The Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogs for 2010 have been announced at the American Historical Association Annual Conference held in Boston.
I was pleased to see that the award for best post went to Mike Dash for his "The Emperor's Electric Chair,". This post provided the base for a teaser post on this blog. I said at the time that it was a remarkably good post.
Do have a browse of all the winners.
I didn't give an end-day update on Toowoomba flash flood because by then the normal media coverage was so intense. I maybe should have, because that post attracted a lot of hits.
End of the summer break today, so I don't have time for a major post, just a few comments on things I noticed in the context of the Queensland floods.
As you might expect, the heavy rain and floods affected the telephone system. On some reports, mobile coverage in parts of Brisbane seems to collapsed quite early under the combination of rain and traffic pressures. Loss of power affected ability to communicate.
These things aren't new. However, it does raise the issue of increased vulnerability associated with technology based systems.
Border myopia was alive and well. We are dealing with a weather system that extended from north of Rockhampton as far south as the Macleay Valley. The coverage and maps essentially stopped at the border, with Northern NSW, the broader New England, dealt with as an add-on. I found this quite annoying.
Coverage was remarkably patchy, even scatter-gun. I found is hard to get a proper picture of just what was happening as it applied to individual centres or even areas. You had to listen all the time just to pick up passing references that then left things hanging up in the air.
I know the geography quite well, but even so I struggled to fit things together.
Flood mitigation is already back on the agenda. Problems with the Wivenhoe Dam show upsides and downsides that are sure to generate a lot of discussion.
Finally, and especially interesting from my viewpoint, were the pattern of overall responses, including discussions generated on Australian resilience. I just not this one at the moment.
This post may seem a bit odd when the present big story is the floods rolling down towards Ipswich and Brisbane, but I just wanted to get it all down.
I have written a number of posts on Australian responses to natural disasters. I will link those in in a later posts.
My thanks to KVD for this one in a comment on Toowoomba flash flood, KVD kindly referred me to an article in the New York Times by Brisbane writer Nick Earls dealing with Australian responses to the Queensland floods. It was, I thought, a rather nice piece.
Given the headline Staying Afloat Down Under, Nick's piece captures something of the way Australians do, and would like to be seen as, responding to things like natural disasters. The piece was written before the latest tragedy. However, this does not affect the message.
Just last Friday in Australia's wet spell I reported that some people were asking if we were about to see a repeat of the 1955 floods. This was actually a New Englan
The rain and flood affected area is huge, stretching from Rockhampton in Central Queensland more than a 1,000 kilometres south to the Bellinger River Valley in Northern New South Wales, with flooding so far mainly concentrated in Queensland.
Part of the problem for the authorities is that there has been flood event after flood event.
Yesterday, a two metre high wall of water swept though the CBD of the Darling Downs city of Toowoomba.Toowoomba sits atop the Great Dividing Range. The flash flood lasted ten minutes. The first shot from the Courier Mail flood photo gallery shows the force of the water.
People scrabbled to sa
You will find fuller coverage here.
The sheer geographic scale of these floods is difficult to comprehend. Last night Brisbane itself was on full flood alert with fears that the city could experience a full scale flood.
As I write, the weather forecasts suggest some easing of the rain, although further heavy falls are possible.
The economic costs of the floods are already very high, reaching $A5-6 billion. The problem remains that with saturated catchments, further rain quickly translates to rising river levels.
In my earlier post, I included the medium term forecasts from the Bureau of Metrology covering the period to end March. These suggest a 60-75% probability over that period for above average rains across North Eastern NSW and Southern Queensland. This means that further floods are possible.
Postscript
Neil has put up a companion post, Queensland floods. Listening to the radio as I drove back from the city this morning, the news just seemed to get worse by the minute. It's not just Toowoomba, but the small communities at the base of the range as well that have been affected. The death toll from this one event has risen to eight, the number missing to some seventy, although hopefully many of these will be found.
I won't attempt to live blog developments, but will give a summary update tonight.
Last night I watched the new SBS program, the Immigration Nation: the secret history of us. I almost didn't. The promo put me off completely. This, it seemed to me, was going to be preaching, not history, another unbalanced perpetration of what have become modern myths. I also thought that it was potentially dangerous.
I did watch the first episode and then browsed the supporting material. You will find the web site here.
I am glad that I did. This is ambitious well made TV. Based only on the first episode and current web material, it is somewhat unbalanced, partisan, Looking at comment responses, it has divided viewer opinion in the expected way; it may well re-ignite the history wars. However, it also draws out some of complexities involved, presenting Australian history in a way that will be new to many Australians. looking at it just as TV, I found it quite fascinating.
I see little point in critiquing the program a this point. Rather, I thought that I should provide a few background comments, pointing to my own writings. In doing so, my aim is simply to provide a deeper context for those who are interested.
The Chinese in Australia
The Chinese were Australia's first large non-Aboriginal, non-European migrant group. They did not just arrive with the gold rushes as many Australian's believe. The NSW colony was on the main shipping route for the China tea trade. With the ending of transportation, there were labour shortages in the bush. Employers looked at India and China as possible sources of migrants, generating the first ethnically linked migration discussions.
The Chinese in New England 1848-1853 provides a short introduction to this early period.
The gold rushes brought large numbers of Chinese to Australia. By 1861, 38,258 people, or 3.3 per cent of the Australian population, had been born in China. This rapid increase caused tensions and resentments among the European population. There was intermittent violence, including the famous Lambing Flat (now Young) riots of 1861.
