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Notes from Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies 700-500BCE

May 23, 2024 – 3:46 pm

p.4-5 p. 4 “the Scythians are even mentioned, albeit in passing, in the Bible’s New Testament. A passage from Colossians 3:11 in the Letters of Paul states: Here there is no Greek or Jew, circuncised or not, barbarian Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all.” The use of the name Scythian here serves to convey a stereoptypical view of non-sedentary peoples as barbarians whose uncivilised conduct was in need of divine intervention. It clearly does not aim to designatre any particular ethnic or cultural affiliation … to the Achaemenids, the Saka and the Scythians were one and the same people, as evidenced by several inscriptions at Behistun and Persepolis. Pliny was probably right that the Persians indiscimrinately gave the name Saka to all the nomadic groups that lived east of their territory to distinguish those from the Scythians to the west. The Avesta is even more vague, referring to the nomadic enemies of the Iranian people as the ‘Tura with the fast horses”. The later successors of these early Iron Age nomadic societies are the Sarmatians, whose historical fate is a bit clearer. Their military hegemony reached its peak in the 1st century BCE, when their territory reportedly stretched from the Vistula River to the Danube delta…. Prior to the Xiongnu period… the Chinese also applied many blanket terms (hu, sai) to the nomadic groups who lived on or beyond their northern frontier. All these ambigious, unbrella ethnonyms fall into the same pitfalls that have hindered the study of the so-called Phoenicians, Germanen and prehistoric Slavs – all largely invented terms for otherwise diverse, unrelated groups that came together in the face of a common geopolitical enemy or economic challenge… steppe nomads were not mischaracterised only by their contemporaries. Another (and, one might argue, more problematic) layer of essentialism emerged in the colonial discourses of the 19th century. That era’s preoccupation with evolutionist social theory and Ernest Renan’s seminal ‘nationhood’ model resulted in even more essentialised images of ‘non-state’ steppe societies, seen as kinship tribal formations, or as fierce warrior-hersmen who lacked administyrative sophistication and thus organised into clans and tribes. These views of steppe societies as tribal units that existed ‘outside history’ in some arrested stage also fit well within the emerging Marxist models. In the two millennia separating the ethnographies written by Herodotus and the treatises of 19th-century thinkers, the image of steppe societies did not undergo much of a transformation in the scholarly discourse or public imagination. The study of steppe materials, whether textual or visual, has inevitably been hindered.”

p. 7 “Zoomorphism and elitism were thus inestricably linked- across the Eurasian steppe domain since at least the early Iron Age. By the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, Eurasian nomaid superelites had developed a complex form of shared zoomorphism that was not rooted in a particular religious or spiritual system, but rather in their ever-changing interactions with various ecosystems and constructed environments…. Complex visual tropes based on fantastical, fragmented animal anatomies helped construct a shared collective memory in a reluctant alliance, subsequently solidifying its elite core. They also marked the nomad’s identity as separate from that of rival political actors in Central Euroasia. At the heart of such endeavours were three distinct forms of ‘Othering’. … the ordinary members of the alliance were Othered by the elite. But to the nomadic alliance as a whole, both Mother Nature and the geopolitical rivals on the outside were Others that had to be faced, understood and defeated. .. Finally, the Chinese and, to a lesser degree, Persians started to strategically appropriate steppe zoomorphic elements in their material culture to demonstrate their ability to tame the ‘Barbaric Other’.

p. 17 Most widely circulated along the steppe is a metonymies device rooted in a pars pro toto mode of expression, which I refer to as ‘visual synedoche’. Counterintuitive substitution is a key tool in the making of the composite beasts on the surfaces of animal-style artworks. Such fantastic creatures are accomplished through the construction of a ‘zoomorphic juncture’ which constitutes a fusion of several visual synecdoches. his is an irregular zoomorphic body consisting of the ‘signature’ anatomical parts of various animals. for example, the main body might be that of a wold with horse hooves, with deer antlers sprouting from the head and terminating in curved raptor beaks. The reliance of this method of substitution in the construction of counterintuitive biology must have been vital in earl nomadic visual cultures across the steppe: we observe the repeated occurrence of such if junctures on personal adornment and in tomb interior design across thousands of kilometres. … Can one attribute this mode of expression to a particular ecology of imagery rooted in the steppe environment and thus trace a direct link between making, meaning and nature? We’re cut tropes merely politically motivated visuals? Or could they have been both?”

