France’s lost opportunity
When Rose de Freycinet visited Sydney, and despite having been robbed almost as soon as she set foot in the town, she saw advantages in the British method of founding a colony.
Magnetic memories
In 2020 the Geological Survey of Australia’s Northern Territory had published a full-colour magnetic map of the whole of their area, with accompanying grids. For me, a trip into the days of my youth, because in mid-1964 I was party chief of a team flying part of a feature centred on Tennant Creek that had come to be known as the ‘Aeromagnetic Ridge’.
A colony of thieves
In the published French editions of Rose de Freycinet’s journal there is a gap between the arrival of the Uranie off the coast of New South Wales and the 27th of November, more than a week after she anchored in Neutral Bay. Was that week devoid of incident? Absolutely not.
Ayn and Meghan
In what is still known, with unintentional irony, as the United Kingdom, we are currently enjoying the spectacle of our royal family indulging in one of its recurrent orgies of self-destruction. What would Ayn Rand have thought?
Those damned beach balls
The Kaverina diagram used to display different tectonic regimes as defined by different styles of faulting has been modified by the addition of focal mechanism ‘beach-balls’. How helpful is that?
A problem with some letters
During the three long years she was away from France, Rose de Freycinet wrote letters to her mother, and after her return copies were made and were preserved in the Freycinet family archives. Is it possible that there were not one but two transcriptions, and the second set was never completed?