Re: Banana helps Sleep Apnea Patients (keyboard damage alert)
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2009 4:34 pm
NY Times book review that captures the spirit of my points above
http://www.times.com/books/98/12/06/spe ... fatal.html
DSM
#2 - I see they require a login (the rogues, they'd make good Aussies) Here is an excerpt
ROGUES' CONTINENT
Date: January 25, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 2; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Thomas Keneally: Thomas Keneally is an Australian whose novels include ''A Family Madness'' and ''The Playmaker,'' which will be published in the fall.
Lead: LEAD: THE FATAL SHORE By Robert Hughes. Illustrated. 688 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
Text:
THE FATAL SHORE By Robert Hughes. Illustrated. 688 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
IT is common for Americans to say of Australians - if they say anything about them at all -that they are people of a frontier experience similar to their own and therefore, at the least, cousins. The Australians themselves know that the kinship and the difference are more subtle than that, but generally keep their counsel.
The largest difference between both nations, as conveyed by Robert Hughes in ''The Fatal Shore,'' an authoritative and engrossing record, is that in America the European Adam and Eve arrived by choice. They were redeemed by their arrival and their tread sanctified the earth. In the Australian case, however, the choice of landfall had been made by the Home Secretary of Britain. Adam and Eve arrived involuntarily and in chains. Their crimes were written on their faces, and they cursed the fatal shore.
There was a time, partly encompassing Mr. Hughes's Australian childhood, when Australians desiring respectability denied that the convict system had in any ultimate way marked the complicated nation Australia eventually became. But Mr. Hughes argues that 80 years of convictism was too large a historic fact not to have left, both in society and in the soul of the individual, a range of peculiar strengths, fallibilities and crotchets. Mr. Hughes concludes that the convict system in Continued on page 24 Australia was a massive but botched act of British sublimation. As for Australians, ''The 'convict past,' '' he writes, ''made [ them ] cynical about Authority; or else it made them conformists. As so many Australians are conformist skeptics, the 'convict legacy' is seen to be all the more pervasive.''
The first small convict flotilla of 11 ships found its way into Sydney Harbor in the humid summer (January in those parts) of 1788. America had had an oblique hand both in this first tenuous settlement and in the development of all the other vast Australian outdoor gulags. For the American colonies, which had once taken Britain's prisoners, often assigning them to farmers along the Eastern seaboard, were now independent and refused to receive Britain's exported criminality.
In the British Isles, the 1780's were as subject as the 1980's to the shock of the new. ''For the first time in human history,'' Mr. Hughes writes, ''the machine dictates the term of organic existence to its servants; the body becomes an inferior machine.'' And in the new industrial mills of Britain it was so treated. At Lytton in Derbyshire, one 4-year-old infant laborer worked with ''two hand-vices of a pound weight each, more or less, . . . screwed to [ his ] ears.'' Traditional trades had been obliterated by the machines. Child prostitution, addiction to gin and epidemic crime characterized the rookeries of Soho and Tottenham Court Road. Displaced country folk mugged travelers along the rural lanes of Devon and Cornwall. THE British Government defended society with stringent criminal legislation. For the stealing of lead from church roofs, sundry acts of poaching, as for more than 60 other crimes, death was the statutory penalty. The gallows dominated the penal landscape. Many death sentences were, however, transmuted to ''transportation,'' or forced exile, for life. Since the Home Office and the Admiralty no longer had a definite place to transport criminals to, the jails overflowed with habitual and small-time criminals - all the pals and molls of the so-called criminal classes. The excess went to the hulks, disused naval vessels moored in all the major ports of Britain and filled up with convicts. The ships served as tiny offshore penal settlements but were not offshore enough to satisfy the Government. The option of sending some of the felonry to New South Wales, the Georgian equivalent of deep space, began to exercise an attraction.
http://www.times.com/books/98/12/06/spe ... fatal.html
DSM
#2 - I see they require a login (the rogues, they'd make good Aussies) Here is an excerpt
ROGUES' CONTINENT
Date: January 25, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 2; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Thomas Keneally: Thomas Keneally is an Australian whose novels include ''A Family Madness'' and ''The Playmaker,'' which will be published in the fall.
Lead: LEAD: THE FATAL SHORE By Robert Hughes. Illustrated. 688 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
Text:
THE FATAL SHORE By Robert Hughes. Illustrated. 688 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
IT is common for Americans to say of Australians - if they say anything about them at all -that they are people of a frontier experience similar to their own and therefore, at the least, cousins. The Australians themselves know that the kinship and the difference are more subtle than that, but generally keep their counsel.
The largest difference between both nations, as conveyed by Robert Hughes in ''The Fatal Shore,'' an authoritative and engrossing record, is that in America the European Adam and Eve arrived by choice. They were redeemed by their arrival and their tread sanctified the earth. In the Australian case, however, the choice of landfall had been made by the Home Secretary of Britain. Adam and Eve arrived involuntarily and in chains. Their crimes were written on their faces, and they cursed the fatal shore.
There was a time, partly encompassing Mr. Hughes's Australian childhood, when Australians desiring respectability denied that the convict system had in any ultimate way marked the complicated nation Australia eventually became. But Mr. Hughes argues that 80 years of convictism was too large a historic fact not to have left, both in society and in the soul of the individual, a range of peculiar strengths, fallibilities and crotchets. Mr. Hughes concludes that the convict system in Continued on page 24 Australia was a massive but botched act of British sublimation. As for Australians, ''The 'convict past,' '' he writes, ''made [ them ] cynical about Authority; or else it made them conformists. As so many Australians are conformist skeptics, the 'convict legacy' is seen to be all the more pervasive.''
The first small convict flotilla of 11 ships found its way into Sydney Harbor in the humid summer (January in those parts) of 1788. America had had an oblique hand both in this first tenuous settlement and in the development of all the other vast Australian outdoor gulags. For the American colonies, which had once taken Britain's prisoners, often assigning them to farmers along the Eastern seaboard, were now independent and refused to receive Britain's exported criminality.
In the British Isles, the 1780's were as subject as the 1980's to the shock of the new. ''For the first time in human history,'' Mr. Hughes writes, ''the machine dictates the term of organic existence to its servants; the body becomes an inferior machine.'' And in the new industrial mills of Britain it was so treated. At Lytton in Derbyshire, one 4-year-old infant laborer worked with ''two hand-vices of a pound weight each, more or less, . . . screwed to [ his ] ears.'' Traditional trades had been obliterated by the machines. Child prostitution, addiction to gin and epidemic crime characterized the rookeries of Soho and Tottenham Court Road. Displaced country folk mugged travelers along the rural lanes of Devon and Cornwall. THE British Government defended society with stringent criminal legislation. For the stealing of lead from church roofs, sundry acts of poaching, as for more than 60 other crimes, death was the statutory penalty. The gallows dominated the penal landscape. Many death sentences were, however, transmuted to ''transportation,'' or forced exile, for life. Since the Home Office and the Admiralty no longer had a definite place to transport criminals to, the jails overflowed with habitual and small-time criminals - all the pals and molls of the so-called criminal classes. The excess went to the hulks, disused naval vessels moored in all the major ports of Britain and filled up with convicts. The ships served as tiny offshore penal settlements but were not offshore enough to satisfy the Government. The option of sending some of the felonry to New South Wales, the Georgian equivalent of deep space, began to exercise an attraction.
