May 6, 2013
Dinosaur hunting in outback western Queensland with the Australian Age of Dinosaurs team - click this link for my Dinosaur Dig story
Dig site 60km beyond Winton
Australovenator – love is his middle name
Palaeontologist Scott Hocknull examines a newly unearthed femur
Far from bone idle
May 3, 2013
This month in Port Macquarie, NSW, the National Koala Conference will address many an issue concerning the shaky future of the iconic, laconic marsupial.
It’s a fitting location given that Port Macquarie’s famous Koala Hospital - Port’s leading tourist attraction - is smack bang in the midst of one of Australia’s largest genetically viable wild koala populations.
Follow this link to my recently published koalas port macquarie feature story
Port Macquarie Koala Hospital
A koala’s hospital bed
A check-up for Joanne
Cheyne Flanagan and volunteer treat a patient
Westhaven Barry chugs di-vetalact
February 28, 2013
I have a new story published in Qantas inflight magazine and Travel Insider website which investigates the horticultural highlights of Ballarat, Victoria’s biggest historic gold-mining city. Link to story here
Historic Craig’s Royal Hotel, Ballarat
Ballarat Botanical Gardens
Lake Wendouree, Ballarat
Lambley Nursery
Lambley Nursery
October 21, 2012
A follow-up on earlier posts re the Wild White Man William Buckley, a remarkable convict of Australia’s penal colony era who has his own chapter in my Tour To Hell.
The amazing survival of this hardy escapee after three decades in the bush (1803-1835) is thought to have inspired the Australian phrase Buckley’s Chance, meaning a very slim one.
But what is the earliest published evidence of this saying?
As Trove increasingly digitises Australia’s newspapers, earlier mentions keep popping up. Here’s one from an anonymous sporting columnist in the Daily News (Perth), March 21st, 1892.
In his Sporting News From Victoria (dated March 8), one ‘Nunquam Dormio’ [i.e. ‘I Never Sleep’] writes that had a horse named The Duke been fit to compete in a certain race, ‘he might have sneaked ahead so far in the first mile and a half that they wouldn’t have had Buckley’s chance of catching him afterwards’.
As the context strongly suggests the saying is already a well-known cliché, there must be earlier examples as yet unearthed. Thanks to Trove we have more than Buckley’s of finding them!
September 17, 2012
David Levell & Josephine Pennicott
Saturday night was the annual banquet of our literary agent Selwa Anthony, this year staged at the Hotel Amora in downtown Sydney. It was great catching up with writing friends such as Ian Irvine, Katherine Howell, Anna Rosa Berman, Anna Romer, John Suter Linton and many others. After dinner and Selwa’s inimitable Sassy Awards, Abba tribute act Fabba had many a female scribe bonding on the dance floor, music speaking louder than words. Josephine’s novel Poet’s Cottage – or should I say Dornen Tochter (I lack the web skills to stick on the umlaut) – has just been launched in Germany so there was much to celebrate!
August 11, 2012
Saturday August 11 is National Bookshop Day in Australia – the day to show some support for your local bookshop. If you don’t support them they will wither away in the glaring supernova of online retail and kindles and another nail goes in the coffin of community.
So I am going to put in a good word for some of the great bookshops of King Street, Newtown.
Josephine Pennicott signs copies of her novel Poet’s Cottage at Better Dead Than Read bookshop
BETTER DEAD THAN READ: This is an excellent bookshop open late seven days and right next to the Dendy Cinema in King Street Newtown. They have a room for book clubs to meet and they promote local authors so of course they are especially valued and appreciated for the extra mile they go.
ELIZABETH’S: Just a few doors up from Better Dead, Elizabeth’s is a mostly (but not all) second-hand bookshop with all kinds of interesting books. I’ve made a lot of great finds here over the years.
GOULD’S BOOK ARCADE: Bob Gould, who died recently, was a real character and his huge rambling labyrinth of a bookshop lives on after him. Some darker corners of the book-crammed alleyways in his shop are probably unmapped – here be tygers, or dragons…. There’s almost too many books for the mind to comprehend, often teetering in mad jumbles. But it adds to the atmosphere. The answer to ‘t00-many’ is simple – dive in and you might be able to lighten their load by buying some! It’s a win-win. Gould’s is at the city end of King Street, near where Queen Street crosses.
July 17, 2012
A decade ago (March 2002) there was a brief media frenzy when a boatful of people saw a large shark breaching four times near Taronga Zoo Wharf. One said, “It turned on its side and you could see its jaws and it looked to me like a white pointer”. The same day a yachtie reported an 8-ft shark near the Harbour Bridge, which rose from the water “shaking its head from side to side”.
A bull shark, most people reckoned, and with good cause – it’s the only large species frequently seen in the harbour. Nino Kinnunen (Manly Oceanworld aquarist) was quoted as saying that great whites had never been ‘officially recorded’ in Sydney Harbour.
AND YET…. on 22 May 1927, fisherman Charlie Messenger reportedly caught a 5m great white shark in the harbour’s Watsons Bay. The Sydney Morning Herald covered the story on May 26, stating Messenger ‘caught the monster just after a French mail steamer had passed, and he presumes that it followed the vessel through the heads and into the harbour’.
The specimen was identified as a great white by David G Stead, Fisheries Department naturalist, father of the writer Christina Stead and later the author of Sharks & Rays Of Australian Seas.
Two days later (May 24) Messenger caught nine bull sharks in the harbour; some are shown in this PHOTO.
Stead identified this catch as ‘mullet sharks or whalers’ – bull sharks by another name, even though their usual maximum length is 3.5m and Messenger’s ‘mullet sharks’ apparently ranged from 2.3m to 4.4m. Before Stead saw them, the newspapers misnamed these sharks ‘deadly grey-nurse’.
Stead didn’t identify the great white until May 25th – the day after the bull sharks were caught – so he may have examined all Messenger’s sharks together. Otherwise, it is possible that Stead only saw the bull sharks and tentatively identified the 5m shark, caught three days before, from Messenger’s description.
The paper hints at the possibility that Messenger’s great white may have been a tiger shark (unlike bull sharks, tigers can reach 5m). Stead was surely too well informed for such an error, but the Herald reporter, listing the common names of the captured shark, offered ‘great white death’, ‘terror of the sea’, ‘white pointer’, ‘grey death’ and ‘sea tiger’. All but one clearly refer to the great white, but the last raises a slim possibility that the Herald muddled Stead’s tentative identification of a tiger shark, conflating names for two species.
If Stead didn’t see the specimen or receive an adequate description, he may have speculated a white or a tiger, which the Herald reporter merged – by accident or design – into a single shark.
But objections quickly surface. ‘Sea tiger’, while rare, crops up in various old sources as a general term for any dangerous shark, and could be legitimately (if not exclusively) applied to great whites.
Also, the Herald notes the 5m shark ‘was on this coast a very rare variety’. In the 1920s, tiger sharks were better known than great whites and relatively common in Sydney waters. And if the newspaper bungled, where is the corrective letter from Stead in defence of his professional reputation? It’s possible he missed the story, but more likely he read it and saw nothing wrong.
Unless more information crops up, the most likely explanation remains that this wayward giant was indeed, as Stead pronounced, a 5m great white shark – the only one ever seen inside Sydney Harbour.
