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www.danbyrnes.com.au

Phone: Australia (+61) 0267 715 243
Dan Byrnes' website:
http://www.danbyrnes.com.au/
Email address: dan@danbyrnes.com.au

Dear Netsurfers,

If you find yourself on this page, it might be merely an accident. Pay no attention to contents here, this page is now used only to prepare various material for proofreading, then for uploading to a variety of other pages on these websites. That is, it is a scumble file not actually intended for public display - Ed

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More update material below:

2008 file, This website has wondered before if the USA really is the home of free speech? So we wondered about this snippet. "Our study suggests Wikipedia is six times more liberal [in outlook] than the American public." (From a long article byu Tim Adams on Wikipeda and its founder Jimmy Wales. About 1700 articles are added to Wikipedia each day. (Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 18 August, 2007)

17,000BC if not earlier: Who painted the "Bradshaw boat" of the Australian Kimberleys? Somewhere in the Kimberlys, north-western Australia, somewhere on the Mitchell Plateau, someone as rock art, for some reason, painted a picture of men in a boat (large canoe with a high prows at each end?) on a sandstone rock. In 1996, a group of bushwalkers photographed a boat painted "in the Bradshaw tradition". The boat has room for four people or so and may have a rudder or a keel. Does it depict people working as ocean navigators? Australian prehistorian Rhys JOnes of Australian National University sees the discovery of the boat art, as "extremely interesting". Other paintings of boat have been found in Arnhem Land and Kakadu (Northern Territory), but they are not more than 1000 years old. Does the Bradshaw rock art depict something to do with an arrival of a wave of the people becoming today's Australian Aboriginals? One view is that since the end of the last Ice Age, there has generally been a minimum of 70km of water between Australia and islands to its north, and land bridges may have meant an even shorter distance needed to be sailed. Evidence of human habitation - stone tools about 800,000 years ago - on the Indonesian island of Flores may be able to be related to the Bradshaw rock art problem. Some Bradshaw rock art concerns depictions of people dancing, or animals such as kangaroo or wallaby, but it is the boat art which is the most intriguing. Rather mysteriously, some local Aboriginals regard the Bradshaw paintings as "uknown", and have no explanation for them. Why the name Bradshaw? Because the first white man to notice them was one Joseph Bradshaw in 1891. How to properly date the paintings? A recently-working researcher on the Bradshaw paintings has been Australian Grahame Walsh, who has visited the area each winter for about 20 years. Walsh now has a library of about 1.2 million photographs of the artefacts. (Article by Graeme Leech in The Australian Magazine, 18-19 July 1998. See a 1997 article in British journal, Nature.

music, David Nicholls, John Cage. University of Illinois Press, 2008, 132pp.

lw general, Don Lattin, Jesus Freaks. Harper One, 2008, 236pp. (The really wacky sides of Christianity - so-called - in USA)

mercs site, Where do dead ships go to die? Freighters and so on? Aircraft carriers, oil tankers, cruise liners, ferries, fishing boats, Many - as many as hundreds per year - go to the world's biggest ship-breaking yard at Alang, of the Western Indian state of Gujarat, on the Gulf of Cambay. The ships are rammed ashore and worked on by thousands of workers, stripped down to the last bolt. Everything is recycled/resold. In 1997, Alang worked on scrapping 348 ships, almost one per day. There are upsides and downsides. Workers' living conditions verge on the putrid. Working conditions for up to 40,000 workers are unsafe, conditions - as with an oil tanker - can be dangerous. Shoddy environmental regulations can mean that dying ships release toxic wastes that no one worries about except environmentalists. Upsides are the provision of employment and a service. The ship-breaking industry producs about two million tonnes of re-usable steel per years. And this websites imagines the shipbreaking industry has grown near Bombay because in the days of sailing ships, Bombay was the most prominent and respected ship-building centre in all India. In 1997, an expose story on ship-breaking in the USA's Baltimore Sun won a Pulitzer Prize. (Article in The Australian Magazine, 18-19 July 1998.)

famous, John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature. Faber, 2008, 374pp.

