This month’s major concert schedule is jam-packed, with artists including Benson Boone, Khalid, Joji, Robyn, J. Cole and Harry Styles all set to play stadiums across the country. Fans will turn up in the thousands to sing along with the biggest hits.

But what makes a song a “hit”, exactly? There’s no shortage of advice on this. Keep the melody singable. Give listeners something familiar, but not too familiar. Make them feel something. Find a catchy hook. Repeat yourself – but not so much that people get bored.

Much of this advice is sensible. Songwriters, producers and music scholars can readily identify techniques shared in successful songs.

At the same time, having the right formula alone isn’t enough to write the next big single.

There have always been rules in music

Arguments about musical taste quickly become arguments about musical technique. In late 16th-century Florence, a group of musicians and intellectuals known as the Florentine Camerata objected to aspects of the prevailing polyphonic style, where two or more singers perform different but complementary melodies at the same time.

They felt this obscured the meaning of the lyrics and diminished their emotional impact. Inspired by their understanding of ancient Greek drama, the Camerata emphasised a single vocal line, allowing for clear and emotively shaped delivery of words.

As Vincenzo Galilei, a Camerata member, lutenist and father of astronomer Galileo Galilei, put it:

when a musician […] does not have the ability to bend the souls of listeners to where he wishes, his skills and knowledge may be considered null and vain.

The Cameratas’ experiments helped create the conditions from which opera emerged. Centuries later, however, new technologies and social movements transformed popular music.

The rise of rock and roll changed ideas about rhythm, instrumentation and performance. And hip-hop made the manipulation of recorded sound central to musical creation.

What makes a certain style ultimately comes down to a set of choices. Change the style, and the technical advice for success changes with it.

That hasn’t stopped people trying to codify the craft, however. Songwriter Molly-Ann Leikin’s book How to Write a Hit Song is a genuine “how-to” guide that covers song titles, hooks, lyrics, melodic range and structure.

What do successful songs tend to do?

Successful songs often sound familiar, but different. Take Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World. Its opening melody traces the same pattern as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, but transforms it through rhythm, harmony and phrasing. Listeners need enough familiarity to recognise the pattern (consciously or not), but enough difference to keep listening.

Successful songs also make us feel something. That doesn’t necessarily mean they make us happy; they may mix nostalgia, melancholy and hope. Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over and Billy Joel’s Piano Man are good examples. Research has shown listeners can actively seek experiences of sadness, nostalgia and emotional complexity through music.

A hit song will often also leave room for the listener. In Pharrell Williams’ Happy, happiness is compared to “a room without a roof”. It’s hardly a precise definition. The listener brings their own meaning to it.

Finally, hit songs are often catchy and singable, but not too singable. Older songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley tradition treated a range of roughly an “octave plus a note” as a practical ideal: enough space for melodic interest, but still manageable for ordinary voices.

But these rules change. Recent K-pop hits such as Golden from KPop Demon Hunters turn vocal difficulty into part of the song’s appeal.

If we know all this, why isn’t every song a hit?

A hit song is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. It depends on a rare alignment of three factors.

1. A honed craft

A lot of music theory is a distillation of what musicians have done before. This includes, for example, constructing memorable hooks, using patterns of repetition to create expectation, shaping melodies so they feel purposeful, and aligning words and music through techniques such as word painting (where the music interprets or deepens the meaning of the lyrics).

2. Innovation and change.

Today’s new sounds become tomorrow’s conventions. Research shows evolving creative practise is a key factor when it comes to comparing one-hit wonders with creators with sustained success.

Some songs initiate a wave of change. Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel became a breakout hit in 1956 as changing musical tastes brought rock and roll to the centre of popular culture.

The song Torn had also been recorded by other artists without making much impression before Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 version became a global hit. Ednaswap, the band formed by the song’s original co-writers, recorded it in a slower, grunge-inspired style about a year earlier, without much success.

3. Appealing to the zeitgeist

The third factor driving whether or not a song will be a hit is the wider social and cultural conditions of the time.

Taylor Swift is an obvious example. Scholarship on her work examines not only melody and lyrics, but authorship, collaboration, gender, race, citizenship and the meanings audiences attach to her as a cultural phenomenon.

Her cultural significance is such that the same songs might not be hits if ascribed to someone else. Songs enter a world already crowded with ideas about identity, authenticity and belonging. Sometimes an artist and the zeitgeist align. Sometimes they don’t.

Musicians can study their craft and anticipate change. But chasing the zeitgeist risks sounding calculated or inauthentic. I’ve always felt it is better to write good music and be yourself. Whether or not your songs meet the mood of the moment will fall on everyone else.

Timothy McKenry, Professor of Music, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has announced a plan to make civics and citizenship education compulsory for all Year 9 and 10 students.

This follows concerns at state and federal levels about young Australians’ knowledge of Australian democracy in recent years.

Ministers have now asked the national curriculum authority to examine what these updates to civics education might look for Year 9 and 10 students – students who are only a few years away from voting age.

Here’s what the research says effective civics education needs to include.

What’s in the current curriculum?

Civics and citizenship already exist in the Australian curriculum for years 3-10. It’s currently listed as part of the compulsory humanities and social sciences curriculum for years 7-10.

Current topics include:

• the Australian government

• political parties

• the Australian Constitution

• the legal system

• policy

• individuals’ rights

• participating in a democracy.

However, teaching civics and citizenship education in schools has been haphazard.

While research shows civics is most effectively taught as a standalone subject, this hasn’t happened. Instead, states and territories have taught civics and citizenship education within existing subjects, such as history.

The national curriculum is also “interpreted” by state and territory curriculum agencies. So it’s not entirely clear how civics is taught in schools and whether it’s consistent across the country.

Results in decline

Australian students’ declining civics results in recent years suggest the current approach hasn’t been working.

National civics and citizenship test results from 2024 show only 28% of Year 10 students reached the national proficiency standard. This is the lowest level since 2004.

The results also suggest more than 70% of Year 10 students don’t understand how Australia’s democracy works and our system of government.

This is a concern when students become old enough to vote.

What should lessons cover?

Research shows there are three key areas young Australians need to know in order to participate effectively in a democracy. These include:

1. How democracy works: This includes how the Australian government system is structured and how our preferential voting system works. It also includes democratic interference through misinformation, disinformation and political deep fakes (false videos or images of politicians doing or saying things that didn’t happen in real life). These are all concerns amplified through widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI)

2. How laws are made and interpreted: This includes the roles of parliament and the courts, as well as citizens’ responsibilities and the Australian Constitution.

3. Citizenship, diversity and social cohesion: This includes antisemitism, as well as the values that address what it means to be an Australian in the 21st century.

