Rosaleen Love

It is a brave editor who compiles a paper-based anthology of science writing in the age of the Internet. Electronic publishing allows the skilful juxtaposition of text and image, with the added value of links that lead the viewer to instantly available extra information. With Stephen Pincock’s print anthology The Best Australian Science Writing 2011, I am nostalgically transported to the nineteenth century, where Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley brought their science to the people in discursive essay form.

In Feeling the Heat, journalist and science writer Jo Chandler voyages to Antarctica (mostly), where she meets and talks with scientists about the meaning of their work. She reminds me of the eighteenth-century philosophical travellers, the first anthropologists who travelled to strange lands (Australia included) to observe the language and customs of savage peoples, and to learn from them. From ice field and coral reef, Chandler reports on the latest in climate science, as if meeting the inhabitants of a distant country where they do things differently.

A few years ago, I heard Michael Cathcart speak on ‘the myth of the inland sea’. It was one of the funniest takes on Australian history I have heard. He related how his initially confident search for statements of belief in an inland sea by early Australian colonists petered out in the face of lack of evidence. Certainly, the explorer Charles Sturt believed in an inland sea and in his divine mission to discover it, but by 1845 he knew better. Finding little other evidence of the inland sea as the impetus for exploration, Cathcart decided it must be a creation of historians from Ernest Giles in 1889 to Derek Parker in 2007, with the idea recycled uncritically from book to book. Cathcart intended his research to be an academic thesis in history. How hard it must have been to be his academic supervisor. Each session must have ended in laughter and a mounting sense of desperation. How could an increasing lack of evidence be turned to good thesis account?

Have you heard the latest joke about emissions trading? There was this factory in China that produced so much carbon dioxide from coal they had to get rid of it somehow. So they sold it to Coca-Cola. We shall burp away in the cause of carbon sequestration, imaginatively interpreted. Somewhere in the joke is a kernel of truth. If there’s a buck to be made from climate change, there’ll be someone, somewhere, who’ll be making it, and we’re right to be suspicious.