Why I Am a Christian

     The short answer, of course, is that I was blessed to have been brought up that way. I have always felt God's guiding hand on my shoulder. I have always lived in His presence, and known the peace of mind and the exaltation that brings. But when you grow to man's estate, and it is obvious that what you were taught is rejected by many, it behoves you to determine whether it can be justified intellectually as well as experientially.
     For myself, my degrees were in science, with particular emphasis on zoology. But over the decades I have sought to satisfy my curiosity about such fields as history, anthropology, and psychology. A cynic once declared that I have read widely, but not deeply. By that as it may, it provides an advantage over those whose studies have been intense in a single field and limited in others. It has always appeared incongruous to me that any educated person could be a non-believer - especially if his field is astronomy or ancient history, when he must face the issues head on.

A Skeleton in the Family Closet

     It doesn't do for an Australian to dig around the roots of his family tree if he is afraid of what might be unearthed.
     When my paternal grandparents, H. F. Smith and Amelia Skelson were married, the bride's father was recorded as Samuel Skelson, miller. Since the wedding took place in 1890, the assumption might be that, like my maternal great-grandparents, they arrived during the great migration boom in the middle of the nineteenth century. But assumptions can be - well - presumptuous. It turned out that my grandmother never actually knew her father, as she was the daughter of his (relative) old age, and she was still only a baby when he died.

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. [I have since added a better version near the end of this essay.] 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.