Philosophy, A. C. Grayling, The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the 21st Century. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008, 184pp.  // Simon Leys, Other People's Thoughts. Black Inc., 2007, 1600pp. (Reflections of a thoughtful reader) // Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Allen Lane, 2008, 499pp. //

Merchants, Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: markets, power and the hidden battle for the world's food system. Portobello, 2007, 438pp. //

Self, Fred Stephens and Richard Fox, (two professional oncologists), Cancer Explained. The Essential Guide to Diagnosis and Management. Random House Australia, 2008, 267pp. (Gives some hope, but be aware, some cancers are curable, some are not)

Science, Marcus Chown, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. A Guide to the Universe.  Faber and Faber, 2008, 200pp. (Experts in physics are themelves often mystified about quantum mechanics, which Einstein disliked, it's not just you, how reassuring is that?) // Robert Tavemor, Smoot's Ear: The Measure of Humanity. Yale University Press, 2008, 249pp. (On the various measuring systems which have been used by humanity over aeons, go figure) //

History Aust, Jonathan Richards, The Secret war, University Queensland Press, 2008, 320pp. (Well-researched on the rather violent native police of Queensland. Enough to make loathsome ideologue Keith Windschuttle choke on his breakfast cereal, apparently.) // Ed Glinert, West End Chronicles: 300 Years of Glamour and Excess in the Heart of London. Penguin, no details.  // Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Melbourne University Press, 2008, 371pp. // Adam Shand, Big Shots. Viking, 2007, 406pp. (On Melbourne's gangland murderers)  // Paul Cleary, Shakedown. Allen and Unwin, 2008, 304pp. (On the basically disgraceful attitude to Australia to oil resources off Timor) // N. N. Miklouho-Maclay, (Ed.), The New Guinea Diaries, 1871-1883. Dingo Books, 2008, 280pp. (On the work of Russian Scientist N. N. Miklouho-Maclay) // Phillip Jones and Anna Kenny, Australia's Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Inland, 1860s-1930s. Wakefield Press, 2008, 160pp. // Hamish Maxwell-Stuart, Closing Hell's Gates: The Death of a Convict Station. Allen and Unwin, 2008, 312pp. // Susanna de Vries, Desert Queen: The Many Lives and Loves of Daisy Bates. HarperCollins, 2008, 272pp. //  Bob Reece, Daisy Bates: Grand Dame of the Desert. National Library of Australia, 2008, 205pp. // Inga Clendinnen, True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality. Text Publishing, 2008, 132pp. // Raelene Frances, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution. University of New South Wales Press, 2008, 342pp. 

Famous people, A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet Volome One: The Young Genius 1885-1920. Oxford University Press, 2008, 507pp. (Reviewer remarks on Pound's "rebarbative" personality streak, meaning, repellent in a quite offputting way, not a good way for a poet to be, more so if later becoming a broadcaster for Mussolin's fascist Italy, whether Pound had earlier edited T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland well, or not). // /David Stratton, (well-known Australian TV film critic), I Peed on Fellini. William Heinemann, 2008. (Confessions of a film critic who knows his film onions and despite now wearing a grey beard has not yet tamed his inner film nerd) / Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot. Bloomsbury, 2008, 458pp. //  // Julian Bell, Mirror of the World: A New History of Art. Thames and Hudson, 2008, 496pp.  // Charles Allen, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. Little, Brown, 2008, 426pp. ///  Caryl Flinn, Brass Diva. University of California Press, 2008, 542pp. (Life of Broadway musical star, Ethel Merman) //Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. Headline Review, 2008, 534pp.   // Christopher Reid, Letters of Ted Hughes. Faber and Faber, 2009, 800pp.  // Jonathan Carr, The Wagner Clan. Faber, 2008, 409pp.  (On the family of composer Richard Wagner) // Charlotte Mosley, The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. HarperCollins, 2008, 834pp. Larry Buttrose, Dead Famous: Deaths of the Famous and Famous Deaths. New Holland, 2008, 303pp. (Morbidly fascinating) // Valerie Grove, A Voyage Around John Mortimer. Viking, 2007-2008, 542pp. // Eileen Considine-Meara, At Home With Kate: Growing Up in Katherine Hepburn's Household. Wiley, 2007, 230pp. // William J. Mann, Kate: The Woman Who Was Katherine Hepburn. Faber, 2007, 621pp. // Pierre Assouline, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Thames and Hudson, 2007, 280pp. // Michael Palin, Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years. Phoenix, 2007, 721pp. // Alberto Manguel, Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography. Allen and Unwin, 2007, 285pp. (On the long-term influences of Homer's poetry on literature and history) // // Tim Heald, Princess Margaret. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, 346pp. // // Jill Fields, An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie and Sexuality. University of California Press, 2007, 392pp. // Darleen Bungey, Arthur Boyd: A Life. Allen and Unwin, 2007, 576pp. (A life of one of Australia's greatest painters // Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Melbourne University Press, 2007, 220pp. // Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage. Harper Press, 2007. Bruce Beresford (Australian movie director), Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This: True Stories From A Life In The Screen Trade. Fourth Estate, 2007, 325pp. // ) Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife. Bloomsbury, 2007, 406pp. (Unconvincing, says one reviewer) //

