 Good evening. Thank you. As president of the Australian Academy of Humanities, I'm very pleased to welcome you here tonight to this public lecture to be given by Simon Winchester. I wish to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Nanagual people, past and present. It's upon their ancestral lands that this theatre in the Manning Clark building is built and it is right and proper that we pay our respects to the knowledge embedded forever within Aboriginal custodianship of country. I am just going to be very very brief in this particular occasion. I want to introduce Kate Burridge who's going to be chairing this session but my role is just to thank a number of people who've been involved in this particular event tonight with Simon Winchester and with his visit more generally. So I wanted to thank once again Professor Ian Young, the ANU Vice Chancellor, Professor Ray Francis, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Professor Simon Maddox, Vice Chancellor and President of Charles Darwin University and also Professor Giselle Burns, Pro Vice Chancellor for the Faculty of Law, Education, Business and Arts at Charles Darwin University. Dr Alex Byrne, the Director of the State Library of New South Wales and Harper Collins Publishers. I should explain perhaps that the reason why there are so many people and a number of those people are not in Canberra and not here tonight is because Simon has been very generous in agreeing to give talks in a number of other cities. So Melbourne, Sydney and then in Darwin. Not only has he done that, but he's been doing a number of radio broadcasts so he's been extremely busy already. So we're extremely grateful to him for that. So that's the end of my role. It is just for me to introduce Professor Kate Burridge from Monash University and a symposium convener who's going to introduce Simon and then chair this session tonight. So thank you, thank you. Thank you very much. Can I just start by saying that when the theme of the Academy Symposium was first proposed, so that's dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases, the name Simon Winchester came up naturally too as someone who's well written extensively and also wonderfully on many different aspects of this idea of well, looking things up. In fact, the title of the symposium is Look It Up and so it's looking at different works of reference in old and new formats, in traditional and non-traditional formats and I suppose different ways of accessing and different ways of delivering and sharing knowledge. So Simon's books often deal directly with these works, but also I think his works, his books and there are well over 20 of these, aren't there Simon? And many more in the pipeline. They are also themselves wonderful examples of delivering knowledge. So delivering knowledge that is really very meticulously researched and also brought together in a very entertaining way in these works of narrative nonfiction. The Surgeon of Crowthorne and the Meaning of Everything remain, I think, among my favourites. I mean, I always knew that the business of dictionary making was exciting and we had evidence of that this afternoon, particularly with the Greek Dictionary Wars, but I think what was it, a tale of murder and madness and the love of words, which was the subtitle of The Surgeon of Crowthorne. I mean that took lexicography to a whole new level of exciting. We're still waiting for that movie, Simon, and which role Mel Gibson is going to play? Well, but seriously, it is extremely difficult to do justice to Simon's very impressive CV in just the couple of minutes that I have. But there is a wonderful bio on the web, which makes for great bedtime reading, I can tell you. It starts off with a spectacularly destructive science experiment, which I think got you expelled from school, is that right? And then there are tales of, well, sledding in uncharted parts of West Greenland ice caps and tales, marvellous tales of travel and journalism. And let's not forget those 20-something books, which have earned Simon many awards from universities and also, I think it was in 2006, an OBE. I don't think Simon Winchester sleeps, but I hope he sleeps on long-haul flights because he's only just arrived and it's been a grueling schedule since he landed yesterday. But I don't want to eat into your time, so please, thank you for coming all this way and please let's welcome Simon Winchester. Well, thank you very much, and this is an enormous honor to be here, a great delight. I, incidentally, on a radio program earlier today and also at tea, I was asking the question, what is the only English word that becomes its plural with the addition of the letter C? And the people in the radio station didn't seem to know, but a very nice chap from Adelaide, who may be in the audience and said that he would work it out and raise his hand to tell me what the answer is, but he appears either not to be here or not to have... Oh, and did you work it out? Would you like... Well, I'll tell you what, I'll announce it at the end of the talk in that case, but it's something if you get really bored during this, you must think about it. It's a short word, don't anyone scream it out now, the only word in the English language that becomes its plural with the addition of the letter C. So, when I had to come up with a description of this talk, I said it would be about pedants, precision and the Pacific, and I think pedants, because that day, as almost every day, I get angry emails from pedants who I hate. But when you write a book about dictionaries, inevitably someone is going to pick you up on something, and for me it's always the same two words or the one that really bothers them is my use of the word fulsome. So, I think on this particular day, someone... Well, I won't name the town he wrote from, but something in Ohio. How dare you use the word fulsome? And you know he'd opened the Webster's Third International and got their definition from the 1930s, and I needed to say to him very politely that English is a descriptive, not a prescriptive language, and the meanings change and blah, blah, blah. So I was angry, I think, or irritated, and then Kate said, what are you going to talk about? So I said, pedantry, and so... But there isn't going to be a great deal about pedantry. But looking it up, there'll be a lot about the Pacific and a lot about precision as well, which is something I'm very interested in. But because the theme of the conference is looking up, I thought I would begin this with a short story related to the serendipitous joys of looking things up. This was something that happened to me in 1982, when you may remember some of you, a movie called Paris, Texas, by a man called Vim Vendors, which I thought was exquisite and wonderful film. And I went to see it, I was living in New York at the time, I think, and I wanted to look up where Paris, Texas was. So I opened, I had at the time, as I still have now, a new edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas, which I still maintain. I hope it's not a sacrilege to say so. The best Atlas you can buy. And I'm looking up Paris, Texas. And as I was looking down the columns, I happened to notice a great agglomeration under the PA of 18 places all called Paradise in America. And I thought, that is wonderful. I immediately lost interest in where Paris, Texas was. Switched three columns over to Paradise. And this was at a time when particularly English magazine editors spent money like drunken sailors. And so I rang one almost immediately. I said, I think he was at the Illustrated London News, a magazine which no longer exists, presumably, because