Research shows engaging students in civics works best if the goal is student learning and participation. This can look like classroom discussions, student elections and mock parliaments.

How can we teach it well?

If ministers go ahead with compulsory civics, research suggests three key measures or actions will help it work well.

1. Clear guidance from governments and curriculum agencies of what material is to be taught to Year 9 and 10 students and at what stage of their schooling. This would make it clear what is expected of schools, teachers and students.

2. Additional resources for schools and existing teachers. This would include access to teaching materials and professional development opportunities.

3. Adequate and engaging teacher education at Australian universities. This would help to prepare the next generation of competent, knowledgeable civics and citizenship education teachers.

Australia could look to Germany for how to do this well. The country has long had civics as a mandatory school subject.

Civics education leads to stronger democracies

We know young Australians are increasingly not turning up to vote. Data from the Australian Electoral Commission shows the last two federal elections had the lowest voter turnout since compulsory voting was introduced a century ago.

When students are taught civics and citizenship well, they are better equipped to participate in democratic life. This is essential in a time when global democracy is in decline.

Murray Print, Professor of Education, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Many music fans know that Nina Simone’s 1965 hit “I Put a Spell on You” helped establish the 32-year-old singer as the “High Priestess of Soul.”

Few probably realize that it was Langston Hughes – the pioneering poet and face of the Harlem Renaissance – who had encouraged Simone to record it.

As a Langston Hughes scholar, I’ve spent the past six years documenting Hughes’ largely overlooked friendship with Simone. I explore the creative bond they shared in my newest book, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power,” which details how the two supported and inspired each other.

The seeds of this relationship were planted in 1949, when Hughes delivered a lecture featuring his own poetry at Simone’s high school in Asheville, North Carolina. Simone – then known by her birth name, Eunice Waymon – was just 16 years old.

As part of the programming, Simone played the piano. Hughes was impressed. Even though she was just a teenager, Hughes saw her as a “somebody” – a budding talent who would one day join figures such as classical singer Marian Anderson in the pantheon of legendary Black performance artists. Simone’s performance that day went on to inspire his poem “To Be Somebody”:

Little girl
Dreaming of a baby grand piano
(Not knowing there’s a Steinway bigger, bigger)
Dreaming of a baby grand to play

Simone’s big booster

As Simone matured into adulthood, she and Hughes became close friends. Once she permanently moved to New York City in 1959, the two routinely visited each other’s homes.

Hughes’ relationship with Simone remained strictly professional. As far as scholars know, the poet did not harbor romantic feelings for her.

Simone performed at clubs across New York City, including the famous Village Gate in Greenwich Village. And her debut album, “Little Girl Blue,” was well received in 1959.

But Hughes also used his considerable fame to elevate the rising star. He secured her a spot at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, where she performed songs like “Trouble in Mind” and “Little Liza Jane.” Hughes himself wrote the final song of the festival, “Goodbye Newport Blues,” which Muddy Waters’ pianist, Otis Spann, sang. At the conclusion of the festival, Hughes and Simone slipped off to the nearby Rebel Festival, an “anti-festival” organized by jazz icons Charles Mingus and Max Roach. There, Simone joined Little Richard for an impromptu performance.

Later that year, Hughes published an article in the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender, headlined “Spotlight on Nina Simone.”

A regular columnist, Hughes rarely devoted an entire article to one artist. And with a cultural status in 1960 that rivaled that of Oprah Winfrey’s today, Hughes’ endorsement of Simone’s talent as a singer, performer and pianist carried exceptional weight.

The article was important for another reason. At the time, Simone couldn’t seem to shake comparisons to Billie Holiday, who had died in 1959. Like Holiday, Simone sang with a husky, blues-inflected voice. And like Holiday, she had covered a song from George and Ira Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” “I Loves You Porgy.”

Hughes put those comparisons to rest. In repeatedly highlighting Simone’s masterful piano playing – an instrument over which Holiday had no command – he was able to signal that Simone was completely unlike “Lady Day.”

Not only did quotes from the review appear on Carnegie Hall concert posters advertising Simone’s performances, but a revised version of the article also ended up being included as the liner notes on the back of Simone’s 1964 album, “Broadway-Blues-Ballads.”

A source of inspiration

Beyond using his considerable fame to elevate Simone, Hughes also inspired her songwriting.

Largely known as a poet, Hughes considered himself a songwriter as well. But he never achieved the same stature or success as a lyricist, which ended up being a source of some frustration. Still, roughly 60 of his songs were eventually recorded by a variety of artists, and he provided Simone with more than a dozen original lyrics of his own.

In 1964, Hughes suggested Simone consider singing the lyrics of an obscure song that his personal assistant, George Bass, uncovered while preparing archival material for his radio show broadcast. Bass went on to quietly copyright the unpublished folk song himself.

Simone performed the song, “See-Line Woman,” for the first time at a March 21, 1964, concert in Carnegie Hall, where Hughes was in attendance.

Often spelled various ways – “Sea-Lion,” “C-Line” or “She-Lyin’” – the tune describes sex workers who greet sailors as they arrive in port, with their different-colored dresses conveying the services they are willing to provide:

See-line woman (See-line)
Black dress on (See-line)
For a thousand dollars (See-line)
She wail and she moan (See-line)

The birth of the spellcaster

Sometime between November 1964 and January 1965, Hughes approached Simone in person with a new concept.

Buoyed by his success at pitching “See-Line Woman,” Hughes suggested what he called “Incantations for Nina Simone.” These were what Hughes titled “Songs of Enticement, Bewitchment, Voodoo, Hoodoo, Conjuration, Bedevilment” and, most importantly, “Spell Casting.”

In one song he’d written – which Hughes titled “You Cast a Spell on Me” – he imagined Simone as a witch riding a broomstick brewing magic potions. It included uninspired lyrics such as:

I’ll work my black and white magic
And the other color, too,
So come on, baby bunting,
Let me cast a spell on You.

It’s easy to see Hughes’ suggestions as an effort to typecast Simone as a hypnotic Black woman. And perhaps there was an element of that at play. But Simone accepted the concept, which she saw as a nod to Hoodoo, a set of African American folk-magic traditions that developed primarily in the American South. And she found a way around using Hughes’ verses, turning instead to “I Put a Spell on You,” which the eccentric R&B singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had recorded in 1956.

“I Put a Spell on You” ended up becoming the title track of Simone’s album, which she released in June 1965. It helped forge her identity as a sultry, mysterious singer and eventually served as the title of her 1991 autobiography.

Over the years, when Simone performed the song live, she would sometimes leave the stage, only to return in a trance, as if she possessed the hypnotic powers of a spiritual shaman.

