80 years of influential books: what Tish Gorman read

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

This was a Bluesky thing in late 2024, and over January/February in 2025. Initially I refused to get drawn in, because I couldn't be bothered to seek out images of the book covers. But I followed what other people were skeeting, finding new books and insights into the person, and eventually I thought I'd join the throng. Part of the appeal was not having to explain anything! (Although I did write alt-text for each of the covers).

When I'd done my 20 books, I asked my mother Tish if she'd like to have a go. Tish loves to read; my annual Christmas present to her is a subscription to the Australian Book Review bundled with the Griffith Review. My brother-in-law Daniel Jordan, who owns independent bookstore Roaring Stories in Sydney, also generously brings her books. Tish is nearly 94, so she has read a LOT of books in this time.

We didn't quite get to 20, but these 16 are what she chose.

    1. Tim Winton - Cloudstreet (1991)

Tish loves Tim Winton in general, but chose this one as it was the first of his that she read and representative of his work. This, of course, is one of the award-winning novelist's most loved books. 

Cloudstreet is about two working class families, the Pickles and the Lambs, who share a large house in Perth called Cloudstreet. It's been called 'Australia's most iconic novel'.

I've never actually read any Tim Winton. Perhaps I should.

2. Robbie Arnott - The Rain Heron (2020)

Robbie Arnott is another Australian author. This short description, from a review by Laura Elizabeth Woollett, gives you the gist of the plot:

'In an unnamed land under the thrall of a mysterious coup, mountain-dweller Ren wants only to live off the grid, undisturbed by human contact. Ren’s familiarity with the natural world becomes a liability when a band of soldiers comes seeking information that only she can provide: the whereabouts of a fabled bird with the ability to make it rain.'

So it's speculative fiction, I guess. This book was shortlisted (and received) a gajillion awards, so perhaps I should read it too.

3. Hans Hass - Diving to Adventure (1939)

Tish has all Hans Hass' books, with original dust jackets. They were a very cool kind of science writing, autobiographical, full of science facts, and funny as well. Hans Hass was a pioneer of underwater photography and his pictures of life under the sea were jaw-dropping in the 1940s and 1950s. Maybe I liked them even more than Mum - I read them over and over again!

4. Thor Heyerdahl - Kon Tiki (1950)

In 1947 the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl built a balsa wood raft and sailed from Peru to Polynesia, nearly 7000 km, with a small crew. His intent was to prove that white people colonised the Pacific before brown people, but leaving that aside, the popular book he wrote about this expedition is a rivetting read. This is another one of Tish's books that I read over and over again as a teenager! She also had Aku Aku, his account of his expedition to Easter Island.

5. Brenda Niall - My Accidental Career (2022)

Brenda Niall is 'arguably Australia’s foremost biographer'. She's written about the lives of people like Georgiana McCrae, an English painter who moved to Australia in 1841, Archbishop Mannix, whose views on conscription in WW I divided the nation, and four Australian women writers in Friends and Rivals. Her latest book is a biography of Joan Lindsay. 

Brenda and Tish went to school together and have been lifelong friends. She's also a distant cousin on the Gorman side. This book is an autobiography and chosen by Tish as her favourite. The publisher says:

'Her Jane Austen-like wit and elegant prose enlivens this story of Australian women’s history seen through the lens of her remarkable life'.

6. Richard Fidler - Ghost Empire (2016)

Tish probably loved Turkey the most of all the places she travelled. Her house reflects this in numerous souvenirs she brought back - beautiful tiles and ceramics in the classic Islamic style. She also loved Richard Fidler's part history/part travelogue about the city of Constantinople. 

7. Lillian Beckwith - The Hills is Lonely (1959)

This was one of a series of books by Lillian Beckwith about her life in the islands of the Outer Hebrides. I remember Tish reading them when I was a kid. They were semi-autobiographical and filled with comical characters.

8. Alice Gorman - Dr Space Junk vs the Universe. Archaeology and the Future (2019)

Tish very kindly listed my book as one of her favourites! Her copy is face-out in the glass-fronted bookcase in her living area so everybody can see it. She is mentioned in the book a few times, in the early chapters which are semi-autobiographical. And I would credit her love of reading as a major influence on me growing up.

9. Miss Drake's Home Cookery (1940 edition; originally published 1915)

This is an old cookbook but still a classic. Tish's edition was worn and soft. She made things from it regularly. A favourite of mine was Nutties, little caramelly nutty flavoured cakes (don't put the sultanas in if you try them!). They were delicious and a staple of the morning tea table. You can download the full Miss Drake here: https://commons.swinburne.edu.au/file/677a05ac-e17c-4e86-a1b2-268667cce648/1/pub015-miss_drakes_home_cookery_hq.pdf

10-. Gerald Durrell - The Overloaded Ark (1953)

Many people may have heard of Gerald Durrell because a series was made of his wonderful autobiography My Family and Other Animals. The Overloaded Ark is about a wildlife collecting expedition to what was then British Cameroon. According to the Wikipedia article about the book, it launched his career as a writer. His books were very funny but Tish also enjoyed the much darker writing of Gerald's elder brother, Lawrence Durrell.