The pressure of public opinion against the Chinese caused the New South Wales Government to pass the Chinese Immigration Restriction and Regulation Act in 1861 to restrict the numbers of Chinese in the colony. Queensland introduced restrictions in 1877 and Western Australia followed suit in 1886. Anti-Chinese leagues appeared and there was a range of explicit discrimination.
For those who are interested, End Week Reflections - Quong Tart and the Chinese in Australia provides a snap shot of the second half of the nineteenth century focused on one leading Australian Chinese figure.
Chinese emigration was not limited to Australia, nor were the responses among the Australian colonies necessarily different from responses in other places. To many, the Chinese were seen as a direct economic threat.
The point is that White Australia did not just emerge in 1901. Its roots were earlier.
Attitudes to Race and Ethnicity
Reading the official yearbooks after 1901 can be uncomfortable because of their explicit discussion of racial issues. However, we have to be very careful in understanding that discussion.
Ethnic, cultural or racial prejudices exist in all societies. We can see this in nineteenth century Japanese and Chinese views of the Europeans; we can see this in some Asian attitudes to Australia; we can see this in changing US attitudes to its Negro population; we can see it in attitudes to the Jews in multiple countries; we can see it in the ethnic cleansing that took place in the Balkans; the list goes on.
So where does Australia fit in this mix? Were there distinctive features in Australia? And why, if racism was so deeply entrenched in Australia, did White Australia fall so quickly? How come we ended up with a multi-ethnic society?
In some ways, Charles Darwin has a lot to answer for. His idea of competition among the species combined with evolving ideas about people and races to create social darwinism and eugenics. I explored a little of this in Sunday Essay - Race, Eugenics and the views of J H Curle.
The idea of competition and natural selection among races and and peoples (the terms were often used interchangeably) for survival and dominance were deeply held. Curle's own pessimism expressed in his 1937 book lay in his doubts about the ability of the British people to survive; to his mind, the future lay with the Chinese.
Australia and Australians shared this type of view. They believed in the superiority of the British race or people, in the emergence of a new people in a Southern land. But could that new people survive?
This fear was deeply embedded. Australia was on the periphery of Empire. To the north lay the hordes of Asia and especially the Chinese and then, later, the Japanese. Notions of the superiority of the British people demonstrated by the power of Empire wrestled with doubts about very survival. In the cruel world of social darwinism, would we survive?
This fear provided the special and unique Australian features. It drove the initial exclusion focus. Then, when circumstances changed, it drove the need to adjust, to move in new directions.
William Morris Hughes and the Japanese
The first SBS program focuses on the role of Australian PM William Morris Hughes in the Versailles' peace settlements at the end of World War One in preventing the inclusion of a racial non-discrimination clause in the League of Nations convention. Hughes was, the program suggests, a dupe of the British and Americans. To my mind, this is a misreading of history along a number of levels.
Part of the problem lies in the current tendency in Australian historiography to want to write in terms of them (the British) and us (the Australians). The world wasn't like that.
Hughes was both an Australian and Imperial political player, quite prepared to intervene in British politics at an electoral level if that suited his interests. Further, he had a number of objectives at Versailles; a key one was to punish Germany, to make the Germans pay the full cost of the war.
Hughes's personal views as well as Australian interests played out at Versailles across a range of spectrums. Of course, those such as Britain's Lloyd George used him to promote their own positions, but this was part of the political process.
There is a rather wonderful cartoon by David Low, I couldn't find a link, that shows Hughes banging the table at Versailles while those around him look bemused. Yet the point is that Hughes was no mere cipher, nor was the damage done limited to the racial-non inclusion clause. Hughes was a power in his own right. Arguably, his role in helping place punitive sanctions on Germany was far more important in creating World War Two than his objections to the racial non-discrimination clause.
All this said, the SBS program does show Hughes, dupe or not, pursuing an independent line defending what he saw as the Australian interest. This wasn't the first time that Australia or the Australian colonies had tried to force the Imperial or Commonwealth hand. Pacific Perspective - Australia in the Pacific describes earlier action by Queensland to force the annexation of Papua. Again, defence concerns were an issue.
The SBS program also shows how Australian actions could have side-effects. The impact of the non-exclusion clause on the Japanese is little known in Australia. However, here the program has so far at least missed an important local sub-text.
New England Story - The life and death of the mysterious Harry Freame provides a glimpse into the life of one of Australia's more colourful characters. The story ends with Freame's role as an Australian spy in Japan just before the Second World War and his subsequent death. There I said in part:
In my post Ethnicity, ideology and the sometimes slippery concept of Australian "independence" - Part One: "Independence", I spoke of the evolution of Australian independence. I also mentioned the role that Billie Hughes had played at the end of the First World War for both better and especially worse. One of my points in the post was that the simple us (Australia)/them (London) model that seemed to be so popular today acted to conceal the reality and complexity of the Australian position.
The complexity of the Australia-Japan relationship in the period leading up to the Second World War is an example.
The adoption of the White Australia policy, in some ways the new Federation's first foreign policy act, created real problems with Japan and also for the Imperial Government wishing to maintain good relations with the Japanese Empire for broader strategic reasons. This included the signing of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in 1902. These Imperial imperatives actually led to some modifications of the policy, exemptions allowing for some types of Japanese entry.