Simone’s follow-up album, 1967’s “The High Priestess of Soul,” featured a startling cover that continued the Hoodoo theme: Simone appears as a sorceress smoking a pipe.

Fans and critics have been responding to her spellbinding performances ever since.

Keep on workin’

Simone may have passed on Hughes’ version of “You Cast a Spell on Me,” but the poet would get another chance a year later.

In 1966, Hughes gave a copy of a poem he had written to Simone. He wanted to know if she would be interested in performing it.

Simone agreed, and Hughes was in the audience at the Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall on Nov. 22, 1966, when Simone performed “Backlash Blues” for likely the first time.

Simone received a standing ovation, and “Backlash Blues” became a staple of her performances. It was later featured in the 2021 Academy Award-winning documentary film “Summer of Soul.”

After Hughes died in May 1967, Simone added a new verse during her live performances of the song, paying homage to its author:

When Langston Hughes died, he told me many months before
“Nina, keep on workin’, till they open up the door.
One of these days, when the doors are open wide,
Make sure you tell ‘em where it’s at, so they’ll have no place to hide.”

Jason Miller, Assistant Lecturer, North Carolina State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On April 10 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration revealed the first picture of a black hole. The object is at the centre of a galaxy known as M87, about 55 million light-years away.

The iconic ring structure instantly became one of the most recognised scientific images of the modern era.

It showed a black hole “shadow” outlined by light from swirling hot gas – just as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The result supported the long-standing idea that the centres of galaxies house supermassive black holes.

However, scientists have since had some disagreements on whether the details and structure of the ring in the original publication were accurate.

Our new research, published today in Nature, used new techniques to investigate the original datasets. Not only do our results validate the original work, but they also provide a fresh perspective on the ring structure.

Our independent results enhance confidence in one of the most significant modern scientific results. And we bring the image of a black hole millions of light-years away back into focus.

An Earth-sized telescope

Imaging the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxy M87 is very challenging. It’s similar to photographing a doughnut on the Moon while standing on Earth. To obtain that level of sharpness and detail, you’d need a telescope the size of the entire planet.

To achieve this, the EHT combined signals from radio telescopes across the globe. Doing so enabled the sharpest imaging possible from down here on Earth. The results ushered in a new era of imaging – we could finally see the extreme environments around black holes.

Four independent imaging teams within the EHT Collaboration participated in the original publication. Though all teams produced a ring-like structure, there were some differences in how the black hole’s fine-scale features were represented. Such differences are known to be caused by human and algorithmic biases in the imaging process.

However, one study fundamentally challenged the ring-like nature of the source. Some discrepancies are understandable. They’re bound to happen when combining data from a sparse telescope array into one Earth-sized virtual telescope.

Other factors contribute, too. Each radio telescope gathering the data will also introduce errors, caused by its instruments or simply by Earth’s atmosphere.

Normally, astronomers estimate these errors and correct them during the analysis. But residual errors from this complex process can lead to incorrect outcomes. To address these issues, we developed a new method for combining data, called “closure invariants”.

The standard practice for analysing the data combines pairs of telescope measurements. By contrast, closure invariants combine triplets – three telescope measurements at once.

This not only eliminates those atmospheric and instrumental errors, it also reveals cleaner information about the object’s structure.

The face of a black hole

To make the most of the data from our closure invariants, we designed a machine learning imaging method called GenDIReCT, which produces images consistent with the measured data. To minimise biases, we trained it on terrestrial images like cats, dogs, and cars. Therefore, it had no idea what a black hole looked like.

We also put the model through a large suite of validation tests, which included imaging a wide range of non-ring structures. This included validation on real datasets of other galaxies like Centaurus A.

Once satisfied with its accuracy, we froze the training and testing procedure so human biases couldn’t affect our imaging outcomes.

On December 4 2025, we finally allowed our fully validated imaging method to “look” at the EHT observations of M87.

Across all datasets, the ring structure was consistent. The appearance and diameter of the ring were consistent with a black hole with a mass of 6.5 billion Suns observed nearly face-on – like looking straight down into the eye of a hurricane.

A fresh perspective

When compared directly to images from the EHT collaboration, our result is consistent in diameter and overall orientation.

Naturally, there are some differences in the fine details of ring width and surface brightness along the circumference, but the overall structure matches. This provides a fresh perspective on the iconic black hole ring while also resolving previous discrepancies.

To prove this success didn’t depend solely on advanced machine learning, we also developed a complementary imaging method based on traditional statistical techniques. This entirely different method also validated our structure using the new closure invariant data we produced.

Overall, our work delivers a strong independent validation of the supermassive black hole structure at the centre of galaxy M87.

And it could do more in the future. Our technique could also be useful in other situations where data from multiple sensors are combined to map unknown structures – such as medical imaging or mapping earthquakes.

Samuel Lai, Early Research Career Fellow, Space & Astronomy, CSIRO and Nithyanandan Thyagarajan, Principal Research Scientist, Space & Astronomy, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In 1774, a young man in his early 20s named Mai arrived in England.

The first Pacific Islander to visit Britain, Mai had joined Captain James Cook’s second expedition during its stop in the Society Islands, which include the islands of Tahiti and Raiatea and today are a part of French Polynesia.

Two years after Mai’s landing in England, the painter and founding Royal Academy President Joshua Reynolds depicted Mai on a canvas nearly 8 feet tall.

Now, more than 250 years later, the painting has made its way to Los Angeles. The Getty Center and the National Portrait Gallery jointly acquired it in 2023 for US$61 million, and the painting went on display at the Getty on Sept. 15, 2026, where it will remain through March 2027.

Audiences in the U.S. might not appreciate just how remarkable – and strange – it was for 18th-century Britons to encounter this portrait.

Reynolds transformed a young Pacific Islander into a monumental figure of European portraiture, giving Mai the grandeur and authority normally reserved for the elite. The painting let 18th-century Britons project their ideas about people from distant lands, how they should be depicted and what could be learned from them.

Romanticizing the ‘savage’

Beginning in the late 1750s, English translations of the books of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had helped to popularize the idea in England that “savages” merited closer study.

Rousseau argued that societies were happiest before agriculture and metal production corrupted them. “Savages,” he believed, had few desires and could easily satisfy them, unlike Europeans, who made themselves miserable pursuing unnecessary luxuries.

Rousseau lamented that accounts of these societies came mainly from merchants, sailors, soldiers and missionaries. He called for learned gentlemen to undertake “a serious Voyage round the world” to “study Men and Manners.”

The fabulously wealthy young naturalist and botanist Joseph Banks shared Rousseau’s interest in indigenous societies – and was willing to spend a fortune to study them.

