Who is Online

We have 200 guests and no members online

Australian Echoes

 

 

The discovery of gold in California soon had echoes the other way across the Pacific in Australia. 

Small finds of gold had been reported across the various Australian colonies from the earliest days, with a fully substantiated find in 1823, but the last thing the colonial governments wanted was everyone rushing out into the bush to look for gold. The claims were dismissed or kept quiet.

But after the California gold rush caused many to leave Australia, depressing the infant economy, both NSW and Victoria responded by offered prizes to the first to find the gold that they already knew was there.

Thus in 1851 an Englishman Edward Hargraves, who had recent gold prospecting experience in California, claimed the prize and set off the Australian gold rushes. These reversed the flow across the Pacific and resulted in significant population rises; stimulating economic development; leading to the iconic 'diggers'; contributing to the infant labour movement; and thus to Australia's unique style of democracy.

The Hawaiian experience suggested another opportunity.

In 1862 Captain Louis Hope and John Buhot established a sugarcane plantation near Brisbane where Hope operated Australia’s first commercial sugar mill. Sugarcane growing quickly spread along the coast of Queensland and into northern NSW.  As slavery was illegal, the Queensland solution was to emulate the Hawaiian growers and recruit indentured labour from the pacific islands. Elsewhere in the Empire indentured labour toiled in the diamond and coal mines of South Africa and on the farms of Rhodesia.

As the Federation of Australia was coming into being the founding fathers had no doubt that indentured labour was disguised slavery and required that Queensland end the practice before it was permitted to join the new Federation. Just a month after the new Federal Legislature first sat in Melbourne the infamous Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was introduced by the new Prime Minister, Edmund Barton. It had overwhelming support and passed both houses to receive Royal Assent in December 1901.

Thus the first significant act of the new Australian Legislature was to prohibit importing 'coloured labour' to Australia.  Existing indentured labour - mainly islanders - known as 'kanakas' were to be deported - giving rise to Australia's first illegal immigrants when some absconded.  This became known as the 'White Australia Policy'.

Over the next 60 years this 'policy' became a festering source of tension with other partners in the British Commonwealth, particularly on the sub-continent, Singapore and Hong Kong. It was also mentioned frequently in  Russian and particularly Chinese propaganda that I could listen to on my shortwave radio, condemning the 'running dog capitalists'.

On the other hand, supporters of the policy pointed to growing racial tensions between 'whites', now often outnumbered by indentured or enslaved black labourers and their descendants in southern Africa and the United States. Thus the Immigration Restriction Act was amended many times but was not repealed until June 1959 when I was already in High School. It would be several more years before the thorn was fully extracted and Australia would embrace a new wave of Asian immigrants. 


 

Back to the story...

 

Kamehameha III died in 1854 and was succeeded by his nephew, Alexander Litholiho who was crowned Kamehameha IV. 

Alexander had married Emma Rook, the beautiful mixed-race granddaughter of John Young. They were a glittering couple who were received in several of the royal palaces of the world.  Kamehameha IV was the first monarch to attempt to curtail the culture-destroying activities of the American missionaries and the growing influence of the less than godly planters.

He was encouraged in this when on a visit to America as a boy in 1850 he was called a 'nigger' and almost thrown off a train, like Ghandi in South Africa.  He was outraged saying that he had never been treated in such a way in any other county. He became steadfastly pro-British and the couple named their short-lived first child: Prince Albert. 

Alexander, Kamehameha IV, died in 1863 and Lot, Alexander's brother was crowned Kamehameha V.  He took note of the planter's growing power and introduced a new constitution to restore power of the Hawaiian electorate.  By then the American Civil War 1861-1865 was in progress, see my notes on our visit to southern US states last year.  Read here...

This gave another great boost to the Hawaiian sugar industry, now that Southern sugar was no longer available to the world due to the Northern Blockade. As a result sugar prices rose over fivefold.

After the war the South was in ruins and their workforce was freed from their forced labour.  US sugar producers struggled behind a tariff.  It could be a golden time for Hawaiian sugar growers, if only they could be rid of the protective tariff. 

 

 

No comments

Travel

Israel

 

 

 

2023 Addendum

 

It's a decade since this visit to Israel in September 2014.

From July until just a month before we arrived, Israeli troops had been conducting an 'operation' against Hamas in the Gaza strip, in the course of which 469 Israeli soldiers lost their lives.  The country was still reeling. 

17,200 Garzan homes were totally destroyed and three times that number were seriously damaged.  An estimated 2,000 (who keeps count) civilians died in the destruction.  'Bibi' Netanyahu, who had ordered the Operation, declared it a victory.

This time it's on a grander scale: a 'War', and Bibi has vowed to wipe-out Hamas.

Pundits have been moved to speculate on the Hamas strategy, that was obviously premeditated. In addition to taking hostages, it involving sickening brutality against obvious innocents, with many of the worst images made and published by themselves. 

