Table of contents for Summer 2017 in Smith Journal

A pilot dad, a pilot uncle, pilot cousins. Most of our family friends were pilots and, being Australians of a certain age, most of them got their start flying in New Guinea in the 1960s and ’70s. My dad met my mum there – she was a flight attendant for a while, and worked in airline logistics. So in all the yellowy Kodak images of my parents before I came along, New Guinea is the backdrop. New Guinea and planes. Twin props like Aero Commanders and DC-3s, mainly: lobbing through the highland air. Idling on jungle airstrips or on tarmacs in the bigger cities, cabin crew standing out the front, smiling and mini-skirted with hibiscus flowers in their hair. Images like this constitute pretty much half our family photo album.…

WHEN HURRICANE SANDY HIT THE U.S. IN 2012, FOOTAGE OF THE DISASTER WAS BROADCAST AROUND THE WORLD. For many viewers, the defining moment came when Atlantic City’s boardwalk washed away under the roiling ocean waters – a city’s emblem tossed around like nature’s plaything. But when Joel Zika awoke to the news in Melbourne, it wasn’t the boardwalk, or Times Square, or any of the usual fixtures of the American Northeast on his mind. It was Keansburg Amusement Park in New Jersey, and the small ghost train it counted as one of its attractions. Five years earlier, Zika had visited the park specifically to ride that ghost train. And now, like a chunk of the boardwalk, it was gone. “It occurred to me then that I should have taken footage…

TOWARDS THE END OF APRIL, BJÖRN AHLANDER, A 69-YEAR-OLD SHIP’S CAPTAIN FROM GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN, FOUND HIMSELF CAUGHT IN A NASTY SQUALL IN THE ROUGH WATERS OFF SCOTLAND’S FAR NORTHERN SHETLAND ISLANDS. When faced with these sorts of howling high-speed winds kicking up frigid Norwegian Sea waters, most seamen today can take shelter below decks, relatively confident in the security of modern engineering. Ahlander and his 34-strong crew couldn’t escape the elements because they weren’t on a modern boat. They were on a 35-metre-long medieval Viking-style longship with a low hull, riding just above the waves, with nothing to ward off the elements save for one tent on their wide-open deck. They hunkered down in the storm for six hours – wearing life suits designed to give a better survival horizon…

WHEN HENRY MOLAISON STOOD UP FROM HIS LOBOTOMY ON AUGUST 23, 1953, NOBODY COULD HAVE KNOWN THAT HE’D JUST FORMED HIS LAST EVER MEMORY. The majority of his hippocampus, amygdala and entorhinal cortex had been removed as part of an extreme attempt to control his epilepsy, and Molaison’s fractured brain would soon become ground zero for an entirely new understanding of memory and consciousness, one that would arguably render him the single most significant human research subject in medical history. His is a brain familiar to every student of medicine and psychology – a case so famous as to make him the lifelong obsession of dozens of researchers and the subject of thousands of articles, studies and books. Patient HM, as he came to be known, changed the way we…

 ONE HAS TO SYMPATHISE WITH THE HACKS RESPONSIBLE FOR GETTING OUT LISMORE’S NORTHERN STAR NEWSPAPER IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY. With all due respect to what is doubtless a perfectly pleasant settlement – and with proper admiration for the Star, a small-town paper that still publishes today – it doesn’t sound the most riveting of beats. In the “Interesting Items” column of the Northern Star’s edition of Wednesday January 10, 1912, the leading report is, “The project to establish freezing works at Cooma is meeting with encouragement.” However, it is substantially thanks to the Star’s need to fill its columns that we know what little we do about the life of one of the finest naturalists and illustrators Australia has ever produced. The above-cited edition of The…

“WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF THIS TRAVEL GUIDE IN 1936, IT HAS BEEN OUR IDEA TO GIVE THE NEGRO TRAVELLER INFORMATION THAT WILL KEEP HIM FROM RUNNING INTO DIFFICULTIES, EMBARRASSMENTS AND TO MAKE HIS TRIPS MORE ENJOYABLE.” That’s the first sentence of the 1949 edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book. With lynching and Jim Crow segregation still a fact of life in those days, the words “difficulties, embarrassments” seem almost laughably understated. But for nearly 30 years, the handy guide helped African Americans find safe places to eat, sleep or dance, get a haircut or a manicure, fill the car with petrol, have a suit made or buy a pair of shoes. (The name of the guide was later abbreviated simply to Green Book – everyone who needed it knew…