Banks secured a place for himself on Cook’s first voyage, which took place from 1768 to 1771. Banks paid millions of dollars by today’s standards to bring along a botanist, artists, servants, his greyhound and scientific equipment. With Cook, he studied the flora, fauna and cultures of the Society Islands, New Zealand and Australia.

During the expedition, Banks encountered a priest from Raiatea named Tupaia, who asked to join the voyage. Banks recognized an opportunity to continue studying Tupaia and his culture and offered to support the islander in England. But Tupaia died on the return voyage, possibly from malaria.

Banks didn’t join Cook for his second voyage, which took place between 1772 and 1775. But he would soon get an opportunity to host another Pacific islander.

Remaking Mai

Like Tupaia, Mai was from Raiatea, where he was born into a family of middling rank. When invaders from the neighboring island of Bora Bora conquered Mai’s homeland and killed his father, he fled to Tahiti, sinking to the status of a dispossessed refugee. He later went to the island of Huahine in order to assist a high-ranking priest. He was staying there when Cook’s expedition encountered him in 1773.

Though Cook later warmed to Mai, the navigator initially viewed the islander as too dark, too ugly and too lacking in “intelligence” and character. He was not a “proper sample” of the indigenous people of the South Pacific.

But Mai ingratiated himself, showing he could usefully perform a seaman’s tasks. Apparently, he also charmed Cook’s men, who affectionately nicknamed him “Jack.” So Cook eventually agreed to let Tobias Furneaux, the captain of Cook’s consort ship, the Adventure, to transport Mai back to England. On the Adventure and in England, Europeans conflated the Tahitian “o,” which means “it is,” with “Mai,” calling their visitor “Omai.”

While Furneaux likely intuited that Banks and other naturalists would value Mai as a specimen for study, Mai had a plan of his own: He wanted to obtain British firepower to retake his homeland.

Mai was no more than a commoner in the Society Islands, and aboard the Adventure, he preferred the company “of the armourer and the common seamen,” according to the memoirs of midshipman John Elliot. Yet Elliot went on to explain how Furneaux refashioned Mai into a “priest of the sun.”

Furneaux appears to have understood that marketing Mai as a prominent figure would smooth his British reception. Rather than welcoming a landless nobody, the British public would receive a man of the highest caliber.

When the voyage docked at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, Furneaux dressed up Mai “in his own clothes,” introducing him to the “best companies,” wrote George Forster, one of the expedition’s naturalists. Forster noted how Mai himself began declaring that he was “not a towtòw, which is the denomination of the lowest class,” but “a hòa, or attendant upon the king.”

Fit for a king

Mai’s arrival in England coincided with a fad for Pacific cultures that had risen to new heights in 1773, when a blockbuster compilation of accounts of Pacific expeditions, which included Cook’s first voyage, was published. The collection portrayed Tahiti as a tropical paradise that knew neither sexual shame nor the drudgeries of labor, popularizing European fantasies of Tahiti as a “New Cythera,” or Aphrodite’s island.

The wealthy Banks quickly agreed to become one of Mai’s key handlers. Though he knew Mai was a commoner, Banks nonetheless promoted the idea of him as a noble, introducing Mai to luminaries at parties, dinners and theater performances.

Yet the reactions to Mai were not uniformly positive, and reflected debates over the value of voyages like Cook’s. The critic Samuel Johnson, for example, refused to read Cook’s account, declaring, “There can be little entertainment in such books; one set of savages is like another.”

Nonetheless, King George III and Queen Charlotte agreed to meet Mai at Kew Palace, where Banks presented him to the royal couple.

Westminster Magazine lampooned the encounter: The royal and public fascination with Mai reflected a broader pattern of cultural decay, in which meaningless entertainment sapped England’s vigor, a sure sign that “the glory of this Nation will sink with the luxury and dissipation of the times.”

Others tried to make Mai a more palatable object of study by emphasizing his purported royal lineage. London Magazine praised Mai’s “genteel” manners and pointed out that he came from a family of “great consequence” with “large possessions” in Tahiti. This, it seemed, made him an apt subject for “persons of curiosity and taste.”

Mai’s Legacy

During Mai’s last year in England, Reynolds debuted his portrait.

To Reynolds, Mai was an embodiment of the universal nobility of humanity – a far cry from Westminster Magazine’s depiction of the islander as no more than a cheap amusement.

Reynolds modeled Mai on ancient Roman senators and military leaders, dressing him in robes reminiscent of Tahitian tapa cloth but with a Roman flair. The portrait debuted alongside Reynolds’ full-length portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire.

The politician Horace Walpole, who had earlier dismissed Cook’s travel narrative as “at best an account of the fishermen on the coasts of forty islands,” was nonetheless impressed by the portrait, describing it as “very good.”

When Cook departed with Mai for the Tahitian archipelago in 1776, the naturalist Forster expressed popular disappointment that Mai had not learned anything useful during his stay, but merely enjoyed an endless round of “splendid entertainments.”

Perhaps the visit disappointed Mai, too. Though he received some firearms, Cook refused to drop him off on Raiatea, fearing an outbreak of violence. Instead, Cook deposited Mai on Huahine in 1777.

Two years later, Hawaiians killed Cook on the Big Island of Hawaii. Not long after that, Mai died, succumbing to a fever. Before his death, he did get one chance to use his acquired firearms in a skirmish with Bora Borans, a victorious battle during which Mai killed many of his enemies and became one of the first Pacific Islanders to successfully obtain and employ British firepower toward his own ends.

As cultural icons, Mai and Cook lived on. Mai had returned to Huahine with a horse, and tattoos of horsemen appeared on islanders years after Mai’s death. In England, poet William Cowper portrayed Mai as an innocent corrupted by European society.

And then there was the lavish, blockbuster 1785 stage show “Omai: or, a Trip Around the World.”

Employing vibrantly painted scenes based on sketches from Cook’s third-voyage artist, it wowed the public.

In the performance, Mai’s image as a noble endures: He is depicted as a visiting prince who falls in love with an Englishwoman whose name, fittingly, is Londina.

Saar Shahar, PhD Candidate in English, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

To the surprise of nobody, last month Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991) won a poll of Australia’s top 100 books run by ABC’s Radio National. Winton’s novel has regularly topped such polls in the years since it was published.

A similar inexorability attaches to the response that appeared in my social media feed decrying this result. I belong to a perverse caste of people whose disdain for Winton goes up in direct proportion to his broader national and international acclaim. One expressed relief that, “at least it wasn’t Trent Dalton”.

Review: Tim Winton – Songs from the Firefront (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin)

These respective positions on Winton – unabashed love and weary disdain – are hard to square but, like any dialectic, we have to credit each thesis with seeing something that the other cannot.

