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See also a new page in this series - Literary - book reviews and literary links
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Dan Byrnes | Note: This personal website was begun on 13 August 2008 as an adjunct on the domain - http://www.danbyrnes.com.au/ It replaces a different and older personal website which was at a quite different URL. It will be a vanilla, no-frills website and will probably carry various family pictures and some family history information, and a little "blogging" as well. Anyone who can manage a website doesn't really need a blog, is the feeling. - Dan Byrnes Pages of interest here: This last page of the series can redirect you to the first page here | |
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This is the last page of this personal website. It's mostly for material arising from the latest in personal business, a new poem, a new remark, and so on.
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1983: Desktop computers begin to hit desks in workplaces across Australia. Beginning of a revolution of some kind. More to come 2008: From October-November. Global Financial Crash. Looking set to be somehow repeated in 2011-2012. More to come |
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(Poem 799 on 15-11-2009 draft3, written as the sun comes up)
Upon my sister turning 60,
and upon my soul,
I recall how I turned 60.
Luckily, without incident.
It's like finding a great flat plateau
with not a lot new to look at.
The water is fresh, the animals and the breezes are slow,
the grass is green enough for the cattle we inherited,
and neither of us sings hymns anymore
of any particular description.
We shared a childhood, then life
shared us out into busyness that seemed important,
until surprise ebbed, or mercy gasped with disbelief,
or The Veils of Maya lifted,
the climate shifted.
Conclusions drifted,
because the feeling grows
that life is more gifted
than we can ever unwrap.
And then what?
It's all in how you look at it,
read a book at it, find a nook,
eat what you cook
for yourself,
and discover that God is a skyhook.
You don't and anyway can't tell anyone the secrets,
because each secret reshapes itself a little overnight
as it bellyflops into the past to escape you once again,
and you wake and wonder if sleep is practice for death,
or if death is practice for another very long dream.
If the sunrise is better than usual,
that could be quite enough versus the evils of the day.
| |
| My sister Maureen, in 2011. Mother of Sharon Lima, below. |
The earth turns, but it doesn't exactly go anywhere,
nor does it seem to care about that,
it's just involved in turning,
yearning for more turning,
yearning and turning, yearning and turning ...
Maybe we ended up in entirely free space?
I don't know.
Just that it doesn't feel so expensive anymore,
and here, there's much less wear and tear.
(Poem 808 of 18-4-2011)
I lived, I loved,
some things I forgot.
Some things I forgave,
others still know not.
The heart and the mind,
the heart and the loins …
I wonder, I wonder,
about the joins,
Where to now?
The years get gray.
What to make of it all?
Being careful what to say.
::::::::ends ::::::::::::::
| |
| Sharon Lima with her first child, Sarah Christina, by now aged 9-10 weeks, at a family gathering in Tamworth Easter 2011. |
(On the January 2011 floods in Brisbane and south-eastern Queensland.
On 7 January 2011, a friday, and some days later)
[By Dan Byrnes Poem 804 of 7-1-2011 (and some days later draft4. to 21 October 2011)]
in the humidity of a state
under siege from rain,
a calamity of post-drought paradox ….
versus national politics
and focus-group hocus-pocus findings,
the bland leading the blind,
and the blind staring back at the bland
with impotent rage,
and vice-versa, all the time …
but here in brisbane, just watch
the girl who takes such pleasure in his company
and shows it as they walk
on such soggy streets into a future
here, the street people let you know,
eg., i'm very attached to my dog,
and it's very attached to the food I dispense,
just watch now how it shits!
now meet a a fellow who keeps
a hive of bees in the middle of a city,
he's got a brand-new smoker
for them on the table,
and just up the road is the house
where they shot part of the movie
'he died with a falafel in his hand',
… that's really mordant fun …
abc jazz burbles along as usual,
going absolutely nowhere,
like snow falling on a fire,
and 24x7 tv news,
heck, the things you can find to look at
on a big new tv screen
pre-programmed for everything
but quotes from the latin
and the true biography of william shakespear
jokes spring to mind
but the punchlines
tend to freeze like a computer screen
how the hell do you work this thing?
 |
|
| Sarah Byrnes about 1998, in her room at Nazareth House, Tamworth, then aged about 81, with one of her beloved books, by then in a wheelchair due to a leg amputation due to problems of diabetes and circulatory problems. As visited here by her grand-niece, Jenni Burke. Sarah died 31 July, 2000, quietly and quite unexpectedly. |
it rains again and noticeably,
no one jokes,
brisbane is living proof
that australians can improve things
and often need to
I was going to go here,
there and everywhere,
but it rained again
and I got stuck
in my observations,
like with writing a letter to you,
like someone chasing
a dog escaping down the street
and forgetting how good home is …
to get here I got so hot to trot
I left home an hour early, by mistake,
stupid, like a kid
who can't read the time,
I forgot my digital camera,
so you'll just have to imagine it,
cloudy, rainy, coming and going,
just now it's a friday on holiday,
brisbane pretty much inner-city mobile phone
24x7 heaven,
we'll take your money, honey,
just walk right in and sit right down,
baby, let your hair hang down
1,2,3,4, that's a telstra help number,
oh, ok, someone else who says they
always ignore tv ads and haven't seen
that amusing ad with the bloody silly green sock
a man who does me a favour,
but with such a dour face
I thought i'd broken a law
and unwritten laws
are worse than unwritten poems,
no one knows what gives or takes
its pound of flesh
the clouds try to clear but can't,
and someone asks,
what does the 'balmy' mean in 'balmy breeze',
not the cricket barmy army, balmy?
the similarity between queensland
and the rest of australia is like that,
like a bad pun dipped in chocolate
i meet a fellow
with the best collection of cookbooks
i've ever seen or heard of,
he speaks of provencale with relish,
and we wind up
tipping out a few quick nips
of hazelnut liqueur from castle glen,
a spot in australia, not scotland,
all the castles in australia are fake,
as you know ...
but the food in brisbane is great!
the sheer variety in these suburbs is enormous!
and the mish-mash of architectural styles
is like the dream
of a manic property developer asleep on a roller-coaster,
the hills make the roads meander
in a crazy quilt of pathways
some of the facades on the streets here
are a bit deceptive,
so i'd look up google maps for directions
just in case an unwary soul met an accident,
though behind some addresses
there's plenty of extra parking space
at the rear of the building
anything can happen here including getting lost ….
and then it rains again
and is that the time?
and is it true that the colours of flowers
are more gorgeous here
than anywhere else in the land
of the blind leading the bland
care for some more wine?
hand me that guitar, could you?
i like your computer set-up here, and
god, if I could have gotten my instrument
to sound like that about thirty years ago,
I probably wouldn't be here today,
i'd be in london or new york,
but, here we are in a flood zone
where a convict wrote
'moreton bay', and the other less-personal melancholy,
the one from history here,
slips under the rug and hides awhile
near that road named logan
there's a black frenchwoman lives next door,
from paris, says her name is marie-ellen,
a humble and modest person,
don't know if she really enjoys this humidity
could you put these batteries in my torch, please,
they said the electricity might go off (and later it did)
really, could that be the time?
 |
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| Sharon's older sister, Donna, at left, with daughter Thalia and husband Damian Canavan who is from County Tyrone, Ireland. Family gathering in Tamworth Easter 2011. |
it's starting to rain again,
it's going to blot
the page I write on,
I mean the original,
not the best, necessarily,
i should get in off the street again,
this is brisbane,
started by convict guards
and continued by escapers
from government in sydney and anywhere else,
and still at it, under the carpet
the bandy-legged versus the nervous, the agile,
or today, the fat,
the sunshine state versus global warming,
a moment's pause
for the topic of flood relief
and the senior public servants
cross their fingers and wonder
if any forgotten latin quotes
could be relevant,
quo vadis, queensland, wither and hence,
and if all this rain doesn't stop,
noah, then whence?
when and how high will the rivers peak?
still, soggy or not, this is brisbane,
great relief from most of the burdens of history
in i don't know how many other countries,
black africans have quite a presence here now,
their future seems valid enough already,
it's as though this city is cooked from
the ingredients for a banquet
for a global come-as-you-are party
where even the police are invited!