11. Eleanor Dark - The Timeless Land (1941)

 Tish said this novel was really the first time she had ever read anyAustralian history, because they only studied  European history at school. It was pretty radical for its time as it represented an Aboriginal perspective on the European invasion of Australia. Watkin Tench is one of the main characters.

12. Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose (1993)

In the 1990s, everyone was reading this - it was the Da Vinci Code of it day, but superbly written. It was a gripping murder mystery with a philosophical bent, set in a monastery. The labyrinthine library was almost a character in its own right.

13. The Bull of Minos - Leonard Cottrell

Tish actually nominated The Gold of Troy but I couldn't find a picture of the cover anywhere. She had many of Leonard Cottrell's popular books on classical or Mediterranean archaeology - of course an influence on me! I particularly remember one with a picture of Tutankhamen's mask on it. She also had Mary Renault's rivetting novels about ancient Crete. They may not be archaeologically accurate these days but they were such a vivid evocation of the mythology of Minos and the labyrinth. Inspired by these tales, I proposed Theseus as a name for a beautiful liver-spotted Dalmation we somehow acquired around the same time (my choice won). I should make a list of all the dog's names I remember (I listed the cow's names in my book). Sorry, I got a bit sidetracked there.

14. Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw (1912)

This play was about Professor Higgins taking a bet that he couldn't transform a cockney flower-seller into a high-class woman by teaching her how to speak with a posh accent. It was made into a Broadway musical starring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. Mum had the record too, and we knew all the songs by heart, especially as it was the end-of-year performance when I was in 3rd grade or something similar. Poor Tish had to make me a costume of a race day outfit complete with parasol!

15. Orhan Pamuk - Museum of Innocence (2009)

Another book which reflects Tish's love of Turkey. It's a love story set in Istanbul. The author did actually create a museum to go along with the book!

16. Robert Graves - The Greek Myths

This is a two volume work in the Penguin Classics series. Tish had several books by Graves. I devoured The Greek Myths as a teenager and I asked her if I could have them several years ago - they now reside in my bookcase. As I remember, some of the best material is in the footnotes. These two volumes are a very extensive exploration of the entire corpus of Greek myths, with all their variants and inconsistencies. It's a fabulous way to learn about Greek culture and philosophy.

Sorry for the weird formatting, I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

A feminist map of the Moon

What if we made a feminist map of the Moon?

This is a question I posed on Bluesky in October 2024. To me, the question, methods and results were sort of self-evident, as I imagined they were to many. But not everyone; and in response to the question 'how'? I decided to elucidate. So this post is based on how I expanded the skeet into a narrative. As is often the case, a random thought expressed on social media resulted in, for me, some new avenues to pursue.

Perhaps I should start with the obvious question of what is a map? Wikipedia has a definition which is as good as any: 'A map is a symbolic depiction of interrelationships, commonly spatial, between things within a space'.

I decided to start with place names, as this is something I've written about before.


1. Place names

Craters are one of the most well-known lunar features. How many of them are named after women? In 2023, the artist Bettina Forget decided to find out, and it turns out it's only 33 out of 1,578 named craters. That's 2% - hardly anything at all. (Dr Catherine Neish, planetary geologist at the University of Western Ontario, told me that there are now 44, an increase of 25% in three years). In the video below, Forget talks about the art she made in response to this fact, including the absolutely stunning hot pink craters.

Let's look at a couple of the craters. There is a one named for Jane Austen, but interestingly this name has never been approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), who are responsible for managing the names of everything outside Earth. It's used by scientists, but it's not official.

There's Ann and Annegrit. The Gazetteer for Planetary Nomenclature says that they are a Hebrew and a German female name - just generic names, not a particular person. So from this we learn that there are fewer than 33 actual women (there are generic male names too but this wouldn't make much difference in 1500 or so).

There's a crater named for Mary Adela Blagg, an astronomer who was appointed by the early IAU in 1920 to systematise the lunar nomenclature system which was A MESS.

A very recent one is E. Margaret Burbidge, inscribed in 2023. I guess this is one of the new ones Catherine was talking about.

Of course craters are only one type of lunar feature. Another is the catena, a chain of craters. There are 20 named catenas on the Moon, and one is Brigitte, a generic French female name. Let's pretend that this is the fascinating Brigitte Bardot, who isn't represented anywhere else in the solar system!