they were spending money like drunken sailors. And I said, Joe, I think his name was, this is Simon here in New York. I've just noticed that there are 18 towns in America called Paradise. And I just left it at that for a few seconds. And he said, I suppose you want to go and see them all and work out why they're called Paradise and are they still Paradise. And I said, yeah, that's the general idea. He said, it does sound a rather good story, doesn't it? Why don't you, how long do you think it'll take? And I said, a couple of months. And he said, fine, OK, off you go. And so I got this assignment. And I did, indeed, go to every single town in America called Paradise. There are, as I mentioned, 18 of them, beginning with the most easterly is Paradise, Florida, which is a retirement community, more a gateway to Paradise, I think, than Paradise itself. And then there's Paradise, Pennsylvania, which is on, I don't know if you know, it's Amish country, Route 43. And it's right next to the town of Intercourse, Pennsylvania. And of course, for a prurient British audience that believes that the way to Paradise is through Intercourse, this was absolute perfection. And it turned out that every single one of these Paradises had been ruined by one or other aspect of modern American life, except one. And that one was Paradise, Kansas, which is a small wheat-growing town about 50 miles northwest of Salina, Kansas, which is, therefore, almost exactly in the center of the continental, or the contiguous, 48 states. So it had great symbolism for me. And so I went there and, as always, turned up at the post office and said, hello, I'm an English journalist. And I'm writing about all the towns in America called Paradise. And the postmaster, who was a woman because postmasters in America can be of either gender and are still called postmasters, said, oh, you must, in that case, go and stay with the patriarchs of this town who are, believe it or not, John and Mary Angel. So I went to, I'm absolutely serious. And if you look in the Paradise phone book, they're still there. But the most marvelous moment was, and I tell this story when I describe the American book that I've just written, was it was one of the many reasons that made me fall in love with the United States, was that after I'd been staying with John and Mary for a couple of days, they had a cherry tree down the bottom of the garden. And I'd expressed some fondness for cherries. And so Mary baked me an apple pie. And I think the moment when I really believed that I was going to be eternally fond of the United States was the evening that I sat on the terrace eating cherry pie with the angels in Paradise. Nothing can get much better than that. So what I thought I would do this evening, and I cleared it with Kate ahead of time, was to talk about structure in books, and in these narrative non-fiction books that I've taken to writing recently. The early books in this genre, things, as you very kindly mentioned, like The Surgeon of Crothorn, or The Professor and the Madman, as it's known in America. And the book on William Smith on the map, The Change the World, and The Man Who Loved China about this extraordinary character, Joseph Needham. The structure of those books is relatively simple, because the biographies that Chappie's Mourn does something extraordinary and then dies. So there's a fairly simple narrative structure. But I found it quite interesting to take on bigger topics. And the big ones, and I'm going to talk specifically about the three most recent, The Atlantic Ocean, The United States, and the book I'm working on now, The Pacific Ocean, sort of going to be a trilogy, I think, ultimately, they present organizational problems and all these challenges anyway. So I thought I'd briefly sketch how I went about writing these and trying to put all this massive information into a moderately coherent structure. They're not reference books, of course, so there's no question of a need to look anything up. You've got an index that allows you to do that. But to present all this information in a form that is accessible and interesting and perhaps somewhat different from the way such books, text books, anyway, are normally structured. So let's start with The Atlantic. I put the proposal to my publisher that I, it's rather a hackneyed belief, I suppose that the Mediterranean is the classical sea of the inland sea of the classical world. The Atlantic is the inland sea of today's world and the Pacific is the inland sea of tomorrow's world. So that's the starting point. I wasn't interested in or competent enough to do The Mediterranean, but on the other hand, I lived in America, so why not have a bash at doing the Atlantic, which was so hugely important in the construction of America. So I spent, as I normally do in this kind of process, a year or a year and a half traveling around the ocean and getting heaps and heaps of books and atlases and Admiralty charts and things like that. And then when I've assembled all this information, there's the question of how exactly to write it. And I've always maintained that there are three key elements to a readable, not necessarily successful, but a readable non-fiction book. The first, the most important thing is the idea. I mean, the idea behind the book has a natural sort of primacy to it. Fine writing is great. It's nice if you can write it beautifully. That's lovely and you strive to do such a thing, but it's not the second most important thing. The second most important thing is, in my view, the structure. It's got to be well organized. I mean, you can write lyrically about a brilliant idea, but if the structure's all to breakfast time, people will go to sleep. It's simply rather like the famous Stephen Hawking book that, short, brief history of time, if you remember, people put a dollar bill on page 53 because no one ever got to page 53 because it was so hopelessly organized. So I had to try and come up with a structure for the Atlantic and I didn't really know how to. I didn't address it when I wrote the original proposal that got me the contract to do it. I just sort of vaguely said, this is an important ocean. How does one write about it? So I was flying on one particular day, I remember, back from London, back home to New York, and I was reading or had in my briefcase a copy of an anthology of poetry by David Owen, a former British foreign secretary now, Lord Owen, and it was called Seven Ages. And he had organized all the poetry that he had come to love over his life according to the Seven Ages of Man from Shakespeare's As You Like It, All the Worlds are Staged, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, the number of acts being Seven Ages. And then it goes on from there, the infant mulling and puking in his nurse's arms and all the rest of it. I thought in a sort of epiphany on that plane journey that that possibly would be the way to organize this book on the Atlantic Ocean. So I got back to New York and I looked at all my notes, and yes, indeed, it would be possible. So taking those Seven Ages, the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the old man, and return to childhood, it seemed quite legitimate to corral various bits of the Atlantic story into those seven categories. And so the infancy would indeed be the geological infancy of the ocean and write about its creation and the moving of the continents and so forth. Schoolboy would be the learning about the ocean, so the early expeditions, like the challenger expedition and so forth, to chart it and learn about it as a schoolchild would learn about it. Then there was the lover. Now, the lover was a