Category Archives: Academia

We return to talk about the values expressed by who we, in Australia, present on our currency. I promise this entry didn’t take a lot of research. I’d normally joke that ‘I don’t recognise these bills’ because I’m a digital person and don’t make this kind of cash transaction very often. The previous denominations of currency are here (five, ten, twenty), if you’d like to see them.

Howard Florey

Chances are you know the name Florey, at least vaguely. You want a few moments…?

I can wait.

Tick tick tick.

What if I mention Sir Alexander Fleming?

Right. Howard Florey was one of the two people who shared the Nobel Prize with Fleming for Medicine. They discovered between them this stuff called penicillin, which helped spread antibiotics throughout European culture, and therefore, its economic and physical colonies. Florey was an Australian from Adelaide who conducted the first medical trials of penicillin – trials in which the patient died because Florey and his team failed to make quite enough of the drug.

Sir Ian Clunies Ross

Hobby horse time! In Australia, we have this thing called the CSIRO, the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation. While a bit of a kickball politically, CSIRO has been a longstanding part of Australia’s push to scientific discovery and research, and has made crops, space-ship equipment, internet technologies and all sorts of neat things in that same sprawling general category of ‘what good can this thing be?’

CSIRO went on to create the system of wireless TCP/IP transmission that you now know as Wi-Fi, and the patent was used without credit for quite some time by businesses like McDonalds. We sued over that.

Anyway, CSIRO is cool, and Sir Ian Clunies Ross was at first a parasite researcher for its forebear, then eventually, its director. He was also a vet, which means that this was one of the first-printing notes to have two qualified scientists on it.

Edith Cowan

In the new printing, we have Edith Cowan, who was the first woman elected to Australian parliament. In uh, 1921? Which is not bad, considering that we didn’t have a Parliament until 1900 and all, but it’s still a wee bit embarassing since despite allowing women to vote, we needed to pass special laws to let them be elected.

Edith Cowan was a pro-education, pro-information legislator. In an ironic twist, in her first election, she beat the man who was responsible for passing the legislation that gave her the right – or rather, stopped withholding the right – for her to run for parliament. Once she was elected, she pushed hard for womens’ rights and for education.

The most interesting thing about Edith Cowan’s very interesting life didn’t happen until after she died. Two years after her death, a clock was erected in honour of her – and people fucking protested it. What the hell, people of Western Australia? What possible reason to you have to not want to commemorate the passing of a person who did a thing first?

…claimed that monuments were inherently masculine and therefore not an appropriate form of memorial to a woman…

Oh, fuck you.

Now, Edith Cowan has a monument that gets handed around every day, her image is printed out and shared and given and everyone in the country possibly sees her about once a week. And to everyone who wanted to push back against her can suck a duck.

David Unaipon

Ho boy.

So before we go any further on the specifics of Mr Unaipon, it’s worth noting that David Unaipon was an Aboriginal Australian. To be specific, he was a Warrawaldie Lakalinyeri of the Ngarrindjeri, which is a set of words I am not only unqualified to pronounce, but are older than everything that I consider ‘my culture.’ Specifically, the term ‘Ngarrindjeri’ is a term used for a coalition of Aboriginal people in the area we now call Adelaide, and means ‘The People Of This Land.’

sigh

I’m sorry. I’m really so sorry.

Mr Unaipon is credited broadly as ‘breaking stereotypes of Aboriginal people,’ which can be rephrased as ‘made it harder for White Australians to be quite so blatantly racist.’ David Unaipon was a smart man, and we know that because he filed for nineteen different patents of working inventions. We can also, if we didn’t know it, infer that he was an Aboriginal man, because he couldn’t afford to file those patents fully, given that he was poor, despite having a job as a bookkeeper. There are all these lovely quotes about how clever Mr Unaipon was, but they all use such patronising language to do it.

Setting aside what Mr Unaipon was talked about, and how he broke stereotypes, let’s just look at what he actually did. He was an avid reader, loved studying philosophy, science, music and literature. He invented a technique for, uh, and I’m just going to quote the patent here, ‘converted curvilineal motion into the straight line movement,’ which is used in modern shears. It’s used in almost all modern shears.

Mr Unaipon was credited for this patent once. He received no financial renumeration.