Music, Trevor Dann, Darker Than The Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake. (Biography of an English pop singer who died aged 26) )// Graeme Skinner, Peter Sculthorpe, The Making of an Australian Composer. UNSW Press, 2007, 752pp. // 

Famous people, 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 Autralian 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. // John Worthen, The Life and Death of Robert Schumann. Yale University Press, 2007, 384pp. // // 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. // Nana Mouskouri, Memoirs. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007-2008, 389pp.// Steve Martin, Born Standing Up. New York Media, 2007. (Memoirs of the American comedian) // lw glam, 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) 

Science,  Daniel Johnson, White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was fought on the chessboard. Atlantic Books, 2008, 368pp.  (On game of chess) // David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or how 32 carved pieces on a board illuminiated our understanding of war, science and the human brain. Anchor Books, 2008, 327pp.  (On game of chess) )// Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. Phoenix, 2008, 327pp. // Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. The New Press, 2008, 288pp. //

Sea: // Peter Heller, The Whale Warriors. HarperCollins, 2008, 3200pp. (Japanese whaling today ... you have a problem with that?) //  Andrew Darby, Harpoon. Allen and Unwin, 2007, 296pp. (On history of whaling) // lw sea, Nicolette Jones, The Plimsoll Sensation: The Great Campaign To Save Lives At Sea. Abacus, 2007, 400pp.

Futurism/environment, 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.

How to live, Jonathan Biggins, The 700 Habits of Highly Ineffective People. MUP, 2007, 250pp. (Satire, of course)

Music books,  Anthony Meredith and Paul Harris, Malcolm Williamson: A Mischievous Muse. Omnibus Press, 2008, 534pp. (On the respected British composer) // Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters. University of California Press, 2007, 242pp. // Graeme Skinner, Peter Sculthorpe: The Making of an Australian Composer. UNSW Press, 2007, 752pp. // // Nana Mouskouri, Memoirs. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007-2008, 389pp. // Slash (with Anthony Bozza), Slash: The Autobiography. HarperCollins, 2008, 458pp. (By Gun's 'N” Roses guitarist, Slash, overdrinking, drug abuse, etc)

Chronology below:

History, // Eluned Summers-Bremner, Insomnia: A Cultural History. Reaktion Books, 2008, 224pp.  // 

Book list, History various,  Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking People Since 1900. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, 736pp. (Reviewer says, this book may be magnificent, but it is not history) // David Crane, Scott of the Antarctic. HarperCollins, 2007, 595pp. // David Starkey, Monarchy. Harper Perennial, 2007, 319pp. (You've probably seen the TV series of the same name, which has been quite popular where this website lives) // Michael Wallis, Billy The Kid: The Endless Ride. details lost. (On Henry McCarty, known as Billy the Kid, and the trashification of the history of the USA's Old West) ///

cities, Rosemary Goring, (Ed.), Scotland: The Autobiography. Viking, 2007, 483pp. 

Book list, Antiquity, John Ray, The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt. Profile Books, 2007, 200pp. lw history old, //// Charles Spencer, Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, 430pp. // // Fidel Castro with Ignacio Ramonet, My Life. (Translated by Andrew Hurley). Allen Lane, 2007, 735pp. // Robert Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. Free Press, 2007, 463pp. //