Those who love Cloudstreet, however, do not feel moved to produce detailed reasoning for their love. It is like asking someone why they love their dog. There are things that they can point to, but in the end they just love them and that’s all there is to it. Those who hate Cloudstreet will first of all insist they don’t hate the novel; they just find it problematic. A familiar litany follows – too white, too Christian, naff vernacular language, the women are weird. Cloudstreet, they say, is evocative but ultimately mawkish settler apologia; no wonder Australians love it so much.

In the final essay of Winton’s new book Songs from the Firefront, he meditates on the strange adulation and vituperation of “That Book”:

Some people despise the novel for its ‘nostalgia’. Others tell me they wish I’d write more books like it, that they miss the soft, happy, sunny world of the Lambs and the Pickleses. But I don’t recognise my book in any of this. Somehow the misery, the fear, the mutilations, the beatings and murders have evaporated from those readers’ memories. Sometimes a notable book simply has to bear the size of its own footprint. Would it have provoked such strong feelings if it had sold a thousand copies and not taken up so much cultural space? Who can know.

Those who find Winton’s work mired in nostalgia will not be disappointed if they thumb through the essays and reflections in Songs from the Firefront. But the relationship to the past that powers Winton’s writing and funds his appeal is missed if one writes it off as sepia-toned amnesia. In an age of accelerating alienation where humans now willingly outsource their speech to machines, should we really be so quick to scorn serious remembering?

The vanquished wisdom of childhood

Winton wrote Cloudstreet in his twenties, having spent his childhood in the 1960s in the then new Perth suburb of Karrinyup. The mood at this time was one of rapid progress. Milkmen, outdoor toilets and trams were being replaced by freeways, supermarkets and television. So, how was Winton able to so evocatively recreate the prelapsarian Perth of the 1940s and 50s?

In the family vignettes that make up one of the main lines in Songs from the Firefront, particularly those dealing with his parents, we glimpse the roots of how this remarkable act of historical ventriloquism was achieved.

In the first instance, a picture emerges of a particularly close family. Winton’s imaginative ties were not just to his parents but to his grandparents and the broader extended family. More decisive still was the fact that Winton seems to have absorbed the world of his forbears with intense interest. Most normal children learn to slink away when their parents start to talk to their parents about the olden days. But the young Winton seems not only to have stayed through countless hours of world-sustaining generational reminiscence but to have hit the “record” button.

The essay “Ancient of Days” consists almost entirely of dialogue between Winton and his father on the occasion of the latter’s 94th birthday. In the rhythm of their timeworn schtick we see the flicker of the family conflicts that his novels capture with such precision.

“You’re late,” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“Dad, those two sentences don’t belong together.”

“What do I care? It’s my birthday.”

“I thought you don’t care about birthdays.”

“I don’t. Just another day.”

“You mean you don’t wanna come?”

“I don’t want any fuss.”

Through these vignettes of family life, we experience something of the familial world that produces Winton’s fiction. The world is not without its ambivalences. What now seem like quirks in his parents would once have been maddening flaws. The mute force of their love was at times, we can suppose, experienced as an enveloping claustrophobia.

Songs from the Firefront helps us understand how Cloudstreet’s mythopoeia is the transmuted expression of these intimate dramas; how Winton’s childhood formed in superimposition with the memories of his parents and their parents.

Reading Songs from the Firefront we come up against a surprising realisation, which is that Winton has gotten older. Now in his mid-sixties, he is playing with his grandchildren and dealing with the frailty of his parents.

He describes bumbling attempts to help his age-ravaged mother swim in the ocean. These hover between comedy and heartbreak. During his father’s painful medical treatment, Winton tries to assuage his suffering by playing Johnny Cash with mixed results. In these moments of divine comedy, the inevitable brutality of mortal life is solemnised by the paltry, plaintive gestures that get offered. Winton lends a recuperative dignity to the tragic farce of human existence.

The fact that Winton has aged should not of course be surprising, but it is. Part of Winton’s charm seems to be a perpetual boyishness that inflects his writing and public image. That is not to say that Winton lacks maturity or moral gravity but to notice that his writing is flecked with the vanquished wisdom of childhood.

Winton is not unique in this respect, but it is all the same a distinctive formation. The art theorist Carol Mavor’s book Reading Boyishly identified a certain “boyish” stance in the writing styles of J.M. Barrie, Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes and Donald Winnicott. Like these great writers, Winton’s work often sees the adult world with the hungry fascination of the precocious child. Proust’s remembrance takes on its most sublime resonance when it relays the ruinous love of Swann for Odette through the eyes of the narrator as a boy. Only a boy can see them as deities rather than deluded fools.

In the family stories of Songs from the Firefront, one is left with a lasting impression of Winton as the good son. It has clearly been both a blessing and a curse. Either way, Winton seems to understand that this is not something over which he had much choice. The good son is not the one who refuses to see his parents’ failings, but the one who sees them all and accepts them. This, in many respects, is the cornerstone of Winton’s faith. His faith in the dignity of his forbears is of a piece with the structuring role of faith in his work more generally.

That Winton is a writer of faith is painfully embarrassing to the secular cynic. It seems an unforgivable capitulation and raises the still more troubling question of sincerity. How is it possible to distinguish sincerity from sentimentality? A feeling that is truly expressed from its sentimental performance?

In many ways, the scandal of sincerity is at the heart of the bifurcation in opinion on Winton. Those who enjoy Winton see no scandal. Those who don’t simply cannot believe that he believes. They cannot buy it. Is it too much, they ask, for at least the fig leaf of irony?

The natural world

This question of sincerity also arises in the other throughline in Songs from the Firefront, which are the encounters Winton has with the natural world, particularly the coasts and oceans with which he is now indelibly associated.

These often take the form of quiet epiphanies. In this respect, this new book is a sequel to earlier “landscape memoirs” like Land’s Edge (1993) and Island Home (2015). Like those earlier books, Songs from the Firefront features limpid nature writing. Winton paddle-boarding amongst the whales and dugongs of Shark Bay. Winton hiking in the labyrinth of arid canyons in Cape Range next to Ningaloo Reef.

Winton is not blind to his own pretensions and the romanticism of these quests is leavened by servings of self-mockery. But in the end, any qualms about his own human ridiculousness must give way to the plain and overwhelming fact of the more-than-human worlds that he meets.

It is hard not to read about the “alpine white” glimmer of a humpback whale calf sliding metres beneath Winton’s board and not feel a slight shiver of awe. Or, to read of the “brassy backs” of dugongs galumphing in the tepid sea-meadows and not have one’s heart warmed:

Beneath you, the mother and calf truffle away with their blunt, rubbery snouts, ploughing pale furrows and leaving a brown plume in their wake.