He also wrote poetry and books. He was a recognised expert on ballistics. He also wrote about the synthesis of Christendom and Aboriginal beliefs that he held. He gave lectures, pushed for Aboriginal rights, and when he was travelling around giving these lectures we didn’t let him stay in most of the nice hotels because good christ.

Jesus christ this is a depressing bill.

Basically, we have here a pair of people who at some points in our history, we said we didn’t want. Now they are icons of our nation, shared and recognised by the people of our country… but probably not as much, or as well as we should.

Following on from our discussion of the $10 and $5 notes in Australian currency, we move on to the $20. We’re going to do things a little backwards this time: We’re going to start with the newer note. It’ll probably become more obvious when we’re done why.

Mary Reibey

I feel a bit bad that we jump so quickly to this. Ms Reibey was a businesswoman. Like, that’s basically her big achievement, the reason she’s remembered, because she was a woman who became very successful in business. And I mean very successful in business – her estate was valued at £20,000 back when there weren’t many £s at all. If you walk along the dock areas of Sydney (that’s all of them) you’ll find a number of old copper plates on the buildings signifying when they were made – and a startling number of huge-ass warehouses for shipping were made in the 1820s.

See, Mary Reibey (and if I spell her name differently from time to time, don’t worry so did she) was in Australia because John Burrows was arrested for stealing a horse. That is to say, Mary Reibey’s crime-committing alter-ego got arrested and deported to Australia. Why did she steal a horse? Because she was bored. After being deported, she took up work as a nursemaid, then married an East India company worker – and when he travelled, she managed his estate. And his family – which wound up at seven or eight kids (give or take).

And then her husband died.

Most folk figured this would be when the Reibey business holdings in shipping would be distributed. Were they hell. She consolidated, and expanded, and expanded so aggressively that she founded a bank in her living room.

She retired in 1828 and spent her later years kicking around Newtown and giggling at the fictionalised novels people had written about her.

Reverend John Flynn

Remember how I mentioned airplanes were important to Australia? Well, turns out if you live out on the stockyards that are each individually larger than Delaware, you don’t have a lot of easily access to doctors. That was, at least, until the Flying Doctors service was started – and it was started by John Flynn.

Flynn was a really nice person, and I don’t mean that sarcastically; he wrote books on how to survive in bush environments and deal with medical problems or foraging for food and he made sure the book was distributed for free in the outback regions of Australia. But knowing that wasn’t enough, he moved on to found the Flying Doctors – which is exactly what it sounds like. Small planes that could reach a spread of territory the size of countries were loaded with a pilot, a doctor, and then flew around stockyards all across the great brown land of Australia, checking up on people.

The Flying Doctors became a really easily ridiculed TV series full of turgid melodrama, because we’re not very good at making TV, which is a goddamn shame because they’re really quite cool and badass and they help people. But oh well.

Sir Charles Kingsford Smith

The first $20 was an interesting one because the two figures were linked in a way other notes weren’t: They were both aviators. Now, look, Australia is a country that’s basically the size of America with almost every major population center literally thousands of kilometers away from one another, so flight was important to our early, pre-internet infrastructure.

What’d he do? Smithy, as he was known, was kind of an endurance flier. First and lesser, he crossed the nation in a plane, which when the plane was basically a shoebox with wings and a bike engine, was pretty badass. Then he flew to New Zealand, crossing the Tasman. That was also pretty amazing. And then, he crossed the freaking Pacific.

The PACIFIC OCEAN.

When planes were a new piece of tech, we had to find out what they could do. We had to prove their limits. And Smithy was a grown man who was willing to strap his butt to one of these little pieces of wood and canvas, and risk his life in literally the most remote parts of the planet.

Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith died in a flight between India and Singapore, pushing the limits of what planes could do.

Lawrence Hargraves

Now here’s the odd one.

Lawrence Hargraves is a slightly strange one to talk about for me because there’s the stories the history books offer, which are interesting and kind of distant. And then there’s the stories my family swap about the guy, stories we have heard from his great-niece.

Who is my grandmother.

So what I can tell you that seems to be publically agreed upon is that Lawrence Hargraves was a geek, one of those multi-disciplinary geeks back before science was quite so easily distributed. Thanks to living on a coastline hemmed in by a mountainside, he had the option of taking to very high altitudes to fly kites, which he did, and, with that thrill undertaken, he then decided to try flying kites with him in them.

