The rock art that redraws Australian history

HIDDEN in rugged ranges in north-west Arnhem Land, a spectacular treasure-trove of Aboriginal rock art is set to rewrite the history of Australia.

In a find that has stunned archaeologists and anthropologists, a vast wall of about 1500 paintings chronicles the history of Aboriginal contact with outsiders, from Macassan prows and European sailing ships to 19th-century steamships and a World War II battleship.

Alongside exquisite rock art more than 15,000 years old are paintings that capture some of the 19th and 20th centuries' most important technological innovations - a biplane, bicycle, car and rifle - as well as portraits of church ministers, sea captains and traders.

This indigenous version of a history book rivals anything similar in the world and holds the key to Australia's ancient and modern history, according to scientists who have just returned from an expedition to the Djulirri rock shelter in the Wellington Range. The Griffith University archaeologist Professor Paul Tacon, one of five scientists who travelled to Djulirri, said it was of international significance, unprecedented in artistic and technical merit and telling a new story of contact between Aboriginal people and the world.

Contrary to the popular view that indigenous Australians were isolated on their island continent, waves of other seafaring visitors arrived long before British settlement. For hundreds of years there may have been an export economy in northern Australia driven by the Chinese appetite for trepang, or sea cucumber.

While it has long been known that Macassans traded with Aboriginal people, the accepted date for this was in the early 18th century. The team of scientists believes it may have begun centuries earlier.

"This rock art dismantles the popular identity of Australia being a nation first visited by the British," said Dr Alistair Paterson, of the University of Western Australia, also on the expedition. "It goes against the idea of the Bicentennial and convicts."

The first rock art expert known to have seen the shelter was George Chaloupka in the 1970s. But the exact location was lost until a doctoral student at the Australian National University, Daryl Guse, relocated it by working with a local Aboriginal elder, Ronald Lamilami.

Apart from conducting the first full recording of the Djulirri art, the team of researchers discovered thousands of other rock paintings previously unknown to science.

Their trip was the first part of a three-year national program to uncover the archaeology of first contact with Aboriginal people around Australia. But the researchers fear that, without urgent government support, the Arnhem Land sites could be severely damaged. Tourism is rapidly expanding in the Wellington Range, says a Griffith University archaeologist, Dr Sally May, and one of the most important rock art sites, known as Malarrak, is being severely degraded by visitors.

Mining companies are also sweeping into the area. The range is a prime site for uranium and other exploration. Mr Lamilami wants an indigenous ranger program established to ensure the sites are properly managed.

.. from smh.com.au

Unearthing Sydney's underground bar scene

The City of Sydney council will investigate mapping the central business district's network of underground retail arcades in search of hidden spots suitable for small bars.

"Unlike most cities, we have an absolute labyrinth of underground shopping arcades but they basically pull the shutters down after the 5pm commuter exit. There's an opportunity to activate those places after dark," said Jeff Lewis, a spokesman for the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore.

Mr Lewis pointed to the arcade that joined Town Hall station to Pitt Street Mall, the link from the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth streets to Museum station and Park Street, and a stretch from York Street to Wynyard to Hunter Connection to Pitt Street. "Who knows what's down there. I know Wynyard had a number of levels they used for storage and there's a whole World War II storage area under [St James]," he said.

Andrew Dodds, a bar reviewer from the website Where is the Pub?, remembers Wynyard's Hunter Arcade packed full of drinking spots in the '90s. "That building had about eight or nine if you counted them. There was the 747 bar where the windows and seats were styled like you were inside an aeroplane. The Porthole was fairly small but the Jungle Bar was a reasonable size," he said.

Mr Dodds said he was more pub patron than bar fly but welcomed the liquor licensing reforms proposed this week. "If the pubs had listened more to what the people wanted rather than just the pokie punters, then they wouldn't find themselves in this situation," he said.

The former Hunter Arcade bars, owned by the nearby Menzies Hotel, were closed in the early '90s after the Menzies' owners decided to focus on the hotel. "I do remember the Jungle Bar was a very hot R'n'R bar during the Vietnam years," said one long-standing Menzies worker, who asked not to be named.