slightly difficult one because it was slightly out of order in what I wanted to do had I thought about it in a different way. But that was humankind's romantic view of the Atlantic Ocean and so that was the painting and the music and the architecture and so forth. And I had to sort of choose what I thought were architecturally emblematic cities that sat on the Atlantic and so Rio and Cape Town and Liverpool. The most beautiful to me, the one that really represents the man's romantic attraction to the Atlantic Ocean writ in stone is the capital of the island of St. Helena where Napoleon was exiled Jamestown, which is just a wonderful 17th century confection of just exquisite buildings, all reflecting the ocean in which it lies. So I could deal with music and art, so JMW Turner and all these people that did wonderful Winslow Homer, of course, that did all these paintings about the Atlantic. Then the soldier, well, that was a great deal easier because that's all about the development of warfare and how wooden hulled ships gave way to the great sea battles which were first staged in the Atlantic and then all the other violent things that happened in the Atlantic Ocean and so piracy and the slave trade and all that sort of nasty stuff. And then justice, well, that could be all about trade and the rules, the law of the sea and material like that. And the old man, well, the old man gets careless and doesn't treat the sea as it should be. So it was pollution and overfishing and the degradation of the sea undermans sort of poor invigilation. And then return to childhood is the sea striking back, so bad weather generation, rising sea levels, climate change and all that sort of stuff. So it actually held together pretty well. I mean, when I advanced the idea to my editor, he was somewhat taken aback. I mean, to look at the Atlantic Ocean through the prism of a 17th century or late 16th century Shakespearean play was a little bit eccentric, but mercifully the reviewers were kind. And so this gave me some leeway. I thought when I came to write the next book which was the book that's out now on the United States. So much the same thing happened so the Atlantic had been published and I now get this contract to write a book about America. Now, I had become an American citizen in 2011 on July the fourth and on the afterdeck of the USS Constitution which was a nice sort of homage to the Atlantic Ocean. But I then thought, well, you know, I'm in love with this country thanks to things like Cherry Pie and Paradise Kansas with the angels, let's write a book about it. So I did a lot of traveling and I collected a lot of books much as I did with the Atlantic. And once again then was had this challenge of how to organize it. And the initial thought, I mean, before the organizational structure came to mind was first of all, what sort of a book to write? And one of the things I thought was I love railway trains. So I did think of crossing America from coast to coast on what are called class three railways which are the little mom and pop freight lines and you can go from Maine to California but my editor reasonably enough said that that would end up being a book about railway trains and it wouldn't really be a book about America. And then I thought that what I really was interested in was this notion of unity, how an immense continental entity like the United States, despite being a huge sort of mongrel collection of every race and every language and every religious persuasion and every kind of view imaginable had managed to hold itself together since 1776 with obviously unpleasantness in the 1860s in a way that most other great continental entities had not. So Europe, classic example of course, not everyone loses the euro, everyone jabbers away in a variety of different languages, constantly having wars with each other. If you try to plug an electric razor into your socket in the bathroom in Stockholm, you'll need something completely different in Madrid and you have things like Scotland attempting recently too or thinking about leaving the United Kingdom. So clearly Europe isn't as united as it should be, Russia clearly or Soviet Union. Mother Russia is not united. Dear old Canada, lovely, but it does have this great block of grumpy or occasionally grumpy Francophone people in the middles, endlessly threatening to split the country into three. Australia of course, great success, but slightly smaller population. But how has America done it? I mean China obviously is united really only by force of arms or force of the state. So I thought I'd be fascinating to write a book about how America physically, how the connective tissue was spun and created to bind the country into one. And so I was in my study creating a list of all the people that I thought had been involved in a big way or in a less important or forgotten way in helping to knit the country together. And my wife came into my study one day and said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I've made a list and there are sort of 40 or 50 people on it. And I read her names, the names of the people I'd come across. And she said, oh, so you're writing a book about the men who united the states. And I said, my God, what a brilliant title. I mean, honestly, thank you darling, that was so sweet. But she said, you're going to get a lot of flack of course, because it's only men. And indeed I have to just to forstall any hostile questions. In the story of the physical uniting of the states, it really is a story that does only involve men. The only one woman really is Sakha Jweer, the Shoshone Indian guide who helped the Lewis and Clark expedition. And Pocahontas makes a sort of cameo appearance. But otherwise, I mean in abstract ideas, plenty of women of course are involved. But in the physical uniting of the country, it is all men. So once my wife had departed, I kept assembling the list. And I eventually got to about 200 people, I suppose. So there was a question then of how do you organize that? And obviously you could arrange them alphabetically, but I'm just like reading the phone book. I mean, how boring would that be? You could do it chronologically, but then that would be incredibly complex because different achievements would appear in different eras and it just would be a complete mess. And then I was writing to a friend of mine. I used to live in China for quite a long time. And I was writing to a friend in Shanghai and he wrote back and we were talking about the elements of classical Chinese or Eastern civilization. And obviously all of you will know when you're in India, there are sort of four classical elements. And as you go eastwards and cross the Mekong, it becomes generally five. And a variety of what those five actually are. But in China, they're nearly always the same five. And those five are wood, earth, water, fire, and metal. And it suddenly seemed to me in rather the same way as that sort of epiphany I had on the transatlantic plane, that it would be possible to organize these 200 men with their various achievements along the lines of these five classical elements. So for instance, when Lewis and Clark, and I sort of begin the story with the decision, well, once the Louisiana purchase had been achieved in 1803, and then Jefferson decided to send Lewis out across America to see what he had just bought basically from the French. It occurred to me that those early expeditions had a great deal to do with wood. So Jefferson, for instance, Jefferson's the key. He's sitting in Monticello. He's absolutely obsessed with many things. But one of the things he's obsessed with is gardening and trees. He loved