(no subject)

Sorry I didn't blog yesterday - the root canal work and the trip home were more than I could manage and I kind of melted for the rest of the day.

It wasn't a bad melt. It was the simple result of doing too much. My tooth needed two injections and getting home including 4 kilometres of walking, partly thanks to the excitement that is the demolished Belconnen Bus Interchange.

I rang my dance teacher this morning and said "I don't think I should be dancing today." This is because my right jaw feels a bit as if someone has socked it. There was a reason for that root canal, after all.

It turns out that my zombie tooth may well have been a contributing factor in my curious and exciting few weeks. Folks, if you fear you have zombie teeth, get them looked at!

Instead of other news, I'm going to link to a project a friend is working on. He wants to raise a few dollars for charity. I can't manage much in the way of donations right now (obviously) but I can link people to projects they might be interested in, so if any of you would like to find out about Paul's charity and maybe donate, please just cick on this link. And if any others of you have projects you'd like to share, maybe tell us about them in the comments? I may do this again sometime. Open threads on charities of choice mean more people know what's out there.

If I do anything interesting with my day, I'll be sure to blog. Mostly, though, I'm catching up with the various things I couldn't do Sunday because the few days before had tired me and I was unable to do them yesterday.

I keep feeling I ought to be zinging with energy, but the truth is that missing the bullet isn't the same as being entirely and instantly well. I'm still going to need till Worldcon, it seems. I'm better than I was, but it's all annoyingly slow.

Aussie history for Aussiecon4

Yesterday, Scalzi wrote briefly about 1812 in his blog. I had a vision of Napoleon and brambles. I wasn't the only one, judging from some of the comments. I keep forgetting that the US doesn't think of itself as being part of a side skirmish in the Napoleonic Wars. Australia quite often thinks of itself as a solution to someone else's prison problem partly due to those wars, partly due to the North American unrest, but mostly due to a harsh penal system. '1812' to us is mostly a piece of music and the end of a war in Europe.

Because of this vast gulf in understandings, I have decided that, whenever I'm bored, I'll post useful historical tidbits (mostly inaccurate)that will enable all my friends-who-live-outside-the-Lucky-Country to sound way informed when they visit us in September. Australian and New Zealander friends – always feel free to annotate. Politeness not essential. The more confusing this is, the more it will look like Real History*.

Today (just in case you hadn't noticed), I'm bored by my own health. So…

Eureka Stockade – mining rights for illegal immigrants. And legal ones. No taxation without representation! (Yep, just like that North American unrest only… not). General mayhem on Bakery Hill. The miners lost. However, as Tom Lehrer pointed out (in another context entirely) they had all the best songs. Peter Lalor was the hero of the day and he fled ignominiously. His next appearance in Australian history was as a Queensland politician.

Rum Rebellion – Governor Bligh did not hide under a bed. His daughter did defend his virtue with a parasol. All this is obvious and besides, I've blogged it before. I've also blogged current politicians' links to the rebellion. What I haven't blogged is that it basically changed some assumptions about government in New South Wales. From 1808 to 1810, New South Wales was governed locally rather than from a 10,000 mile remove. My theory is that this is why we didn't really care about independence: we learned to ignore Britain from very early on, except when matters really counted. Cricket is something that really counts, for instance.

John Batman – "This is the place for a village" is what I was taught he declared when he founded my home town, though I've heard different words since then. Presumably the rude words weren't appropriate to teach a child. He bought some land, but Melbourne grew outside those paid-for bits quite quickly. Looking at a map, I'm pretty sure the land I was born on wasn't paid for.

History Wars – one of the bloodiest and lengthy series of skirmishes in Australia. Australian historians are trying to work out if we're the great success of the British Empire (we produced Kylie and play cricket) or if we have a truly shameful genocidal past, or maybe, the whole thing is really tangled. Historians have been known to turn their backs on each other over the interpretation of 'post-colonial.' Macintyre – one of the great generals in this war – once gave a two hour lecture on why Marxist economics showed that his team would win the next Grand Final. His team lost and my confidence in economic history has never been the same.

Mabo – the other side of Terra Nullius (a legal fiction that enabled much land grabbing) – Mabo v Queensland was an historical landmark case. Basically, a legal fiction was challenged by a human being (Eddie Mabo) and the human being won. Australia's still fairly European and land rights are still a vexed question, but at least the legal fiction was proven to be such in several courts of law. My personal interest at this moment (for which I blame a writer called Green) is how this impacts indigenous copyright of stories. Kaaron Warren elicited some thoughts about it here.

Gallipoli – A film, a place in Turkey, an icon of agonized Aussie (and NZ) self-sacrifice for the better British good. We're good at war symbolism, especially given we missed being invaded by Japan in World War II. My father saw the minisubs in the Harbour and I have a friend who saw the bombs dinning Darwin, but that's not an explanation of the power of the Gallipoli landing in our culture. We have a very troubled relationship with Empire, is what I think, and I mostly avoid discussing it by giving most Australians and New Zealanders a day off on my birthday, which just happens to coincide with a certain death-riddled landing on the coast at Gallipoli.

That's enough bad history for one day.




*At high school I was taught that Real History was something other people had. When I was an undergraduate, Geoffrey Blainey tried to convince us all that this was wrong.

Snapshots 2010

I've been snapshotted. There are some really cool other snapshots linked at the bottom of the page and more to come all this week.