Then during the First World War, Japan played a critical role in keeping shipping lanes open to Australia. There was disappointment on the Japanese side when Hughes at the subsequent peace conference fought to limit Japanese mandates over former German colonies in the Pacific. One can argue that he was right in the case of New Guinea, a Japanese New Guinea would certainly have complicated things later, but scarring was there.
By the early 1930s, Japan was central to Australian life in a way that I, for one, had not realised. Japanese trading companies played a major role in Australian trade, while there were tens of thousands of Japanese living in Australia under various forms of entry arrangements.
The idea that there were tens of thousands of Japanese living in Australia in the 1930s is somewhat alien to the SBS presentation. To understand this, we need to go back a little in time.
In the world of competition and social darwinism, European expansion met empires in China and Japan equally convinced of their own cultural and ethnic rightness. The result was massive cultural shock, for the Europeans had the power to support their own version of rightness. One outcome was modernisation movements in both China and especially Japan.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 in which, for the first time, a European power was defeated by an Asian one, marked a turning point in attitudes. Japan was now a force to be reckoned with.
Relations between the British and Japanese Empires had been generally good, with the British providing intelligence to the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War. These links were strengthened during the First World War. So in arguing as he did at Versailles, Hughes was not being a British patsy, he was actually working against the Imperial interest.
The SBS program draws out the reservations in Australia about Hughes' position, but does not address the practical outcomes. A key one is that Japanese power meant that from the beginning of the White Australia Policy, the Japanese had to be placed in a somewhat special position. That is why there were tens of thousands of Japanese in Australia. By the early 1930s, relationships with Japan had become the second most important element in Australia's evolving foreign policy after the Empire itself.
The establishment of the Australian Legation in Japan, one if not the first independent Australian diplomatic posts outside the Empire itself, was intended to extend Australian reach and to protect our economic and political interests in Japan.
White Australia and Individual Rights
The SBS program uses case studies, individual personal examples, to draw out some of the personal costs of the White Australia Policy. This is a useful technique, one that I use myself.
There is no doubt that Federation and the national application of the White Australia policy imposed personal costs. Our treatment of Australia's quite large Japanese community is an example, one that probably dwarfs any other example in terms of actual numbers. The Australian Government simply classified them all as "seamen", a legal fiction allowing mass deportation.
In all this, we need to keep a sense of perspective.
It is sad but true that most, if not all, Government policies have adverse outcomes for some individuals. it is, I think, equally true that "good" policies can be badly administered. These are the reasons why many of us watch Government like a hawk.
The question of what is good and bad can really only be judged in retrospect. Over the last fifteen years, Australia has probably (I haven't checked the numbers) deported more people than in the rest of the nation's history. Over the last ten years, we have had hundreds of documented cases of wrongful treatment of individuals under our migrations laws. Some of us believe that these things are wrong, others disagree. In the end, history will decide.
Whether the White Australia policy was wrong in principle is a matter of perspective. I would argue, I think, that it was probably a necessary precondition for the later emergence of a multi-ethnic community given the fears and even xenophobia that existed among the Australian population at the time. Had Chinese migration continued, for example, had we ended up with a large Chinese minority group, then I doubt that the country today would be as united or tolerant.
I can adopt this position without condoning the way the policy was administered. My view is that this - the administration - was done in an unnecessarily harsh and unfair fashion.
Changes to the White Australia Policy
I don't yet know how the SBS program will handle the changes that have taken place in Australia's migration policy. This one has been a matter of personal interest to me, so I wrote a series of posts back in 2006 looking at the history of the changes. In date order:
Looking back of those posts as well as later posts, I would argue that the some what dramatic change in Australia's position was due to a combination of things:
Each migrant group experienced prejudice. We will probably see a bit of that in the SBS series. Yet it is still a remarkable transformation.
Conclusion
Today's Australian had some lyrical reviews on the series. This, for example. If Graham Blundell wishes to add to the ethnic slurs from Australia's history he might consider banana (yellow on the outside, white inside) or coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside). Ethnic slurs are not limited to Australia's Anglo population.
There is no doubt that it's very good TV. Whether it's good history is yet to be seen. It's impact on popular opinion is also an open question. I really hope that it adds to a balanced understanding, that it reinforces views on a diverse Australian community that began to erode during the Keating years.
In saying these things I have taken off my historian's hat and am speaking at a purely personal level. Australia has come a long way, and not in the right direction, since the decision of the Fraser Government to accept mass Vietnamese refugees, something that I discussed in New Year celebrations 09 and the 97 Cabinet records.
It is hard to believe today that an Australian Government from only thirty three years ago would be prepared to accept a refugee intake that finally totaled more than 200,000 from one country. It is harder still to believe that that intake was accepted by the Australian people without protest even though public opinion polls actually showed majority opposition.
Postscript
While I was preparing this post, Neil (Ninglun) brought up a useful post. As it happened, I wrote some of the original migration series as part of a set of discussions I was having with him.
Even as I was posting, Neil brought up a second post, Being Australian 7: inclusive multiculturalism Aussie style 2, this one specifically referring to our past discussions. We start from different perspectives, but much of the time reach common ground. That's what dialogue is for, specification of difference, identification of areas of agreement, mutual challenge as to views.
Each year, Club Troppo and On-line Opinion combine to select the best independent blog posts over the year for publication in January by On-line Opinion. In a comments exchange on Persia, Greece & the Delian League I was quite critical of the process followed. Re-reading my initial comment I felt that it was un-balanced because it failed to recognise the work involved.