There may be better sentences about dugongs grazing but I somehow doubt it. The effortless poetry in Winton’s writing allows us to sell it short. He conjures his vital images from the improbable resources of the oral archive of a lost Australian vernacular. But the sinews of these spoken idioms tauten the moments of encounter that might otherwise fall into misty cliché.

Human mortality and animal alterity come sharply together in the tale he recounts in Songs from the Firefront of “Roo”. Winton’s morning surf is interrupted by an aging kangaroo standing incongruously at the water’s edge. Or, as Winton has previously called it, the land’s edge.

Winton tries to sidle past, but the roo moves towards him and starts to square up. Taken aback, Winton stops and stares into the weathered face of this roo and realises that the animal is blind:

It wasn’t safe to get within kicking distance, but I could smell him, see the ticks feasting on his face. His mouth was slack, his eyes milky[…] He was there for an hour, lurching in the wash, a silhouette not so different from that of a man.

A persistent prejudice opposes sincerity to worldliness. The immersive immediacy of family and nature in Winton’s writing can make us forget that he has spent most of his working life enmeshed in the culture of letters.

Loving ruthlessness

But several essays in Songs from the Firefront remind us that, like all great writers, Winton is a great reader. The best of these is his brilliant meditation on the work of Helen Garner, “With Respect”. Winton and Garner seem at first a very odd couple, the boyish Christian surfie from outer suburban Perth and the acerbic chronicler of Melbourne’s inner-city. Garner’s cautious endorsement of his first novel An Open Swimmer (1982) in a review for the National Times meant the world to the young writer: “Helen-bloody-Garner”!

“With Respect” was originally presented as lecture at a symposium on Garner at the University of Western Australia that I attended. Although the intersection of Winton and Garner fans is a little hard to make out in the Venn diagram, the latter found themselves surprised and entranced by Winton’s speech.

It turns out none of us had read Garner in quite the way Winton had, which was as a friend, mentor and rival. The loving ruthlessness of his reading of Garner was quite moving. Above all, what Winton valued in Garner’s writing was its refusal to compromise. It was against this resolute refusal that Winton was able to whet his prose.

Songs from the Firefront returns its readers to some of Winton’s more persistent themes. These take on a new hue at the author’s time of life. But the elegiac mood is shaken by the more urgent moments in the book; by a firefront that seems to be rounding on us with the change of wind.

Well known for his campaign to save the Ningaloo Reef from fossil fuel extraction, Winton’s most recent novel Juice (2024) was a frightening portrait of where our addiction to hydrocarbons is sending us.

In the background of Songs from the Firefront is a world that seems now unremittingly ablaze. Along with the water’s edge and the land’s edge, there is now the fire’s edge and what might lie on its other side.

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia

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Plate tectonics is one of the reasons Earth looks so different from its planetary neighbours.

The movement of enormous chunks of our planet’s crust builds mountain ranges, triggers earthquakes, shapes our oceans and continents, and helps regulate Earth’s climate and magnetic field over deep time.

This process may also be key to sustaining the kind of long-term habitability that allowed complex life to evolve. But exactly when it began has been a long-standing mystery.

In new research, we studied chemical fingerprints in more than 1,000 rocks to look for clues – and found clear evidence for when this remarkable shift occurred.

Why plate tectonics matters

Many scientists believe plate tectonics provides the long-term stability that keeps our planet life-friendly, unlike tectonically “dead” worlds such as Venus and Mars.

But debate has raged over when this process began: has it run throughout Earth’s entire 4.5-billion-year history, or did it “switch on” at some point along the way?

For much of its early history, Earth may have been mostly covered by oceans, without the shifting, colliding plates that build tall mountains – which in turn erode away, supplying the nutrients to feed marine life.

The question is hard to settle because plate tectonics are very good at destroying the evidence. Where plates collide, some old crust is dragged back down into the mantle, and the crust that is thrust upward to form mountains also starts eroding away, which erases the geological record.

Often, all that survives are chemical fingerprints preserved in ancient rocks that have endured for billions of years, against the odds.

Reading the fingerprints in rocks

In our new study, we studied one such fingerprint.

New continental crust – the ground we stand on – doesn’t always form fresh from crystallising mantle magma. Often it’s made from melting older rock that was already sitting inside existing crust.

That process leaves a lasting chemical trace in the new rocks, a bit like the DNA a child inherits from their parents. This is the fingerprint we studied.

In some minerals (feldspar and some sulfide minerals, in our case) this fingerprint can survive largely undisturbed for billions of years.

We analysed over 1,200 rocks, some newly analysed by us, others compiled from earlier studies, from ancient landmasses across Australia, Africa, North America and Europe, spanning nearly four billion years of Earth’s history.

The vanishing signal

We found a striking pattern in the fingerprints. Rocks older than about 2.5 billion years carried the unmistakable signature of very ancient crust, which appears to have formed about four billion years ago.

In geological terms, this is not too long after Earth itself formed. This ancient crust material was melted and remelted repeatedly, for well over a billion years, to produce the granite-like rocks that made up much of Earth’s earliest continents.

Then, around 2.5 billion years ago, that fingerprint vanishes abruptly. We searched through hundreds of younger rocks without ever finding the distinctive signature of those ancient crustal reservoirs again.

A turning point for Earth

We think the vanishing of this fingerprint marks a fundamental reorganisation in how Earth builds continents. Before 2.5 billion years ago, our results suggest the same ancient continental material was melted over and over again, with little input from other sources.

Then things shifted. Instead of melting ancient rocks to form new crust, the planet started producing crust from a mix of old and new sources. This is something we still see happening today at the edge of tectonic plates, where volcanoes bring fresh molten rock up from the mantle while older crust is also being recycled.

As a result, the fingerprint of the ancient crust disappeared. So we believe this shift 2.5 billion years ago was when plate tectonics may have begun.

There is other evidence of major changes around the same time, too. There were more changes in rock chemistry and alterations in the thickness and composition of the crust, and Earth’s first supercontinent also formed in this era.

Taken together, all this evidence shows there was a turning point in how our planet works at this time. And as a result, Earth’s surface developed the environment life needed to flourish.

We still don’t know exactly what triggered the start of plate tectonics, but we’re continuing to chase an answer. For now, our results offer another piece of the puzzle of when Earth’s unique tectonic engine kicked into gear.

Janne Liebmann, Research Fellow, Curtin University

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Popular media, from computer games to movies, often portrays medieval life as being dominated by fighters and farmers. In these depictions, there’s little evidence of a world beyond political struggle and simple subsistence.

Leisure activities are often overlooked, despite the fact that they existed in one form or another at most – if not all – levels of medieval society. The intangible nature of much of the evidence, often coupled with poor preservation of physical objects, can help explain this.