trees. And indeed, four of the trees that he actually planted himself were only felled in Monticello about three years ago. The evidence, the legacy of his arboreal fascination is all around with these marvellous alleys of oak trees and their apple trees, and all sorts of beautiful, beautiful trees. So I imagined him sitting on the West Terrace of Monticello looking over the gardens that he's created and all these beautiful trees. And in front of him is this enormous wall about 2,000 feet high of the eastern spurs of the Blue Ridge Mountains, over which he has never traveled. I mean, he's been across the Atlantic because, of course, he was in Paris. But he never went west. He had this fascination with what might lie across the Blue Ridge Mountains. And he had just read to his enormous irritation this book published in London in 1802 by Mackenzie, who was the first man ever to cross the North American continent. And he eventually painted his name with a mixture of bare grease and vermilion powder on a rock outside what is now the town of Bellacoola in British Columbia, and wrote a book about going from the Great Lakes to British Columbia. And Jefferson read this thing on the terrace. I mean, he talks in his diaries about reading this book and being furious, you know, how a Canadian crosses this continent, it's an impertinence. And he calls in his secretary, Mary Weather Lewis, and says, Lewis, I want you to cross the country and, mercifully, everyone, at least as far as Jeffers is concerned, now completely forgotten. Mackenzie and everyone remembers Lewis and Clark, the Great Expedition. But if you think of them, they, well, Lewis, first of all, crossed from this magnificent garden, crossed the forests of the Blue Ridge, met his friend, old friend, Clark. They sailed down the tributaries ultimately to the Missouri, well, the Ohio River, then to the Mississippi, and up the Mississippi, and then turned left, went up the Missouri, in wooden canoes, and they built camps, surrounded them with wooden palisades. They had wooden fires to keep out the animals and so forth. So wood is a constant feature of the very, very earliest exploration of the United States. So it seemed reasonable to corral all that into a chapter under the heading of wood, and then earth. Well, once we've established, as Lewis and Clark and the other explorers did, the topography of the country, where the Rockies were, where the Sierra were, where the Great Rivers and Lakes were, then it was a question of what they were made of, and what, in other words, was the underpinning, where was the gold in Suttus Mill in California or the silver in Nevada, the farmlands in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. So the early geologists, the people who, particularly the ones that worked in the West, and lured with these stories of what they had found, the settlers who went on the Mormon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail and the California Trail and who populated the West of America. In that story, generally, geologists were hugely important, and I used to be a sort of geologist once in my life, so this was relatively familiar territory. And then they were incorporated into that the four great surveys, which discovered the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and, well, the most famous of them all is called the 40th Parallel Survey, done by an extraordinary man called Clarence King, but that's a separate, wonderful story, but a very different story, surveying the land between Sacramento and Cheyenne. So all of these people could be put under the category of Earth. So then there was water. Well, once again, it seemed to work quite nicely because the early American settlers on the East Coast, they would venture into the hinterland by going in canoes themselves, up the rivers, the Susquehanna and the James and the Potomac and the Hudson, and after 60 or 70 miles of paddling, they would inevitably come to waterfalls and rapids where they would stop because they clearly couldn't carry their canoes, but it would take them a long time. So they built little settlements there and they built settlements that would become eventually towns, so Fredericksburg and Jamestown and Washington, D.C. and Richmond, not Jamestown, but Richmond, and on the Hudson Albany. And once they had settled there and decided they wanted to begin trading with the people further upstream, then to get round the rapids, they built little canals and they became quite good at learning how to build canals. And then having acquired that knowledge, they would then start to build real and proper canals which would change the face of America forever. The first of the big ones was the Manchester Canal, which came down from New Hampshire to essentially make Boston, the big mercantile capital that then it turned into. The most important of all canals, the Erie Canal, which was constructed in the 1820s, which brought trade goods down from the Great Lakes to this stripling city, which then became, of course, the mightiest of all cities, New York. And then the not particularly elegantly named a Chicago sanitary canal, which was built ostensibly, well, initially not just ostensibly to move Chicago's sewage, which had been pumped eastwards into the lake. And, of course, in summer, that olfactory unpleasantness. So they decided to build a canal and send it westwards into the tributaries of the Mississippian. No one sort of cared about that. And so that linked Chicago to, via the Mississippi to the Gulf, which changed both the character of Chicago and the city of New Orleans at the southern end of the Mississippi. So all of those stories could quite neatly go into under water. And then fire. Well, it's all very well to conduct trade in the 1820s and 1830s by taking your goods in a canal behind a horse, clip-cropping along three or four miles an hour, pulling a barge. It was very economical, much better than it had been before. But James Watt had invented steam engine over in the United Kingdom, in Scotland. And suddenly the application of that technology, first of all, to building steam-powered boats to go out the canals and the rivers and then to power railway trains. And ultimately different kinds of fire-breathing devices would be invented to power motor cars and aeroplanes and things like that. So faster, and of course America is all about speed, swifter commerce relied initially and probably still to this day on things that are related to fire. So all of that could go under the category of fire. And then finally, the fifth one, metal, well, sort of self-explanatory when you think about it, the copper conducting wire of the telegraph and then the telephone and then the distribution of electricity, which is usually important, particularly during the 1930s, and then radio and then television and then the internet. So it all seemed to be quite neat and then massively, not only these five categories allowed me to put these 200 or so names into them, but also they were all in chronological order that things related to earth came after wood and things related to metal came after fire. So I took the idea down to my editor in New York and he gulped much as he had done with the Atlantic and said, well, I just don't know how Americans are going to like being seen through the prism of ancient Chinese philosophy but give it a whirl, why not? So that's how I wrote the book. And mercifully, the critics liked it and it sold extremely well in America and I've just signed two copies today. So apparently it sells in the paperback anyway in Australia. So that was, I've got to keep an eye on the clock. Now I'm doing this book