To my mind, the idea of a mechanism for recognising the best blog writing is very important because it provides peer group recognition, while also exposing particular posts to a broader audience. However, it is also a difficult task. This post explores those difficulties.
Scoping the Problem
I do not know how many Australian blogs there are that publish on a regular basis. Certainly in the thousands. Then there are some off-shore blogs that may be eligible because they focus exclusively on Australian issues.
If we just start with a 1,000 blogs with daily posting, then we are looking at 365,000 posts a year. That's a lot. How, on earth, does one identify possible best posts out of such a big field?
Present Selection Process
To try to manage this problem, Club Troppo and On-line Opinion call for nominations. Other blogs pick the call up. Bloggers can nominate their own posts or be nominated by others. A number of biases are inevitably built into this selection process.
Club Troppo and On-line Opinion appeal to a particular slice of the blog readership. As an example, on the mapping that's been done of the Australian blogosphere, a Club Troppo reader is likely also to read Larvatus Prodeo, John Quiggin or Scepticslawyer.
There are cross-overs into the other side of the political spectrum. For example, Scepticslawyers has a Libertarian thread, while many read Catallaxy Files to gain an alternative view. Nevertheless, the particular readership does introduce a selection bias.
This is compounded by a further factor. While both Club Troppo and On-line opinion have quite large readerships compared to other blogs or independent on-line sources, their share of the overall readership is small. This means that nominations are biased to some degree towards a relatively small, slanted audience.
Memory introduces another bias. With so many posts around, who can remember a precise post from the past? I follow some 100 Australian blogs. I can't remember all my own posts, let alone all those that I have seen! This makes reader selection something of a hit and miss affair. It also makes self-nomination more difficult because this requires trawling back through past posts to find suitable entries.
Those involved in one way or another in the best blog post process are well aware of these issues. The main mechanism used to overcome it are link posts. Examples include Ken Parish's Missing Link, Rafe Champion's new link section on Catallaxy Files, my own blog round-ups.
One problem here, and I am only speaking for myself, is that my primary focus has been on providing a snapshot at a point in time. I have not been specifically interested in identifying posts that may later be suitable for inclusion in the best independent blog posts.
Suitability for Inclusion in On-line Opinion
The blogosphere is both fragmented and complicated.
In addition to the type of blogs that form the current core of the selection process, I now follow history blogs, technology blogs, management blogs, legal blogs, economics blogs, photo blogs, regional blogs. I also follow blogs in multiple countries.
Blogging is interactive. I interact with other blogs, with my own past posts, with my readers. Many of my posts are directly linked to this interactivity. They are full of links. I also write series of posts that are meant to be read together. Increasingly, I use range of visual material.
All this means that the proportion of my posts, or of the posts that I see, that might be suitable for inclusion without significant editing has diminished. I just don't have the time for this.
Lead times
The number of posts selected for inclusion in On-Line Opinion dropped from 40 in January 2008 to 12 in January 2009. So far this January, one post has been published. I don't know what's in the pipeline, but I can't see selected posts getting back to January 2008 numbers.
A key problem here is the late call for nominations. To my mind, the nomination process needs to run over the whole year. It can't start in December.
Conclusion
I said at the start of this post that I was concerned that my initial comment failed to recognise the work involved. I an grateful to Ken Parish and others for the work they have done. However, I feel that it is time that we specifically addressed the question of the best way of recognising and promoting the work of Australia's independent bloggers.
Greek Trip, Day 11, Tuesday 28 September 2010, Delos
This post continues the story of Delos from my last post, Introducing Delos.
Words are fractious things. They carry changing meanings that are often unseen. Take, as an example, the changing use of the words "near east", "middle east" and "far east".
All three are geographic descriptors, defining territory in terms of relative location to Europe. This type of geographically bound thinking is quite common, but it can also mislead. The current use of the term "middle east", for example, is quite new.
I mention this because understanding the next part of the story of Delos requires a shift in thought. Put aside, for a moment, all current geographic descriptors. Think, instead, of a stretch of territory from Egypt in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. This is imperial territory, home to empire after empire in unending succession over millennia. Boundaries and capital cities may have varied, but the boundaries of those empires always fluctuated between the Mediterranean to the Indus.
When I first studied ancient history, I could never understand why the short lived history of Alexander the Great and his empire should have had such a long influence. Geographic myopia, I fear. I thought of Alexander in Greek or European terms, moving from Macedonia into new and apparently unknown territory. In fact, he was asserting personal control over a vast territory already linked together in different ways by history.
T he great river valleys were central to those various empires . They provided the irrigation based agricultural wealth, the peasant populations, that helped support the rulers, the aristocracy, the priests, the bureaucrats, the military.
The problem with empires is that, once built, they have to be maintained. All empires struggle with the dual problem of protecting their borders, while maintaining internal security in the face of sometimes fractious and often ethnically different subject peoples. All empires have also struggled over time with questions of succession of power.
In 552 BC, the biggest powers in the geographic area that we are talking about were the Lydians in the west, the much bigger Median Empire in the east. The Lydians survive today in the phrase as rich as Croesus, a term derived from the fabled wealth of the last Lydian king.