However, when conditions are right, archaeological remains can shed light on the extra-curricular activities of medieval folk. My colleagues and I found abundant evidence of life’s luxuries at the site of Caherconnell Cashel in the Burren region of western Ireland.

Caherconnell Cashel was a farmstead of houses and workshops enclosed within a well-preserved circular dry stone wall. Such settlements are also known as ringforts and generally housed a single family (possibly multiple generations). Caherconnell was a large ringfort; the home of wealthy local rulers from the late 10th century AD to the early 17th century. Our recently concluded excavations revealed all aspects of life at this well-preserved family settlement.

While activities such as fighting, farming, industry and crafts were clearly represented in material recovered from the site, so too were the less mundane activities of game playing, literacy, and music.

Games, pens and harps

The true extent of game playing is undoubtedly lost in the perishable nature of the materials used extensively in such pursuits – such as wood, leather and textiles. At Caherconnell, however, surviving evidence includes small gaming pieces made of bone and antler, metal, clay and stone.

One of the more complete finds was an 11th-century barrel-shaped and polished antler gaming piece. A bronze peg or stem runs through its hollow core and projects from its base. It originally had a plate or cap at the top, the loss of which may have resulted in the piece being discarded or set aside for repair.

Pegged game pieces like this were used in the Saxon and Viking board game of hnefatafl, a game that appeared in Ireland around the 9th or 10th century AD. Hnefatafl, and other games like it, provided both strategy training and entertainment.

Evidence of literacy at Caherconnell includes writing implements and associated equipment. One of our most remarkable finds was an 11th-century pen made from bone and bronze. The slender hollow bone shaft or barrel was probably made from the bone of a wader bird or swan.

Experimental work by the archaeologist Adam Parsons found that the closest match was a swan radius (a tubular bone) from the right-side wing. Inserted into the narrow end of the barrel is a tapering bronze point or nib.

The Caherconnell pen finds no exact comparisons within Ireland or elsewhere; its early secular context is also, so far, unique. Until now, evidence of early literacy in Ireland has been largely confined to monastic and related church sites. At Caherconnell, the pen may have been used in general record keeping and external communications.

However, it also reminds us that literate occupants of Caherconnell Cashel may have enjoyed composing, reading, and sharing ancestral pedigrees, praise poetry and epic tales “of gods and fighting men”.

The musical sounds of a settlement are rarely represented in its archaeological record. Wood, a common material in the construction of various instruments, rarely survives to the present day.

Metal and bone fittings, however, have been found during excavations, including at Caherconnell, where bone and bronze tuning pegs were among the finds. Two of the tuning pegs are readily identifiable as components of stringed instruments.

They have a circular sectioned shaft that splays slightly into a rectangular sectioned turning block at one end (now missing from the larger bone example). The opposite end pinches in slightly and is perforated by a small circular hole through which the string was attached.

The bone tuning peg, being a relatively soft material, still bears impressions from the wire-string of the instrument. Both date to the 11th century, but they are clearly from different instruments.

One had strong bronze pegs, the other had larger bone versions. Outside Ireland, shorter tuning pegs are commonly associated with lyres, lutes and fiddles (up to 65mm is classed as short).

No lutes or fiddles survive from early Ireland, however. Nor are there any written references to, or depictions of them. The lyre, on the other hand, is represented. Depictions are found in several ecclesiastical contexts and early Irish literature confirms that lyres or lyre-like instruments were also used outside religious settings.

Music, and accompanying songs and poetry, probably fulfilled various social, political, and cultural functions. These range from proclaiming the magnificence of the nobility to entertaining a family around their hearth in the evening.

Life at Caherconnell was, in many ways, very traditional. It was a place where ancestry and heritage were valued, yet it was also a place connected to the outside world. In leisure, as in so many other facets of their lives, the occupants encountered, adopted, and no doubt adapted the most desirable elements of a wider cultural realm.

It is clear from this one site that those with more leisure time, often the wealthier in society, filled that time with various recreational pursuits. However, human nature suggests that all classes engaged in such activities, albeit often in a manner that’s less visible to archaeologists.

After all, you didn’t need a fancy bronze and antler game set to play games, writing equipment to create stories, or peg-tuned wired instruments to compose and sing a song. Such things just prove the existence of these activities, not how commonplace they were.

Michelle Comber, Lecturer in Archaeology, School of Geography, Archaeology and Irish Studies, University of Galway

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Ernest Shackleton is one of the most well-known polar explorers in history. He’s mostly remembered for his incredible leadership following the sinking of his ship Endurance in the Weddell Sea in November 1915, which saved his life and the 27 others on board.

Yet had you known Shackleton in 1895, his future fame as an Antarctic explorer would have seemed highly unlikely. At the time, he was an unknown officer in the merchant navy, and Antarctica meant little to him. He had never even put on a pair of skis.

So how did Shackleton become such a famous polar explorer? This is one of the questions at the heart of my book The Grip of the Ice and the answer is suprising: his fame had as much to do with what he did back home as it did with his time on the ice.

Shackleton’s polar career started with the British National Antarctic Expedition, usually known as the Discovery Expedition (named after its ship). The venture was jointly organised by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society and partly funded by the government. The gregarious Shackleton found a place on the expedition by befriending Cedric Longstaff, the son of one of the expedition’s major donors. On the March 15 1901, Shackleton was ordered to report to the Discovery’s commander, Robert Falcon Scott, at the expedition’s office in Mayfair. He would be the ship’s third lieutenant.

Arriving in Antarctica in January 1902, they explored the continent’s coast and then spent the winter on board their ship in McMurdo Sound. During the months of polar darkness, conditions were too harsh for further exploration. Shackleton became a vital and well-liked member of the Discovery expedition. To help keep up morale while cooped up on board the ship, he edited The South Polar Times – the first magazine ever published in Antarctica.

Shackleton soon heard exciting news: Scott had selected him, along with the expedition’s zoologist and junior medic Edward Wilson, to accompany him on a journey towards the South Pole. This would be the expedition’s first major journey.

Leaving the ship on November 2 1902, the journey started off well, with Siberian huskies helping to pull the men’s sledges. They were soon further south than any explorers before them. But things gradually began to unravel. The dogs weakened due to problems with their food, the men grew hungry on insufficient supplies and they couldn’t move their sledges forward all st once, drastically reducing their daily distances.

Shackleton and Scott may also have had an argument on this journey, with Albert Armitage, the expedition’s second in command, later suggesting in his letters that Scott called Shackleton a “bloody fool” during a heated argument. Even so, they patched things up and trudged southwards. Eventually, they managed to lighten their sledges by leaving supplies for the return march in a depot, improving their rate of progress. However, their dogs continued to weaken so Shackleton and Wilson killed the sickest animals and fed them to the stronger ones.