I DIDN’T PAY MUCH MIND TO LADY GAGA’S SINGLE ‘BORN THIS WAY’ WHEN IT CAME OUT. BUT THEN I SAW HER PERFORM IT ON SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, AND HER ARTISTRY JUST SHONE. I REALISED SHE WASN’T JUST SOME REALITY TV SHOW CONTESTANT; SHE WAS A REAL ARTIST WITH A CAPITAL A – MORE ALICE COOPER THAN BRITNEY SPEARS. Bowie, T-Rex, Cooper – they’re the originators of those over-the-top, larger-than-life stage shows that have had a lot of progeny over the years. I started to see that Gaga was a part of that, from the meat dress to her incredible piano skills to the fact that she can really fucking sing. I’ve seen Lady Gaga play a couple of times. And though we’ve never played together, I consider her a homie.…

When the Ukrainian civil war reached its peak in the early months of 2015, photographers Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni travelled to the frontline to document the combatants. Gathering with the anti-Russian forces in the children’s holiday centre they had converted into a training ground, the pair noticed how un-soldierlike everyone seemed. “Most of them were at their first conflict,” Caimi says. “Students, simple employees, common people – they were all taking up arms for an ideal on little or no wage.” Equipped with a Polaroid camera, Caimi and Piccinni offered to take the soldiers’ portraits before they headed off to the front. They also asked each of them the same question: “What do you see when you close your eyes?” The photos, along with the soldiers’ handwritten notes, were…

TOXOPLASMA GONDII People who don’t like cats sometimes view those who do with suspicion, as if they’ve been brainwashed. They could be onto something. Cats regularly play host to a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which causes the disease toxoplasmosis in humans. (This is why doctors advise pregnant women not to handle cat litter, as the microbe can lead to foetal complications.) Adults with toxoplasmosis, which could be as much as 40 per cent of the Australian population, usually experience a few flu-like symptoms before the single-celled organism is overcome by the immune system, at which point it collapses and lies dormant in the brain. Or so we thought. New evidence suggests Toxoplasma may actually spend its so-called ‘dormancy’ quietly rewiring the connections between the brain’s neurons, changing the way our…

WE’RE IN A GOLDEN AGE OF DINOSAUR DISCOVERY. ABOUT HALF OF ALL KNOWN DINOSAUR SPECIES HAVE BEEN FOUND IN THE PAST 10 YEARS, AND ABOUT 75 PER CENT SINCE 1996. IT’S BEEN AN EXPONENTIAL RATE OF DISCOVERY. There are new parts of the world that have only recently been opened up for serious dinosaur exploration, the most notable being China, where the first feathered dinosaur was discovered in 1996. We now think it likely that nearly all carnivorous dinosaurs had feathers – even T-rex. Experts originally believed they might only have had feathers as juveniles, but a series of feathered mature tyrannosaurs has recently been found in China, which changes that thinking. Of course, we don’t know for sure what these dinosaurs used their feathers for, but we think some…

“IF YOU ASKED ANOTHER LICENCE HOLDER HOW MANY FISH THEY HAD CAUGHT, AND THEY ANSWERED ‘SIX’, IN REALITY YOU COULD BET HE’S ONLY CAUGHT ONE.” THE BRITISH COUNTRYSIDE CAN SOMETIMES SEEM LIKE A BUCOLIC, BENIGN KIND OF PLACE. BUT THE TRUTH IS THAT IT’S MUCH MORE COMPLEX, MUCH MORE NUANCED, MUCH MORE ENIGMATIC AND MYSTERIOUS. THERE ARE PECULIAR PASSIONS AND ECCENTRIC CUSTOMS IN ALL OF BRITAIN’S GREEN AND PLEASANT CORNERS. On the serpentine estuaries of Carmarthen in West Wales, for instance, under almost constant rain, in a no-man’s land between sea and meadow, a tradition that stretches back to Roman times is still practised. If you squint at dusk, you might catch sight of a lonely man sitting in a tiny boat not much bigger than a bathtub, bobbing along…

