Why Is There a Silent "l" in "Malcolm?

    In Alaska and the Yukon, I noticed, they have, to put it politely, an idiosyncratic attitude towards spelling. When I asked the attendant at a local museum in Skagway why the cattle yoke was labeled a "yolk", she replied, "That's how it's spelt", with the nonchalant tone of one who can't imagine why anyone would want such self-evident information. And who was the Malcom So-and-So who donated the old telephone. He was an elderly resident of the district. Is that how he spells his name? "Yes," she replied, as if to ask: Why would you ever imagine anything different?

H. F. Smith (1862 - 1948)

      How transitory is earthly renown! My paternal grandfather was a wealthy and prominent citizen of Brisbane, and his shop a major city landmark for more than half a century, but now both have been completely forgotten. Perhaps this blog will rectify the situation to some extent.

      Harry Frederick Smith was born in Middlesex, England on 3 December 1862 to Richard Smith, the foreman of a glass warehouse, and his wife, Emma née Goodwin. It is possible that his first name was actually Harold. His father died in England, and his widowed mother brought her children out to Australia on the Woodlark in 1875. Of course, it is impossible at this distance to guess her motives, or why she chose Brisbane - which was not exactly the centre of civilisation in 1875. The semi-tropical climate must have come as a bit of a surprise. Harry was totally unimpressed with the first banana he ate. It was only later that he was told the skin needed to be removed first.
    Probably Emma hoped that there were better prospects in Australia for a family without a male bread-winner, but the situation must have been pretty grim. It is said that she kept the wolf from the door by sewing. Also, it is likely that his late father's title of glass warehouse foreman suggests a higher status than it actually entailed. Family tradition has it that the children, and possibly the mother, were illiterate. Some women in Brisbane taught him to read and write, and sent him to school. On Sunday he used to read the Bible to his mother's friends.

The Little Girl in the Painting

 Please accept my apologies for the poor quality of the illustration. The photograph on which it is based, printed on cardboard,  is over 100 years old, and has been exposed to much deterioration. However, you can view the original oil painting at Newstead House, Brisbane. The volunteers there will be able to tell you the name of the artist, and the subject, but probably not much about who she was, or how it managed to arrive there.
    It was painted in 1901 by the Swedish-born Oscar Friström, the most celebrated portraitist in Queensland at the time, and it represents my aunt, Ruby Isobel Claris Smith (later Boyle) at the age of five.
    She was born at St Lucia, Brisbane on 3 August 1896. As I shall describe in the following post, my grandfather, Harry Frederick Smith was a wealthy jeweller, whose shop was a well-known landmark in the Brisbane CBD. By 1901 he had already established two new branches in Ipswich and Toowoomba. He had "arrived", and apparently decided to celebrate by commissioning  portraits of his three daughters (at the time): Millicent (9), Ruby (5), and Dorothy (3).

Captain John McGovern (1846 - 1929)

    My mother's maternal grandfather passed away when she was only 20, but she never stopped talking about him.

    He appears to have been a genuine "character" so, lest his memory perish, let me introduce him to you, starting with his obituary in the Coolamon-Ganmain Farmer's Review of 20 December 1929.

He was born in Sunderland, England, in 1846, and was one of a large family.

    Well, maybe. The story I heard - but which the man himself always denied - was that he came into the world in Dublin, but his family moved to Sunderland when he was six weeks old, and his birth was registered there. On the other hand, the 1881 census gives his birthplace as Midlothian, Scotland.

Bunyips and Bigfoots

Bunyips and Bigfoots. In search of Australia's mystery animals. (Millennium, 1996)

   This book was originally published in 1996, and is now out of print. Since then, the value has gone up exponentially. At the time of posting, good used copies are being offered on the US branch of Amazon for $999 US (which I think is extraordinary). In fact, as of November 2013 some-one was offering it for sale at £3,000 (that's pounds, not dollars!), but more often the price runs in the region of $100 to $150. 

        However, in 2021 I  self-published a second, revised edition, in both paperback and Kindle format, and at a reasonable price. Here is what it looks like.

What's it about?