By Christmas 1902, the men were also in trouble. Wilson inspected the men’s gums and noticed signs of scurvy – a disease we now know is caused by a lack of vitamin C. Soon, they were forced to turn back, having achieved a new furthest south record of around 480 miles from the South Pole on December 31 1902.

On the march back to the ship, Shackleton’s health deteriorated rapidly. As well as suffering from scurvy, he was also coughing up blood. When the last of their dogs was killed, Scott and Wilson pulled the sledge while Shackleton made painful progress on skis.

Eventually, on February 3 1903, they got back to the ship to find that the Morning, a relief vessel, had arrived.

The Discovery was still trapped in the ice and, with winter closing in, Scott ordered that Shackleton return to New Zealand when the Morning sailed northwards on March 2 1903. Among polar historians, Scott’s decision has been controversial. Some suggest that Scott saw Shackleton as a potential rival, though there isn’t a great deal of evidence for this.

Early return and celebrity

So, Shackleton’s career as a polar explorer seemed to have got off to a bad start. While Scott sent him back with a glowing reference, he had been pronounced unfit for further Antarctic exploration. Frustratingly, he seemed “practically well” according to Gerald S Doorly, then a junior officer on the Morning, by the time he arrived in New Zealand and was in even better shape when he reached London.

Shackleton’s diaries show that he felt a mix of emotions: frustration, embarrassment and disappointment. He had been desperate to stay another winter and see the expedition through to its finish.

Yet studying this period, what amazed me was how Shackleton took advantage of his early return to Britain.

As the only officer back from Antarctica, he was in a unique position to tell the public and the media what had happened on their journey. He wrote articles for The Illustrated London News and Pearson’s Magazine and gave lectures to enthralled audiences, eager to hear about his amazing journey towards the South Pole.

Shackleton was also involved in equipping a relief vessel, the Dundee whaler Terra Nova, to help free the explorers from the ice the following year. By early 1904, he’d even managed to land a job as secretary of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.

The Discovery expedition transformed Shackleton from an unknown officer in the Merchant Navy into one of the best-known polar explorers in Britain. He’d also built a wealth of logistical experience and connections that left him perfectly placed to launch an expedition of his own – which he did in 1907, much to Scott’s annoyance.

In his return to London, Shackleton had demonstrated his unique ability to make the very best of a disaster.

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Ed Armston-Sheret, Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London

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First you are shown a new hack to keep wine from spoiling. Then a dog lovingly devoted to its owner. Immediately in tow there are methods to repair broken glass and remove acne, a tip for weight loss, a cake recipe and an astrological reading of your future. But this is not your TikTok or Instagram feed – it’s the contents of a book written nearly four-and-a-half centuries ago.

The English writer Thomas Lupton’s book A Thousand Notable Things was first published in 1579. True to its title, it collected roughly 1,000 short passages ordered randomly, one after another. A seemingly endless stream of household “life hacks”, sensational stories and recipes, it offered answers for just about everything.

Trouble sleeping? Rub your forehead with a mix of white poppy and henbane seeds. If you find yourself bewitched, leave a mercury-filled quill under your pillow. And have you heard the folklore that claims when a robin red breast finds a dead human, they cover its face in moss?

Flitting through eclectic, attention-grabbing short-form content may be the de facto mode of media consumption in the 21st century. But how-to books like A Thousand Notable Things suggest that our ancestors’ preoccupations were not entirely different.

Lupton understood the wide appeal of such easily digestible material. In a revealing preface, he argued that imbibing many passages of “strangeness and variety” was preferable to being “fed too long with one food” by reading entire books.

It proved a winning formula. A Thousand Notable Things enjoyed at least 33 editions, remaining in print from the time Sir Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe until 1827, the year the first known photograph was taken.

Its success belonged to a burgeoning taste for “books of secrets”, recipe-like instructional texts that taught everything from cosmetics and alchemy to brewing and beekeeping.

Originating in Italy, and published throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the most popular of these works were continually translated and reprinted throughout Europe. They are now recognised as exerting genuine influence on contemporary scientific culture.

Whether providing alchemical routes to the philosopher’s stone or the recipe for a nutritious stew, books like A Thousand Notable Things thrived on the promise of revealing hidden “secrets” about nature’s inner workings.

Of course, there was no guarantee that everything Lupton suggested would work: whether sleeping on your right side during pregnancy really meant the baby would be female, or that dreaming of eagles flying overhead was necessarily a sign of imminent good fortune. Sheer efficacy alone wasn’t the point. The appeal lay in the wonder, curiosity and amusement that accompanied practical instruction.

If some passages sound absurd or downright dangerous to modern ears (henbane and mercury are highly poisonous), consider that much of Lupton’s material was cutting-edge in its day. His most cited source was Antoine Mizauld, a Parisian medical professor and advisor to French queen Marguerite de Valois.

Even though the vitality of astrology, occult science and ancient medicine waned over the book’s 250-year lifespan, the deeply human concerns it addressed proved enduringly popular.

Personal copies

We know that contemporary readers found Lupton’s eclectic material engaging thanks to their annotations in personal copies, precious few of which remain today.

One survivor from 1612, now in the Glasgow University Library, is marked with small crosses at passages on lameness, heart trouble, ulcers, meat eating and stomach problems. We might speculate that its owner was managing symptoms of dietary issues or gout. So too are gout cures underlined in a copy owned by the 17th-century book collector Frances Wolfreston.

Another reader pencilled crosses next to 38 predominantly medical passages in their 1706 copy, including remedies for head and toothaches, burning eyes, shortness of breath, sore throat and insomnia.

Others were more selective. One copy in the Wellcome Collection is marked only occasionally, including at an anecdote about a German farmer who died with terrible pain in his side. A surgeon cut him open to find large pieces of wood and four steel knives, afflictions that were blamed on the Devil.

Just as we worry today about the pernicious effects of TikTok, 16th-century commentators also feared the “brain-rotting” potential of low-brow mass entertainment, distraction and information overload.

But Lupton’s take was more optimistic. Offering bite-size morsels gleaned from a wide range of texts, in plain English rather than scholarly Latin, gave ordinary readers access to knowledge that otherwise required whole libraries to attain.

These how to books, which are the subject of an ongoing research collaboration between Glasgow University and the Herzog August library in Germany, will take centre stage in an exhibition at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, from January to March 2027.

Whether or not they are direct antecedents of today’s instructional media, these texts encapsulate both the past’s profound strangeness, and those facets of human experience that seem perennial: the potent dialectic of similarity and difference that makes history so compelling. If nothing else, they might provide a handy hack to stave off your next headache.

James Fox, Research Associate in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow

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