p. 18 “Next comes the ‘visual parallelism” trope. This device relies on a vertical array of fantastic beasts which appear reflected along a delineated axis, usually facing each other. In nomadic art, we commonly encounter attempts at bilateral symmetry, exemplified by mirror images of ‘twin’ animals positioned in such a way as to create a mask-like configuration.”

p. 18 “Steppe artisans also reached trope of “animal combat”, which is often a misidentification for what I would preferred to describe as ‘zoomorphic interface’ of abbreviated animal forms… often composed of a pair of otherwise anatomically complete animals with bodies so contorted and entwined that they end up forming an homogenous, stylised amalgam of shapes rather than a recognisable and coherent animal form… accentuates the creation of a novel organism by creating a visual pandemonium of seemingly disparate body contours which transform and dissipate into each other.”

p. 22 Ernst Gombrich’s seminal work The Sense of Order. At the heart of Gombrich’s enquiries is his belief that decorative pattern results from the cognitive impulse to resolve a certain tension between our senses and the realities of the outside world; but to do so our mind comes equipped with its own filing and scanning system which sorts, filters and rearranges external forms, thus creating its own sense of order. .. even when we claim to render images from observation, we rely on what we know and not what we see. Gombrich’s view of successful design shines through in his succinct assertion: “Delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.”…to strike the right balance between monotony and a surfeit of novelty, the designer relies on a frame of reference which may be both psychologically and culturally determined.”

p. 23 “perhaps a composite body with with a feline head and deer antlers signified a particular religious belief in, say, Pontic Scythian culture, but had an entirely secular meaning on the northern Chinese periphery. Unable to prove a direct cultural contact between the two, we are thus intimidated by different meanings attached to the shared image… but what if we were to temporarily abandon our fixation with meaning and turn to the function of those images….? There we might find many meaningful parallels since composite images were meant to reflect a particular relationship with the natural world and do so to a certain end – whether to instil fear, release anxiety or manipulate the audience into thinking one was a master of of the most supernatural and grotesque of beings.”

p. 26 William Worringer’s thoughts on the creative process on his seminal work Abstractions and Empathy. … This view rejects the notion that the art of prehistoric societies was often abstract because of technical failure in mimetic expression. … the history of nomadic image-making was defined by tensions of fluctuations between these two polarities – the wish to respect, even celebrate the fauna around them and the simultaneous desire to keep a safe conceptual distance from the beast through excessive stylisation or metonymies expression.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Marie Von Clausewitz by Vanya Eftimova

April 11, 2024 – 10:30 am

p. 20 Sophie was the youngest child of William Gomm Jr and Marie Jeanne Poggenpohl. Gomm’s father was a prosperous cabinetmaker in London whose rococo designs remain of interest to art historians to this day. William Jr however was the second son and stood to inherit little. In 1750 he left for Russia where, due to changes in custom fee payments, British businesses enjoyed significant commercial advantages. Gomm quickly rose to prominence in St Petersburg, but risky ventures like the export of Ukrainian tobacco kept him constantly only a step away from insolvency. Luckily the merchant came under the patronage of the wealthy and well-connected Count Peter Shuvalov, and in 1754 obtained from him the timber export monopply over the vast region around Archangelsk… Gomm married Marie Jeanne, the daughter of his fellow contractor at the Russian court, Friedrich Wilhelm Poggenpohl.”

“In 1780s, Gomm was hired as a member of the British embassy in St Peterburg and later moved to be a secretary at the embassy in The Hague. .. his oldest son, also named William, served as a lieutenant colonel in Great Britain’s 55th Regiment during the French Revolutionary Wars and in the West Indies. He eventually became a baronet. Marie’s first cousin, the celebrated British field marshall Sir William Maynard, married the granddaughter of Pennsylvania’s founder William Penn. Jane, the oldest Gomm sister, served as governess to King George III’s daughters.