i could just as easily start scat-singing
like the abc digital jazz
on the big pre-programmed tv screen,
but I would like some more bass in the speakers
by at least tomorrow
time is of the essence,
the transport system knows,
but the leafiness
of all the suburbs
intrudes through that.
trees grow slowly,
but they wave in the wind,
and the good morale here
is just as full
as this city's stomach is,
full with pleasant illusions,
delusions, passions aplenty,
and the aforesaid interest-free period
laced with trickery,
a set of interstate rail links
that's a joke in poor taste,
a waste-disposal system that's admittedly tidy enough,
an economy larded with financial transfat,
but now on a fiscal diet for the flood-prone
i'll just go and buy the newspaper
it feels like it'll rain again soon,
there are places north of here
that are under water as far as you can see
from a tv news helicopter
and even adelaide
has to keep a watch on that lot,
the bureau – gulp – is predicting
a monsoon a month for the foreseeable …
ahh …. abc jazz, that tinkle-piano work
is just so fluid, and breezy,
everyone gets a chance to say something
 |
|
| Husband of Donna Simmonds, Damian Canavan from Country Tyrone, Ireland, a concretor and/or natural gas line maintainer. Family gathering in Tamworth, Easter 2011. |
I visit here and somehow spend
a lot of time watching and listening to the rain
hmm, some of the day
is for the call of the crow,
but near sunset,
enter the kookaburras,
laughing till the next rain quietens them,
after this little effort from la nina,
it looks like the entire great barrier reef
will soon be vomiting up its dead
and like, with the music now,
I always wonder about that french-style
harmonica sound that the English sometimes use too,
don't do it, you never hear it live here …
that wind is coming up again,
like an intent to rob with menaces,
but no, it subsides,
nothing at all in the weather
can be trusted right now
hmm, here's a package of print material
from San Bernadino, California
and the delivery boy says “cheers, mate”
in a vaguely asian accent,
in a very non-pauline hanson kind of way,
and he's off into the gathering afternoon
under the sound of a red-and-white airliner
up there filled with more escapers, you see,
heading out
elsewhere, in the newspaper,
there's worse-than-usual problems with the cricket,
israel versus its neighbours,
there are more stern and scathing expressions
on the faces of vehement radical muslims, so bitter,
the usa is in debate on whether their constitution
is actually holy writ or not (of course it's not!)
what gives with michael jackson's non-physician,
and a good deal of print-media bleating
about tweeting, and what's happening on twitter
the news is on …
and it's time for a spot of pensive sax-playing, really,
this is a one-in-one-hundred years flood,
you know, and with the blind leading the bland,
we find, that,
putrid as pus
in the infected eye of a flying pig,
tony abbott wants to dam those damned rivers!
while the blessed government
talks up a new ports policy
in a portmanteau sort of way, obviously,
given that most of our ports
arose from accidents in history
under the rubric of what is called,
'british imperialism as a force for good in the world' ….
while the water on queensland rolls on and on,
and down, and through, and over, and past,
and into, so vast,
some of it fast,
some of it slow,
if you're not actually in it,
you don't really want to know
how country queensland becomes venice
with its atmosphere filled with insects and stench
in brisbane alone,
'the water-filled clouds go by so quick
past the eaves of the roof,
or the leaves of the trees,
it's going to be 'hardly ideal weekend weather'
these floodwaters don't surge
as much as they simply ... drown ….
[except for an unexpected inland tsunami in the lockyer valley which terrified]
 |
|
| Grandmother Maureen fiddles with a salt mill, granddaughter Thalia attacks a good-looking BBQ chicken and her friend Anna wants to get in next. |
this summer of sorrow, south-east queensland sodden,
strings of towns are joined now by water and really sudden fear.
“daddy, are we going to live?' asks a boy
and his father wonders aloud …
after the amazing amazing has happened,
the great divide intervenes,
water goes deadly quick and high,
and crashes past roadways and into belief and disbelief,
it comes up 10 feet in 15 minutes,
maybe at 15 kilometres per hour,
property floats away “and by then we'd gotten frightened”.
“the floor just lifted under you,
the house moved and then it went,
floated down and smashed down a tree
that could otherwise have been climbed.”
buildings show their feet of clay.
buildings afloat attack buildings not yet budged,
houses float past with people in them,
as shipping containers and cars
drift past on the floods
with all sorts of no-longer personal possessions nearby,
helicopters fly in to save people from roof tops,
winching and winching and wincing and wincing,
till darkness closes in on people on rooves,
rescue teams try and try,
and signs of well-known lives just go, well, missing.
hang on, mate, hang on!
the lucky people just kinda, swim out.
all the new rainwater adds to the other,
it's raindrop mysticism in a very bad way,
and a lesson in how things natural can gather.
“that tree there saved my life”, says a bloke
with all his memories now rearranged.
lives torn apart and memories abridged
no one now is quite sure where to stand to cook
sausage sizzles as a way of grouping and coping
and groping into the future
but god, it's good to be dry
and soon, time for a kettledrum roll
for the lawyers, the insurance people,
the dam walls, the runners in The Blame Game,
and anyone with an answer.
(ends)
 |
|
| Being the granduncle, complete with beard. |
(Poem 799/819 draft 1/2/6/7/8/11 on 10/11-8-2008)
By Dan Byrnes
(About governments which behave badly.)
Really, that's your first question?
I wonder what will be your later one?
You might be like a sea captain who doubts himself
and all his crew, before the mast, 'cos they are human;
doubts the water he sails on and the fish below.
And where those fish came from.
Doubts the wood of the ship and all its nails,
and doubts the wind that fills its doubtful sails.
And yet he sails on and his soul mostly never fails.
How do you learn to interrogate the wind?
I'll leave you to think about that once you've really sinned.
A woman asked me, “What if a person makes a mistake?”
“You had a life, and never made a major mistake?”,
I asked her, “What's a life for you not just to watch but to give to or to take from?
Nor is this the time for any exchanges of heartache.”
Which begs the question ... she said,
“What if my betters or my government have sinned?”
Well, then, you really need the wind.
I'll leave you to think about that once you've really sinned,
how to interrogate the wind.
Get a boat going. Get a sail going.
Get a life, and once you've revived,
then can we have a competition about,
how do you say it, “I survived.”
I'll tell you what. I'll tell you a little of what I know.
The rest is unsayable till we know, how what when where and why,
are all in a place they never were or ever will be. In a row.
(Ends)
(NB: This poem is difficult to explain. It is mainly about governments which behave badly. It was written on seeing a free-to-air documentary Australian ABC TV 10-8-2008 on important C20th poetry, especially that by Osip Mandelstam. But thoughts were then invaded by the results of long discussions I had had with a woman whose C21st situations had suffered by the the 2004 post-tsunami, n/e Sri Lanka. Anyone living in a well-governed country, as Australia is, has difficulty with becoming properly aware of what it is like to live in a country badly-governed.)
(By Dan Byrnes Poem 801 of 18-12-2009 draft 6a of 30-1-2010)
(For Paul Anglin, Melbourne)
 |
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| Sharon Lima's father, Terry Simmonds, with his new granddaughter, Sarah Christina, here aged 9-10 weeks, at a family gathering. |
We secured the location with rifles,
grenades, mortars and air strike.
Rifles using academic-coated bullets,
the grenades of utter frustration,
napalm of seemingly-seductive linguistic balm,
burning and smoking,
turning in the wind and choking.
And set to making the sets.
A dictionary here, a rhyme there,
a word from a nerd, a cast of a thousand recluses,
each of their homes lovingly detailed
to capture the misanthropy, angst and anomie
that go into the making of The Poetry.
The secret is to learn how to digitise the word,
bring in graphics the poet never thought of,
freeze-frame it, speed it up, slow it down, give it an edge,
make it contemporary and drown it in the ignorance
that all sorts of people have, who actually think
that the emotions are, or ever could be,
skilled workers.
We needed more special effects and make-up than expected,
though, truckloads, because poets regrettably get old
and often can't plausibly explain any more
their fantastic love affair when they were twenty-six,
any better than you or I could who were never there.
