless swimming on Australia’s beaches.  Topless swimming for men.

Boland’s work is probably mostly invisible to American students, but it should provide some good enrichment for students of world history.

The case for Australian journalist Ron Boland's Remington Portable typewriter, testifying to the globe trotting done by the typewriter, and Boland. State Library of South Australia

Resources

• Teachers kit for learning activities from the Boland exhibit
• Below the fold, the Texas connection

Geologist finds meteor crater – on Google Earth

Geologist Arthur Hickman used Google Earth to look at part of Australia he was studying. In the satellite photos provided by Google Earth, Hickman noticed something no one else had seen: An impact crater.

For his alertness, Hickman had the 270-meter crater named after him.

• Note on the discovery at Ogle Earth
• Original story source as best I can tell, Science Alert – Australia & New Zealand
• Note at Google Maps Mania
• Tip of the old scrub brush to Bouphonia, and Friday Hope Blogging

Oceans white with foam, mate!

This is cool. Natural phenomena, the stuff that makes geography really interesting — where and what is this? (Pictures from August 2007)

• Photos from Icon Images and Australia’s Daily Mail. “Boy in the bubble bath: Tom Woods, 12, emerges from the clouds of foam after deciding that surfing was not an option.”

It was as if someone had poured tons of coffee and milk into the ocean, then switched on a giant blender.

Suddenly the shoreline north of Sydney were transformed into the Cappuccino Coast.

Foam swallowed an entire beach and half the nearby buildings, including the local lifeguards’ centre, in a freak display of nature at Yamba in New South Wales.

One minute a group of teenage surfers were waiting to catch a wave, the next they were swallowed up in a giant bubble bath. The foam was so light that they could puff it out of their hands and watch it float away.

Perhaps a good geography warm-up: Where are these pictures from? What is the phenomenon shown in the photos? Why might it be unusual for these people to be swimming in the ocean in August?

Prehistory and art: Lesson plan material

Teachers looking for good interactive graphics on human migration in prehistoric times should take a look at the website of Australia’s Bradshaw Foundation. The map requires an Adobe Flash player, and I cannot embed it here — but go take a look, here. “The Journey of Man” seems tailor made for classroom use, if you have a live internet connection and a projector.

Ancient art is the chief focus of the foundation.

Examples of some of the most famous cave and rock paintings populate the site, along with many lesser known creations — the eponymous paintings, the Bradshaw group, generally disappear from U.S. versions of world history texts. The Bradshaw Foundation website explains:

The Bradshaw Paintings are incredibly sophisticated, as you will see from the 32 pictures in the Paintings Section, yet they are not recent creations but originate from an unknown past period which some suggest could have been 50,000 years ago. This art form was first recorded by Joseph Bradshaw in 1891, when he was lost on an Kimberley expedition in the north west of Australia. Dr. Andreas Lommel stated on his expedition to the Kimberleys in 1955 that the rock art he referred to as the Bradshaw Paintings may well predate the present Australian Aborigines.

This ancient art carries a story that should intrigue even junior high school students, and it offers examples of archaeological techniques that are critical to determining the ages of undated art in the wild:

According to legend, they were made by birds. It was said that these birds pecked the rocks until their beaks bled, and then created these fine paintings by using a tail feather and their own blood. This art is of such antiquity that no pigment remains on the rock surface, it is impossible to use carbon dating technology. The composition of the original paints cant be determined, and whatever pigments were used have been locked into the rock itself as shades of Mulberry red, and have become impervious to the elements.

Fortuitously, in 1996 Grahame Walsh discovered a Bradshaw Painting partly covered by a fossilised Mud Wasp nest, which scientists have removed and analysed using a new technique of dating, determining it to be 17,000 + years old.

Texas history and geography teachers should note the Bradshaw Foundation’s work on prehistorica art in the Pecos River Valley: “Pecos Experience: Art and archeaology in the lower Pecos.” There is much more here than is found in most Texas history texts — material useful for student projects or good lesson plans.

• Image: painting in Panther Cave, lower Pecos, Texas. Photo from Bradshaw Foundation.