In 553 BC, the Persian prince Cyrus led a rebellion against the last Median king Astyages. While Persian, Cyrus was a grandson of Astyages and was supported by part of the Median aristocracy. By 550 BC Cyrus had emerged victorious; the Persian or Achaemenid Empire replaced the Median kingdom. 
As you can see from the map, this was a seriously big Empire. You can also see how it covers the territory I have just been talking about.
To the Persians, the Greeks were something of a problem, a problem that would lead to major war.
In an earlier post, I spoke of the Dorians and Ionians as two of the major Greek tribes.
King Croesus had incorporated the Ionian cities of Asia Minor into Lydia. Sensing an opportunity in the troubles created by Cyrus's rebellion, Croesus invaded Media. The famous story goes that before doing so, he sought the advice of the oracle at Delphi on what is now the Greek mainland on the likelihood of success. The response was that if he did, a great empire would be destroyed. It was. Croesus lost, and Lydia was incorporated into the Persian Empire!
During the fighting, Cyrus asked the Ionian cities to join him. They refused. When, following his victory, they offered to submit on the same terms and conditions as had governed their relationships with Croesus, Cyrus refused. The Ionian cities were then forcibly incorporated into Persia. However, this left Cyrus with a problem. How should those cities be governed?
As I indicated earlier, these type of problems are common to all empires. The empire cannot survive for long if all authority has to be enforced by purely military means. A way has to be found of governing that extends beyond the purely military.
Lacking local elites or power structures, the Persians chose to install tyrants.
The idea of tyrants, local rulers wielding single power, had been popular among Greek city states as a way of overcoming the division created by factional fights within small communities. However, that idea had now been superceded by newer forms of governance. The tyrants appointed were unpopular. Worse, they drew Persia into the complicated world of Greek city states politics.
In 499 BC, Ionian city states revolted, a rebellion supported by city states outside Ionia. It took the Persians six years to crush the rebellion. Persian Emperor Darius decided to get rid of those pesky Greeks once and for all. The result was warfare on a mass scale.
The following map shows the war theatre.
The war began with Persian successes. In 492, Darius's son-in-law invaded, forcing Thrace back into the empire, while making Macedon a client kingdom.
The following year, Darius sent ambassadors to the Greek cities demanding submission. Many cities complied, but both Athens and Sparta responded by murdering the envoys. In 490, the Persians sent a major amphibious force to invade. The Athenians managed to defeat this at the battle of Marathon.
Darius was now determined to mount a full scale invasion. Preparations began, but were delayed by a major rebellion against Persian rule in Egypt. Darius died and was succeeded by his son Xerxes. Having crushed the Egyptian revolt, Xerxes prepared a huge military force.
The size of the Persian forces has been subject to debate. The suggestion in Herodotus of an army of 2.5 million seems to have been rejected by modern scholars. Even so, the consensus estimate of a force of 200,000 men drawn from across the Empire, a naval force of more than 1,000 ships, is a major invasion.
Planning appears to have been meticulous, with Persian engineers building a pontoon bride across the Hellespont to allow the huge force easier access. In 481, the army finally crossed into what is now Greece. In the end, and despite military successes on land, the Persians lost the war because they could not control the sea. As it had been before and would be later, naval power was critical.
In the last stages of the Greek city state forces turned to the offensive. This included the capture of the city that would become Byzantium, later Constantinople and now Istanbul.
Sparta now wished to withdraw from the war. The loose alliance of city states which had fought against the Persians had been dominated by Sparta and the Peloponnesian league. Now leadership shifted to Athens, the dominant naval power.
In 477 BC, a congress was called on Delos to institute a new alliance to continue the fight against the Persians. According to Thucydides, the official aim of the Delian League was to "avenge the wrongs they suffered by ravaging the territory of the king". This goal was divided into three main efforts; to prepare for future invasion; to seek revenge against Persia; and to organize a means of dividing spoils of war. Members could either offer armed forces or pay a tax to the joint treasury on Delos, with most opting for a tax.
A new building program began on Delos. This photo shows the remains of the treasury.
We now enter a new phase in the turbulent world of Greek politics, for Athen's power and political ruthlessness turned the Delian League into an Athenian Empire. In turn, this lead to the Peloponnesian War.
In symbolic terms, the transfer of the treasury from Delos to Athens in 454 BC marks the final transition point.
What had begun as a cooperative league among a reported 173 city states, was now subject to the needs of Athens and empire. Delos was now, once again, just a religious centre.
The floods I mentioned earlier in the week in Droughts and flooding rains roll-on. There is now discussion 
This photo shows the West Maitland (now Maitland) railway station during a still earlier flood, that of 1930. The 1955 floods were larger.
The very big floods occur when, as now, you get further rain when soil is already moist.
On 5 January, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology released the 2010 annual climate statement. The Australian mean rainfall total for 2010 was 690 mm, well above the long-term average of 465 mm. As a result, 2010 was Australia’s wettest year since 2000 and the third-wettest year on record since recording commenced in 1900.
These are national figures. Australia is a very big country, so you get considerable variations across the country. 2010 was the wettest year on record for the Murray-Darling basin, yet the driest on record for South West Western Australia.
Water held in the Murray-Darling storages has increased from 26% at the start of 2010 to 80% at the start of 2011. Many of the inland dams were built in part for flood mitigation purposes. This has reduced the incidence of big flood events. However, once dams fill, then further rain goes straight to the rivers.
The following chart shows the Bureau of Meteorology latest national rainfall outlook released on 17 December. It suggests that both New England and southern Queensland have a high probability of above average rain. 