Sophie Gomm was the youngest child, well educated and attractive, so when the 36yo Charles von Bruhl appeared in St Peterburg he quickly fell in love, despite her being two decades his junior.. Their first child, Marie, was born on June 3 the following year in Warsaw, where the family had stopped on their way to Saxony.”

p. 36

“Marwitz bore witness that both Bruhl girls excelled in their studies of history. Marie indeed remained a passionate scholar of the past, to the point that later in her life friends like August Neidhardt von Gneisenau would acquire history books as presents for her. She had artistic talent and knowledge in the visual arts… the Bruhl’s family actively supported Maries’ proximity to important and educated ladies in Berlin. Where others keenly attempted to limit theitr daughters or young wives’ interactions with literary women – the most notorious case being Freidrich Wilhelm II’s disapproval of his wife Louise’s friendship with Caroline von Berg, the Bruhls encouraged Marie’s interaction with Madam von Berg and her daughter Louise.”

p. 45 “Thanks to the previous generation of socially and intellectually ambitious women, Berlin now boasted its own popular salons. With their emphasis on emotions, intuition, and fantasy, all traits perceived as primarily female, the literary movements Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Romanticism women a chance to grow into an active and integral part of the literary society. Marcus Herz, the husband of the first Berlin salon hostess Henriette Herz, famously said once when asked about a poem from Goethe, “Go to my wife; she knows the art of how to explain nonsense.” … in their early 1800s version, the literary gatherings contrasted so sharlpy with convention that they had an almost revolutionary character and thus attracted significant attention.”

p. 101 “Clausewitz’s conclusion about what constituted an exceptional human being ran in the opposite direction of the romanticist notion of Kraftmensch: “Therefore we would argue that a strong character is one that will not be unbalanced by the most powerful emotions.”

p. 222

“The official obituary in Berlin’s Statszeitung on November 22, anonymously published but in all probability written by their close friend Groben, presented a long account of Clausewitz’s achievements as the soldier’s soldier, fighting since boyhood and then participating “in that colossal battle at the gates of Moscow” [Borodino}; as a talented staff officer “at the side of the greatest commanders”; and as an influential instructor in military theory for young officers. Marie must have been intimately involved in the creation of this text not only because of her close relationship with Groben but also because the last passage hinted towards the manusceript of On War and her intention to publish it soon… bringing forward his achievements and then emphasising the groundbreaking characters of his general theory on war, would be Marie’s way of dealing with the challenges ahead.”

p. 224 “Despite relying on her brother Fritz in the beginning, and later involving in the process two close friends, Franz August O’Etzel and Carl von Groben, Marie Kept … tight control over the manuscript of On War. … ultimately presided over and carried out the editing process.”

p. 226 Facing just the beginning of such controveries in 1834 [over the relative power of military and political decisionmaking] Marie indeed encourgaed critical examination of the text, but she emphasized that such endeavours should not aim at a plain rejection but should search through vidorous debate to “convey the truth,,, that was the author’s goal above all… Just like the man she loved and supported for three decades, she embraced and upheld the descriptive character of his theory. But in doing so, Marie actually went one step further than Carl. He argued that the treatise should help understand war but not prescribe how to win one. … Marie suggested that particularly the unfinished character of the work, with all its deficiencies and conflicting ideas, should provoke debate through which an understanding of the complex phenomenon of war would emerge.”

p. 227 In early 1832, Maries assumed the new position … chief lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta, the king’s daughter-in-law. The new post guaranteed her financial security, enormous social visibility, and tasks she enjoyed but which also put great strain on her time and energy … p. 228 In the “Preface” of On War Marie actually due attention to her position by describing the “new and valued task” of caring for and educating the little Prince Freidrich Wilhelm, Augusta’s son and later Emperor Fredirich III…. enjoyed her own independent rank at the court that was higher than all other ladies (ranked after the titles of either their husbands or fathers) and it put Marie right after the members of the princely family she served.”

p. 229 “Augusta was a well-educated, energgetic and open-minded woman, interested in fine arts and most of all politics (during the tumultuous days of 1848, the liberal faction actually considered the possibility of installing her on the throne as her son’s regent.)”

p. 232 From the beginning, Marie envisaged On War as a text to be read and debated well beyond the professional military audience… sent copies to members of the royal family … the poet and sloniere Sophie von Schwerin received one and praised Clausewitz’s clear language and ideas illuminating the complexities of war and politics.”