Features on the Moon are mostly named after male scientists, philosophers and explorers. These are fields which were barred to women, whose role in European and North American settler society was to provide domestic and sexual services, and subsume their identity, to men and children.

Let's look at more generic names from a different perspective. The Sea of Tranquillity is an old name dating to 1651. This was where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969, establishing Tranquility Base as the first human site on the Moon. What does tranquillity mean for women? In the domestic context of contemporary western cultures, it's something women have to fight for, whereas leisure/ a room of one's own/ time to oneself is a male norm. Not all the non-people names bear such analysis, but this demonstrates the point that there doesn't have to be a uniform meaning.

Before I move on, don't forget that there are many places named for women on other celestial bodies. For example, names on Mercury are artists of all kinds (art is less manly than science), and Venus is devoted to the female, so if someone isn't on the Moon you may find them there (Jane Austen is on Venus, thus solving the mystery of why the IAU hasn't sanctioned her name on the Moon).

Our feminist map of the Moon might just include the female names, leaving the vast tracts of unnamed features as a stark demonstration of how women were excluded from the naming of heaven and Earth. This map could be both historical, and future-looking - freeing up places to receive new names.

2. Hidden figures

What if we took some of the places named for men, and looked behind the official story to see if there were women who have been forgotten or left out? We know that the contributions of women to science have often been ignored, downplayed, or just derided. There are many women whose science has dropped out of the authorised patriarchal histories. I was thinking about this recently as I was reading a 19th century account of astronomy. All the standard men got a look-in, and I thought how differently this history came across when you knew about the women who had been left out. And the work women did to make men successful was rarely acknowledged either - their labour and its fruits were owed to the men who had authority over them.

Sophia Brahe.
Credit: unknown

One great example of this is Tycho crater, near the South Pole. It's one of many craters visible to the naked eye from Earth. It's named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). His observations are held to be the most accurate and reliable before the invention of the telescope in 1610. But is this the only story to be told?

Many of the much-vaunted observations for which Tycho is famous were made in collaboration with his sister Sophia Brahe (1556-1643) who he actively discouraged from doing astronomy, while also acknowledging her contributions. What if the crater were named Brahe instead - honouring them both instead of just him? A simple change to make, but it would make a world of difference.

It wouldn't be hard. In fact there is already a crater which does this: Bok, which honours the husband and wife astronomers Priscilla and Bart Bok. The gazetteer says 'Priscilla Fairfield; American astronomer (1896-1975), Bart Jan; Dutch-American astronomer (1906-1983).', but I particularly like this one as Bart Bok worked in Australia as the director of the Mt Stromlo observatory for nine years and was very supportive of the early growth of radioastronomy. Priscilla Fairfield Bok got to do a lot of child-raising and domestic work, but it is said of them 'it is difficult and pointless to separate his achievements from hers'. Together, they wrote one of the most successful astronomy textbooks of all time. 

However, Sophia's place in the history of astronomy is apparently more controversial, as I found out when I attempted to amend the Wikipedia page for Tycho Brahe. She was removed in minutes, so fast are the male gatekeepers, and this despite her having her own page which outlines her astronomical work.

By using this classic feminist method, we'd likely find many more instances where a bit more research will show the women whose work was ignored or written out of official stories. 

3. Relationships and perspectives

Another feminist method is to simply change perspective. De-centre the male, turn the story upside down, or turn it in different angles to see what catches the light. An inverse Moon, perhaps, where Alice has gone through the looking glass to find that other logics prevail. Or the lenses of microscopes and telescopes where you can see other worlds at a different scale. In fact Lewis Carroll was well aware of this effect, as evidenced by this quote from Through the Looking Glass:

All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass.

The process of naming could be seen as an act of possession that bends the Moon to a patriarchal, colonial purpose. It's no coincidence that the colonisation of Indigenous lands in the global south were undergoing the process of claiming and naming at the same time as places on the Moon, drawn into the colonial gaze by the telescope. (After 1957, satellites replaced the telescope as an instrument through which to find the things to name). I wonder how much overlap there is between the naming of places in 'virgin' lands and on the Moon - are they called after the same people? It would be an interesting project to undertake, although there were many competing name systems before Mary Adela Blagg sorted it all out!

In a world described, named and quantified by men, perhaps we should seek the female and feminine in the places in between: the bits of the Moon between the craters, seas, and other features held in common with terrestrial maps. A feminist map of the Moon might mean NOT focusing on craters and other features in the IAU system.