It seemed to be deliberate provocation, with a highly predictable outcome.

Martyrdom?  

Historically, Hamas have done Bibi no harm.  See: 'For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces' in the Israel Times.

Thinking about our visit, I've been moved to wonder how many of today's terrorists were children a decade ago?  How many saw their loved ones: buried alive; blown apart; maimed for life; then dismissed by Bibi as: 'collateral damage'? 

And how many of the children, now stumbling in the rubble, will, in their turn, become terrorists against the hated oppressor across the barrier?

Is Bibi's present purge a good strategy for assuring future harmony?

I commend my decade old analysis to you: A Brief Modern History and Is there a solution?

Comments: 
Since posting the above I've been sent the following article, implicating religious belief, with which I substantially agree, save for its disregarding the Jewish fundamentalists'/extremists' complicity; amplifying the present horrors: The Bright Line Between Good and Evil 

Another reader has provided a link to a perspective similar to my own by Australian 'Elder Statesman' John MenadueHamas, Gaza and the continuing Zionist project.  His Pearls and Irritations site provides a number of articles relating to the current Gaza situation. Worth a read.

The Economist has since reported and unusual spate of short-selling immediately preceding the attacks: Who made millions trading the October 7th attacks?  

Money-making by someone in the know? If so, it's beyond evil.

 

 

A Little Background

The land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea, known as Palestine, is one of the most fought over in human history.  Anthropologists believe that the first humans to leave Africa lived in and around this region and that all non-African humans are related to these common ancestors who lived perhaps 70,000 years ago.  At first glance this interest seems odd, because as bits of territory go it's nothing special.  These days it's mostly desert and semi-desert.  Somewhere back-o-Bourke might look similar, if a bit redder. 

Yet since humans have kept written records, Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, Ancient Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, early Muslims, Christian Crusaders, Ottomans (and other later Muslims), British and Zionists, have all fought to control this land.  This has sometimes been for strategic reasons alone but often partly for affairs of the heart, because this land is steeped in history and myth. 

Read more: Israel

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Atomic Bomb according to ChatGPT

 

Introduction:

The other day, my regular interlocutors at our local shopping centre regaled me with a new question: "What is AI?" And that turned into a discussion about ChatGPT.

I had to confess that I'd never used it. So, I thought I would 'kill two birds with one stone' and ask ChatGPT, for material for an article for my website.

Since watching the movie Oppenheimer, reviewed elsewhere on this website, I've found myself, from time-to-time, musing about the development of the atomic bomb and it's profound impact on the modern world. 

Nuclear energy has provided a backdrop to my entire life. The first "atomic bombs" were dropped on Japan the month before I was born. Thus, the potential of nuclear energy was first revealed in an horrendous demonstration of mankind's greatest power since the harnessing of fire.

Very soon the atomic reactors, that had been necessary to accumulate sufficient plutonium for the first bombs, were adapted to peaceful use.  Yet, they forever carried the stigma of over a hundred thousand of innocent lives lost, many of them young children, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The fear of world devastation followed, as the US and USSR faced-off with ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction.

The stigma and fear has been unfortunate, because, had we more enthusiastically embraced our new scientific knowledge and capabilities to harness this alternative to fire, the threat to the atmosphere now posed by an orgy of burning might have been mitigated.

Method:

So, for this article on the 'atomic bomb', I asked ChatGPT six questions about:

  1. The Manhattan Project; 
  2. Leo Szilard (the father of the nuclear chain reaction);
  3. Tube Alloys (the British bomb project);
  4. the Hanford site (plutonium production);
  5. uranium enrichment (diffusion and centrifugal); and
  6. the Soviet bomb project.

As ChatGPT takes around 20 seconds to write 1000 words and gives a remarkably different result each time, I asked it each question several times and chose selectively from the results.

This is what ChatGPT told me about 'the bomb':

Read more: The Atomic Bomb according to ChatGPT

Opinions and Philosophy

Carbon Capture and Storage (original)

(Carbon Sequestration)

 

 

 


Carbon Sequestration Source: Wikimedia Commons

 

At the present state of technological development in NSW we have few (perhaps no) alternatives to burning coal.  But there is a fundamental issue with the proposed underground sequestration of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a means of reducing the impact of coal burning on the atmosphere. This is the same issue that plagues the whole current energy debate.  It is the issue of scale. 

Disposal of liquid CO2: underground; below the seabed; in depleted oil or gas reservoirs; or in deep saline aquifers is technically possible and is already practiced in some oil fields to improve oil extraction.  But the scale required for meaningful sequestration of coal sourced carbon dioxide is an enormous engineering and environmental challenge of quite a different magnitude. 

It is one thing to land a man on the Moon; it is another to relocate the Great Pyramid (of Cheops) there.

Read more: Carbon Capture and Storage (original)

Terms of Use

Terms of Use                                                                    Copyright