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Books History Politics

Islanders and The Fishers of Men

February 13, 2024 – 7:35 pm

By Yevgeby Zamyatin, translated by Sophie Fuller and Julian Sacchi

from the introduction
p. 10 “Zamyatin saw the world in terms of an eternal struggle between forces of energy and forces of entropy, found in the established and dogmatic. Entropy lulled man into a dangerous complacency. What foundt against entropy was revolution and heretical thought, the energy of an unquenchable life force…. The regulated, restricted life of the respectable English middle classes seemed to Zamyatin to be a perfect example of the horrors of entropy. He depicts a world where everything has its correct place, where the vases displayed in every window on one side of the street are blue and on the other freen. It is a world in which Reverend Dewley plans a set of timetables detailing his every movement. Reverend Dewley dreams of a time when the government will adopt his ideas and everyone will live by time table. This is, of course, exactly what has happened in One State – Zamyatin’s future society in We/ Almost every hour is ruled by the Table of Hourly Commandments… He believed that literature could only be kept alive by constant innovation and revolution. His work is full of imagery and symbolism. Characters are reduced to a pair of worm-like lips or a glittering pince-nez. The lumbering Campbell is a lorry and the rigid Mr Draggs a little iron monument.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Women on the Margins: Three 17th-century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis

January 23, 2024 – 8:10 pm

Jewish merchant woman in Hamburg, Glikl Bas Judah Leib
p. 19 Glikl began to write the book of her life “with an aching heart” after the death of her husnand Haim “to help against the melancholy thoughts which came … during many sleepless nights.”… Hers is the first autobiography from a Jewish woman that we know of … But Glikl never described herself as doing something odd or new, and, indeed, recent scholarship is showing that autobiographies – full or in fragment – were composed by early modern Jews more often than has previously been believed.”

p. 20 Jewish life history was fostered expecially by the centuries-old “ethical will”, an exposition of moral lessons and personal wisdom passed on to one’s children along with instructions for one’s burial and the disposal of ones goods.”

p. 21 “For the Christians, the major model was still Augustine’s confession with a definitive conversion. We see it in the widely read Latin autobiography of Anna Maria van Schurman, Eukleria, published in 1673 in Altona… tells how Schurman renounced worldly fame and the scholarship in languages and secualr literature that she had begun in her native Utrechy and how she embraced a life of humility and religious fellowship with the Labadist sectaries, just then inhabiting Altona. (They were changing their money with the Jews; Glikl and Anna Maria may have passed each other on the street.) A variation on the model is the Leben of the Pietist visionary Johanna Eleonora von Merlau Peterson, published in 1719 when she was 75… describes not a single conversion experience but rather a set of tests, all of which she passed with God’s help”.

Marie Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation
p. 64 “one of the two women who hounded the first Ursuline convent and school for girls in North America p. 65 “femme forte, a classical and biblical image used by both the literary feminists of 17th-century France, and by the religious, “a femme forte such as Solomon depicted,” her Ursuline sisters said of her after she died.”

p. 65 “born in 1599 in Tours … came from a modest family … father was at best only a ‘merchant baker,’ and it was a step up when he arranged to marry one daughter to a schoolteacher, another to a busy wagoner, and Marie to a silkmaker – a member of the city’s most important industry. … as a teenager she had thought wistfully of the local Benedictine nunnery of Beaumont, where one of her mother’s distant kin was abbess. In fact, that ancient and noble convent would have been unlikely to receive a baker’s daugher as a novice, even if her parents had agreed to a religious vocation”.

p. 128 “As women in Europe, like Maries, expanded their religious voice … so it may be that women in the American woodlands were expanding their voice in religious culture while the men were expanding their political oratory. Conceivably, the role of Amerindian women in dream analysis and soothsaying was not a timeless one, but a response to political changes that began in the 15th-century and were intensified by the arrival of Europeans. Then the women converts that people MArie’s letters, the Hospital records, and the Jesuit Relations – women praying, preaching and teaching – would be an energetic Christian variant on a process also at work in the religion of the okis and the Manitou.