And what's the point of lengthy filming or re-enactments
of the wit-of-the-stairs of them
half-remembered smart-arsey quips,
now-demolished hospital wards,
forensic DNA work on landfills of dead used condoms and pizza crust,
the archaeologies of the bad use of punctuation and of
well-intentioned tendencies to multiculturalism?
G e t .. a .. l i f e .. We thought, this is historic and never been done!
Drizzled with history like a homeless dog in the rain,
flavoured with dead languages, printed,
and remorselessly drained
of life fluids in the morgue for posterity.
A screen-saver picture of a waterless, wind-blown desert here,
a bit-torrent download of Beethoven symphonies there,
and we get Rumi-eyed poetry,
poetry of the frangipani,
poetry of the beloved homeland,
poetry of the needy-souled wishful thinker,
poetry of the disastrously-undressed soul
in some fresh and excrutiating extremity,
and a eulogy from a meek vice-chancellor
from yet-another pointless university.
Is good. The sound track is by Phillip Glass,
as minimalist as an old city razed
slow-mo in just a few blitzkrieg strokes.
Hence the ending with the ...
disappointing scenes of ruins
under slowly-rising smoke.
 |
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| Sharon Lima, (nee Simmonds), with her daughter Sarah Christina, here aged 9-10 weeks, named for her grandmother Sarah Byrnes (see below). Sharon here was visiting her parents and sister Donna in Tamworth. Her husband Hugo Lima (a Brazilian) could unfortunately not be present at this family gathering. |
We gather now in post-production parties,
and everyone here tries to hide
that they know the other people know
that they all knew, that the others know,
who aren't saying, unforgiving,
this is the kind of joke that arises from high school, from Year Seven,
when wordy-educated people, ordinary voters, try to make a living,
but also secretly try to defy the angels and to annex heaven.
What they're going to do in heaven
for such a long time
is the question never answered.
Odd that the parties never wind up,
talk continues while the zephyr winds blow, the surf comes in,
peace grows between the wars,
and no-one knows what a zephyr is anymore.
Someone puts on some old Irish music
composed by the mounds of heartbreak.
Someone cries,
and life goes on because it has to.
(ends)
By Dan Byrnes Poem 803 of 25-9-2010 (late night draft2)
Pardon me,
but just now I'm not in anywhere.
I'm not in China,
despite remembering the I Ching.
Not in Ancient Egypt,
despite a fleeting memory of the boomerangs
in Tutankhamun's tomb.
Not even in Australia, where I come from,
before or after redemption,
living near the highest altitude airport
this country has.
I don't quite know where I was,
but what's good is that I don't care,
don't have to care,
don't need to care,
dont' have a care,
I'm enjoying being, right here and now,
not in anywhere.
You have a problem with that,
you best go back to school
if you want to know what to think,
instead of knowing that it is better to be
not in anywhere,
fully aware of just what not to think,
and that my “pardon me” isn't exactly an apology,
though it could be a kindly warning to thee,
about where you thought
you were coming from.
(Ends)
Dan Byrnes Poem 811 of 15-5-2011 draft two/three
He never learned that life is not a race,
a game, a way to fame or to any destiny or place,
that life is not a thing, a waste, a trance or an illusion.
It is a flame, a continual bounce,
not a set of well-made shoes, but having legs, feet and the pounce
to avoid the kill, being able to prevent intrusion
into the secret, which is in having no secret.
We know, there is a near-infinite number of ways to have a bet,
but few ways left to keep entertaining a delusion.
There are many rocks to be shifted and counted,
ironic mirth, the luck of not killing. Why are jewels worth being mounted?
And even if they are, their distance from the seclusion
required for the first flash of insight is a mystery
not well given in any story or history.
It is well to, simply, give attention to undoing the confusion.
(Ends)
(Dan Byrnes Poem 796/815 on 22 April 2010 draft1a)
Look at that!
An entire life gone in poetry and music!
Now the mind enjoying that is resting
on the other side of something difficult,
too far gone for protesting,
but not for, I told you so.
Not in so many words but as with music,
the silences between the notes,
the little bits of nothingness
sliding quietly between the slats of reality,
riddled with the shyness of the unsayable.
The loom of day and the womb of night
throbbing on regardless ...
A lot of people worry.
Apart from that, it's come to this,
a pattern here and a pattern there,
woven in time and space
as though everything might have mattered.
And did it?
(Ends)
(Poem 816 of 19 February 2007 - draft 3a
(for Scott Hall)
This is where the human conscience always groans,
no part of life ever really knows what it owns ...
The unknowably secret life of children
The daughter who'd have been better off as a nun
The fire that gets away and damage-burns
The chance remark, but what's done is done
One too many a drink, one too few a think
So many idiots as the sun goes down
But for that wrong turning, I'd have died that day
And it's mostly not the best man wears the crown
Evil looks less evil from a distance
The present looks to the future, but the favour is not returned
The young know much, but the old just clear their mind
Now I can hardly remember, what it was I thought I yearned
This is where the human conscience always groans,
no part of life ever really knows what it owns ...
(Poem 817 on 20 February 2010 draft1)
By Dan Byrnes
Praying in public
is a peculiar thing.
We never, for example, witness
a consoling angel on the wing.>
We just see a supplicant
with power gone faint,
asking something from someone,
with altitude, who ain't.
(Ends)
I've been using Ubuntu for several years now, and find that (assuming my hard disk is ok) computing work is steady, unfussy, reliable, everything just works. Which was rarely my experience with Microsoft software and operating system from my early days of using Windows 95. In fact, after resisting earlier badgering from a friend to migrate to Linux from Microsoft due to the need to keep using one particular piece of software, I finally decided to make the migration when one day, Windows XP fell over one time too many. WinXP had taken to doing this to me, just falling over every so often. That's it, I muttered, this will never happen ever again! It's Ubuntu for me! Goodbye to Microsoft forever!
And right now, July 2010, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 on two computers (which just now are not networked, but they have been, and all that worked well too). Both computers receive their usual Ubuntu updates in the usual way. Everything is still working well.
There are though some issues about using the greatest variety of software that Ubuntu makes available. But firstly, for those who don't know, Ubuntu's Synaptic Package Manager, which installs new software for us when we want to start using it, offers us the use of up to 6396 software packages. Of the 6396 or so packages, I have 1368 installed, or about one-sixth. It is easier to mention what I don't do with a computer, in order to let you know where I might be up to as a Linux user.
I don't do anything with video-handling software, and rarely look at say, Youtube. No video editing. Actually, watching video and/or movies/documentaries on a computer doesn't interest me. My fooling with graphics is restricted to using The Gimp and checking anything coming from my digital camera (for which sort of picture-handling, Picasa is also very handy).
I am not into any sort of wireless computing scenario. I have no mobile phone-cum-camera. Not into texting or SMSing or Facebook or cloud computing. Not into using online storage set-ups. Not into computer games. Have no useful knowledge of electronics or computer hardware. I'm not into programming, so I don't need new packages of Python or Perl or any other programming languages unless indicated to be so by an expert for a specific purpose.
I do need any available updates of Open Office for word processing and spreadsheet work. Any variety of packages for work with websites I'll look at avidly, such as Bluefish (a robust code editor which I lately use).
I should be using improvements/add-ons to Firefox more than I do for work on website pages. I do handle a lot of sound files for home entertainment, and I've tinkered with music notation software. Using music notation software is a whole ballgame in itself. I've experimented with it, but tend to fall in a heap with the complexities of software for MIDi etc. Also because some music-writing software requires complicated adjustments to a computer's ability to generate and distribute sounds to a set(s) of speakers. There are some strange things with using specialty music-notating software, which happen with usual computer settings for sound-handling, such that I've given up pursuing such musical curiosity, at least for the time being.