THE EARTH IS LOUSY WITH NITROGEN. IT MAKES UP 80 PER CENT OF THE PLANET’S ATMOSPHERE AND, CONSEQUENTLY, MOST OF EVERY BREATH WE TAKE. But until 100 years ago, no one could figure out how to isolate it. Nitrogen was literally in our faces, but remained tantalisingly out of reach. That is, until a German scientist finally cracked the case. He saved the world from disaster in the process, before promptly causing another, arguably more tragic one. Such is the nature of the periodic table’s most paradoxical element, which can give life – and also take it away. When nitrogen is being nice, it brings us pretty celestial light shows in the form of the Auroras Borealis and Australis, which are caused by electrons from the magnetic field hitting nitrogen…

 FOR IGOR MUKHIN, PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE ART OF BEING IN THE WRONG PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME. In the late 1980s, the U.S.S.R. was on a slow tractor ride into an economic and cultural quagmire. Consumer goods were rationed, alcoholism was rife, and news footage showed colourless citizens shuffling their feet in an endless breadline. It was the last place on earth where you would predict the emergence of a radical new youth movement. But emerge they did. With spiked hair, frayed jeans and leather jackets, they thumbed their noses at state-endorsed Soviet realism while dancing to music that flouted everything it held sacred. Their music was rock’n’roll. And Igor Mukhin became the chronicler of their brief, unruly crusade. From 1985 to 1990, Mukhin photographed the illegal gigs, frenzied…

THE AVERAGE READER, LEAFING THROUGH THESE PAGES AT A LEISURELY CLIP, WILL TAKE ABOUT TWO MINUTES TO READ THIS ARTICLE. ACCORDING TO SOME EXPERTS, THIS IS THE EXACT AMOUNT OF TIME YOU NEED TO BREW A CUP OF TEA. TO OTHERS, IT DEPENDS WHICH PLANET YOU’RE ON. For now, let’s assume you’re on Earth. Start brewing. Then imagine doing this 285 times. That’s the number of cups Northumbria University scientists went through in 2011, uncovering what they believe is the perfect formula for tea: drop a tea bag in water boiled to 100 degrees centigrade, brew for two minutes, add 10 millilitres of milk and wait six minutes before drinking at the optimum temperature of 60 degrees. The formula isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, though. In 1980, the British Standards…

CABALLERO ALWAYS POSITIONS HIS PISTOL ABOUT 30 CENTIMETRES FROM HIS TARGET, SO HE CAN’T MISS. HE ALSO TRIES TO AIM AT ORGANS THAT PEOPLE HAVE TWO OF. HALFWAY THROUGH MY FIRST CONVERSATION WITH COLOMBIAN BUSINESSMAN MIGUEL CABALLERO, HE CALLED OVER HIS WIFE AND TOOK OUT A TASER. Sensing my nervousness, he smiled. “Do you know how many volts this produces?” I shook my head. “Around 30,000.” As his wife Carolina arrived, she said a few words in Spanish and obligingly held out an arm. Caballero placed a thin layer of grey cloth over her wrist. Then he pressed a button on the taser and tilted it towards me, so I could see it was real. I didn’t need much convincing; through the pixels of our video link I could clearly…

 I DON’T THINK WE’RE GOING TO MAKE IT. THAT’S THE ONLY THING IN MY HEAD MOMENTS BEFORE TOUCHING DOWN ON A MOUNTAINSIDE AIRSTRIP IN PAPUA PROVINCE. THE ASTONISHING STICK-AND-RUDDER SKILLS GAINED BY LANDING A HEFTY AIRPLANE ON A MOUNTAINSIDE ARE PRICELESS IN AN AGE OF PERVASIVE COCKPIT AUTOMATION. As we get closer, Matt Dearden, a 35-year-old Brit, eases the stick back, pulls the throttle to idle and kisses the ground. He labours with the rudder to keep the fully loaded Pilatus Porter – a product of post-WWII Swiss engineering – going straight up the perilously short runway. As we near its end, Dearden adds a touch of power, easing the plane up the hill and onto the runway’s small plateau, then kicks the rudder to the left. We swivel 180…

I AM LIKE MOST PEOPLE UNDER THE AGE OF 30. For the bulk of my adult life I’ve spent half my income renting a lightless, dank room in a crumbling share house whose walls would fall apart instantly if they weren’t held together by a healthy and vibrant community of rats. Splitting the rent with seven of the most unhygienic, erratically scheduled people alive suited me for a time. But there came a point when I realised I would rather not be able to afford food than have to use a pressure cleaner to get someone else’s week-old korma off one of my plates in order to eat. So I scoured Gumtree for the cheapest one-bedroom apartment within three days’ hike of a train station that wasn’t currently a murder…