Book list, lw general, //  history general, Ariel Heyanto, State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia: Fatally Belonging. Routledge, 2007, 242pp. // Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 291pp. // Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps. Faber and Faber, 2007, 361pp. (History of Burma) // Paddy Doherty, The Khyber Pass. Faber and Faber, 2007, 261pp. // Katrin Himmler, The Himmler Brothers. Macmillan, 2007, 333pp. David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. Free Press, 2007, 478pp. // // Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World. 1940-1941. Viking, 2007, 624pp. // Robert Dalleck, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. Allen Lane, 2007, 740pp. (A Faustian bargain, says one reviewer) // // Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Belknap Press, 2007, 358pp. // Peter Stansky, The First Day of the Blitz. September 7, 1940. Scribe, 2007, 212pp. //lw general //Peter Conrad, Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins. Thames and Hudson, 2007, 592pp. (How creation has been imagined by humanity over the centuries) ) // Robert I. Rotberg, Worst of the Worst: Dealing With Repressive and Rogue Nations. Brookings Institute Press, 2007, 342pp. // Lisa French Baker, Heart of Darfur: Hope and Humanity in the World's Worst War Zone. Hachette, 2007, 348pp. // Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life's Scarcest Commodity. (Translated by Shelley Fish) Scribe, 2007, 368pp. // Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father. a story of race and inheritance. Text Publishing, 2007, 464pp. // Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Serpent's Tail, 2007, 452pp. // Michael Newton, Gangsters Encyclopedia: The World's Most Notorious Mobs, Gangs and Villains. Collins and Brown, 2007, 256pp. // Peter Doherty, A Light History of Hot Air. Melbourne University Press, 2007, 302pp. (On hot air balloons) // do as it has not been done - lw books general, // Mark Willacy, The View From The Valley Of Hell. Macmillan, 2007, 327pp. (From a former BBC reporter, suggesting that what Israelis do to Palestinians is brutish and inhumane) // Gordon Hahn, Russia's Islamic Threat. Yale University Press, 2007, 349pp. // Neil Henry, American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media. University of California Press, 2007, 326pp. // Waleed Aly, People Like Us: How Arrogance is Dividing Islam and the West. Picador, 2007, 277pp. (Notes on how radical Muslims want to remake humanity, or the world, the deadly old dream of humanity revisited) // Alastair Campbell, The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries. Hutchinson, 2007, 794pp. // Michael Gawenda, American Notebook: A Personal and Political Journey. Melbourne University Press, 2007, 256pp. // Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, 397pp. // Charles L. Pritchard, Failed Diplomacy: the tragic story of how North Korea got the bomb. Brookings Institute Press, 2007, 228pp. // John C. Fortier and Norman J. Ornstein, Second-Term Blues: How George W. Bush Has Governed. Brookings Institution Press, 2007, 146pp. // Tom Keneally, Searching for Schindler. Knopf, 2007, 304pp. // Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Allen lane, 2007, 702pp. // Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. Scribe, 2007, 354pp. // Mark Barber, Urban Legends: An Investigation into the Truth Behind the Myths. Wakefield Press, 2007, 318pp. // A. C. Grayling, Towards The Light: the story of the struggles for liberty and rights that made the modern west. Bloomsbury, 2007, 336pp. // Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag. Princeton University Press, 2007, 223pp. // new lw general, // George Tenet (with Bill Harlow), At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. HarperCollins, 2007, 549pp. // Daphne du Maurier, Golden Lads: a study of Anthony Bacon, Francis and their friends. Virago, 2007, 338pp, first pub in 1975. (From the author who believes that Francis Bacon wrote most of Shakespeare) // Jerome Groopman, MD, How Doctors Think. Scribe, 2007, 307pp. // Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House, 2007, 576pp. // John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Allen Lane, 2007, 229pp. // Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilisation. Text Publishing, 2007. // Bill Clinton (former President, USA), Giving: How Each Of Us Can Change The World. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, 284pp. // 

Websites: Daily Hits Figures at last counts Total page loads from domain, in 2006, 129,529. Unique visitors in 2006 are 95, 865.  In 2007, Pageloads 114,133 and unique visitors are 87, 372.  Hits are in decline, therefore as at 24-3-2008 Lost Worlds = ?? hits daily The Blackheath Connection = ?? hits daily Dan Byrnes Word Factory Links Garden = ?? hits daily Merchants and Bankers Listings = ?? hits daily History of Technology of Music (HoTM) = ?? hits daily The Business of Slavery = ?? hits daily Bibliographies = ?? hits daily Total hits daily = approx ?? Or about ?? hits monthly Above figures as at last count

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