Re-introducing a Great Adventure Writer

     One is hard pressed to find even a copy of H. G. Wells in my local suburban library, but when I was a teenager in the 1960s it was a source of hardback copies of lots of older writers, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Baroness Orczy, R. M. Ballantyne - and H. Rider Haggard. One day, my mother brought me home a book by the last author, Nada the Lily. At once I was immersed in a larger than life milieu: the bloody world of the Zulu king, Shaka, "the black Napoleon". I thrilled to the exploits of the invincible hero, Umslopogaas, who wielded a great axe, who roamed the veldt with his friend, Galazi, at the head of a pack of "wolves" (ie hyenas), and who loved the beautiful Zulu maiden, Nada. It left me with two ambitions: to learn more about this phase of African history and, most of all, to read more of the author. Over the following 50+ years, I have scoured libraries, secondhand book shops, and lately reprint publishers, and have just completed the twenty ninth.
     However, I have noticed that H. Rider Haggard appears to have dropped off many people's radar by now. Even my son-in-law, who grew up in South Africa, had never heard of him. In fact, I read on a now extinct website that most of his fans are people like me: baby boomers who were introduced to him by an earlier generation. In that case, it is time to pass the torch and reintroduce one of my favourite authors to a new generation.

Vegetarianism

     A doctor once gave me a recipe for avoiding heart disease: have a naturally long and lanky build (he was short and squat), don't smoke, get plenty of exercise, and eat lots of fresh vegetables and fruit, with moderate amounts of lean meat. "In other words," I replied, "live the life of a traditional tribal Aborigine." Then, as soon as I uttered the words, I realized their significance: until recently, the hunter gatherer lifestyle of the Aborigines was the way of life of all human beings and their immediate ancestors for a couple of million years. It was the lifestyle for which our bodies evolved.

No, Women's Swimsuits Are NOT Too Brief.

     "Well, Frances," I asked, "how was your camp last weekend?"
     This was 1980, I should add, and Frances was my square dancing partner. She was a strong Roman Catholic, rather prim and proper in some ways, and she was studying to join the Roman Catholic school system as a teacher. The previous week she had informed me that her class was going to a camp, or rather, one of those youth centres with dormitories, kitchen, and hall, the following weekend - hence my query.
     "Oh, it was all right," she replied, "but it was rather primitive. We had to get water from outside taps. Also, I'd forgotten my swimsuit, so I had to go in with nothing on, and I was embarrassed until I got into the water."
     That set off a light in my brain. "It was an all female group, I take it?" I asked.
     "Oh no," she replied. "It was a mixed group."
     "Wait a minute!" I demanded. "How come you bathed naked in front of men?"
     "Oh," she said, almost off-handedly, "they were just friends - nobody I was romantically attached to."

When History Is Just a Matter of Chance

     The First World War, as every schoolboy knows, was sparked by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by the Serbian terrorist, Gavrilo Princip. The royal party took a wrong turn, and the assassin took a wrong turn, and by chance they came face to face. The gun went off. A million others followed. Later, when Princip was asked in prison what he thought would have happened if he had failed, he said, in effect, that the Germans would have found another pretext to go to war. He might have been right. Europe at the time was powder keg waiting for a fuse to be lit. But he might have been wrong. Perhaps the right conjunction of events would never have occurred.
     Nevertheless, there are many instances where the course of history has turned on chance. Let us examine a few.

Your Christmas Crib is Wrong!

     Some years ago my wife's aunt sent her $100 as a Christmas present, so we went out and purchased a Christmas crib, which now goes on display every year during the Christmas season. It contains the usual features: the baby Jesus in the manger, Mary, Joseph, a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulder, the three Magi, an angel, and, of course, the ox and ass. It is all very nice, and we like it. But it is inaccurate. No, I am not going to "debunk" the Biblical story. You can believe it or reject it as you feel fit. What I am saying is that the traditional story as we know it is not actually consistent with the Bible.

The Tragedy of an English Jihadist

     Thomas Evans, alias Adbul Hakim, alias "The White Beast" is dead, a white corpse among the black on a battlefield in Kenya. He has committed his last atrocity. A typical white British boy, he converted to Islam at the age of 19. Two years later, in 2011, he flew to Egypt and, a year after that, slipped into Somalia to enlist with Al-Shabaab. He took part in the terrorist raid on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya in 2013, but his number finally came up in a failed raid on Kenya on 14 June 2015.
     His descent into the abyss has been adequately documented, both by the press, and in a television documentary. In both, his mother and his brother asked, "How could this happen?" Well, as soon as I saw his history, two factors leaped out at me.

Wedding Presents Are So Passé

     Recently, the daughter of a family friend got married and, per instructions, the ninety guests gave no physical presents, only money. Well, that should cover the cost of the wedding and reception, and they wouldn't have needed anything else. I read that some engaged couples provide lists of presents such as vouchers for sky-diving, and other totally impractical items. Perhaps it is about time we accepted that, to a large extent, the rationale of wedding presents has disappeared.

No, the Germans Did NOT Know About the Gas Chambers

     ". . . like those Germans who claimed they knew nothing about the gas chambers."
     You  don't hear that comment very much these days, but it used to be cited as an example of people who were deliberately blind, who refused to look at, or accept, some evil which they must have known about, or even that those who were pronouncing their ignorance were telling lies. Well, I have news for them: during World War II the average German, particularly the average German civilian, really did know nothing about the gas chambers.

Understanding Those Strange Scientific Names

     Once, when I was studying for my M.Sc., Lone Pine Sanctuary was suddenly invaded by a host of girls from some private school, obviously as part of a science project, for they each carried a list of questions to be researched. To the question, "What is the scientific name of the spiny anteater", half of them had nothing, and the other half had written "echidna", which I suspect is what the nuns expected. In any case, I always religiously crossed it out when they showed it to me, and wrote, Tachyglossus aculeatus, tried to teach them how to pronounce it, and informed them that I was a zoologist, and knew what I was talking about.
     All this raises a subject which is probably arcane to most of you. What is the purpose of these strange scientific names? Who coins them? What is wrong with "echidna", or even "spiny anteater"? Indeed, how do you pronounce the silly things anyway?

Same-Sex "Marriage"?

     I see Warren Entsch's ill-advised cross-party bill on same-sex "marriage" has died a natural death - at least for the moment. Common sense should have told him that the Coalition had no choice but to refuse a "conscience vote" on the issue. For a start, you can't have a free vote on a moral issue, because it implies that it is legitimate to vote for an immoral law. (The same thing, of course, goes for a plebiscite.) Apart from that, the only reason "conscience votes" are called is to allow the government to get their way without splitting the party, and to deflect from the party itself the popular odium the law may bring. This is undemocratic enough when done by a government; it is ridiculous when it is contrary to government policy. What the minority of Coalition extremists wanted was the right to join with the Labor Party in the hope of overturning majority policy. Why would the majority agree to that?
     And the irony is, there has no renewed support for same-sex "marriage". All that has happened is that its proponents have been shouting more loudly in the wake of the Irish referendum and the decision of five of the nine people who really make the law in the US. But although a lot of people may be prepared to accept it, the only groups who really want it are (a) about half the homosexual community, equating to about 1% of the community, and (b) the extreme left, who will never vote Coalition anyway. However, the Coalition would lose a lot of their natural supporters if they supported this unnatural policy. So what on earth were the rogue Coalition MPs thinking? And why don't the rank and file come out in force argue against it? Well, since they don't appear to want to do so, here are the reasons. And - guess what? - they have nothing to do with religion.