    For a start, don't believe the claims of some Amazon vendors that it is a hardback. It is a high quality trade paperback.
    As you will have read on my home page, I took my degrees in zoology. I have also long been interested in cryptozoology: the investigation of alleged animals not officially recognized by science, but whose existence is suggested by native tradition, eyewitness reports, footprints, or other traces. Long ago, I decided to produce a book on Australia's mystery animals, and as I delved, the evidence accumulated - far more than I expected. It hasn't stopped yet, but this book is the result. And, being a scientist, I have provided references to every statement and report. Maps and illustrations are also included.

Details about the chapters.
Introduction. 3 pages
1. The Passing of the Bunyips. Everyone knows that the bunyip is the mythical monster of Aboriginal tradition, but what isn't known is that it was taken seriously by white settlers, and sightings were reported by them every 20 or 30 years until the 1970s. This chapter sets out the evidence, and makes some attempt at an explanation. 22 pages + 52 references (in the first edition; the second edition contains an addendum on what has happened in the last 25 years.)
2. Yes, Virginia, There Are Sea Serpents. A comprehensive - and probably definitive - catalogue of sea serpent sightings along the Australian coast, along with some anomalous carcasses washed ashore. 40 pages + 83 references.
3. A Legend Stalks North Queensland. This covers the famous "North Queensland marsupial tiger", which has never been caught, but had actually been listed in two classic Australian mammal guides. 23½ pages + 33 references.
4. The Thylacine Moves to the Mainland. We all know that the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, became extinct in Tasmania last century (or did it?), and it became extinct on the mainland a few thousand years earlier with the arrival of the dingo. What bothers me is that a lot of people are reporting seeing the animal on the mainland - and many of those reports are not so easy to dismiss. 20 pages + 59 references.
5. The ABC of ABCs. The initials stand for "alien big cats". All over the south and west of the continent, people have been seeing huge cats, regularly reported as black panthers or cougars. Massive stock losses, bearing all the hallmarks of cat attacks, have sparked interest by state parliaments. The material on this topic is extensive, and even this large chapter could not cover it completely. 24 pages + 60 references.
6. Apes Down Under? This chapter covers the yowie - the "bigfoot" in the title - a huge ape very, very similar to the sasquatch or bigfoot reported in North America. It is something which definitely should not exist in Australia, but the evidence appears to be overwhelming. I started this chapter as a non-believer, and halfway through, I became a believer. 24 pages + 58 references.
7. A New Zealand Mystery. This covers the waitoreke, a mysterious small mammal reported from New Zealand for the earliest days - in a country which has no known land mammals. 7 pages + 14 references.
8. Odds and Ends (Mostly Odds). A miscellany of strange reports, including the Ompax hoax, questionable stories of diprotodonts and giant goannas, and some more credible sightings of crocodiles far south of their normal range. The chapter also includes some extraordinary sightings of animals like nothing on earth. 9 pages + 29 references.
9. So, Where Do We Go from Here? In this final chapter, I give my opinions as to how unknown animals ought to be investigated in Australia. 8 pages.

Any Similar Books?

No, I don't mind giving free advertisements to the "competition".
   Out of the Shadows, mystery animals of Australia, by my friends, Tony Healy and Paul Cropper, was published two years before Bunyips and Bigfoots, and bears a similar price on the secondhand book market. The two books are sister works, with about 50% overlap in content. The best way to describe them is to say that one has greater breadth, and the other greater depth. Shadows covers the same ground, but in more detail, as chapters 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of B&B ie bunyips, mainland thylacines, alien big cats, the north Queensland tiger, and yowies. It does not include all the cases in B&B, but it covers extra ones, and has many more illustrations. Nevertheless, it does not include the waitoreke, or the odds and ends, and it has nothing on sea serpents - its major deficiency. However, if you want to know about the search for the Tasmanian tiger in Tasmania itself, then Shadows is the book, for its absence is the major deficiency of my work.
   Moving to books which are still in print, and which each cover one aspect of the mystery -
   The Yowie, the search for Australia's bigfoot, also by Tony Healy and Paul Cropper (2007). This must certainly rank as the definitive, and most comprehensive, review of the evidence concerning the yowie.
   Australian Big Cats. An unnatural history of panthers, by Michael Williams and Rebecca Lang (2010). Although it is not as comprehensive as the previous work, this is only because the amount of material is so vast that no book could encompass it fully. At 434 pages, it provides an enormous amount of information on the subject, especially that which has come to light in the last decade, as well as copies of many official government documents.
   Of course, these cover only two of the mystery animals described in Bunyips and Bigfoots.