 

Maybe we have categories instead which take into account how a place appears in different lights or times - one which is more relational. This is more in line with how amateur astronomers on Earth often see the Moon. They have features defined by shifting relationships of light and dark, which you might only see if you look at the right time. These also have names - like the Eyes of Clavius - but at anther angle, or time, the feature dissolves and does not exist. Such places are called

clair-obscur

effects, and involve a degree of pareidolia:

These lunar illusions are a play of shadow and sunlight interacting with craters and other features, making them appear as something familiar through the eyepiece.

I've been

obsessed with lunar shadows

for some time, but perhaps I should elevate them to a lunar feature of significance. Their presence in the Permanently Shadowed Regions of the lunar poles is what traps the water ice which is a target of current commercial and lunar economy plans. But there are shadows everywhere on the Moon, in craters, of mountain ranges and rocks, rilles and sea shores, human artefacts. Perhaps the shadows themselves deserve names. Or categories of shadow need to be defined.

A type of feature on the Moon which does not receive names is the light plain. Perhaps this is because they are not as obvious as craters or maria, and were only recognised as a feature in 1965. Here's light plains 101:

What are light plains? They are smooth, flat, maria-like deposits that are higher in albedo(reflectance) than the smooth, flat, dark maria. Light plains cover about 9.5% of the lunar surface, while the maria cover about 16%.

The light plains were mapped by Dr Heather Meyer in 2019 using data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Here's a video:

They create a very distinct pattern on the Moon, making it look very orange-like. They may have come from a single event - the impact that created the Orientale basin, the dark spot at the lower right. As far as I can tell, no lunar light plains appear in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature as places. However, as a geological unit, they are also called the Cayley Formation. My purpose in mentioning them here is to show what a different kind of moon you would see if different qualities were emphasised.

Feminist methodology invites us to see other kinds of relationship in the process of map-making, which represent other values.

4. Look beyond the European Enlightenment tradition

Of course all the names/stories I've discussed so far are from one dominant cultural tradition. If we cast our net further, we can catch non-western knowledges and traditions about the Moon. This is a intersectional feminist method, and an acknowledgement of the women who kept and passed on astronomical knowledge - not that they would necessarily frame it like that.

It's hard to find any Indigenous or non-European traditions where the craters and ridges visible with the naked eye from Earth have any significance. My research, admittedly not exhaustive, has failed to turn anything up in the ethnography. It may exist in other places, particularly oral knowledge, it's just not evident in the literature. This may also be the fault of the ethnographers who failed to ask the right questions or ignored what they were told because it didn't fit with conceptions of Indigenous science.

Most Indigenous descriptions of the lunar surface involve patterns in the reflectance features of dark regions like maria. They are not named; instead they are associated with a story which has other moral dimensions to it: the place is embedded in knowledge. Thus we might say reflectance - like the light plains - determines the hierarchy of features, those with the least reflectance having the greater significance. The Moon's phases, how it catches the light of the sun, are important too. There is a light/dark aesthetic at a large scale rather than interest in the fine details of landscape. Of course the purpose of Indigenous stories and knowledge is not to map directly onto scientific facts.

Another aspect of this is that the Moon is seen as a whole entity rather than being divided up, a process I call cadastral colonialism, where geographic features get turned into administrative boundaries relating to western notions of property and productivity. The naming of craters and other features is a prelude to cadastral colonialism. There will be a complete change in our relationship to the Moon when there are more places unrelated to geographic features (like a settlement), and when simply saying the name of the feature will have some sort of cultural resonance for people who have never been there, in the way that, say, Uluru, or the Grand Canyon do. At the moment, I would say that the general public doesn't have any strong associations with any features except perhaps the Sea of Tranquility.

5. Give the Moon back to blood

Western science has decoupled menstruation from the Moon. But it's one of the deepest cultural connections that we have. Half the population of Earth, about four billion people, stands in some kind of relationship to menstruation. 20th and 21st century studies may have shown that menstruation is not driven by lunar cycles - or have they? Recent studies, such as this one,  seem to be returning the Moon to the equation. All I'm saying is that we should not be so quick to discard the relationship between the Moon and menstruation, and that the cultural relationship does not need to be based on science to be significant.

The anthropological, sociological, psychological, medical, and scientific literature on menstruation is vast and I'm not going to pretend to be across it. But I do think it's worth noting that the Moon's significance for women is very different than it is for men. The cultural values associated with the Moon and menstruation are profound. I think we should reclaim this. Visually, this means emphasising the phases of the Moon rather than the lunar surface. But it also means co-opting these new telescopic, satellite and ground images of the Moon into the web of meaning rather than leaving it to men to determine this meaning.

Is the decoupling of the Moon from women an important prior step to treating it as a resource to be exploited? Or is the continued association of the Moon with women something which allows the exploitation of its resources under patriarchy? I'll drop these questions here as a reminder to myself to return to some classic literature eg Carolyn Merchant's Death of Nature, and some newer literature which sounds amazing eg The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature: Notes on a Wild Fluidity by Natalie Rose Dyer. 