on the Pacific and the Pacific very complicated. So big, of course, I mean bigger than you could put all the continents into the Pacific. It is so gigantic and all-encompassing. Doesn't have a, at least from my perspective, I know I'm going to get shouted out by people that will go on about Polynesian navigation, which I actually do write about. But it's history, it's human history, at least from a Western point of view, is perhaps not as rich and interesting as the history which gave us John Cabot and Lee Verickson and Columbus and all those people. So I decided that I would start, that I wouldn't write a book about the Pacific which was all-encompassing. I didn't want to begin it at the year dot. I wanted to begin it later and I thought actually the interesting aspect of the Pacific was the modern Pacific. So I had to decide when to start the story and so I thought, well, post-war. So it seemed to me that perhaps the surrender of the Japanese on the Missouri in September 1945 would work or perhaps the founding of the People's Republic of China in October 1949 might work. But then there was a marvelous sort of serendipitous moment when I decided that, when I was looking at, I'm sure you all know this, but it's now unfashionable of course to talk about things happening AD and BC because we're not all Christians. There was this attempt to reform BC by turning it into BCE before Christian era or before common era, but the scientific community didn't much care for that either and came up in the end with this notion of BP. So you talk about a glaciation occurring 10,000 years BP, BP standing for before present. But the question is, when is present? Well, present was defined in 1965 by a group of radiochemists who said that this was the moment, it was the 1st of January, 1950. And that reason for choosing that date because before 1950, it was possible to conduct carbon-14 dating tests and they would be accurate. We knew how much carbon-14 there was in the atmosphere. We knew it decayed and it's half-life 5,730 years. So knowing that baseline, it was possible to calculate the age of anything up to about 60,000 years. But after the 1st of January, 1950, there was such an enormous amount of nuclear atmospheric testing as it happens most of it in the Pacific, with the Americans, of course, in Bikini and Inuitok, the British Christmas Island, the French Marreroa, British again, of course, in Wimmera here. So the Pacific was hugely polluted, but the crucial, I mean, we all know about nuclear weapons producing strontium-90 and radioactive iodine and things, but they also produce a gigantic amount of carbon-14. So this meant that the baseline of carbon-14 was tremendously distorted from 1950 onwards. And to get accurate measurements of anything's age, you had to induce a different algorithm almost every month because of the rate of nuclear testing. So in the end, they decided that dates should be counted backwards from the 1st of January, 1950. So BP before present or before physics or before purity was ended. So that was my starting point. And now I'm on chapter four of the book. And what I decided to do was forget seven ages of man's structure, forget classical Chinese, give it a somewhat more conventional structure, look at, make a great big list of everything that seemed to me important and interesting that happened in the Pacific from 1950 to the present day and select 12 of them, 12 a slightly arbitrary number, but each of these would be a chapter. 12 events that seemed to be token something more important that said something quite important about the Pacific Ocean. So I've done chapters one, two, three, and I'm just under four. So chapter one was about an event. You may not think of it much as an event, but on the 12th of August, 1955, so these events are in chronological order, in Winnipeg and also in Minneapolis, electronic shops sold, I think they were $45 each, small box type thing, the TR 55, the first ever transistor radio. And if you looked at the tuning dial, it said Tokyo Tushin Kaigyo, Tokyo Telecommunications Corporation. But if you looked above it, tiny little letters was a newly invented word, and that was the word Sony. It was the beginning of the Sony Corporation and this amazingly clever man, not Akio Morita, everyone knows him, but he was a very nice and flamboyant salesman, but the technical guy, a man called Ibuka, he invented these things, he invented the Walkman, he invented the Trinitron, and so the whole universe of Japanese or Asian consumer electronics began at that moment in 1955. So that seemed to be an important trend, obviously it moved from Japan to Korea and it's moved now from Korea because Samsung's in trouble and it's now the Chinese who are doing it, but that was the beginning of this massive onrush of container ships going from Yokohama to Seattle and San Francisco. So that's chapter one, chapter two, I'm talking about, and I actually get into Australia here, events that brought all sorts of people into what one might call a Pound Pacific Communion and that it begins also with a Japanese story. I didn't want to make this too heavily Japanese, but the first two chapters got a lot of Japan in them relating to the whole internment issue of the American citizens of Japanese origin and what happened to them after the internment was over. But I also chose things like Yvonne Gulagong's appearance at Wimbledon when she beat Margaret Court in I think it was 1959 or maybe 1960 and talk about the North American Indians taking over the island of Alcatraz, various attempts by people to become incorporated into this Pound Pacific community. Chapter three, you may think this is trivial but I thought it was important to have some lighter chapters into leaving the more ponderous chapters is 1959, August the 23rd. I think it was the release in America of the movie, Gidget. May think it's trivial, but actually it had an enormous economic effect on making surfing a huge worldwide phenomenon, 20 million people now surf. There's a gigantic industry in it, although it started in, first of all, Tahiti and then became popular among the very socially stratified in Hawaii. It wasn't until Jack London wrote about it in 1906 and that it started to be practiced in Redondo Beach in California. But it was still then a sort of marginal sport but Gidget and then the formation of the Beach Boys in 1961 made it hugely popular. So that seemed another Pacific phenomenon and then chapter four, the one that I'll be starting to write when I get home next week will be about the capture of the USS Pueblo in 1968. So each date is a little bit later, which is one of those episodes which sort of marks North Korea down as being a perpetual irritant in the Pacific. And then after that I'll get on to things like, I very much want to write about Australia and how she's become such an important regional power in the Pacific. And I thought that the two events that both in the 1970s that I'd use was the opening of the Sydney Opera House and the sacking of Goff Whitlam. And so it moves on and it ends and this, and I must really be careful about my time. The last chapter is about the Hokulea. I don't know how many of you know about the Hokulea but it's this 62 foot long Hawaiian wa. The wa is the Hawaiian word for canoe. It was built in the 1970s and under the tutelage of a man called Miao Piaolug, who lived in Satawal in the Caroline Islands, the last surviving Polynesian who knew non-instrumental navigation, how to get from A to B by using only the stars, the feeling of the swell, the migration of birds. And they succeeded. They took Hokulea from Maui to Tahiti in 1972, I think. And