The Repat Racket (Book)

   I have had two books published (so far), so we might as well start with the most recent:
The Repat Racket. An insider's report on Veterans' Affairs (Zeus, 2010) ISBN: 978-1-921574-60-3.  This is no longer in print, so I have put the whole thing on the web here.

     As mentioned in my previous post, for 30 years I was an employee of the Australian Department of Veterans' Affairs. For the first five years, I was posted to the Treatment section, and provided medical treatment to sick veterans and war widows. Then I was transferred to Compensation, and worked processing claims for pensions based on war-caused injuries, disease, or death. This was just about the time the entire section took off, as the result of certain exceptionally generous High Court decisions.
     Gradually, I started to notice that I had passed through some kind of Alice's looking glass into a surreal world where normal reality was inverted. Yes, we were still compensating battle-scarred old diggers genuinely sick or traumatized by war - and often making them worse in the process. But more and more - in fact, 90% of the time - vast amounts of taxpayers' money were being handed out for the results of lifestyle choices and old age. We were also treating the deaths of 80-year-olds as war-caused, and pretending that men were psychiatricly incapacitated as the result of their war service, even when they had never come into contact with the enemy.
     Mostly, the claimants were not even being deliberately dishonest; the government and the courts had produced a legal fiction that such things were the outcome of war, and now claimants were honestly believing the fiction. But even I was amazed when I did my sums, and discovered that the total spending on inappropriate pensions amounted to two billion dollars a year. Bit by bit, the determination arose that when I left the department, I would let the general public know what was going wrong.

What has been the response to the book?
      Well, one character decided to attack the messenger. I was amused to read on a website that I was the front man for some sort of sinister government conspiracy, and that many people in the department were treating the book as their bible. I should be so lucky! In fact, I had consulted no-one before writing it, and would certainly have caught flak if upper management had known of my plans.
    
     However, within a few weeks of the book's launch, my publisher received an e-mail:

It supports a position I have held for a number of years which actually caused me to walk out in hopeless frustration on my Voluntary Pension Officer job. . . . I just want Malcolm to know that us blokes involved in some of this stuff are well aware of what's going on. I back him all the way and I do not think he is a disgruntled former employee. I believe he sees things the way I do.

     He was apparently not the only one because, a short while later, I was contacted by an officer from another branch of the department. He had read the book after a friend of his, a Vietnam veteran, kept urging him to do so, and raving about how true to life it was.
     Then, a doctor attached to the military reserve for 30 years contacted me to tell how he had phoned the Deputy Commission of the department in his state to discuss what he considered a fraudulent psychiatric claim. The DC then recommended the book. This confirms my suspicion that the powers that be are fully aware of the book, and the anomalies and abuses it details, but prefer not to make waves by responding to it.

Who should read it?

1. Any public spirited citizen who wants to know how his/her money is being misused, and how the law and policy can produce a bureaucratic monster. Indeed, it is essential that the general public know what is going on, if any reforms are to be initiated.
2. Members of the armed service, past and present, their families, doctors, and representatives. Let's be realistic: if you have regular dealings with the Department of Veterans' Affairs, and you see a book subtitled, An insider's report on Veterans' Affairs, you would be foolish not to read it. You may love the message or hate it, but at least it will give you a detailed insight into how the system works - and that can only be an advantage.
3. Officers of the Department of Veterans' Affairs. I don't claim to be the only expert in the field, but if you have been employed for only 10 or 20 years, you probably don't know how the system you were plunged into actually came about. Also, unless you have served in all three levels of decision making, you probably don't know how the other levels function. And if you are an executive, you have probably never worked at the coal face.

What's it all about?
     It provides a detailed account, in layman's terms, of the way veterans' legislation and policy works in Australia, and how the system went terribly wrong. Chapter by chapter, this entails:

1. Repat Will Provide. This is the introduction. Along with the blurb, it can be read on the publisher's website.
2. The System as it is Supposed to Work. This explains the various types of pension, the eligibility requirements, and the appeal system ie the essential background to the system.
3. How the System Went Up in Smoke. This explains how a badly worded law, and an over-generous interpretation of it by the courts, resulted in pensions being handed out to anybody who could claim to have started smoking on eligible service. Although imost of the applicants are probably sincere in their claims, I show how the rationale behind it is essentially bogus. Yet this is the basis of approximately two thirds of pensions.
4. More Horses Bolt. This describes how the courts now sought to grant pensions for every condition under the sun, and Parliament's valiant rearguard action to maintain some semblance of sanity.
5. The Myth of Agent Orange. These are the facts, and this is the science. After you read this chapter, I hope you never again fall for the line that Vietnam veterans have been adversely affected by this sinister chemical.
6. Sundry Rorts by Honest People. How the effects of old age are regularly treated as the effects of war.
7. The PTSD Epidemic. Anybody who works in the Compensation section will tell you that psychiatric claims are the one major area overwhelmed by lies, rorting, and dubious practices. Yes, there are a lot of men genuinely traumatized by their combat experiences. But there are an equal number of people who never faced the enemy, and never had anything serious happen to them, yet are claiming the same status, and being supported by doctors and - what is worse - the law. You will be shocked at the case histories you read here.
8. Paid to be Sick. One of the saddest aspects of it all is the way the process inhibits rehabilitation. People genuinely sick or traumatized by war are being sucked into a system which makes them worse.
9. The War Widow Racket. Forget the relatively young diggers being killed in action in Afghanistan. According to Veterans' Affairs, most of the people giving their lives for their country today are over 80 years of age.
10. Through the Looking Glass. This is essentially a supplement to chapter 2. It allows you to follow a claim through all the levels of decision making, and all the deficiencies in the process.
11. What is to be Done? Twenty-six suggestions for fixing the problem.

     Finally, since there is always the temptation to attack the messenger, rather than the message, let me state up front: the book is not anti-veteran. In the text, I point out repeatedly that the amount of fraud is probably not much more than in other jurisdictions. Veterans are mostly ordinary people who were once involved in extraordinary situations. The problem is not that the system can be abused, but that the law is an ass.
     Nor is it anti-Veterans' Affairs. I have the highest respect for my former employer and workmates.

Who Am I?

Well, my name is Malcolm Thomas Alfred Smith, as this is what I looked like the day before I turned 40. Since then, I have acquired a few grey hairs, some wrinkles, and a pair of spectacles.

I was born on 6th May 1949 in Sydney, N.S.W., the first of two sons to Sydney George Smith and Margaret Clare Smith née Dennis. However, I have spent most of my life in Brisbane, Queensland.
      According to accepted definition, a "nerd" is someone combining high intellectual development with low development of the social skills. At school, I was the class nerd, before the term was even invented. Moving on to the University of Queensland, I gained a B.Sc. in zoology then, for my M.Sc. thesis, performed groundbreaking research into the behaviour of koalas. It is my sole claim to academic fame, so I shall be writing about it in a future blog.
      How matters would have turned out if I had been able to follow my chosen career is anyone's guess. Alas, only one in 20 zoology graduates ended up with a placing, and I was one of the other 19. So, in 1978, while waiting for a real job to come along, I decided to sit for the public service exam, and found myself in the Department of Veterans' Affairs.
     That took care of the next 30 years. By the time I received a voluntary redundancy in 2008, I was acting as an advocate for the department before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal - a pretend barrister in front of a pretend court. When I had been recording the scratches and squabbles of koalas, that was one thing which never entered my mind!
    Although zoology was neither my first, nor my only, love, I did keep up with it to some extent. I was a member of the now defunct International Society for Cryptozoology, and I wrote a book on the subject, Bunyips and Bigfoots.
     Also, safely ensconced in a government job, I found myself free to use my annual leave to travel the world - to 83 different countries, as far afield as Greenland, Madagascar, and Easter Island (twice). I have walked among gorillas, hunted with pygmies, and stood, barefoot and shivering, in the Yukon rapt in gaze at the northern lights. I have been places millionaires never visit.
      Then, in 2000, everything changed. To the complete surprise of everyone who knew me, I got married - to Esther Philippi, a pastor's daughter 8 years my junior, born and bred in New Guinea - and lived happily ever after.
       Life has not turned out as I planned it - whose does? - but it has turned out well. I now live in retirement, with leisure, affluence, health, memories, and someone I love. In this life, a man is blessed if he can achieve any combination of the above.

Surely goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life,
And I expect to dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

      I have a very wide range of interests, and over the coming months and years, will endeavour to share them with you in a wide range of blogs, which will be listed below.

      OTHER BLOGS
      
      Humour.  This pretty much speaks for itself.