Maria Sibylla Merian

p. 154 “Merian’s … subject was a set of events ,,, and to represent them properly meant crossing the line between orders and putting the plant and animal kingdoms in the same picture. Yet even while lacking the logic of classiciation, her sequence was not “tumultuous”. Emerging, from the sensibility of two artists, Merian and her publisher-husband Graff, the books moved the reader’s eye through the transformations by a visually striking and pleasurable path. The “method” of the Raupen – highly particular pictures and accounts strung together by an aesthetic link – had scientific importance quite apart from the new species contained on its pages. It made the little-studied process of metamorphosis easy to visualize and remember, and insisted on nature’s connections, a long-term contribution. It also fractured older classification systems by its particularism and surprising mixtures, and so cleared the ground for those like Swammerdam who were proposing a replacement.”

p. 155 “Merian was a pioneer, crossing boundaries of education and gender to aquire learning on insects and nurturing daughters as she observed, painted and wrote. Her focus on breeding, habitat and metamorphosis fits nicely with the domestic practice of a 17th-century mother and housewife. We have here not a female mind uneasy with amnalysis or timelessly connected to the organic … but a woman perched for scientific enterpirse on a creative margin – for her a buzzing ecosystem – between domestic workshop and learned academy.”

p. 186 In the Metamorphosis, the Amerindian women themselves identify the abortifacient to Maria Sibylla Meriam: the peacock flower, whose seeds can also speed delivery. Here is a public sharing of the ‘secrets of women’ reported with some symoathy by a Eruopean in whose world abortions were illegal and sinful… (Merian may well have spaced her own children, born in 1668 and 1678, by some form of birth control such as coitus interruptus, but probably not by anortion.) As for her statement that the African slave women did not have children, it is hyperbole, buty it lends support to those historians who explain the low fertility among the slaces as being, in at least small party, a matter of the women’s choice.”

p. 198 “She is 62 years old, but still very lively … and hardworking, a very courteous woman.” Thus Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, a learned young scholar from Merian’s birthplace, recorded in his notes in 1711 after visiting the artist-naturalist and buying her books and watercolors. She was now one of the international figures of Amsterdam, a person one had to meet, the way one had to attend Frederick Ruysch’s anatomy lectures, see Nicolas Witsen’s collection, and view the great maps in the Town Hall.”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled

January 10, 2024 – 2:33 pm

p. 90 Burke’s prosecution of Hastings was not the anti-imperial stance that some later took it to be. Burke was an advocate of empire his whole life. The loss of Britain’s 13 American colonies in the previous decade had appalled him; he believed they had been lost due to poor management. When Burke heard of similar forms of minmanagement in British India, he leaped to curtail them, insisting that Hastings and “sulliedS and “dishonoured” Britain’s name… Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne attended Hastings’ trail at a particularly interestiung stage. Just one week earlier, on 9 April 1794, Lord Cornwallis, Hasting’s successor in India, had refuted in his testimony all of Burke’s charges, not only defending Hastings but also announcing that Britain’s name was now beloved by Indians. Burke’s case never really recovered. The House of Lords at length aquitted Hastings in favour of Prime Minister William Pitt’s ruling faction.

Although Hunter was now formally responsible for the Wangal visitors, Phillip seems to have been the driver behind their attendance at the trial. Phillip probably sided with the government’s defence of Hastings; as we’ve seen, he showed deep loyalty to Pitt’s increasingly reactionary government Benelong and Temmerrawanne could have visited the trial at any point during the previous year but only now it was turning in Pitt’s favour did they do so. As earlier events will show, Phillip was keen to demonstrate to the Indigenous guests the operation of British power at its most decisive, irrestitible and legally rationalised