PRETTY MUCH EVERY MOVIE I SEE, I’LL BUY THE FILM MUSIC AND JUST LISTEN TO IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHY THEY WROTE THE MUSIC FOR EACH SCENE. EDWARD SAID When I was growing up in Tennessee, I was an awkward Arab kid in a Southern Baptist universe. There was this association between Arabs and terrorism, which was very new at the time and strong and suffocating. And Lebanon, the place that I was from, meant terrorism to people – it represented this hell where American people were killed. I remember longing for a role model who could counteract all that, who was thoughtful, who was smart. Edward Said was the first guy I discovered who was that for me. I encountered his work in high…

SENDING A SATELLITE INTO SPACE IS AN EXPENSIVE EXERCISE. A garden-variety communications satellite will easily burn a $50-million hole in your pocket. And that’s before you add in another $50 million to fling the thing up into low Earth orbit. So unless you’re a multinational company, a global superpower or Elon Musk, it can be incredibly difficult – if not impossible – to get your gear into space. But Stuart McAndrew is trying to change that. For the past two years, the self-described space nerd has been working on something he calls the OzQube-1: a Rubik’s Cube-sized satellite he’s hoping to launch into space next year, ideally without going bankrupt in the process. McAndrew is one of a new breed of amateur satellite makers taking their inventions to the skies…

ROBIN NAGLE’S APARTMENT IS TECHNICALLY IN HARLEM, BUT THAT’S A MATTER OF SEMANTICS. IN THE MORNING, WHEN SHE MAKES HER WAY DOWNTOWN TO HER OFFICE AT NYU, ALL LOGIC SAYS SHE’LL BE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE – BUT SHE WON’T. Nagle is living in a shadow map of New York City. When she’s at home, that’s not Harlem; it’s Manhattan 9. When she’s working, she’s in Manhattan 2. When she gets off the subway her mind translates her whereabouts in real time: Williamsburg? Nope. Try North Brooklyn 1. These 59 zones are the city’s trash districts. They’re invisible to most, but Nagle came to know this unmarked, parallel dimension by heart after spending a decade (and counting) as the New York City Department of Sanitation’s anthropologist-in-residence, an unsalaried position that runs…

EVERY PIECE OF MERCHANDISE SENT OUT OF THE HEADQUARTERS OF SUCKLORD ENTERPRISES IS EMBLAZONED WITH THE THREATENING REMINDER OF WHAT ITS CREATOR THINKS OF YOU, THE PURCHASER: “YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE FOR BUYING THIS.” YOU COULD SAY IT’S A BIT JUDGEMENTAL. “Obviously I’m not going to discourage people from buying it, but I don’t know if it’s really necessarily that fulfilling in the end,” says the Sucklord – a native New Yorker, born Morgan Phillips IV. He’s the creator of a feverish empire of hand-crafted, hijacked versions of figurines, toys and action figures, which he’s been selling from his “Chinatown suckhole sweatshop” since 2000. “That’s great, if that’s what you want to do,” he says of collecting, while making it perfectly clear it’s not the kind of hobby he’s ever indulged…

PROFANITY IS THE LANGUAGE WE USE WHEN THE LANGUAGE WE’VE BEEN GIVEN ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH. We reserve it for pure emotion. I think of it as everyday poetry. I’m very interested in the cognitive basis for swearing. There’s some evidence coming out that our brains are hardwired to swear: that our brains direct us to do it at certain times. Researchers are going into the brain to see if areas light up just for profanity. It makes sense that the brain has a repository for profanity. When people have brain injuries or strokes, they can have difficulty with certain types of language, or can’t recover vocabulary. Often, when stroke victims’ brains are ‘rebooting’ after the trauma, they’ll utter this stream of swear words. It seems as though the brain is…

“I’VE BEEN WORKING HERE FOR NEARLY NINE YEARS AND I’M STILL ALIVE – YAY,” DEADPANS TREVOR JONES, HEAD HORTICULTURALIST AT ALNWICK GARDEN, HOME TO THE UNITED KINGDOM’S MOST DANGEROUS COLLECTION OF PLANTS. But not all staff remain unscathed: “A colleague who is a senior gardener, and should have known better, went into the Poison Garden once and forgot her gloves, so she gardened without them,” Jones explains. “She was working around a plant called Ruta graveolens, which is often used as a herb, but it’s phototoxic: if you get the sap on your skin, your skin starts to blister. She ended up with third-degree burns on her arm. “And unfortunately, once this gets into your system, it’s with you for approximately seven years. So every time she goes out in…