Australian PM Julia Gillard argues that the current wet conditions should not prevent discussion or action on Murray-Darling water allocations. I think that she is correct.
During the long drought, I argued that some of the reactions to the drought in the big metropolitan centres in the east were plain silly.
Popular perceptions equated the drought to climate change. Politicians responded with rhetoric, controls and expensive initiatives that confused responses to a long term problem (climate change) with responses to a normal cyclical problem (Australia's droughts and flooding rains).
Now that the flooding rains have arrived in many parts of the country, I suspect that the risk lies in the opposite direction. Just because we now have water does not mean that problems associated with the weather cycle, with conflicts over water use and with climate change have gone away. I think that a bit more analysis, a bit less rhetoric, would benefit us all!
There has been something of a spat recently in the American Anthropological Association over directions. The proximate cause was the deletion of the word science from a long term plan. However, it appears to have re-ignited a divide within anthropology.
In an article reprinted in the Australian Financial Review from the New York Times, Nicholas Wade quotes Peter Perigrine, President of the Society for Anthropological Sciences. Perigrine apparently suggests that the what he sees as an attack on science comes from two influences in anthropology: one is the so-called critical anthropologists who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism that should be done away with; the second the postmodernist critique of the authority of science.
The debate also seems to reflect a division between those such as archaeologists for whom science is central and those concerned with "soft" subjects such as culture or gender who see their role more in terms of overcoming perceived social or moral ills and who often adopt overtly ideological positions. One flash point in the debate has been the use of anthropologists in Afghanistan to support the war effort.
Whether anthropology broadly defined can ever be a science is open to question. However, and like history, anthropologists can and to my mind should apply scientific methods.
The issues raised in the United States are on my mind at the moment because of a post I have been trying to write for New England's History on future directions in my research on New England's Aboriginal peoples. As I wrote, I felt my enthusiasm draining away.
At a purely personal level, I don't like fire-fights and am suspicious of those who adopt overtly ideological positions. At a purely personal level, I think that research integrity demands that you follow the evidence even where you dislike the conclusions. At a purely personal level, I have been burnt by those who dislike my research because it challenges their own pet views and ideological nostrums.
When I first became involved with Australian prehistory all those years ago, it was still a clean slate. There were no special positions beyond the purely academic. Yes, we all thought that it was important than we illumine the Aboriginal past. Yes, it was impossible to study the evidence without become somewhat partisan, pro-Aborigine. But there was still a joy in doing something new, in extending the knowledge boundaries.
Four years, ago my private research drew me back into Australian prehistory. I was a bit appalled at what I found.
Public archeology - research for the sake of illumining the past - had been replaced by private, contracted, archeology driven by current needs. At one level this was good in the sense that it supported many more archaeologists. At a second level, it introduced distortions into the discipline in terms of what was studied, how it was studied.
The what was determined by things such as heritage requirements. The how by the need for consultation, the need to take stakeholder needs into account, the time horizons associated with the study, the placement of restrictions on what should be studied. Beyond these limitations, there was a further problem: the material generated from the studies was less available, less useable. Australian prehistory had been effectively privatised.
As I looked at the broader material, I found the same problems. Prehistorians such as John Mulvaney, a doyen of the profession, now had to devote time to the question of what could, what should, be studied and how. I don't know that Professor Mulvaney would agree with my interpretation, but that's the way I saw it,
These types of problems are not unique to Australian prehistory, but affect all aspects of the study of Aboriginal history.
Take, as an example, the work that I have been doing on New England's Aboriginal languages. Some would argue, indeed do argue, that each Aboriginal language belongs to a particular Aboriginal group and that, consequently, I should not be researching in this area without explicit approval of the relevant elders. But which elders? Further, how can I maintain research integrity if my work has to be vetted in some way independent of the standard of that work?
This is a very real problem. In his extremely good PhD thesis on Tindale tribes, James Knight states quite explicitly that there were certain aspects of research that he did not pursue because his respondents stated that they did not want him to do so. Isn't this, in fact, censorship?
The key problem with Aboriginal Australia is that past and present are inextricably entwined. Non Aboriginal guilt and Aboriginal responses play out in a complicated pattern of official, cultural, legal and political responses that affect every aspect of research and writing.
It is now over forty four years since I did my original honours thesis on the economic structure of Aboriginal life in Northern NSW. When I moved back into the Aboriginal history I was astonished, but also a bit flattered, to find that my work was still alive and being cited all those years later. There are not many honours students who can say that!
Part of the reason for the survival of my work is political. The growth in Aboriginal heritage studies and in land rights' issues meant that my work maintained relevance. However, part of the reason lies in shifts in fashion; people focused on the evils done stopped writing about the Aborigines as Aborigines. As best I can work out, my work has never been updated, although specific aspects have.
My Aboriginal mentee argues that I should continue my research and writing. I now know, she argues, more than most. Aboriginal people need access to their specific pasts.
Certainly I now know more than most. I don't think that I am being egotistical when I say this. Certainly, I know that there is a deep hunger among Aboriginal people for the type of material I write. Yet it remains hard.
I get so tired. I really don't want to have to steer between all the reefs of current conflicts. I just want to research and tell a story, to follow the evidence wherever it may take me.
This brings me back to my starting point, the fight in the American Anthropological Association. I really don't want to go down that route. I accept that there are substantive professional issues. But really, I just want to write!
