Welcome to my first foolish attempt at blogging

I keep a journal on my desk-top hard disc, but when I drop off the perch (which can not be too long in the future) it will all be lost. The hard disc and my backup discs will go to the landfill, along with my libraries of books and sheet music and CDs. I nourish the foolish hope that, maybe fifty years from now, some scholar may be interested in what we thought in the early 21st Century. Did we see the catastrophe coming? Take your pick of which catastrophe.



I have a Facebook page, under the name of Aidan Moore, but there are others with the same name, and when I call my page up, I get others as often as my own. Hence this blog, which is in the form of a journal also. I shall add to it frequently. I hope that someone, sometime, will find this relevant.

My choice of picture at the top of the page shows a small human figure in a big landscape. The scene is exotic, beautiful, an almost deserted beach of the Coral Sea in North Queensland in 1964. That is the Australia that formed me.

So is that me today. Well, it was me, and what I was then made things happen to me, or I made things happen, that shaped me. I have got older, I look older, but the memories haven't changed.

That picture represents a young man in the peak of health, totally free in a totally free environment. Not a care in the world. But to get there, I had to work for months without pause, in a roasting desert that destroyed many of those, most of them 'tough' young men, who worked beside me. The exploration crew departed, leaving me with a broken-down surveyor, and a man on the run from his murderous associates, with a clapped-out Toyota truck and a 44-gallon drum that had contained aviation fuel but now contained our water supply. It did not taste good, but we had to finish the job of figuring out where exactly our geophysical survey profiles were. It was not easy. No GPS then. When I left that place, through Old Andado and Abminga, I looked in a mirror and did not recognise myself, a staring wildman with red hair, both on my head and wherever else I had it. I earned that break, wandering the shores of the Coral Sea and its jungle hinterland, looking for adventure and enjoying human company instead of snakes and dingoes, a crazy man and a fugitive from god-knows-what.

My favourite books, movies, videos, music

  • Books - Incognito (Petru Dumitriu) Flight to Arras (Antoine de Saint Exupery) The Guns of August (Barbara Tuchman) most of Arthur Koestler, Le Phenomene Humaine (Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) The Last Blue Sea (J Forrest) The Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon) Most of Robert Graves, Carl Sagan, Paul Johnson, Arthur Bryant, Arthur C Clarke, Richard Berleth, Lord Macaulay, Thucydides, Tacitus, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, and on, and on, as they come to memory.