A City of Sydney councillor, John McInerney, said he would rather have a tipple in the sunshine than underground but said "there are a few little nooks and crannies in that area that are left over from warehouses and funny little subdivisions running down to Darling Harbour".

Cr McInerney also pointed to the underground public toilets at Hyde Park, Wynyard and Macquarie Place that were filled in when the former lord mayor, Frank Sartor, was in office. "Something I would like to do is unfill them and put them back as some other use. The designs were very nice," Cr McInerney said.

He also floated the idea of bars in disused train tunnels at St James station. But a spokesman from the Australian Rail Historical Society, Graham Thurling, said public access to the tunnels was banned after September 11, 2001. "Those tunnels are heritage protected and they won't even let you do tours since the terrorist thing came up," Mr Thurling said.

found on smh

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Archaeologists have published a new map showing an extensive ancient settlement surrounding Cambodia's Angkor Wat that supported large numbers of inhabitants before and after the famous temple was built.

Ancient urban sprawl surrounded Cambodia's Angkor

Now obscured by vegetation and low-lying clouds, the ruins spread over 1,000 sq km and were made up of thousands of houses, roads, manmade ponds and canals, researchers from Australia, Cambodia and France said in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We now know that instead of being just (a collection of) temples, Angkor was actually a continuous and interconnected network of temples and small scale residential features like small village ponds, small village temples as well," Damien Evans of the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"Very little remains now, they are just piles of brick ... a thousand years ago (it) would have been a huge and popular city, full of life, rather than this image of temples in a jungle."

Angkor Wat was built in the early 12th century, while the settlement existed between 500 AD and 1500 AD, Evans said.

"What we can see, even on a preliminary basis, is that several hundred thousand people must have lived in the Angkor area ... which is defined by the infrastructure, the roads, the canals, huge embankments," he added.

Using hand-drawn maps, ground surveys, satellite imagery, aerial photography and ground-sensing radar provided by NASA, the researchers identified what they believed to be more than a thousand former manmade ponds, temples and moats -- all of which were now replaced by vegetation.

Ranging from 20 metres to 8 km long, the ponds were used for drinking, irrigation, livestock and other domestic purposes and were especially crucial for the dry season.

"The slightly lower elevations of the rice fields in the former moats and reservoirs ... result in different stages of rice maturity and in differential levels of soil moisture content, which strongly affect the returned radar signal," Evans said. "You get more mature rice in these wetter areas."

The researchers believe the settlement was abandoned around 1500 AD because of overexploitation and deforestation.

"What our work proved for the first time was that Angkor certainly was large enough and its water management system was complex and extensive enough to have created very serious environmental problems," Evans said.

"In such situations, infrastructure becomes very important and increasingly complex and difficult to maintain."

Future studies will look at how serious these problems were and if the inhabitants were able to deal with them.

source

Spife-ification of a nation

[yes i know there is no spife in this picture]

Now, it's fair to say that I've eaten my fair share of Malaysian meals.
And, as I've mentioned I'm sure, I love the food here, and with your permission, I will continue eating here.

But there is one question that I keep coming back to when dining here.. and that question is:

Why do Malaysian eateries never have knives?

It's driving me spare.

I'm pretty sure that almost every meal I've eaten here has involved the options of a fork, a spoon or chopsticks... but no knife.

Now that's fine if the meal consists of small, dainty morsels, tastefully arranged, but it seems that the most often used kitchen utensil here is a cleaver.





Now a cleaver is a fairly un-subtle instrument... its main purpose is to create medium sized chunks of things, a job it does very well. If a large part of your daily job is involved creating medium sized chunks of something from an even larger chunk, then relax, I am not trying to steal your livelihood.
In the world of IT, the world of the cleaver is the backend, the server room, the kitchen, the no-nonsense nerve-centre of all thing culinary.

It is in the front-end, the end-user experience that I am proposing is the problem.

If we take these afore-mentioned medium sized chunks of things and serve them to a patron who only has a fork, spoon and chopsticks to eat it with... doesn't it seem likely that this patron may have some issue eating it? To my simple western mind, it does. Alas, I am a stranger in a strange land here.... I simply have way too much trouble trying to break apart large parts of any meal here... i end up throwing food all over the place, well, honestly, all over myself.