What sort of map does this make? Not the traditional cartography, but remember the definition that we put in the introduction to this post. We might find different ways to physically represent this relationship to women's bodies, such as Bettina Forget's use of deep pink. I'm sure there are many other creative ways to represent these values.

You might say that what we have already, in the way the Moon is represented, is the male wet dream of the Moon as something to conquer, where unmasked nature is the enemy. This is, I think, a strong element of Musk and his followers' urge to be 'multiplanetary'. Let's take back the phallic rocket which penetrates the mineral-laden mantle as we see in Georges Meliés' iconic film La Voyage dans la Lune. Let's have instead a god who bleeds now.

we need a god who bleeds now
a god whose wounds are not
some small male vengeance
some pitiful concession to humility
a desert swept with dryin marrow in honor of the lord

we need a god who bleeds
spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet
thick & warm like the breath of her
our mothers tearing to let us in
this place breaks open
like our mothers bleeding
the planet is heaving mourning our ignorance
the moon tugs the seas
to hold her/to hold her
embrace swelling hills/i am
not wounded i am bleeding to life

we need a god who bleeds now
whose wounds are not the end of anything

- Ntozake Shange

6. Inscribe new meanings

Women aren't bound by what came before. I put another query out to Bluesky: what new rituals will we need for the Moon? I particularly loved writer and documentary photographer

Nancy Forde's response:

Sacred pilgrimages to the Dark Side. Mourning rituals for Earth alternating between locations of Lacus Doloros (Lake of Sorrow) and Lacus Mortis; Academic Conference at Mare Ingenii (Sea of Cleverness); Insomnia clinics at Palus Somni (Marsh of Sleep); Pride Marches at Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows)

This gives all the place names we talked about completely new resonances by overwriting them with repeated rituals, ones that are not tied to Earth. I love it.

The naming of features, and the process of carving the Moon up into places where you can make habitations, mine water ice or other minerals, land rockets, or dispose of waste, the zoning or property values of the lunar surface, is cadastral colonialism. We should be wary of it as it will creep up on us: the meaning of these names could change quickly.

Instead of making the Moon a resource, why not make it kin? This is a new meaning that completely changes our relationship with the Moon. In

this article

I talk about Val Plumwood's co-participation model:

Then we might ask, what does the Moon need from us in order to survive? Another unstated assumption is that without living ecosystems, atmospheres, oceans and plate tectonics etc, that the Moon is less complex than Earth and hence less vulnerable to harm. In fact we don’t know any of these things. We don’t know what the Moon’s vulnerabilities are yet. We only know something of ours. ... The co-participation model does not close off the possibility of humans using lunar resources, but it does lead to a greater recognition of the Moon as an active agent, and a rebalancing of how resources are allocated: taking into account what the Moon needs to maintain its ecological integrity.

In the Earthrise photo, people are always so fixated on Earth. But what if, instead, we asked what the lunar surface we see illuminated by Earthshine is? It has a glassy, translucent look to me, like quartzite, like it would fracture conchoidally in the same way that stone selected by humans for making stone tools does. It's undulating, white/grey in colour. The craters aren't dark, shadowed pits: they're illuminated. There are bright white spots.  The image apparently shows the eastern limb of the Moon near the equator.

This is not necessarily anything to do with women, but it is the application of a feminist method, and the kind of thing that one could make a new meaning around. This piece of lunar ground makes it an Earthrise photo, yet few analyse it, seeing instead the Earth as the focus. No-one, it seems, has disputed the 'lifelessness' of the landscape over which the living Earth rises. But what if we look at it as a differently animated land - a place or more pure lights and shadows than are possible on Earth - a landscape of light, effectively? Does this give us a meaning that we can base action on? I don't know; I'm just trying it on for size.

Image credit: NASA

People assume that my position is that we can't go to space or explore the Moon. Far from it. I just think the Moon is too important to approach it with a narrow western patriarchal, capitalist eye. Looking at the map as expressions of relationships of power, there are ways to represent these relationships that don't reinforce existing terrestrial inequalities. I think the possibilities are worth exploring.

The Dr Space Junk signature eau de parfum

Image credit: Alice Gorman

It's finally here! I made my own signature scent, thanks to Elke at Red Rosie Studio in Adelaide. Just for something different to do, I and my elegant colleague Dr Mirani Litster did a perfume-making workshop. In two and a half hours, we learned a lot about the process of perfume-making and how to mix ingredients to make something unique. For example, we learnt that an accord is a suite of different scents which you can use as a base for other things. Some accords are very famous in themselves.