And as Linux users and Linux explorers will know, before Ubuntu/Linux appeared, the main problem with Linux systems for non-programmers was with understanding and learning how to do command-line work to get Linux software packages properly installed and actually working. Linux users who were up-and-running ok might well have advised us how-to about certain topics on forums, but they tended to be excessively nerdy, and so were incomprehensible to the non-programmer. I find that this problem - conversing in overly technical language and terminology - still afflicts Ubuntu users via the Ubuntu forums, as follows.
 |
|
| "Me - working hard": A 2010 photo of one of my older cousins, Mike Kelly, a computer programmer in Sydney |
Solving a computer-using problem has much in common with problem-solving in science generally, and with engineering-type problems - it helps to be very precise with language, with approach to the problem, with concepts and with defining what a problem actually is, or how it arises or shows itself. Relative precision of language versus technical incomprehensiblity is another story yet again. And I struck some problems with trying to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR) work - text scanning - with an Ubuntu system (V8.04 to be precise). As follows.
In my Microsoft-using days, years ago now, I had some quite acceptable software for OCR work. At one point I was using a well-known sort of scanning unit, and quite good, a Canon CanoScan LIDE20 stand-alone scanner for either pictures and/or text scanning. But in 2010, we still find that still being lazy, Canon still can't/won't provide drivers for Linux systems for their Lide20, so I can't currently use this unit.
Going back some years, once I'd adopted Linux systems, I bought a well-known all-in one printer-scanner, unit, a HP C3180, which is generally a deftly-operating little unit, quite ok for my purposes. But neither do HP provide drivers for Linux for OCR work. Or if they do, I sure can't find them on the Internet. What to do? What to do when due to their laziness and lack of curiosity, allegedly world-class software developers and equipment manufacturers can't get off their technical backsides to do a bit of useful Linux programming, and aren't made to by governments!?
Visit forums discussing the problem anywhere on the Internet that I can find them - go google on "HP drivers C3180 OCR Ubuntu text scannning" and so on. No useful clues arise, you'll find. What I did encounter was a lot of complaint on Linuxy forums about a similar problem, inability to get a Linux and/or Ubuntu system to do OCR work. But we find mention of a package named ImageMagick, which I downloaded (and so far haven't used, not as far as I'm aware, anyway). It needs to be used in conjuction with Tesseract, supposedly a highly-accurate OCR worker. So I ensure I've downloaded Tesseract too. But neither ImageMagick nor Tesseract show up on any revised list of Ubuntu applications. So how do I find out where they actually are on the hard disk? Is it worth bothering to try to find them in root? Do I actually have them on board? ImageMagick can (should be?) be used with Tesseract-OCR, but some triers here have had problems here of continuous versus discontinuous output (whatever that means). Forums give the impression that the scanner, via use of XSane, which Ubuntu provides, will provide a graphics file of the scanned piece of text (a .TIFF file is usually recommended due to compression ratios etc) but it isn't then clear what to do next. We are given command line suggestions such as:
tesseract ocr.tif $1
gedit $1 txt
Which suggests to me that somehow, the desired text will turn up (in ASCII?) in the Ubuntu notepad software, which is gedit. A result I still can't get. Then, some forum-poster has tried to use a .png graphic file for this trick, though not so successfully.
I find one poster has written, "I started using Ubuntu several months ago, and was very disappointed with the lack of a GUI OCR package - being a newbie and a non-code-type of soul." Just like me, and very disappointed with it. What on earth are we supposed to do? In Ubujntu's bindles of software, XSane looks like it ought to be the said desired OCR GUI, but things aren't this simple at all.
Suddenly I remembered a discussion years ago with a young IT student living in my university town, something about handling PDF files in Ubuntu (which can be read with Viewer, an unfussy, and totally-free, Linuxy equivalent of Adobe Reader). He suggested, if we want to copy text from a secured PDF file, to use a package called Evince. Which I recalled, could highlight-then-copy the said text. Not that I've experimented much with doing that. But if I tested that option many months ago, then I should have downloaded Evince at the time, meaning I've still got it, presumably.
This seemed to be the missing realisation. So I re-inspected XSane (image scanning software) for the umpteenth time. XSane gives us an option to scan-copy a page of text, which my printer-scanner will do. Ok. So what else? Using XSane we can scan for Viewer, Save (which I'd mostly been trying to do and not getting anywhere useful), Copy (as in make a photocopy, that works ok). Multipage. Fax. Email. If we get a result (that is, a file), it can be rehandled by-extension, or as .JPEG, .PDF, .PNG, .PNM, Postscript, Text (is that .txt?) and .TIFF.
Hmm, I thought, Evince is a viewer for PDF files, it comes up automatically when I click on a PDF. But what is this, Evince isn't listed in any list of software I can find on my computer, as kept by the computer (except in Synaptic Package Manager). Can Evince, perhaps, if we try to use Xsane for the Viewer option, read a newly-scanned image of some text? This question was inexact, maybe even misleading in itself, but, I made a new .TIFF image of some text, put it to Viewer within XSane, the image resulting from XSane's scan is presented within Viewer, hit the OCR button on Viewer (that never happened before [?]), and success, suddenly in gedit, there was my scanned text, ready for proofreading/correction. How all this finally happened, quickly, I'm not at all sure. If it had ever happened before, if scanned text had become available from earlier experiments, I wasn't aware of it. And for example, was this good result suddenly due to some package I'd not long downloaded? There was now no way to tell the difference.
The OCR results meanwhile are still not as accurate as I'd like, but maybe I can refine the accuracy aspect of the OCR work in due course, I've at least got some traction on the problems. And none of the forums suggested, try things in Viewer in the XSane list of options. Or any such tactic.
By now, I think it would be good if Ubuntu could arrange three things:
(1) Provide an option in System - Preferences - Preferred Applications to refer to software to be routinely applied to OCR jobs;
(2) Put some extra checking options in the Printer Config box to the same effect;
(3) For godssake, put some notice in official Ubuntu websites, and on the forums, about how to approach the set-ups for OCR work done with various versions of Ubuntu, depending on the version of Ubuntu being used and any different software used in different versions, where this might be relevant. Because the forums are worse than useless, and mostly seem to refer to failed attempts to solve the problems by the command-line approach.
And now I must go, to see if I can improve the accuracy of what I can get so far. This has taken a long time. There's a lot to be done. -Ed
Evince on my machine cannot be file searched-for in user's folders, so it must be somewhere in root. It's Evince Document Viewer 2.22.2, using poppler 0.6.04 (cairo) - whatever that is. And whatever it is, the Internet informs that poppler is pretty damned complicated. Like you or I do not want to know.
A friend now looking into OCR with a version of Ubuntu reports that he has just looked at a review of one release of Ubuntu which remarks about OCR - "Don't even think of mentioning it". Which rather looks as if Ubuntu really doesn't want to discuss OCR. Nor do HP wish to discuss Linux and OCR work, the cowards! More on other reactions when they come to hand. - Ed
Next steps. A friend visits, someone familiar with Ubuntu but mystified with Ubuntu's OCR ways and wondering about tesseract-OCR. Thinks he might stick with MS systems and Omnipage. But our conversations indicate that Ubuntu has developed two separate camps for approaches to OCR work. One is command-line driven (especially re tesseract), the other relies on GUIs (graphic user interface). These two approaches seem to depart from each other with increasing speed, the more one finds out about them, but there is no clue on how the software is actually behaving differently or not with the use of either approach. It's all a pest. We find we have to use TIFF format for images to be handled by an OCR engine, bu the output file extension has to be .tif, minus one F. It seems that OCR options for Linux systems are driven by pedantic, uninformative fools! We'd sure like to be getting better quality output of whatever OCR work we can so far manage!
Who and what is www.abbyyusa.com. A pay site? It advertises several options for OCR work but like so many shy websites gives no pricing information for the newly-arriving punter. Still, it does offer opportunity to download (free?) for test OCR sessions.
- Dan Byrnes (otherwise indicated in these pages as -Editor)
Item 15 November 2009:
I was very amused watching TV news last week, more so for being republican in outlook in Australia. Someone suggested, while discussion on a republic here (or not) comes and goes, that if Australia is a monarchy (it's a symbolic monarchy after all), why not have our own king (or queen)?