 BERNIE KRAUSE DIDN’T START HIS CAREER IN THE WILDERNESS. LIFE AS A MICHIGAN SESSION GUITARIST, SHOWING UP ON THE OCCASIONAL MOTOWN RECORDING, IS PRETTY FAR FROM THERE. AS YOU LISTEN TO THE TEXTURES OF THE NATURAL WORLD, YOU BEGIN TO FIND LAYERS AND PEEL THEM AWAY TO UNDERSTAND THEM, AND THEY’RE VERY COMPLEX, AND QUITE BEAUTIFUL. If you wanted to understand how he became one of the most revered practitioners of soundscape ecology – preserving, recording and understanding the sounds of the natural world – there’s a chance you could draw a thread from his early career in folk music, and that time he landed in the seat Pete Seeger had vacated in the Weavers, just before they broke up in 1964. But really, the counterculture of the 1960s had…

TEL AVIV NATIVE DAVID HALIVA HAS SPENT YEARS COBBLING TOGETHER THE HOLY LAND’S FLAVOURS AND HISTORY FOR HIS NEW BOOK DIVINE FOOD: ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN FOOD CULTURE AND RECIPES. HERE HE SHARES HIS RECIPE FOR FISH BAKED IN A SALT AND HERB MANTLE. Salt- or dough-wrapped fish retains its juices and preserves its flavours particularly well. This dish was inspired by ta’ashima, a recipe from Jaffa thought to work as a charm against unfulfilled desires that are so unbearable they become physical ailments. This version may not grant your wishes, but it will certainly make for a satisfying meal. ingredients Dough: 500g white flour 2 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary 2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley 2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves 2 tbsp finely chopped green onion 200g coarse salt 3 eggs…

WHEN CANDLES REPLACED BRIGHT OIL LAMPS IN THE 1850s, DEEPER WALLPAPER COLOURS AND EXUBERANT PATTERNS BECAME HIGHLY FASHIONABLE. Two of the more vibrant colours favoured by the public were Scheele’s Green and Emerald Green, both of which were created with arsenic, a by-product of copper mining. They were to prove as deadly as they were beautiful. Manufacturers stepped up production of arsenical wallpapers to meet demand, paying scant attention to the effects on labourers of constant exposure to the white clouds of arsenic dust produced by the dyes, and with no thought at all to the health of those who would sit in homes hung with them. Symptoms of arsenic poisoning – skin ulcerations, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, coughing, convulsions, and neuropathy in the hands and feet – were often mistakenly…

THE DA VINCI BRIDGE In 1502, Tuscan genius Leonardo da Vinci got himself a commission. He was tasked by Bayezid II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, with designing a bridge to span the Golden Horn in Constantinople (now Istanbul). Da Vinci’s plans called for an ambitious 240-metre-long single-span bridge – with pressed-bow form and graceful parabolic curves – rising over the Bosphorus. The problem was, no one knew how to build it. Once Bayezid’s engineers put a pin in the project, the plans languished in Turkey’s national archives for 450 years. Then in 2001, a bold new group of bridge builders came along: the Norwegian Public Roads Association. Made in collaboration with Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand, the footbridge now spans highway E-18 in the decidedly non-Ottoman town of Ås, 30…

BORN: September 28, 1945, Tokyo, Japan AS FAR AS TERRORIST MASTERMINDS GO, THEY DON’T COME MUCH MORE UNLIKELY THAN FUSAKO SHIGENOBU, FOUNDER AND LEADER OF THE ONCE-NOTORIOUS JAPANESE RED ARMY (JRA). Dubbed the Mistress of Mayhem, the Red Queen and the Black Widow, hers was a reign of bloody (and confounding) terror stretching continents and decades. Mixing firebrand politics with sultry good looks, Shigenobu became the poster child of ultra-leftist politics: revered by some, reviled by more. Under her guidance, the JRA became one of the most feared terrorist organisations of the 1970s, hijacking planes, taking hostages and committing massacres in their pursuit of a global socialist uprising. It never quite worked out that way, but Shigenobu was a woman determined to leave her mark on history. Born in September…