Astoundingly, Lawrence Hargraves did not die by doing this.

Lawrence Hargraves was fascinated by the idea of human flight, but he was also scrupulous about recording details. Recognise this man existed before the photograph was widely distributed. If he wanted to take notes on the design of a device he had to break out protractors and measuring tape, and he did. So thorough were his notes that his experiments were easily reproduced, multiple times, by other scientists. We know this about his notes because he refused to seal them. He never applied for a patent, he never tried to close his work off to others and when he passed away he made sure the work was public because he believed ‘science belongs to science.’

I guess the thing that most sticks out to me is this quote:

“Workers must root out the idea [that] by keeping the results of their labors to themselves[,] a fortune will be assured to them. Patent fees are much wasted money. The flying machine of the future will not be born fully fledged and capable of a flight for 1000 miles or so. Like everything else it must be evolved gradually. The first difficulty is to get a thing that will fly at all. When this is made, a full description should be published as an aid to others. Excellence of design and workmanship will always defy competition.”

Hargraves described scientific discovery as work, and he advocated cooperation vs competition to overcome great, almost impossible challenges. In an environment of hypercompetitive markets defined by flying machines, these words from a man who is in no small part responsible for flying machines happening at all should be taken more seriously.

Almost two years ago now, I started what I had at the time intended to be a set of posts about the people who appear on the Australian currency. That post, The Value of a Dollar established my theory that currency is the common art created by a government, and reflects values that government has. We’ve done the five dollar bill, so let’s talk about the ten dollar bill!

Francis Greenway

Francis Greenway was a convict sent to Australia for the crime of forgery. Take a moment to let that sink in – for a time, we had a man who was responsible for faking money, on our money. I’m sure he’d have been quite confused by the experience.

That’s not why we put him there, though. Francis Greenway was an architect, and was responsible for the architectural style of many key Sydney buildings. If you’ve ever been to Sydney, you’ll notice the older buildings have a very stocky style, with clear, brightly coloured white or red sandstone outside. That was Francis Greenway’s style. Essentially, Francis Greenway was responsible for the face of Sydney.

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson was a short story writer, a poet, and a journalist when he had the time. Amongst his works was The Loaded Dog, a charming story we tell to children about a good-natured dog so stupid it eats dynamite and dies a horrific explosive death. I feel a bit bad here because Henry Lawson, while a crucial figure in Australian poetic history was overshadowed by…

Banjo Patterson

This guy, the new ten dollar bills’ chisel-featured Banjo Patterson. Patterson was… well, a journalist, a poet, and a short story author, and in his list of work we have things like The Man From Snowy River, or Clancy of the Overflow, or We’re All Australians Now, or, oh wait, here’s one you’d have heard of, Waltzing Matilda.

Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson once had a slow-release rap battle, on the newspapers.

But poetry continues onto the obverse of the $10 with…

Dame Mary Gilmore

There’s just alway something ironic on a tenner in Australia, it seems. The first ten dollar bill had a forger, and this ten dollar bill has a socialist on it.

Dame Mary Gilmore was a journalist, poet, and political activist. She was also, as I say, a registered socialist – a firm believer in a structure where the primary purpose of the Australian nation was to benefit Australians – and therefore, she fought for and argued for ‘extreme’ positions in the 1920s like ‘Equal Pay For Women’ and ‘Government Subsidies For Mothers Who Want To Work’ or ‘Give Disabled/Disadvantaged People Money To Live.’

She had to separate from her political party for being ‘too extreme.’

Then, Mary Gilmore went on to write poetry and letters for the Tribune, which was the communist party’s newspaper. And then, because her poems kicked ass, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the crown – and she was the first person to be awarded that status thanks to literary work! Then she went on to write patriotic bolstering poetry, believing it important to give people strength to work together during the time of war, particularly No Foe Shall Gather our Harvest – the poem that is included on this note.

I like this. I like that our second most commonly-used currency used to have a forger who made a city pretty, and now it has a poet who opposed the idea of money.

Dame Mary Gilmore’s ideals have not yet been met, and we should not forget them.