Lots of mirth, here. Why bother? We really don't want to install a ruling dynasty, do we? Really, and without a fight, we would choose some particular family for the purpose? Which family? A family to be given some kind of power (or duty of conducting ceremony) that no other family has? Why not have a republic and just elect a prime minister, or president, who has power for a limited, earlier-stated period. Who is later to be respectfully sidelined to a Council of Elders to advise on future developments?
I'm reminded of all sorts of things. The derision in Colonial New South Wales that was lavished on politician William Charles Wentworth when he suggested the establishment of an Australian aristocracy. Insubordinate proletarians promptly termed this "the Bunyip aristocracy" and chuckled themselves to death. So all Wentworth became was a First Bunyip Among Equals! And a very amusing one, neutered by the growing powers of the Australian sense of humour.
I'm reminded of all sorts of things by this nonsensical monarchy remark. Occasionally we find an Australian politician saying something about how "great" Australia is, or could become. More nonsense here. Australia isn't great, it's merely interesting. Very interesting indeed. Any idea of "greatness" of course would have to be drawn from history. Greatness of that kind, great wealth, great power or influence in affairs is not something that Australia is destined to possess. Our continent is far too old, tired, soil-worn-out and arid to have patience with any such human-produced nonsense. Our cities are also too badly-planned to ever be able to house "greatness".
The Australian landscape simply doesn't care about bombastic human notions such as "greatness", and nor should Australians care.
But Australia and the life forms it is home to, the histories it presents, are interesting, fascinating, different, often puzzling, and offer unexpected contrasts to anyone familiar with anywhere else in the world. That is the destiny of Australia and Australians. Not to be great. Simply to be interesting, very interesting.
As a matter of world heritage, tradition and history, no one should ever forget. That until recently, so recently that it doesn't matter anymore, no one ever illustrated the story of Noah's Ark with a kangaroo seeking shelter from the coming storm. That's because no one knew that kangaroos existed. Till 1770, Australia and its people existed apart from what the rest of the world thought was "reality". This is an ineradicable part of the meaning of Australia, and it always will be. This is something that cannot be contradicted, and should be appreciated throughout the world -- that life can always offer surprises.
Meaning, the role of Australia is not to be great. It's role is to be surprising, to present the unexpected. And on the world stage, we happen to exercise democracy in Australia with enjoyable surprisingness. Long may this continue!
So if anyone suggests that Australia should produce its own monarch, the republican merely refers to "the flag currently in use", and leaves it at that for the time being.
All round, I think that Australia will become a republic when Australians feel the time is ripe. And not before. It's obvious for now, and it has been all my life, that the time is not yet.
(for Scott Hall)
This is where the human conscience always groans,
no part of life ever knows what it owns ...
The unknowably secret life of children
The daughter who'd have been better off as a nun
The fire that gets away and damage-burns
The chance remark, but what's done is done
One too many a drink, one too few a think
So many idiots as the sun goes down
But for that wrong turning, I'd have died that day
And it's mostly not the best man wears the crown
Evil looks less evil from a distance
The present looks to the future, but the favour is not returned
The young know much, but the old just clear their mind
Now I can hardly remember, what it was I thought I yearned
This is where the human conscience always groans,
no part of life ever knows what it owns ...
 |
|
| Dan Byrnes in Armidale, February 2009. Photo by Bob Cummins |
(for Scott Hall)
This is where the human conscience always groans,
no part of life ever knows what it owns ...
The unknowably secret life of children
The daughter who'd have been better off as a nun
The fire that gets away and damage-burns
The chance remark, but what's done is done
One too many a drink, one too few a think
So many idiots as the sun goes down
But for that wrong turning, I'd have died that day
And it's mostly not the best man wears the crown
Evil looks less evil from a distance
The present looks to the future, but the favour is not returned
The young know much, but the old just clear their mind
Now I can hardly remember, what it was I thought I yearned
This is where the human conscience always groans,
no part of life ever knows what it owns ...
Poem 755
I've never been able to believe in anything to do with astrology. That scepticism is the origin of this poem, where I imagined an astrology-believer beginning to doubt all of it. Some of this scepticism is informing some of my prose writing of 2007-2008.
Dan Byrnes Poem 755: draft 3 of 18-10-2001
It is the never quite knowing, is the worst.
And yet I can’t believe we’re entirely cursed.
Influences from afar, those distant planets, circling, circling,
breezes from the wafting of an imperious god’s kirtling.
Or, uprush of feelings from within, contradictory,
ensuring there is never any lasting triumph for victory
in a society, in a vision, in a dream.
Just the sheen, the sheen of a possible explanation
as the lights of heaven descend for a conversation.
Though about what? When? For the future? To explain the past?
To gather symbolism-plus-possibility, though not too fast.
It is as though the beautiful curves of a fleece keep spoiling the weave
of a tapestry commission that I can’t allow myself to leave,
and when you mention some planets, I might feel a mood,
of yet another extraordinarily ordinary human feud.
So it goes on and on, and if there’s any point of rest,
here, I still can’t say, for sure, what’s best.
(Finis)
Poem 755
I've never been able to believe in anything to do with astrology. That scepticism is the origin of this poem, where I imagined an astrology-believer beginning to doubt all of it. Some of this scepticism is informing some of my prose writing of 2007-2008.
Dan Byrnes Poem 755: draft 3 of 18-10-2001
 |
|
| At an April 2008 Poetzinc reading. Photo by Bob Cummins |
It is the never quite knowing, is the worst.
And yet I can’t believe we’re entirely cursed.
Influences from afar, those distant planets, circling, circling,
breezes from the wafting of an imperious god’s kirtling.
Or, uprush of feelings from within, contradictory,
ensuring there is never any lasting triumph for victory
in a society, in a vision, in a dream.
Just the sheen, the sheen of a possible explanation
as the lights of heaven descend for a conversation.
Though about what? When? For the future? To explain the past?
To gather symbolism-plus-possibility, though not too fast.
It is as though the beautiful curves of a fleece keep spoiling the weave
of a tapestry commission that I can’t allow myself to leave,
and when you mention some planets, I might feel a mood,
of yet another extraordinarily ordinary human feud.
So it goes on and on, and if there’s any point of rest,
here, I still can’t say, for sure, what’s best.
(Finis)
Below are items to be re-posted to various websites on this domain. Nothing actually to do with this personal website - Ed
Michael Veitch, Flak: True Stories from the Men who Flew in World War Two. Macmillan, 2006, 288pp.
Greg Barns and Anna Krawec-Wheaton, An Australian Republic. Scribe, 2006, 135pp.
Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Allen and Unwin, 2011. (How Australian Aboriginals took care of the land they lived in)
Paul Cleary, Too much Luck. Black Inc., 2011, 160pp. (The author argues that Australia is frittering away its inheritance and its future, and uses statistics that are plain frightening, says a reviewer)
Carol Baxter, Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady. Allen and Unwin, 2011, 376pp. (A new treatment of the old story of bushranger Fred Ward and his part-Aboriginal consort, Mary Ann Bugg)
Gerald Stone, Say It With Feeling. Macmillan, 2011, 324pp. (From a major news TV producer, Australian media industry stories)
John Carroll, Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning. HarperCollins, 1998, 280pp.
Mark Shephard, A Lifetime in the Bush: The Biography of Len Beadell. Corkwood Press, 1998, 252ppm. (Life of a noted surveyor and road-maker of the Outback)
Ray Parkin, HM Bark Endeavour: Her Place in Australian History. Miengunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, 1997.
Anne-Maree Whitaker, Distracted Settlement: Journal of James Finucane. Melbourne, Miengunyah Press, 1998, 150pp.
Pamela Statham and Rica Erickson, (Eds.), A Life on the Ocean Wave: Voyages to Australia, India and the Pacific from the Journals of Captain George Bayly, 1824-1844. Melbourne, Miengunyah Press, 1998, 364pp. (Bayly sailed several times on ship Hooghly (465 tons, sometimes shipping horses) of which he was captain and part-owner by age 26. He visited Western Australia in 1830 and 1843. The convict ship Almorah was owned by a relative. Bayly also sailed with Pacific trader Peter Dillon who solved the mystery of the disappearance of La Perouse and was given a French Legion of Honour award for it.
Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea. Island Press, 2011, 435pp. (See also, Neville Peat and his biography of an ocean, The Tasman, and Simon Winchester, Atlantic)
Miriam Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land. Allen and Unwin (Australia), 1998, 288pp.
Problem of the Internet: Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today´s Internet is killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy. Allen and Unwin, 2007, 240pp.
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Atlantic, 2007, 366pp.
Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World´s Greatest Encyclopedia. Aurum, 2009, 252pp.
Micah Sifry, Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency. Scribe, 2011, 224pp.
Kate Askew, Dot.Bomb Australia. Allen and Unwin, 2011, 316pp. (How Australians reacted after the 1990s advent of the Internet, seemingly by giving old-fashioned good business sense the shove!)
Richard L. Brandt, One Click. Viking, 2012, 214pp. (On Jeff Bezos, the brains behind the mighty online bookseller Amazon.com)
Music: Barry Parker, The Physics of Music. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 288pp.
Music: Brian Cadd, From This Side of Things. New Holland, 2010, 303pp. (Autobiography from an Australian pop music stayer)
Keith Richards, Life. Hachette Australia, 2010, 564pp. (Keith Richards´ own view of his life as one of The Rolling Stones)
Andrew Zuckerman, Music. 2010. (An examination of 50 eminent performers, composers and musicians)
Mick Wall, Metallica Enter Night. 2010. (Find out much more about thrash metal) // Mark Blake, Queen: Is This The Real Life? 2010. (Full of incredible revelations about this famous band)
Warren Fahey, Australian Folk Songs and Bush Ballads. ABC Books, 2010, 270pp.
Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World. Faber and Faber, 2010, 320pp.
Jerelle Kraus, All the Art that's Fit to Print (and Some That Wasn't). Columbia University Press, 2011, 260pp. (A history of the illustrations in many of the USA's major newspapers)
Andrew Charlton, Ozonomics: Inside the Myth of Australia´s Economic Superheroes. Random House, 2007, 261pp.
Frank Stillwell and Kirrily Jordan, Who Gets What? Analysing Economic Inequality in Australia. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 280pp.
Lindy Edwards, How to Argue with an Economist: Re-Opening Political Debate in Australia. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 208pp.
Paul Cleary, Too much Luck. Black Inc., 2011, 160pp. (The author argues that Australia is frittering away its inheritance and its future, and uses statistics that are plain frightening, says one reviewer)
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years. Melville House, nd, 544 pages.
Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society. nd, c.2007 (Springer?) (Pessimistic views on questions of supply of sufficient electricity in the future but on prospects for Britain, for example, see www.zerocarbonbritain.com)
Economics: G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? Princeton University Press, 2010, 83pp. (But what if Capitalism has changed since socialism was more or less invented?) // Peter Beilharz, Socialism and Modernity. University of Minnesota Press, 2010, 248pp. (But what if Capitalism has changed since socialism was more or less invented?) // Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master. Allen Lane, 2010, 240pp. // Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Twentieth Century´s Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury, 2010, 224pp. Hyman Minsky, John Maynard Keynes. McGraw-Hill, 2010, first publishing in 1975. // Trevor Sykes, Six Months of Panic: How the Global Financial Crisis Hit Australia. Allen and Unwin, 2010, 464pp.
Economics: Steve Hallett with John Wright, Life Without Oil. Prometheus Books, 2011, 435pp.
Scott L. Montgomery, The Powers that Be: Global Energy for the Twenty-First Century and Beyond. University of Chicago, 2010, 350pp.
Rowan Jacobsen, Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. Bloomsbury USA, 2010, 288pp.
Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos. Nation, 2011, 304pp. (The planet is broken but here are some ideas on how to fix it. Includes discussions of possibilities of fresh wars due to climate-change-type problems in coming decades)
Michael Feeney Callan, Robert Redford. Simon and Schuster, 2011, 496pp.
Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles. Michael Joseph, 2010, 438pp.
Michael Steinberger, Au Revoir to all that: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine. Bloomsbury, 2010, 256pp.
Harriet Elinor Smith et al, (Eds.), Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume I. University of California Press, 2010, 736pp.
Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity. Princeton University Press, 2010, 311pp. (The notion of celebrity has been around for about 250 years, since the time of British literary figure, Dr Samuel Johnson, who certainly was quotable, but more so since about 1918 or so, with the advent of film and radio)
Donald Spoto, High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood. Hutchinson, 2009, 256pp.
Paul McLain, The Paris Wife. Virago, 2011, 400pp. (On Martha Gellhorn, the first wife of writer Ernest Hemingway)
Judi Dench, And Furthermore. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2010, 320pp. (Life of the much-admired UK actress, Judi Dench)
Anne Pender, One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries. ABC Books, 2010, 453pp. (How a funny, hard-drinking, theatrical Australian cross-dresser became even funnier when he gave up the booze)
Kathleen Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen. HarperCollins, 2008, 278pp. (On the amazing creator of the comic figures of Ali G. and Borat)
Terri Irwin, My Steve. Simon and Schuster, 2007, 271pp. (On Australian TV host and crocodile hunter Steve Irwin, who was killed by a stingray dart)
Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad. Camden House, 2007, 808pp.
Graham Lord, Joan Collins: The Biography of an Icon. Orion, 2007, 389pp.
Richard Greene, (Ed.), Graham Greene: A Life In Letters. Little, Brown, 2007, 480pp.
John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad. Heinemann, 2007, 372pp.
Barry Day, (Ed.), Letters of Noel Coward. Methuen, 2008, 782pp.
Julie Kavanagh, Rudolf Nureyev. Fig Tree, 2008, 787pp.
Steve Martin, Born Standing Up. New York Media, 2007. (Memoirs of the American comedian)
Graham McCann, Fawlty Towers: The Story of Britain's Favourite Sitcom. Hodder and Stoughton, 2007, 336pp. (On the TV comedy series, with much on the man who inspired the show, Donald William Sinclair of Torquay, UK)
Anne Pender, One man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries. ABC Books, 2010, 453pp. (How a funny, hard-drinking theatrical Australian cross-dresser became even funnier when he gave up the booze, and became a show-biz legend)
David Bret, Valentino: A Dream of Desire. Robson, 1998, 224pp.
Neil Simon (playwright), Rewrites: A Memoir. Touchstone, 1998, 397pp.
Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity. Princeton University Press, 2010, 311pp. (The notion of celebrity has been around for about 250 years, since the time of British literary figure, Dr Samuel Johnson, who certainly was quotable, but more so since about 1918 or so, with the advent of film and radio)
Tim Flannery, Here on Earth. 2010. (Explaining evolution and sustainability)
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, 397pp.
Adrian Goldsworthy, Cannae: Hannibal´s Greatest Victory. Orion, 2010, 200pp.
Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of Christianity. Viking, 2011, 618pp.
Peter Lalor, Barassi. 2010. (Portrait of a sporting legend)
Music: Brian Cadd, From This Side of Things. New Holland, 2010, 303pp. (Autobiography from an Australian pop music stayer)
Ocean: Lucy Sussex, Saltwater in the Ink. Australian Scholarly Publishing. 2010, 213pp. (Stories of C19th emigrants and their voyages to Australia, their journals and reports)
Vietnam: Michael Caulfield, The Vietnam Years: From the Jungle to the Australian Suburbs. Hachette, 2007, 493pp. // Christian Appy, Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History, Told from All Sides. Ebury Press/Random House, 2007, 574pp. // Trish Payne, War and Words: The Australian Press and the Vietnam War. Melbourne University Press, 2007, 340pp. // David Bradford, The Gunners´ Doctor: Vietnam Letters. Random House, 2007, 313pp. //
James Jupp, John Nieuwenhuysen and Emma Dawson, Social Cohesion in Australia. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 224pp.
Oceans: Frank McLynn, Captain Cook. Yale University Press, 2011, 490pp.
Hugh Lunn, Words Fail Me. ABC Books, 2010, 352pp. (An examination of earlier Australian idioms and word-play, and a very good sense underlying of Australian culture and values)
Matt Warshaw, The History of Surfing. Chronicle Books, 2010, 496pp. (Written in California but has a lot of content on Australian activity, as it should)
Environment also: James Woodford, The Great Barrier Reef. Macmillan, 2010, 420pp.