Then we made a perfume and Elke bottled it in a spray bottle, and printed a label with our perfume's name on it. It was so much fun!

Of course I wanted to make a Dr Space Junk signature scent! At the beginning Elke asked us to jot down any ideas we had to use as a guide of sorts. I hadn't given this as much thought as I probably should have, but I did know from meeting Marina Barcenilla, the planetary geochemist behind AromAtom, that it wouldn't be possible to replicate the actual fragrance of somewhere in space without the kinds of resources that a planetary geochemist has access to.

I'll give a shout-out to Marina here, because she was kind enough to send me a sample pack of her perfume. When I first tried the lunar one, it smelt so otherworldly, that every time I caught it's trace on my skin my brain did a flip as it was so obviously not of Earth. The smell transported me to a place I had never been, and likely would never go to, but which had a powerful and evocative effect on my brain.

I knew we were going to be doing something different with Elke. The inspirations, as I wrote them down in my notes before starting, were: 

Night 

Dark

Moon garden

The space between the stars

Back when the Internet was but a kitten, before even the World Wide Web, there was a website about how to grow a Moon garden with plants which flowered under moonlight, or whose flowers gave up their fragrance as night fell. I'm not any sort of gardener, but I was quite captivated by this idea. I imagined what it might smell like to stand in such a garden and gaze up at the Moon. This was the inspiration behind my Dr Space Junk scent, put together in the most unsystematic way possible. 

The ingredients are:

Chypre Accord 5 parts

Rich Amber Accord 8 parts

White Sandalwood 2 parts

Narcotic Floral Accord 8 parts

Frankinsense 3 parts

Ozone 1 part

I chose Chypre Accord as the starting point, not because I knew what it was, but because I had heard the term somewhere and it sounded ancient and musty and hypnotic. Then my elegant colleague Dr Litster suggested that I try ozone as an element. Ozone was pale driftwood shining like bones in my night garden, and I knew it had to be in there. I also wanted the Narcotic Floral Accord to connote the madness induced by moonlight. Narcotic florals are while flowers which are often night-blooming. Frankinsense is an old favourite of mine, so that was included too. 

I needed Elke's advice to tie this all together and make it work as a coherent scent. She recommended the Rich Amber Accord, and the White Sandalwood. I played around with proportions, and suddenly it came together as an actual perfume. 

It felt pretty amazing to leave at the end of the afternoon with a bottle of eau de parfum which I had designed! (And if you contact Red Rosie Studio and ask for the Dr Space Junk, you can buy your own bottle. All the perfumes people create are kept on file. I mention this because some people asked me about it).

I'm pretty keen to create another one, and this time I know more about where my inspiration will come from. I'd like to have a go at Asteroid 551014, the asteroid named after me, which I feel very close to. 

And this one, for a favourite quote from the story Rocket Man by Ray Bradbury:

And from the opened case spilled his black uniform, like a black nebula, stars glittering here or there, distantly, in the material. I kneaded the dark stuff in my warm hands; I smelled the planet Mars, an iron smell, and the planet Venus, a green ivy smell, and the planet Mercury, a scent of sulphur and fire; and I could smell the milky moon and the hardness of stars.

 

Dr Space Junk 20 Years of Blogging Feminist as Fuck Edition

This beautiful artwork is by archaeologist Dr Katherine Cook https://drkrcook.wordpress.com/ 

This blog is 20 years old! My first post was in July 2004, when blogging was relatively new. In those pre-microblogging days (that's what Twitter was, for those not around at the time), blogs were where all the action was. We had blog carnivals, blog rolls, web rings, bloggers fighting with each other, and all kinds of shenanigans. 

Twenty years later I have written over 400 posts, and as time has gone on, they've become longer and longer, and more researched. This wasn't a conscious decision, more a reflection of how the blog's role in my writing/research life has changed. 

To celebrate this anniversary, I made a list of the top ten most-read posts. Then I realised that the top ten posts weren't necessarily my favourite posts, so I decided to make a list of them, which turned out to be far more than ten. So I decided to break it into smaller sections, and here we are. These are my most feminist posts, and if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen! (No stay in it because I want you to read them).

Please enjoy my Feminist as Fuck edition!

1. The spacecraft, the shirt, and the scandal (November 16, 2014)

Back in 2014, a spacecraft called Rosetta was woken from hibernation, and as the world waited with bated breath, the Philae lander was dropped onto a comet's surface. It was an extraordinary mission, one of my favourites. But an ill-chosen shirt worn by one of the mission scientists temporarily eclipsed the achievement. Why? I gave my take in this post.