Now I believe that it's important for a nation to be proud of its distinctions from other nations.. a national dress, song, dish, that's fine... but human beings have been using knives since the stone age, & it's an amazingly handy tool that neither a fork, or a spoon or chopsticks (or all combined) can overcome. I'm glad that Malaysia is branching out in distinction from the surrounding nations, but please Malaysia, eradication of the knife is not the way to do this.

Please, Malaysia... welcome back the knife into your eatery arsenal. It is a handy, handy thing...

Or at least, can I suggest a widespread uptake of the spife?


A spife is a combination spoon and knife, just as a Spork is a combination spoon and fork.
A Knork, for the uninitiated, is a combination knife and fork, a Splade, of course, being a combination spoon and blade (knife)


Does anyone know a good spife, knork or splade importer?




...Is this issue something that is common to most Asian nations? Who makes a decision like this? Is it a result of fears that the general populous will erupt into a fierce melee of cutlery wielding maniacs?
Are there Government departments working feverishly into the night on such hot topics of national security?

I remember reading something the quote that mankind is only two hot meals from barbarity, but i have never heard it suggested that the barbarity might arise from those same two hot meals...

Please join me, lets begin the spife-ification of Malaysia!

Indoor Rollercoaster at Times Square shopping centre, Kuala Lumpur

...and just to prove that I didn't steal this photo from teh interwebs:



...here's myself and Greg posing awkwardly in front. Greg is one of our team in Sydney who has been kind enough to be sent here by our company for a week. On ya Greggles!

Superfuture: Sydney

...essentially, this site is a hyperlinked map of shops, cafes, bars etc. for select areas of various cities around the world.

Beneficial if you suddenly find yourself in a strange city and needing a hefty dose of fashion, or a decaf soy latte to bring everything back to reality for you.

...You precious, sexy, glamour hominid, you! Go mingle!

Paradise Lost - a brief history of Nauru

found on Economist.com

Of Futurama, Robots and jazzy threads...

Futurama returns! ?

Billy West, voice of Fry has posted on his site that futurama is getting another 26 episodes. Sweet. This is quite possibly my favourite show.

Update: Actually, we may have jumped the gun on this one a little... check out the later posts from Billy on the same forum. Time will tell methinks.

Awesome CGI robot video from 1st ave machine.com

I've seen an animated plants video from these same ppl, but a recommendation on digg suggested that these guys had some great other work, and whoah, they aint wrong.

Amazing t-shirts!

Dare I say Monty Pythonesque, but I'd be proud to be the owner/wearer of any of these fine, fine pieces of apparelege.

yes, it's all happening here. Hi there to you as the dusk sets on another weekend... a busy weekend, which is not to say eventful, neccessarily.
Friday night Mick, Brian and I had a couple of drinks at the Epping. Saturday went into the city with the intention of (again) going to see the "City of Shadows" exhibition, but as is often the case when Kristin and I meet up, we ended up sitting in a pub and talking for hours instead. Not that I mind, I rather have a good full chat than fill my time just *doing stuff* for the sake of it. And we have such great chats.
It took me two trains and a bus to get from Epping to the City yesterday as there was trackwork between Concord West and Strathfield. I couldn't be bothered to negotiate the same in reverse, so caught a cab home. Brian msg'd me as I was leaving the city and so back to the Epping hotel we went. I don't normally drink that much, but lately I've certainly been drinking more than usual. It's not neccessarily a bad thing, it's certainly better that locking myself away at home, and I get to have a few good, surprising chats with both my friends and strangers. Nothing really surprising is likely to happen sitting around the house anyway. The Epping hotel is such a nice looking little pub, great food too. But geez, the entertainment really leaves something to be desired. The same crappy coverbands in moderately high rotation. C'mon guys, take a risk, lets lively things up with some original music. Talking of moosique, the latest bands to have delighted my ears are thus:

• Architecture in Helsinki
• Broken Social Scene
• ...And you will know us by the trail of dead

...Wonderful, gorgeous bands, all of them.

footnote: Anyone else having issues posting images to their blog?
I've tried it from my local pc, from another site and also from Picasa without success.

Ok, next day, seems to be working a bit gooder-er.

wow, this caught me by surprise... the worm turns eh?