Diane Kirby, Tanja Luckins, and Chris McConville, The Australian Pub. UNSW Press, 2010, 311pp.
Compilation, (An Old Housekeeper), Men and How to Manage Them. National Library of Australia, 2010. (Nineteenth Century social history, and a reviewer finds this wonderfully funny, however unintentionally)
Politics: Laurie Oakes, On The Record: Politics, Politicians and Power. Hachette Australia. 2010, 387pp.
Barrie Cassidy, The Party Thieves: The Real Story of the 2010 Election. Melbourne University Press, 2010, 249pp.
Australia and the Anzacs: Jeff Hopkins-Weise, Blood Brothers: The Anzac Genesis. Wakefield Press, 2009. 346pp. (Argues that the ANZAC spirit was first forged during the Maori Wars in New Zealand, and a reviewer strongly disagrees)
Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth. UNSW Press, 2009, 288pp. (Argues that the effort at Gallipoli was militarily pointless, a wasted effort)
Robert Holman, On Paths of Ash. Pier 9, 2009, 302pp.
Kate Lance, Alan Villiers: Voyager of the Winds. UNSW Press, 2009, 307pp.
Robert Lyman, The Longest Siege: Tobruk, The Battle that Saved North Africa. Macmillan, 2009, 308pp. (Said by reviewer to be spot-on)
Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War. UNSW Press, 2009, 320pp.
Stu Lloyd, The Missing Years: A POW´s Story from Changi to Hellfire Pass. Rosenberg Publishing, 2009, 304pp.
Ernest Brough, Dangerous Days: A Digger´s Great Escape. HarperCollins, 2009, 326pp.
Paul Kendall, Bullecourt 1917. 2010. (Treatment of what is regarded as the defining archetype of the horrors of trench warfare in WWI)
Cameron Forbes, The Korean War. 2010.
Hew Strachan: Books That Shook the World: Clausewitz´s On War. Allen and Unwin, 2007, 252pp.
Margaret Macmillan, The Uses and Abuses of History. Profile Books, 2010, 194pp.
Edward Paice, Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, 488pp.
Stephen J. Pyne, Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and other Serious Nonfiction. Harvard University Press, 2010, 314pp.
Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, How To Write History that People Want to Read. UNSW Press, 2010, 272pp.
Craig A. Monson, Nuns Behaving Badly. University of Chicago Press, 2010, 241pp. (A serious study of Italian nunneries in the 16th and 17th centuries, and, behaviour as bad as going to the opera in borrowed clothes)
General History: Robert Hughes, Rome. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2011, 576pp. (History of a major world city by an art-obsessed man with an extraordinary vocabulary)
Phillip Dwyer, Napoleon: The Path to Power 1769-1799. Bloomsbury, 2011, 656pp. (By an Australian, and really, how much of his time did Napoleon spend butchering, bombing, lying, toadying, stealing and scheming?)
Adrian Weale, The SS: A New History. Little, Brown, 2010, 479pp.
Joyce Morgan and Conrad Walters, Journeys on the Silk Road. Picador, 2011, 321pp. (Follows up on the destiny and rediscovery of the book, an ancient Buddhist text, The Diamond Sutra, in the exotic environment of the old Silk Road)
John Carroll, Greek Pilgrimage: In Search of the Foundations of the West. Scribe, 2010, (Do you really believe that Ancient Greece made such a vast contribution to the history of human civilization as all that?)
Michael Wallis, Billy The Kid: The Endless Ride. details lost. (On Henry McCarty, known as Billy the Kid, and the earliest-written trashification of the history of the USA's Old West)
Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet, My Life. (Translated by Andrew Hurley). Allen Lane, 2007, 735pp.
Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise 400 to 1070. Penguin, 2012, 458 pp. (Highly recommended for its archaeological findings, which, well-sifted, allow the reader more opportunity for insight than do the standard old texts usually studied - Ed)
Jacquelin Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves. Atlantic, 2011, 432pp. (On the passions of collectors over the centuries)
Philip Eade, Young Prince Philip. HarperCollins, 2011, 532pp. (Part of the life story of the consort of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain)
Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron. Fourth Estate, 2011, 544pp. (Life of that odd former pupil of Sigmund Freud, Theodore Reich and his views on human sexuality, Reich believed the orgasm cured all known ills)
Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book. WW Norton 2011, 303pp (On the book by Roman writer, Tacitus, Germania c100AD, (subtitle: from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich) later used to provide a sense of identity for Germans, so it is said here, but pick a period, any period?)
Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917. Fontana, 1998, 548pp.
Modern tragedy, Craig Collie, Nagasaki. Allen and Unwin, 2011, 352pp.
Stephen Marche, How Shakespeare Changed Everything. HarperCollins, 2011, 203pp.
Jann S. Wenner, (Ed.), Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson. Allen Lane, 2011, 572pp.
Pam Ayres, The Necessary Aptitude. Ebury Press, 2012, 404pp. (Early years of the now-famous working-class folk poet from England. Strong on the woes of the English class system)
John Bell, On Shakespeare. Allen and Unwin, 2012, 448pp. (Bell, the Australian actor most devoted to Shakespeare´s work, has most interesting views on views that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare)
Nick Davies, Flat Earth News. Chatto and Windus, 2008, 397pp. (Situations for truth with the continuing decline and deterioration of journalism, and do you care? This website does)
C. A. J. Coady, Morality and Political Violence. Cambridge University Press, 2008, 317pp.
Jeremy Bernstein, Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know. Cambridge University Press, 2008, 299pp.
Richard Watson, Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years. Scribe, 2007, 279pp.
Arthur Asa Berger, What Objects Mean. Left Coast Press, 2009, 248pp. (A lot of semiotics here, but treating popular culture, etc. The reviewer enjoyed this, how to interpret everyday objects around us)
Gareth Southwell, (Compiler), Words of Wisdom. 2010. (350 good quality quotations)
Terry Breverton, Immortal Last Words. 2010.
Futurism and tech: Robyn Williams, Future Perfect: What Next? And Other Impossible Questions. Allen and Unwin, 2007, 180pp.
Futurism: Richard Watson, Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years. Scribe, 2007, 224pp.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilisation. Text Publishing, 2007, 429pp.
Pamela Stephenson-Connolly, Sex Life: How Our Sexual Experiences Define Who We are. Vermillion, 2011, 472pp. (Reviewer finds this to be merely sexy chick-lit)
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Bantam Press, 2010, 291pp.
David Perrett, In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, 305pp.
Michael Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Colour. Princeton University Press, 2009, 213pp.
Barry Parker, The Physics of Music. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 288pp.
Modern tragedies: Paul McGeough, Infernal Triangle. Allen and Unwin, 2011. (The ins and outs of a decade on the US fields of battle since 9/11)
Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. Text Publishing, 2011, 327pp.
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Random House, Australia, 2011, 291pp. (Yet another book arguing that morality is not the sole purview of religion)
Martin Nowack and Roger Highfield, Super Cooperators. Text Publishing, 2011, 330pp. (On humanity´s strong tendency to be cooperative, not competitive)
Ian Bickerton, The Illusion of Victory. Melbourne University Press, 2011, 241pp. (Earlier, Bickerton with Kenneth Hagan wrote Unintended Consequences, about outcomes after a war begins. Bickerton here starts with the French Revolution and asks if victory is largely meaningless, and if so, what are wars for?)
Stephen Law, Believing Bullshit. Prometheus Books, 2011, 271pp. (From a senior lecturer in philosophy at University of London, reviewer thinks this is a great guide to how to counter well, bullshit, really)
Dallas Willard (Ed.), A Place For Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life´s Hardest Questions. IVP Books, 2010, 321pp. (Reviewer thinks this book will irritate both believers and atheists alike, which is probably a good advertisement for it)
Neuroscience: Oliver Sacks, The Mind´s Eye. Picador, 2010, 258pp. (Rather more about human resilience. See this writer´s 2007 book on the human fascination with music, Musicophilia.)