2. The day Pluto came to breakfast: Venetia Burney and a life in mathematics (July 12, 2015)

In 1930, there was tremendous excitement across the world because a new planet had been found. It was named Pluto at the suggestion of 11-year-old Venetia Burney. Of course it's not a planet any more, but the point of this post was to look at Venetia Burney's life in an era where women were not permitted to get university degrees. Sometimes I wonder if men realise just how far women have to be dehumanised to allow them to remain the dominant gender. And I guess this is why I write these posts, as drips that might eventually wear away the edifice of the patriarchy.

3. Women in the kitchen of science: on being excluded from the life of the mind. (Novermber 13, 2015)

This is an account of how I came to hate Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game, and how it might feel when the credibility gap for women doesn't exist - when no-one questions who you are and your right to be present.

4. He said, she said, and what the dictionary said  (January 31, 2016)

In 2016 the Twitters were in a spin about language. It had come to the attention of a couple of people that the online Oxford dictionary was using horrendously sexist definitions of some words. A few of us wrote responses to this. The debate is not over, either: in 2019 a petition called for the OED to change how it represented women. The response was that the dictionary reflected language how it was, not how it ought to be. This tells us that we still live in a patriarchal world where women are inferior to men (surprise!), and that dictionaries don't see themselves as agents of change. But why not, I want to ask. It's all in the choices: you can represent current usage while also countering it with the examples chosen. Why do dictionaries have to be the mouthpiece of the politically dominant? (Yes, a naïve question, but why?)

5. An anatomy of street harassment (March 10, 2018)

 

Because I was tired of men:

1. Denying that street (or workplace, or domestic) harassment occurred - you can't believe what a woman says about her own experience, right? See post above.

2. Minimising its impact - you didn't get raped, or physically hurt, right? And it will be couched in such passive language so the harasser doesn't appear.

3. Telling you how to deal with it - just say no, right?

4. And failing to recognise how constant this is, and how much time and energy you have to expend just to stay safe - nothing happened, right? So why are you angry?

I thought I would explain how it works, using a recent example. Sad to say, I sent the post to a male friend to get some feedback and his response was to tell me what I'd done wrong.

Listen up, men, quit your bitching, and change your behaviour.

6. Here now the Sun: a poem for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space (22 February 2019)

This poem was published in Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg. As I said to Midge when she approached me about including it in the book, it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me!

I wrote it using a technique called erasure, where I removed parts of the original text, in this case the transcript of Valentina Tereshkova's epic spaceflight in 1963. The aim was to centre her voice. I had a wonderful experience in 2023, where a whole audience of people recited the poem together at an event at the Secession art gallery in Vienna. This gave a whole new meaning to the poem - people told me they found it exhilarating and triumphant - not knowing how Tereshkova had been vilified and demeaned, this is how they inhabited her words. I found it quite moving.

7.  Space Age Suds: women, washing machines and the astronautics of everyday life (17 March, 2019)

I always find newspapers such fascinating sources of information about public attitudes, and trawling through Trove, the National Library of Australia's online archive of newspapers, magazines and other popular publications, is such a joy. A search brought up this rather delightful article where beloved South Australian journalist Max Fatchen imagines his wife Jean as the commander of a space module in the form of a washing machine. Reading it again, whole new vistas of feminist analysis open before my eyes - but that can be for another time!

8.  Cat-Women of the Moon: ideas of space travel in the 1950s. (31 July, 2019)

It's hard not to love a movie full of sinister black cat-suited women, and although this one is no cinematic masterpiece, it is a classic example of how women and space governance are seen as mutually exclusive. I analysed the genre of women-only planets in an essay for the Griffith Review (paywalled but contact me or them for a copy if you're interested). Early space age movies are so revealing about implicit societal attitudes to space exploration and gender roles, and there's so much more to watch!

9. Between the house and the stars: the life of Varvara Sokolova who married Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (17 January, 2021)

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is known as the 'father of spaceflight' and is one of the most famous people in the whole history of humans and space. I'd been citing him and talking about him for years. One day a few years ago I stopped to ask myself the question: what about Mrs Tsiolkovksy, or Varvara Sokolova as I came to know her? What had been left out of Tsiolkovksy's story? I decided to put her back in it, and this is the result.

10.  Valentina Tereshkova and double standards in human spaceflight history (13 June, 2022)

In case you weren't aware that the first woman in space was being disparaged and belittled over 60 years after her spaceflight, let me disabuse you. Every year around the anniversary of her flight, you will find women celebrating her achievement on social media and men trying to tear her down. One of those men issued a challenge to me, and while I would normally react by saying 'do your own research, buttercup', this time I thought I would take him down. 

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So there you have my favourite posts where I have tackled women's rights or applied feminist methods to interrogate space history and public perceptions. If this is an area which interests you, I can recommend these older publications:

Penley, Constance 1997  NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. London: Verso

Lykke, N. and M. Bryld  2000 Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred. London: Bloomsbury Academic

Enloe, C., 1993 The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War.  University of California Press. 