p. 104-6 The most remarkable outing for Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne in October was to the Parkinson Museum in London’s Blackfriars rotunda. … Phillip probably accompanied them, knowing that Banks had deposited in the museum some of the things he’d been sending back from NSW. He may have been anxious to see eaxactly which things they were…. a teenaged medical student called Robert Jameson who happened to be visiting at the same time… He noted in his diary”… They seemed to affect a kind of cheerfulness which was far from being real. Was it the taxidermy that worried Bennelong? He had seen British officers pack off the skins of local fauna to Berewal for years,but only in slated form, not engorged with cotton and wire… Possibly it was the black club that disturned. The Yiyura believed that some objjects were imbued with special powers and could only beond to and be seen by certain people… There is a third reason… The eventual catalogue of sale indicated that the collection also contained human remains. IT listed six human foetuses, two human hands, two human skulls, an arm, a tonghue and an ear. Given the Yiyura’s known aversion to the uncovered dead body, these items alone would have turned the visitors’ stomachs. If Bennelong and Temmerrawanne suspected that these remains came from their own people, they would have felt more than wretched. .. Researcher Matthew Fishburn has recently argued that Phillip brough at least 3 Aboriginal skulls to Britain on his voyage home… in August 1793, just before this visit to the museum, Banks wrote to two of his peers in Europe that he was relived at long last to send to each of them a “Cranium of a male native of New Holand”… Fishburn is concinved that a third skulls went to the London-based anatomist John Hunter … were there more skulls… if so, they would also have gone to Banks, that powerful adviser to government … In turn, he may have deposited them in the Parkinson Museum for the public’s so-called edification.”.. the British practice of collecting human heads was not, even at the time, uncontroversial. Banks and Parkinson were on one end of an ethical spectrum; both had heard contemporaries tell them directly that the practice was in fact “the greatest of crimes”.

p. 109 “In September 1793 when Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne took the initiative to perform a song at the Mayfair residence. The only evidence we have of this recital is a single sheet of music recording the notes and words of the men’s song. They were written down by the Welsh folklorist Edward Jones… also a musician in the royal household.”

p. 112 “Phillip… was a diligent student of Britain’s history of interaction with Indigenous people and knew that since the 1600s colonial officials had been bringing Indigenous envoys from elsewhere to Briatin … the aim was to forge formal alliances with peoples who might otherwise side with Britain’s imperial competitors, such as France … suggests he thought Bennelong might serve one day, too, as a negotiator for a treaty. The question was by no means resolved for Phillip in 1793, depite many then and later thinking that it was. Philip knew from Britain’s prior experiences that treaties had to be offered to peoples who showed signs of land cultivation, or of permanent construction, or fo sustained social reason… Phillip hadn’t yet figures out that in the absence of European competition for New South Wales, those same bosses would now never be challenged on the issue.”

p. 116 Bennelong never did meet King George III. Without strong backing from the Home Affairs Office that administered the colonies, Phillip failed to secure the meeting he’d always assumed would happen.. This failure may have felt minor at the time, especially for a governor who was clearly mobing on from his colonial experience… encapsulated a momentous shift in British imperial policy … without direct threats from fellow Europeans – and also with a fresh determination to regaim all that had been lost in the American Revolution – it could set a new legal precedent regarding prior occupants of the lands it desired.”

p. 142-3 The Yiyura’s mostly intermixed world meant that all the connections Bennelong forced with the British in these years were enacted with or at least beside Indigenous women. Conversely, Britain’s custom of deparate gender sphere meant that when Phillip attempted to engage with the Yiyura he was surrounded almost entirely by men. True, there were fewer women in Phillip’s colony than men – averaging overall around 20% – but none of them exercised much power compared to men, so featured even less than might be expected… Bennelong’s wife Barangaroo died- “David Collins observed many of the events related to her death as Bennelong’s invited guest .. Bennelong had decided not to bury his wife, as was the common custom, but instead to cremate her – an honour someimtes awarded to more senior people. He invited Phillip and the surgeon John White, as well as Collins, to witness the occasion. … The next day , the same three prominent colonists were brought back to the pyre to watch Bennelong rake Barangaroo’s ashes together. Bennelong clearly wanted them to learn something about the Yiyura through this ritual, perhaps compassion. And Collins, for one, was indeed moved by the cermony, describing how Bennelong “proeced us in a sort of solemn silence, speaking to no one until he had paid Ba-rang-a-roo the last duties of a husband”… The most pressing problem for Bennelong now was how to manage his baby girl, Dilboong. The infent was still nursing. Bennelong raised the problem directly with Phillip, suggesting that he find a wetnurse for her among the convict women. No doubt bennelong could have found one among the Yiyura, which makes his act of reaching across the racial barrier significant…. We don’t know if Phillip secured… What we know more conclusively is that Phillip agreed to be the Yiyura equivalent of a British godfather to Dilboong… Bennelong attempted to cement even further the non-violent connections between peoples at the harbour. But before year’s end, Dilboon… was dead.”(1791)

p/. 157 “Phillip’s spearing in September 1790 … commentators on Bennelong … entertain the idea that rather than a random act, the spearing was the outcome of a plan by Bennelong himself. They suggest that he orchestrated it as an elaborate paycak, either for his own brutal kidnapping by Phillip in 1789 or for general incursions into Yiyura life over the three years prior. They go on to argue that this attack was why the detente could then proceed, because the slate had been wiped clean for Phillip and Bennelong.”