Neuroscience: David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Text, 2011, 288pp. (We see things with our brain and not with our eyes, and other debunking of common-sense-knowledge. By a prolific research neuroscientist, on mysteries of life and our perceptions and in particular, can we rehabilitate criminals? If remaining in any doubt about that, go watch the movie A Clockwork Orange again - Ed)
Joseph Mazur, What´s Luck Got To Do With It? Princeton University Press, 2010, 296pp. (On the human compulsion to gamble, to take risks. On how and why the maths of probability are so sadly misunderstood)
Stuart Kelly, The Book of Lost Books. Polygon, 2010, 436pp. (On 90 authors and their allegedly lost books. Sophocles wrote 120 plays of which only seven survive. What has been lost from T. S. Eliot, or Charles Dickens?)
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences. Allen and Unwin, 2010.
Harry Doherty, 40 Years Of Queen. Allen and Unwin, 2012, 94pp. (All about the supergroup, and amazingly, Freddy Mercury has been dead for 20 years by now)
Books On music, Peter Conrad, Verdi and/or Wagner. Thames and Hudson, 2012, 384pp.
John Street, Music and Politics. Polity, 2011, 256pp. ( On music and politics; song lyrics and what cannot otherwise easily be said)
Frank Joseph, Survivors of Atlantis: Their Impact on World Culture. 280pp, no details.
Alan Dershowitz, Blasphemy: How The Religious Right is Hijacking our Declaration of Independence. Wiley, 2007, 208pp. (Renews discussion on the separation of church/religion and the state in the USA, one of the first countries in the world which tried to keep the two apart for the betterment of humanity)
John Snelling, The Buddhist Handbook. no details.
Warren Bonett, The Australian Book of Atheism. Scribe, 2011, 442pp.
Stephanie Dowrick, Seeking the Sacred. Allen and Unwin, 2010, 364pp.
Henry Kelly, Satan: A Biography. No details, 2006.
Robert Winston, The Story of God: A Personal Journey into the World of Science and Religion. No details, 2006. (Views on the history of religion from a well-known Jewish scientist)
Michael Jordan, In the Name of God. No details, 2006. (On the problem of the linkage between human violence and religion)
W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: Symbols, Secrets, Significance. No details, 2006. (A Freemason of 40 years reveals details and fundamentals of his Craft)
Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes. no details, 2006.
A. C. Grayling, The Good Book. Bloomsbury, 2011. (Reviewer indicates: A pro-rationalism distillation by a philosopher of the best works on atheism, or by atheists, but not necessarily anti-religion. Written in a way that mimics how ancient scholars put together what are now regarded as holy books, and what a clever approach this seems!)
Stephen Mitchell, The Second Book of the Tao. Ingram, 2009. (New translation)
John Carroll, Ego and Soul: The Modern West in Search of Meaning. HarperCollins, 1998, 280pp.
Luc Ferry, (Professor in France), Man Made God: The Meaning of Life. University of Chicago, 2002, (Orig. 1996)
Jo Jackson King, Raising the Best Possible Child. HarperCollins, 2010, 400pp.
Stan van Hooft, Hope. Acumen, 2011, 152pp. (Treats the reasons how and why we feel we want to make the world a better place, by a Melbourne philosophy academic)
Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. Little, Brown, 2011, 311pp. (When you try to find how to do something by trial and error, what is your attitude to the errors made?)
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness. HarperCollins, 2006, 275pp.
Richard Schoch, The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good life. Profile, 2006, 228pp.
John F. Schumaker, In Search of Happiness: Understanding an Endangered State of Mind. Penguin, 2006, 287pp.|
Books on Australian History: Frank Sartor, The Fog On The Hill: How NSW Labor Last Its Way. Melbourne University Press, 2011, 374pp. |
Sue Pieters-Hawke, Hazel: My Mother´s Story. Macmillan, 2012, 470pp. (By a daughter of Hazel, wife of Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke) |
Frank McLynn, Captain Cook: Master of the Seas. Yale University Press, 2011, 384pp. Henry Reynolds, A History of Tasmania. Cambridge University Press, 2011, 336pp, Sarah Maddison, Beyond White Guilt: The Real Challenge for Black-White Relations in Australia. Allen and Unwin, 2011, 240pp. Harry M. Miller with Peter Holder, Harry M. Miller: Confessions of a Not-So-Secret Agent. Hatchette, 2009, 360pp. |
Cameron Forbes, Under The Volcano: The Story of Bali. Black Inc., 2007, 286pp.
Carolyn Shine, Single White Female in Hanoi. Transit Lounge, 2011, 384pp.
Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Most Beautiful Villages of Ireland. Thames and Hudson, 2011.
Lance Newman, (Ed.), The Grand Canyon Reader. University of California Press, 2012, 264pp.
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999, 216pp. (A history of the telegraph.)
Frank Ross Jnr., Oracle Bones, Stars and Wheelbarrows: Ancient Chinese Science and Technology. 192pp. no details (Treats Chinese endeavour in astronomy, medicine, science, engineering, re paper, printing, gunpowder and compass/navigation)
Ted Conover, The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World. Alfred Knopf, 2010, 333pp.
Brian Ladd, Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. University of Chicago Press, 2010, 227pp.
Andrew Robinson, (Ed.), Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity. Palazzo, 20190, 256pp.
Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria has Ruled Mankind for 500,000 Years. Allen and Unwin, 2010, 370pp.
Robert Zimmerman, The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope. Princeton University Press, 2010, 295pp.
Evolution/antiquity: Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Random House, 2009, 468pp.
Richard Milner, Darwin´s Universe: Evolution from A to Z. University of California Press. 2009, 488pp.
Peter Thompson, Seeds, Sex and Civilization. Thames and and Hudson, 2010, 272pp. (Check out new views on the rise of agriculture. Maybe ask more about today´s genetically-modified foods once you get the hang of the history)
Pamela Statham and Rica Erickson, (Eds.), A Life on the Ocean Wave: Voyages to Australia, India and the Pacific from the Journals of Captain George Bayly, 1824-1844. Melbourne, Miengunyah Press, 1998, 364pp. (Bayly sailed several times on ship Hooghly (465 tons, sometimes shipping horses) of which he was captain and part-owner by age 26. He visited Western Australia in 1830 and 1843. The convict ship Almorah was owned by a relative. Bayly also sailed with Pacific trader Peter Dillon who solved the mystery of the disappearance of La Perouse and was given a French Legion of Honour award for it.
Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea. Island Press, 2011, 435pp. (See also, Neville Peat and his biography of an ocean, The Tasman, and Simon Winchester, Atlantic)
Miriam Estensen, Discovery: The Quest for the Great South Land. Allen and Unwin (Australia), 1998, 288pp.
Ray Parkin, HM Bark Endeavour: Her Place in Australian History. Miengunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, 1997.
Frank McLynn, Captain Cook: Master of the Seas. Yale University Press, 2011, 384pp.
More to come
Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us: What Went Wrong With America - And How It Can Come Back. Little, Brown, 2012, 400pp. (The political class in the USA is now disturbingly short-sighted and so on, all too true)
Dick Cheney, In My Time. Simon and Schuster, 2011, 576pp.
Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs. Little, Brown, 2011, 656pp. (Written with the assistance of the computer genius at Apple not long before he died. Therefore, an authorised biography.)
Johnny West, Karama! Journeys Through The Arab Spring. Heron Books, 2011, 350pp. (Karama is an Arabic word meaning dignity, honour, self-respect. Meaning, the Arab Spring dissidents feel they receive too little of this from the regimes running their countries)
randoms - Ian Bickerton, The Illusion of Victory. Melbourne University Press, 2011, 241pp. (Earlier, Bickerton with Kenneth Hagan wrote Unintended Consequences, about outcomes after a war begins. Bickerton here starts with the French Revolution and asks if victory is largely meaningless, and if so, what are wars for?)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through The Clash of Civilizations. HarperCollins, 2010, 277pp. (By an African woman via Somalia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya, seemingly destined to become a famous polemic against the excesses of Islamists in recent times)
Picture below: Cobar Sunset, January 2011, from Mike Kelly.
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Eg., At right: Photo of Dan Byrnes by Lu Danieli, Armidale.
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