Nolen, Stephanie 2002 Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race. Penguin Canada

And these newer ones:

Schwartz, James S.J., Linda Billings, and Erika Nesvold (eds) 2023 Reclaiming Space. Progressive and Multicultural Visions of Space Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Boucher, Marie-Pier, Claire Webb,  Annick Bureaud, and Nahum (eds) 2024 Space Feminisms. People, Planets, Power. London: Bloomsbury

20th anniversary of the Space Age Archaeology blog

Illustration by Jens Notroff.

It just occurred to me that I have been writing this blog for 20 years. My first post was on July 4, 2004, about the International Space University in Adelaide. I'd heard about this new thing called blogging - short for web logging - and I thought I'd give it a crack. I was unemployed at the time, having resigned from my job the previous year in order to pursue space archaeology, which I'd been plugging away at on the side until that point. I was dirt poor and had no idea what I was going to do to survive. 

The tagline of the blog is the original one. Every time I've thought I should update it, something holds me back. It's still largely true! While I've changed the appearance of the blog from time to time, some things have stayed the same.

These are my top ten most read posts, excluding a couple which were attacked by bots who artificially increased the statistics. 

1. The patron saint of astronauts - the surprising story of the "Flying Friar" 11 March 2012. 19.5 k reads

At a drunken dinner party, we decided to find out who the patron saint of astronauts is. The answer: St Joseph of Cupertino, and his story is rather interesting!

2. How to avoid sexist language in space - Dr Space Junk wields the red pen. 6 September 2014. 8.84 k reads

When the subject came up in online spaces like Twitter, members of the (mostly) male class would just go bananas about how language didn't matter. (If it didn't matter so much, why were they so ANGRY about it?) I tried to explain why it mattered, and how easy it was to do - if you cared enough.

3. 'Learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss': the children's playground as a variable gravity environment. 29 December 2016. 7.63 k reads

This was about how the apparatus at children's playgrounds - swings, slides, merry-go-rounds, etc, were ways for children to adapt to 1 Earth gravity by learning how not to fall, and the consequences of falling, and to experience higher gravities through the acceleration provided by many of the apparatus. I aimed to foreground gravity rather than assuming it.

4.  Autobiographical reminiscence: the phases of Venus. 7 July, 2017. 7.4 k reads

This was about how I learned the constellations as a child, and my love of the planet Venus.

5.   From aerospace to everyday life: the trajectory of cable ties. 24 August, 2016. 6.12 reads

I've been obsessed with cable ties for a long time. I and my friend and colleague, Aylza Donald, made a conference poster about how they migrated from aerospace industry to being found in every household across many lands. Catch the #cabletielove and feel welcome to cite us!

6.  Do objects and people cast shadows inside the International Space Station? 6 November, 2016. 6.1 k reads

Shadows have been another long-term obsession. You can read other posts about them here and here. I think people liked this one because it talks about the uncanny elements of living in space.

7.  A funny thing happened on the way to the spaceport. 20 July 2016. 5.22 k reads

UFO. 'Nuff said.

8.  Space-craft: rockets, jetpacks, and other DIY space paraphernalia. 11 May, 2012. 5.01 k reads

I'd always wanted to make a pun on spacecraft! Here is a post with various crafty things and people, and a surprise ending. Or should I say a 'happy ending'?

9.  Consuming the Space Age: the cuisine of Sputnik. 18 January, 2011. 4.73 reads

This was written as part of a writing festival curated by Nicola Twilley at GOOD magazine: 

Food for Thinkers is a week-long, distributed, online conversation looking at food-writing from as wide and unusual a variety of perspectives as possible.

I decided to have a crack at space food, stringing together some ideas and facts that had been floating around in my head. I used some of the post later in my book. In case anyone disputes the value of blogs, I have found mine invaluable for testing out ideas that later become highly relevant, even though I didn't know it at the time.

10.  Technological rites of passage in the liminal space of Earth orbit. 27 January, 2017. 3.96 reads

A USB stick lobbed out of the International Space Station was the starting point for some musings about digital artefacts, the burning of space junk, and the anthropological theory of rites of passage.

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So there you go. I know my blog is clunky and terribly designed. Some of it is the limitations of Blogger, a platform which has been around almost as long as blogging itself, but most of it is my lack of ability. Blogger has served me well for twenty years of talking crap on the internet. 

I haven't been the most serious blogger, only writing when the mood takes me. Some years this has been very little. But it has been my constant companion as I have developed some of my core ideas in space archaeology.

I have had some small impact I think - the blog is archived as a significant scientific publication by the National Library of Australia.

In my next post I'll list my top ten personal favourites.