now they've learned to do it very well. So they set out on May the 17th, I think it was this year, to go completely around the world. And there's a crew, all ways of about 30 people on it. They changed the crew every few weeks. They just raised the North Cape, that's Cape Rainiger, I think, of New Zealand about a week ago. I think they're going to be here at Christmas or they may be in New Zealand at Christmas. Then they're coming here. They're going through the Indian Ocean. They haven't quite decided whether to try and go through Suez or to go around the Wild Coast and around Cape of Good Hope, cross the Atlantic, where presumably they'll stop in Jamestown, my favorite city in St. Helena, and then head up to the Chesapeake and go and see President Obama. Probably the only piece of good news he'll have for a while that his own people, Hawaiian people, are obviously incredibly clever and skilled but an old fashioned form of navigation, which of course is completely given way now to GPS and compasses and sextants and all things like that. So, and then they'll go round Cape Horn and go up across the Pacific back home to Hawaii. It'll take about three and a half years. But if you don't know anything about it, I advise or urge you to go to the Polynesian Voyaging Society and revel in the success of these wonderful, wonderful young Hawaiian people who are doing this. So that is how this Pacific book I hope will be finished. It's got to be delivered on March the 31st, we'll end. But then that leads me on to the next and the final thing I want to say, which is what I want to write next, which is a history of precision. Precision I think is a fascinating aspect of modern human life. It really began in 1787 with a man called Henry Maudsley during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution who produced what was by the lights of the time anyway, the first piece of perfectly flat steel and a micrometer to measure its flatness and then a perfectly spherical piece of steel. And that enabled the cutting of accurate gears and the making of certain that the machinery of the Industrial Revolution was precise and efficient and accurate. And that led to our current love affair with all things precise, except I wonder, and I think the book will ruminate on this, whether actually our love affair with machines and precision is altogether a good thing. And the Polynesians in their little canoe are demonstrating that it is possible to achieve things in a very imprecise heuristic way, if you like. So ultimately I want to sort of question in this book and I haven't even thought about the structure yet, whether societies that worship titanium are necessarily happier, more content and satisfying satisfactory societies than societies that let's say worship bamboo. So that'll be the next book. So as you can see, one book sort of tends to lead organically into another, but the key to making them readable, and of course it's up to the reviewers and the readers to decide whether I've nailed it or not, is the structure. The idea is the key, nice writing is obviously an ambition, but the structure is hugely important. Now that's sort of the end of what I want to say, except I want to go back a little tiny bit to talk about three words that I like. And one of them is this wonderfully imprecise definition in Johnson's dictionary of 1755 of the word elephant. So I'm going to read it to you because I think it's so delicious. And then I'm going to tell you about one other word, which I like, a very imprecise definition, and then my favourite word of all time. So this is the definition, and you've got to remember in 1755, of course Samuel Johnson, he'd probably never seen an elephant, the channel tunnel wasn't built. So it's unlikely that London, he was writing in Fleet Street, was exactly awash with these animals. So he had to sort of guess, and this is what he came up with. The largest of all quadrupeds, whose sagacity, faithfulness, prudence, and even understanding many surprising relations are given. The animal is not carnivorous, but feeds on hay, herbs, and all sorts of pulse. And it's said to be extremely long life. It is naturally very gentle, but when enraged, no creature is more terrible. He is supplied with a trunk or long hollow cartilage like a large trumpet, which hangs between his teeth and serves him for hands. With one blow with his trunk, he can kill a camel or a horse and will raise a prodigious weight with it. His teeth are the ivory so well known in Europe, some of which have been seen as large as a man's thigh and a fathom in length. Wild elephants are taken with the help of a female ready for the male. She is confined to a narrow place around which pits are dug, and these being covered with a little earth scattered over hurdles, the male elephant falls easily into the snare. In copulation, and clearly he, Samuel Johnson realized that to get the readers, you've got to get a bit of sex into everything. In copulation, the female receives the male lying upon her back. I don't think so, somehow. I mean, the idea of a poor little female elephant lying limbs akimbo by 20 tons of sexually engorged jumbo bears down on her is too awful to contemplate. But such is his pudicity, and Johnson falls into the great snare himself of lexicography, which is, you must never include in the definition any word less familiar than the one you're attempting to define. And I suggest that not many people looking at the world elephant will know what pudicity means, but it comes from the same root as pudendum, that of which we are shy. So it's such is his shyness that he never covers the female so long as anyone appears in sight. So he obviously made the whole thing up, because no one... So I liked that. The other thing I like is my favorite single volume dictionary is Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, great for crosswords and things like that. But it also has buried deep within it what are called chamberisms, which are slight attempts at lexicographic wit. And I think the nicest one is the definition of eclair. And I'm sure you all know that eclair is the French word for lightning, which is a reasonable thing to think of. But the definition of eclair in chambers is a cake long in dimension, but short in duration. I think it's absolutely brilliant. And the last word, and my favorite, it's not so much the word that it's my favorite, but it's the definition. It's how marvelous the English language is that it encompasses such a thing in the word... And it's a Dutch word, I should say, originally, malmerocking, M-A-L-L-E-M-A-R-O-K-I-N-G. Malmerocking. The definition of malmerocking in the earliest edition, the earliest edition that I have of Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, and it's crucial because there's another definition later, is malmerocking means the carousing of drunken semen on ice-bound Greenland whaling ships. I mean, really. Oh, they're malmerocking again. I mean, but the crucial thing is that in the latest edition, it came out about 15 years ago, Chambers 20th Century, they've changed the definition very slightly. And it says malmerocking, the carousing of drunken semen on ice-bound whaling ships. They've left out the word Greenland. And this allowed a wonderful editor on The Guardian, who I was working for at the time, to write an editorial Saturday tongue-in-cheek saying he's just read the new edition of Chambers, and he notices to his great alarm that the phenomenon known as malmerocking has now unleashed itself from its native Greenland and appears now to be spreading all over the world. It must be stopped immediately, as I indeed