p. 163 – arrival of second fleet”Phillip … felt compelled to explain to the new Home Affairs Minister William Grenville that this was what happened when state-run empires contracted out their tasks to unscrupulous companies … “it was occasioned by the contractors having crowded too many on board those ships, and from their being too confined during the passage.”

p. 212 Phillip spied in pre-revolutionary France on two separate occasions. In 1786 he was paid £160 to travel to the Med town of Hyeres, close to the naval port of Toulon. This wsa a follow-up mission. A year earlier, he’d been paid £150 to travel directly to Toulon to investigate the state of French maritime rearnmament. Both times he was an employee of Evan Nepean, the under-secretary to Lord Sydney at Home Affairs.”

p. 218 Captain Cook’s Arrival “there is evidence that the observing Gweagal understood the vessel to be at least modelled on their own kind of watercraft, just in outsized proportions. As current knowledge-holder Uncle Shayne Williams discusses, the local population fomr all the way south in Dharawal Country sent smoke signals and used message sticks to convey news of the boatt’s passage; they were warning of strange people in strange vessels; they were not panicking about inexplicable spirits in fantastical creatures …. a long and powerful tradition in Western history-writing which assumed that all Indigenous people understood encounters through mythology… What Bennelong the child may instead have heard in the various tellings of Cook’s landing in 1770 was the following: On the last day, the massive nuwi sailed off up the coast, taking its 80-odd men with it. The Yiyura who watched it depart probably felt less a sense of peril or impending change and more an uneasiness about rituals undone or conventions flouted. No formal welcome had been acknowledged; so no meaningful engagement had occurrred. Materially, they had gained a swag of trinkers which did not appear to have any perceivable use… What angered the Gweagal, though, was the crew’s giant haul of fish and rays.”

p. 228 “Most of the women’s childcare responsibilities went unnoticed by the British. All did, however, remark on the women’s guiadnace of the practice that initiated female babies into girlhood. This involved tying a kangaroo sinew around the bottom joint of the baby’s lefthand little finger. After a few days of interrupted blood ciorculation, the digit shrivelled and fell off. To a man, the colonists were aghast at this procedure and most never came to any understanding of why it was gone… But all societies enact rituals to mark growth and belonging. In the colonists’ society these included circumcision, corset-drawingk trouser-lengthening and beard-trimming.”

p/ Given Phillip’s later certainty that his family coat-of-arms was the tri-camel crest of Claude-Ambrouse Philippe, Jacon could convincingly have been a descendant of Hugenot refugees wgho had once fled Catholic France to a German-speaking town and then fled again to an even staunched Protestant state. Britain experienced a particularly large influx of Germanic Protestant refugees in 1709. The British government, keen to poppulate its new territories in North America, had advertised its commitment to settling any loyal Protestant in the New World. All the same, it was not prepared for the 13,000 or so refugees who consequently flooded into London. British officials managed to send only half that number to their colonial sites; the rest stayed in London.”

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Books Environmental politics Feminism History Science Women's history

Notes from Meeting with Moths

November 29, 2023 – 8:00 pm

p. 34-6 “The Six-spot Burnet is Britain’s most widespread burnet moth … Their bodies are packed with poisons that deter even the hungriest of predators. These poisons are accumulated by the caterpillars… munch on leaves of trefoils, they not only get the essential nutrients for growing, they also swallow the chemicals, in this case cyanides, which the plant produces to protect itself. The caterpillars themselves have evolved ways to deal with the plant’s poisons… cunningly store the dangerous chemicals in small pounches just under the skin. This prevents the toxins from interfering with their own body functioning and also allows them to be exuded through the skin as foul-tasting droplets for any predator follish enough to investigate too closely… As adults, females use cyanides as part of their alluring perfume to help attract males, and mating males transfer varying amounts to the female in little packages with their sperm. A toxic male is the most attractive and desirable.”