Sources on the AAA spat
Just before Christmas in NSW 2010: elections, prorogation and public policy, I mentioned that the NSW Governor had prorogued Parliament at the Premier's request to head of a Legislative Council inquiry into the sale of State electricity assets.That post contained a link to material I had written on the earlier Canadian case.
The key issue in the case was whether the Legislative Council inquiry could continue despite the ending of the current parliament.
This week there have been two follow up stories in the Sydney Morning Herald. Keneally targeted for power contempt contains a link to a legal opinion obtained by the NSW opposition on the matter, while the next story, Premier faces 11th-hour inquiry, contains a link to the subsequent opinion by the NSW Solicitor General. In another piece, It didn't help Charles I and it won't save Keneally, Richard Ackland appears to take the view that the Council can still function until its final dissolution upon the issue of writs for an election.
I haven't yet absorbed the material. I mention it now because I know that some people are interested in the issue. It's quite important from a constitutional viewpoint and not just in NSW since this type of precedent feeds into the operations of other parliaments.
Postscript
The NSW Government can't take a trick. Having decided to prorogue Parliament to avoid an inquiry, the Premier has indicated that that she and the Treasurer, Eric Roozendaal, would appear before it notwithstanding legal doubts about the validity of the inquiry. However, she has refused to recall Parliament to a new session.
The date of the state election has been set for 26 March.
One of Australia's best known poems, Dorothea Mackellar's (1885-1968) My Country says in part:
I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains
Of rugged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains
This photo from the Courier Mail shows the central Queensland city of Rockhampton, population 75,000. Flood levels have yet to peak here, although the city is already completely isolated by the waters.
It is difficult to comprehend the scale of these floods. However, to give international readers a feel for scale, the area now affected by flooding is much greater than that of the UK plus Ireland combined.
Unlike Pakistan and its floods, Australia is thinly populated outside the coastal hugging capital cities. Even so, more than 200,000 people have now been affected.
Coming on top of earlier floods, the damage to the Australian economy will be significant.
Coal mines and coal lines have been affected, with Queensland coal companies declaring force majeure on export contracts. Food crops have been affected; food prices will rise. Government revenues are down, while costs are up. The total cost to the economy is likely to be around one percent of GDP.
Ten people have died so far. Again, this is very small by the standards of the Pakistan floods. But it's still significant by Australian standards.
Inland Australia is very dry and very flat, an old much eroded continent. Waters flow slowly, creating a moving flood wall.
During long droughts, the soil dries, ground water vanishes. During long droughts, people forget about floods. Some inland Australian children can be as old as seven or even ten before they actually see flooding rains.
As the rains come, the thirsty ground absorbs the moisture. The biggest floods come when the ground is finally moist, storage's full. Then, suddenly, all the water runs into the rivers. For months afterwards, floods come under hot, blue, skies. The heat haze shimmers, even as water rolls over the land.
Most modern Australians are now remote from the Australian land. They live in hermetically sealed urban environments linked more to the rest of the world than to the realities of their own country.
To my mind, it's not a bad thing that they should sometimes be reminded of the real realities of their country.
Looking at Neil's Google Reader, I see that many of my fellow bloggers have been caught by the need to reflect on the past year. I am no different. I hope that you will pardon this meander
Looking at the blog stats, I found that one past post, New Year's Wishes, had suddenly appeared in the top post list. Posted on 31 December 2006, the post reflected on my initial experience as a blogger. Even then after only 64 posts, I found the conversations and links that accrued through blogging valuable.
Four years and sixteen hundred posts later, the links and conversations remain valuable. More on that later.
The first graph shows visits (yellow) and page views (yellow plus red) over the last twelve months. You can see a slow if variable upward trend over the year.
There were 365 posts here in 2010, an increase over the previous year, but less than the number in either 2007 or 2008.
To provide a further perspective on 2010 performance, the second graph shows visits and page views for the period from June 2009 to May 2010, the earliest chart I have. Here you can see the acceleration that took place in the first half of 2010 as compared to the previous year.
I have no idea why the numbers should have increased. Nearly all the extra traff
I began blogging at a time of explosive growth in the blogosphere. This was the period when Technorati still attempted to provide aggregate data on blog numbers, with increases measured in the million. There was an excitement about blogging, a feel that this was the wave of the future.
The blogosphere today is very different. Here I want to pick up a few key trends.
The first is the rise of the mainstream media blog, along with the inclusion of comments sections at the end of on-line stories. This has attracted a considerable audience aligned to the particular stance of the media outlet. The ABC's The Drum is a quite sophisticated example.
The second is the continuing rise of both syndicated and group blogs.
Syndicated blogs take a number of forms. In some cases, Crikey is an example, blogs retain their individual identity. In others, bloggers really become free-lance writers for what is effectively an on-line magazine or even e-newspaper.
Group blogs have been around for a while, but have become more prominent. Skepticslawyers is a case in point. Group blogs offer two advantages. The writing load becomes easier, while they also tend to attract more comments from people aligned with the blog's focus. Comments are longer and, despite some flame wars, have a more conversational and community feel.
We normally speak of convergence in the sense of the coming together of different types of media. However, there has also been convergence in content creation, the writers.