must stop this talk. So thank you very much indeed. That was wonderful, Simon, and lovely to get the insights into the books that everyone in this room have been enjoying. And we'll soon be enjoying in the case of the Pacific. November, I think. If I get it in on time, yeah. Now, you're happy to take some questions? Yes, of course, absolutely. If I could ask you, I'm sure there are lots of questions. If you could wait until the microphone gets to you, there is one microphone circulating somewhere. So, yes, please. Owen, has anyone come up with the answer to what the English word beginning? Yes, you've got it. Very good, congratulations. The word singular word is die, and the plural is dice. So sorry about that. Sorry? Oh, you see, very good. But what's the singular? There is no singular of et cetera. Maybe there are no questions. Oh, there's a question, our president. I just wondered, in giving the stories that you've just told us about the three books in terms of the Atlantic America and the current book, and the Surgeon of Crowthorne is a very different book, it seems, in that regard. It seems to start with a story. And I'd just be interested for you just to tell us a little bit about how you came up with the structure for that particular book. Well, how I came up with the structure for the surgeon, it seemed to me that the introduction to that was the moment that James Murray, the editor of the OED, went to meet the man with whom he had been corresponding for 30 years from the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire. Under the belief that this man was a surgeon, an educated surgeon, living peacefully in Crowthorne. And so he went by train, he was irritated that this person would never come to the celebrations they held in Oxford when they'd completed a letter or a fascicle in the dictionary. They'd always invite him, they'd always invite all the volunteers, but W. C. Minor never came. And he'd write and say, I'm sorry, I cannot get away. Little did they know. And so there was this wonderful moment and he describes it in his diaries. When he took the train down, he rode a tricycle through Oxford and he had a great long beard and people would cat-call as he raced down the streets to the station and then got on the train to Redding, changed, went to Crowthorne. There was a landow clip-clopped through the lanes of rural Berkshire and deposited him at this great Victorian mansion where a servant ushered him upstairs into an office of a man, a book-lined office. And Murray bowed and said, very good afternoon to you, sir. I am James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. And you, sir, after 30 years of my questing, must be my longtime contributor, W. C. Minor. And the man behind the desk said, I regret that this is not the case. My name is Orange. I'm the warden of the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, which is what this building is. W. C. Minor is indeed here. But there are three things you should know about him. He's a lunatic and he's a murderer and he's an American. And I don't know which of those things was the worst. And I shall take you to him directly. And doors were opened and the two men met and they looked as if Murray was approaching a mirror because the man who he was greeting looked almost identical, bald, long, white beard, tall. And they embraced and they remained friendly for the rest of their individual lives. So that was the obvious way to begin it, just to lure the reader in, if you like. And then it was a question of trying to relate the history of early OED making, so the Philological Society and the Committee for Unorganized Words and then the decision to make the dictionary and interleave that with W. C. Minor's life in, first of all, in Ceylon or Sri Lanka. And then he's coming to England and then he's murdering this Irish chap and being put in prison and then go back to the dictionary so that the two things are following each other until they merge with the realization that in this lunatic asylum was this extraordinary contributor to the dictionary and from that point on, the story of Murray and Minor was then perfectly interleaved. So it's sort of an easy and relatively logical thing. The one thing I will say, which angers a lot of people, was how easy that book was to write. Once I'd got the files in Broadmoor, which had been restricted for many years and there were 11 linear feet of files. The book only took six weeks to write, so it was a very... And there was one wonderful moment, I should perhaps tell you about, sounds rather... I knew that something, I'm sure many of you that have read the book will remember this, rather gruesome incident. His work for the dictionary declined severely in 1902. He'd been gaily sending thousands of citations to Oxford, but then he stopped. They were in the middle of the letter Q, I think. And they were all very perplexed and Murray would write everything all right and he said, I've not been very well. So no one quite knew what had gone wrong and then I was looking through the notes one day and all this was before typewriters. So all the notes were in beautiful copper plate handwriting, except suddenly I came across a piece of paper on which one of the guards had written in pencil. It was still pretty nice handwriting, but written in pencil, which was unusual. And it was one of the guards said, Dr. Miner came to the South Gate at 9.15 this morning, shouting out, quick, quick, I need a doctor. Why pray? What seems to be the problem? Dr. Miner said, I, the guard, I just cut off my penis and thrown it in the fire. And well, then obviously I attended to him and called the doctor and all the rest of it. So you can imagine the delight, I mean, I felt, holding this piece of paper, which answered the question, because obviously that would take your eye off the ball as it were. And so that even, I did a bit more research on how it was, how he actually achieved this. And then went up to Oxford that evening and went into the OED, the main editorial room, and sort of announced in a rather loud and pompous way. I've discovered why his work rate fell off in 1902 and everyone went silent and I told them and they were, I mean, thunderstruck, but they were delighted, they at last knew. And so then I went to the train to go back to London that night. And at the ticket office, there were two very elderly women who were lexicographers who worked on the OED who weren't in the hall when I made this sort of announcement. And I said to them, have I ever got a story to tell you? So we all trooped into the train, which was one of these sort of open plan, sort of commuter trains full of men who had been up in Oxford for the day, commercial people involved with motorcars and things. And so they were all sitting there and I have this, I suppose, maybe I was very excited when my voice was booming a lot. And I was telling these women exactly how he did it, sharpening the knife that he used to cut out the little index cards, which he would send off to Oxford with the quotations, sharpening that on a wet stone, then using a piece of string to tie around the base of his member as a ligature because he was, of course, a surgeon who had to do this. And then with one fells, cutting it off. And at this moment, all the men, there was a sudden crossing of legs. All the people listening to this story. But the women, these elderly ladies who were going down to the theater that night, there, you could see the lexicographical gears grinding in their heads. And they said, and I swear, it makes the story better anyway, but I swear they said it in unison. They said, oh, auto-peotomy. And then one