Rock gigs to top the play list at Home

Home, Sydney's dance music super club, will be converted to a rock'n'roll venue in a bid to tap into the city's booming live music market.

Although Home was launched as an exclusive super club in the late 1990s for Sydney's dance and rave scene, its conversion to a live music venue reflects the diminishing clubbing scene in Sydney.

Simon Page, who co-owns the club with British businessman Ron McCulloch, has declared the Cockle Bay venue will "become a fully-fledged rock venue".

To be rebranded as Home: Sydney's House Of Music, it is expected to compete against live venues including the Enmore Theatre in Newtown and The Metro on George Street, which already cater for well-known international and local acts ranging from Foo Fighters to Missy Higgins.

"I think there's a real gap in that market," said Mr Page.

"Being a custom-built venue, which had a lot of dollars put into it in 1998, Home is relatively new. So it will give quite a different experience. I love going to old theatres like the Enmore, don't get me wrong, but I think with the modernity of Home, it being a live music venue could be striking."

Mr Page said the main auditorium inside the club had already been reconfigured and the DJ booth shifted to cater for a large live music stage.

"There's quite a difference between a live music sound system and a dance music system," Mr Page said.

"The sound system which went into Home was modelled on the Ministry of Sound's and was for dance music. So I've done some research on what's required for live music.

"We've got a sound system the size of the one inside the Hordern Pavilion going into Home. They're starting to install it on Monday and it will be fully up and running in two to three weeks."

The dance club's management will also refit various areas of the club to attract the world's biggest names in rock, for gigs scheduled on Saturday nights and weeknights. The traditional dance music night, Sublime, will continue on Friday nights.

"You really have to look after the live music properly," Mr Page said. "So we're building a suite of dressing rooms and ... a tour manager's office which has direct access to the stage."

As part of Home's complete overhaul, staff have been poached from major rock promoters, including Michael Coppel, to book some of the world's biggest bands. Mr Page said big-name acts were already being considered for October, November and December.

The shift towards live music at Sydney's biggest dance club reflects a trend in Britain, where the clubbing scene has been slowly losing its appeal over the past few years. While it was a hot, underground movement in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, clubbing went entirely mainstream with super clubs such as the Ministry of Sound in London and Home in Sydney. Now it appears to have given way to old-fashioned live bands.

"All around the world big nightclubs, pure dance clubs, have difficulty getting more than one night happening [each week]," Mr Page said. That's why he's now considering every possible genre of live music to revitalise the venue.

"I'm happy to have country and western on the floor one night and trance the next," he said.

Carr announces $8bn railway project

"The NSW Government will spend $8 billion on a rail line under Sydney Harbour and links to new suburbs in the north-west and south-west of the city in the biggest expansion of the network since the 1930s.

As revealed in the Herald today, the new line will run from Rouse Hill to Leppington and will include new stations under Pitt Street, Castlereagh Street, at The Rocks, North Sydney and Crows Nest.

The Premier, Bob Carr, today said the Government had been working on the rail expansion for the past year.

"The Government will invest $8 billion over the next 15 years for the biggest expansion we've seen of the rail network since the 1930s," Mr Carr said.

"Fundamentally, [this is] a new rail service to the growth areas of the north-west and to the south-west, and an extra capacity for the CityRail network."

The new line will be funded through a mix of borrowings, budget funding and private-sector finance."

• Revealed: the harbour tunnel to ease rail crisis
• Graphic: Rail tunnel plans
• Railing against the trucks that eat Sydney
• Metro line shifting to the North Shore
• Freight plan is off the rails

... from smh ...

Praying monkey in India

A monkey reportedly participated in a Hindu ritual at a temple in the Balasore district of Orissa, India. The monkey allegedly folded its hands, took prasad (sanctified food), and marked its forehead with vermillion. After the villagers adorned it with a garland, the monkey took off into the forest. From the Indo-Asian News Service:

"When we saw the monkey joining us we were surprised. We did not try to drive it out and it continued praying for nearly an hour amid hundreds of devotees," (Junia village resident Aniruddha) Behera told IANS... "We have not seen any monkey around for the last two years. This is a miracle for us," Behera said.

Link

...via boingboing