Chapter 22

Ten Things Australia Gave the World

In This Chapter

Seeing the link between Australia and feature films

Finding out about the Australian origins of penicillin

Knowing where permaculture was developed

Think of Australia as an accidental social experiment that began when a bunch of unwanted convicts were sent out to plant a settlement on the east coast of a continent entirely occupied by Indigenous Australians. It wasn’t planned as a bold new venture in nation-building, but that’s what it became. Along the way, it produced more than a few new innovations that the rest of the world soon adopted.

The Boomerang

It’s a weapon, it’s a toy, it’s a battle club, it’s a fire-starter and hole-digger, it’s a musical instrument, and it’s also a twin-airfoil rotating wing that uses gyroscopic precession to return to the hand of its thrower. It’s the boomerang, and it’s hard to imagine a more popular Australian symbol, except perhaps the koala. International boomerang competitions are held every year with events like Accuracy, Endurance, Trick Catch, Long Distance, Maximal Time Aloft and the Aussie Round. The boomerang also holds the record for an object thrown the furthest, outdistancing the space-age Aerobie.

The Ticket of Leave System

Perhaps befitting a nation that began as a convict dump, one of Australia’s first innovations was in punishment. The ticket of leave system was the first experiment in the operation of prison parole anywhere in the world.

Initiated by Governor King in the early 1800s as a cost-cutting measure, the ticket of leave was a licence for convicts to be free and support themselves. It was conditional: Until the time to be served had been completed the ticket could be withdrawn on grounds of misbehaviour (or a Governor’s hangover). King used them for any convicts who arrived and had a trade or enough money to look after themselves. This way the Governor didn’t have to fork out to find food, lodging and clothes for the convict.

The system also gave the world a valuable lesson: If you truly wanted to reform a convicted criminal, giving some incentive to behave like a decent law-abiding member of society was generally a better bet than floggings and brutality.

The Secret Ballot

Being able to vote for your choice of candidate is essential to a democratic society, but once upon a time votes were publicly displayed, and voter intimidation was commonplace. It wasn’t until 1856 that voters were permitted to vote in private, so that no-one could intimidate or bribe the voter, or link the vote to the voter — and it started in the colony of Victoria. The secret ballot system took off and was adopted in New Zealand, the UK, Canada, and finally in the US, where it was called the ‘Australian Ballot’ (not to be confused, of course, with the Australian Ballet).

The Eight-Hour Day

Fancy working 12 hours a day as a basic minimum? That’s what most labourers had to do before 1856. The Eight-Hour Movement — ‘eight hours work, eight hours recreation, eight hours relaxation’ — began in industrial Britain in the early 19th century, and was incorporated into the working-class Chartist movement. It didn’t meet with much success in Britain or Europe, however, and workers had to wait for stonemasons in Melbourne in 1856 to finally secure the right to an eight-hour day (see Chapter 8).

Feature Films

Short movies had been around for some ten years before anyone got the idea to string a bunch of short films together into a single long one. This film was The Story of the Kelly Gang, filmed in Melbourne in 1906, which ran for 70 minutes. The bad news: Only 17 minutes of the world’s first full-length movie survive. The good news: Kelly’s last stand is still in there.

The Flying Doctor Service

In 1928, the Reverend John Flynn combined the new motorised flight (otherwise known as the aeroplane) with his missionary work of building hospitals in remote bush communities, and the result was the world’s first Flying Doctor Service. The story goes that Flynn was inspired to act after hearing of a bladder operation carried out on a stockman by the local postmaster, who had only a pen knife to use and was receiving instructions from a doctor in Perth via morse code. Inspired by the Australian model, there are now Flying Doctor services all over the world.

The Artificial Pacemaker

Many people with heart conditions are grateful for the invention of the artificial pacemaker, a device that uses electrical impulses to regulate the heartbeat. In 1928 this invention — the brainchild of a doctor, Mark Lidwell, and a physicist, Edgar Booth, both Sydneysiders — was used for the first time to revive a stillborn infant. The modern pacemaker is a tiny device, but Lidwell and Booth’s invention required the patient be plugged into a light socket!

The Practical Application of Penicillin

Penicillin was the first antibiotic that was effective against serious diseases and infections. Although the drug had been known about for some time, penicillin came into real usage during World War II, mostly due to the work of Australian scientist Howard Florey, who figured out a way to mass-produce it. The drug was so valuable during the war that penicillin was actually extracted from the urine of treated patients and reused (yuck factor times ten).

Florey should hold a record for the greatest number of lives saved by his invention — an estimated 80 million — but as the modest guy himself said, ‘Developing penicillin was a team effort, as these things tend to be’.

Airline Safety Devices

In 1956, two passenger airliners collided over the Grand Canyon in Arizona, becoming the deadliest aviation disaster so far recorded. What had gone wrong was just about impossible for investigators to work out afterwards— everyone involved in flying the planes was dead. As a result of this tragedy, ‘black boxes’ — devices that record the information on the cockpit instruments as well as the voices of the crew — were required to be installed on all commercial airplanes. These flight recorders, which were instrumental in improving air safety, were the invention of the Australian engineer Dr David Warren.

While we’re on the subject of airline safety, you know those inflatable slides you read about in the safety information provided on a plane? The ones that, after everyone is safely off the plane, turn into life rafts? They’re standard equipment on most passenger planes the world over, and they’re another Aussie invention — this time by Jack Grant, who worked for Qantas back in 1965.

Permaculture

These days, as our human population continues to increase, most people agree that environmental sustainability is a very big deal. Permaculture, from ‘permanent agriculture’, is an approach to designing ecologically sound, self-sufficient human settlements and farms, developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s. Permaculture is particularly aimed towards restoring depleted land: Today there are permaculture experiments in progress everywhere from the Dead Sea in Jordan to the Ometepe volcano in Nicaragua.