of them said, peotomy, of course, is the amputation of the penis, but auto-peotomy is doing it yourself. And we believe, don't we, that that is a neologism. And if you can write an illustrative sentence in your book, incorporating the word auto-peotomy, then it'll be put in the third edition of the OED. And your fame will be eternal. A vital change of the American edition? Yes, it was called The Surgeon of Crowthorne in Britain and the Commonwealth, of course. And the Folio Society has just produced an edition calling it The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which was my title, because he was a surgeon. The Broadmoor was in Crowthorne. It seemed a sort of jagged sort of, it seemed very appropriate to the story. But my editor in America, Larry Ashmead, now a long dead, said, what the hell's a Crowthorne? No one in America's gonna know what a Crowthorne is. So we'll change it to the Professor and the Madman. But I said, there's no Professor in the story. Yeah, what the hell? He says, no, we'll see. And so, three million copies later, I'm perfectly happy with the title. But it's not precise. It's accurate, but it's not precise. Or rather, it's not accurate, but it is precise. Well, obviously one of your interests is the impact of technology. You spoke of the coming of all these Sony gadgets and so forth. So this prompts the question, our habits of looking things up have changed profoundly in just a few years. Sort of rummaging around town trying to find that reference book. We're just a few taps and we're looking up. Have you any thoughts on what's that's doing to our psyche? How that's changing our sense of the way in which knowledge is organized? Well, all I can say is sort of rather obvious things, which it imparts a lot of information, but that doesn't give us much knowledge and it certainly doesn't give us any wisdom. So I don't like it. I mean, I use it, of course, but I have a, as I dare say most of you, you're at this conference. After all, I have a gigantic collection of Atlas is a huge collection of dictionaries and I try my level best to use them if only because of the tactile pleasure, of course, but also the chance of serendipity. And I know this is perhaps an overused word, but you just don't have it when you're, I mean, I have the OED and I've got the OED online. And sure, I can find the definition of any word instantly online and it is a bit of a pain to actually go to the volume and leaf through it, but I find if I do that, the potential for joy is so much greater. So for me, as someone who searches for joy, I like the old fashioned way, but... Well, exactly, that's precisely the point. It would never, never have happened. So, but it's no use beating against the tide, really. And of course, this, the question whether the OED will actually ever be published again in hard book form, it's going to be published, they say, the third edition in 2037. And it will be at least 40 volumes if it's a hardback book. I probably won't be here in 2037, but I would certainly buy it as a book. But quite honestly, I doubt if they'll produce it in any other version than online. So it's a sad but inevitable consequence of the invention of the transistor. Just to sort of tie up the beginning and the end of the books you've talked about, though obviously there are lots of others of your books that you haven't talked about. But do you worry that the OED encourages lack of precision? That's to say, I have some obsessions about words in fur and imply. Obama used in fur incorrectly. Really? Yes. I shall never vote for him again. When he spoke to the University of Queensland the other day. And complementary and complementary. You can find complementary meaning a free gift. In the ultimate dictionary. And this is because dictionaries are not prescriptive, as you said right at the beginning. But they are duty bound by the methodology of creating the dictionary to record all incorrect usages. I'm not sure that I think that's as great a problem in dictionaries as it is with thesauruses or thesauri. I've got to be careful speaking to you. I taught briefly at the University of Chicago in 2002, I think it was. And the students loved using Roger or whatever available thesaurus there was. And a chap was writing an essay in which he was talking about potting a geranium. And he was commenting on how his fingers once he had done this were earthy. But for some reason he decided that the word earthy which I think you and I and George Orwell and everyone that loves old words would think is a perfectly acceptable word. But no, he didn't want to use it. And so he turned not to his own brain or anything but to Roger. And the essay that he submitted to me said I planted the geranium and then looked with horror at my hands which were cathonic. C-H-T-H-O-N-I-C. So I think that danger not only of not being able to tell infer and imply and complementary and complementary affects students who rely too much on the thesaurus which I think is the greater villain, quite honestly. Could I ask you please, have you got any specific criteria for these 12 events that you're going to cover? The criteria were really whether I thought and this is very much an editorial judgment call and I may be lambasted for it were events that as I mentioned earlier betoken something of much greater significance which affected or infected the whole ocean. So I think, for instance, one can reasonably say that the sport of surfing which is originally I mean there was some argument but that's basically only believed by people that believe in Thor Heierdahl's theory which is now obviously discredited by genetics that it is a pacific sport or a pastime that originated in the pacific and now has spread itself around the world. That seems to me to be a legitimate phenomenon of the modern pacific which is important enough to include in the book. The persistent, irritant, irritating behavior of North Korea is something that affects us all and makes us realize that Asia Pacific is something that we ought to take cognizance of. So for instance also but I wanted these events to be interesting in and of themselves. As an example, I think chapter 6 or 7 is the burning and sinking in 1972 in Hong Kong harbour of the liner, the Queen Elizabeth that was sabotage and an insurance job basically but it was the beginning, it seemed to me of the end of European imperialism in the pacific. So we have the withdrawal from Fiji and Tonga the Solomon Islands which at the time were all British possessions Hong Kong in 1997 the American withdrawal from Indochina after the end of the Vietnam War the French withdrawal. So generally speaking all the Europeans started pulling out, of course there are relics there's pit can and the French possessions but generally speaking the European influence allowing the pacific to develop on its own with its own people under the guidance of its own people was an event that could be symbolized in a hundred different ways but I chose the burning of the Queen Elizabeth an incident which is forgotten but nonetheless when you look at it carefully it's dramatic and fascinating as a way of leading into this story so what I've tried to do then is to put at the head of each chapter an event that I thought rather like the first few pages of the search and of Crowthorne would beckon the reader into the chapter I think it's important and I'm an old journalist so I want to grab the reader by the throat and lead him into the chapter slightly dry as dust thesis to begin each chapter I want an event of some interest someone does need his dinner thank you sweetly put Simon Winchester very much thank you very much