The number of regular bloggers that also write or appear on the mainstream media is quite high. At a very local level, Neil Whitfield (Ninglun) writes for the South Sydney Herald, while I write (here and here) for the Armidale Express. However, it's far broader than this. Nearly every regular prominent Australian blogger I know had some connection with the mainstream media over 2010.
We often talk about the threat the internet poses to the mainstream media. There is much less discussion of the reverse threat.
The blogosphere has become a major source not just of story ideas, but also of raw grunt. This saves money, much writing or appearance is unpaid, but is damaging the market for free-lance writing. It also diverts time. Here I need to add in Facebook and Twitter.
The two are quite different.
Facebook has removed from the blogosphere those, and especially the young, who used blogs as a diary or social networking tool. While Facebook is used by the main stream media as a source, by those with political or campaign objectives as a tool, it remains personally controlled and limited. Facebook is for chat, not writing.
Twitter is more complicated.
Because time is limited, both Facebook and Twitter reduce the time available for writing for and reading blogs. Some people use Twitter as they do Facebook to chatter, creating something of a double whammy effect in that the time spent leaves little time for blogging. However, Twitter is generally public in a way that Facebook is not, so many use Twitter to provide running updates on issues.
This makes Twitter influential in a way that Facebook cannot be because bloggers and especially the mainstream media use Twitter as a main story source. It has become indispensable.
These collective changes pose a fundamental challenge to bloggers and especially to independents like me.
Relevance is one challenge. With exceptions, the blogosphere is getting older as younger audiences move to other forms of social media.
I follow a lot of blogs. Nearly all the bloggers I know are over forty, a goodly proportion over fifty or even sixty. This not just a representation of my own age. When I began blogging, there were quite a few younger bloggers. Attrition, always an issue with bloggers, has been strongest among younger bloggers.
Far be it for me to be ageist, but we do need younger bloggers if blogging is to remain broadly relevant.
Retention is a second challenge. Here another factor comes into play, the role of feeds. Feeds are useful because they provide an easy way to keep in touch with multiple blogs. The difficulty is that it turns people from readers to browsers.
Instead of people coming to your blog because they are interested in your writing in a general sense, they come when a particular story attracts their interest. Further, in many cases they just read the feed; the feed becomes a substitute for a visit. Again, there is nothing wrong with this in a time poor world. Yet it affects one's thinking and writing.
Let me illustrate with a very simple example. Do you write your post headline to attract the feed reader or to gain search engine recognition? The two are quite different.
The problem is compounded by increased competition between media forms. The competition I face as an independent blogger has become so much more intense. One measure of this is provided by links.
Excluding my own cross-links, in December there were seven blog links to this blog, six in November, two in October. Looking at the detail, the majority of these links came from just three sources. The real number of new links I get is actually lower than it was three years ago despite the significant increase in the number of visitors.
No doubt, part of this is due to the relevance of my own writing. However, part at least is simply a measure of competition.
Integration is the third challenge. I write a lot, some would say too much. I blog across several blogs, I have the newspaper column, I tweet and I have a Facebook page. How do I balance all this?
When I look at the blog stats, I find that the column itself has very little impact even though the blog URLs appear at the end. While the column appears to be quite popular, it appeals to an older demographic and especially that group with longer term local links. This is generally not a blog reading group.
However, unlike the blogs, I know that the column does get picked up by the media monitoring services. A week or so back, for example, a friend in the Australian Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet emailed me to say that a column I wrote on, of all things, classical Greek in Armidale was included in the daily media report because I happened to mention Billy Wentworth as the first Minister for Aboriginal Affairs.
This affects my writing. I am a little less open in the column on public policy issues because some of the work I do may be affected by public comments on particular policy issues. On the other hand, if I do want to increase my impact, I also know that I can use the column to target particular agencies or policy areas.
So far as the blogs themselves are concerned, increased readership across blogs with somewhat different audiences means that the blogs themselves have become audience feeds. This is actually reasonably new. It means that cross-posting has become quite important.
By contrast, Facebook is of minor importance in terms of feeds. I haven't tried to expand the number of Facebook friends, nor have I established any public pages beyond a New England New State Movement page.
Twitter is different. I started Twitter as an experiment and have only put up the blog posts. This means that my total number of followers is small - just 56. By contrast, Paul Barratt who joined Twitter after me and who has followed a different approach now has 630 followers. Yet even at my low level, Twitter is quite a significant feed. It has also led to one radio interview.
In addition to this, and with the main stream media, Twitter has become a useful source of stories.
I now face a choice. Do I expand my Twitter presence? It's clearly useful, but I am already time poor.
I want to finish this now long post with a two final comments.
I haven't recounted all my posts across blogs, but they run into many thousands. Through the miracles of Google in particular, my older posts still attract comments and emails. Not only have I met again people from my own past, but I constantly strike people for whom something I have written strikes a personal chord.
This is called the long tail in web 2.0 terms. It is, I think, one of the most valuable aspects of blogging that cannot be matched by any other form of social media.
I struggle to keep up. I know that I disappoint people because of my slowness in responding, yet I so value this aspect of blogging,
Finally, a gripe.
I have now written more than two million words in posts. To a degree, I think that the blogs provide a picture of Australian life in particular. Yet none of the blogs have been classified as worth of permanent preservation by Pandora, Australia's national electronic archive.
I am not alone here, of course. I recognise the problems that Pandora faces. Yet it has become a personal worry because the survival of the things that I have written is largely dependant on the survival of Google. Beyond questions of ego, I think that that's a problem.
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