p. 54 “In 29021, Butterfly Conservation estimated that the work undertaken by volunteers to protect both butterflies and moths, would cost £18 million if valued commercially.”

p. 76 Family of micromoths known as Tineidae. … most feed on organic waste… recycling nutrients back into the environment. Some… specialise in digesting the protein found in animal hair, skin, feathers, claws and horns. As they nibble, they slowly do their bit to break the tough material down … Two species have become rather well know… The Webbing Clothes Moth and the Case-making Clothes Moth are problem pests worldwide… in the dark corners of warm houses they will happily breed all year round…. each female will lay about 50 tiny eggs on suitable substrates, which in turn hatch into the fabric-destroying caterpillers.”

p. 86 Herald (Scoliopteryn libatrix) emerging … “a race against time for the moth, for if the wings are not given the space they need, they might dry in a stunted or twisted position and effective flight is never realised”

p. 88 Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfut in 1647 to a family of artists and printmakers … in 1679 she published her first book on caterpillars… showing the real-life relationship between insects and plants was groundbreaking. The concept of ecology, the interactions between animals, plants and the environment now so fundamental to our understanding of the natural world, was barely considered at the time.”

p. 90 “the book for which she would later receive most acclaium. Metamorphosis Insectorum was publsihed in 1705 with 60 large copper-plate engravings illustrating the stages of development of many different insects arranged around the plants she had found them on…. Her work was circulated, discussed and admired by the scientific elite of the Royal Society of London. Tsar Peter the Great acquired a large collection of her work. Later George III bought a first edition of her Surinam book for the Royal Collection. Carl Linnaeus used her illustrations to help him describe species of plants and animals. At least nine animals now bear her name. Sadly, after her death some of her findings were disputed. Inaccurate copies of her books had been made and when these errors were spotted her work became widely criticised. Genuine observations such as a large spider capturing a bird were dismissed as fanciful female imagination. Only 150 years later, when the explorer Henry Bates proved her bird-eating spider was accurate, was the record finally set straight; but her books and their legacy were soon forgotten.”

p. 101 In most moth species it is the female that releases a sex pheronome, a behaviour referred to as ‘calling’, when she is ready to mate… Males are usually better endowed than females in the antennal department… a greater surface area and therefore more space for special scent receptors.”

p. 102 “There are reports of some species attracting a suitor from over 10 km away”

p. 113 “The very first moths, flying around 200 million years ago, had chewing moutparts and probably fed on fern spores and pollen from primitive conifers in their prehistoric swampland homes. To keep hydrated they might have sipped on dew .. and it is thought this gradiually led to the development of more specialised sucking moutnparts to better deal with these food sources. Once flowering plants made an appearance… things started to change more rapidly… There are still tiny moths that eat fern spores and pollen grains, using a special cavity in the mouth to process these granular foostuffs, But most others have moved on, with the evolution of a long tubular moutnpart called the proboscis”

p. 135 “Moths with ears were flying around their prehistoric worlds at least 28 million years before echolocating bats were on the scene … must once have been used for something other than bat avoidance, probably to hear other approaching predators but perhaps also for communicating with each other”.

p. 144 “Parasitoids… are a crucial part of ecosystems and have an important role in regulating the size of moth populations without eliminating them… reghular fluctuation of moth numbers over the course of years, tracked by a fluctuation in abundance of its parasitoids.”

p. 170 “migrating moths are naive; they’ve never done the journey before and will never do it again… they rely entirely on instinct to know when and where to go. Environmental cues of temperature, other weather patterns and day length interact with the moths’ genetics to make this work.”

p. 185 The most extreme cold conditions, as low as minus 70C, are endured by the Arctic Wolly Bear moth… most northerly breeding species of moth, eking out a remarkable life in the icy realms of Canada and Greenland… termperatures only become warm enough for activity on sunny afternoons in midsummer, so it takes on average seven years, a severely punctuated seven years, for the caterpillar to complete its development.”

p. 199 Alice Blanche Balfour (1850-1936) grew up with a love of natural history… her most significant finds happened during her 60s and 70s… bequathed her impressive collection of pinned specimens, notebooks and equipment to the National Museum of Scotland.”

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