Where in the World is New Philippines?𖤓

 𖤓 Clue: nowhere near the South China Sea

358 words

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Most folk know where the Philippines is, or at least they could point out on an atlas roughly what part of the world map it sits in. But who’s ever heard of (the) “New Philippines”? Probably not too many, unless you live in the Lone Star state and have more of a passing knowledge of early (pre-US) Texas/Tejano history. New Philippines, when it existed, was in what is now (central-north) Texas, a parcel of Spanish-controlled territory lying between the Nueces and Medina Rivers. Nuevas Filippinas, as it was known in Spanish, was named in honour of the then-sovereign King Philip V of Spain, becoming a province of New Spain in 1722. The first governor was the Second Marqués de Aguayo. 

A highly significant event during New Philippines’ provincial existence was the 1819 Adam’s–Onis Treaty between two imperial powers with skin in the game in that part of the continent, Spain and the US. The wash-up of the deal saw Spanish Florida acquired by the US in exchange Washington conceding that all of Texas, including New Philippines, was the property of the Spanish crown. When the Mexicans won independence from Spain in 1821 New Philippines ceased to be a legal entity and the territory was renamed Provincia de Texas…when the United Mexican States was formulated under the 1824 Constitution it became one of the new nation’s states, called Coahuila y Tejas. From 1821 to 1835 an influx of Anglo-American settlers poured into Provincia de Texas.

New Spain and Nuevas Filipinas, 1819

Endnote: A footnote in the history of New Philippines province concerns an 18th century American chancer named Philip Nolan. Nolan was a mustang trader (generous “job description”) and freebooter§, at one time in the services of US senior general and Spanish spy James Wilkinson…his link with New Philippines was that in the course of his horse “collecting” in the province Spanish troops caught up with him and his men killed Nolan in the Hill County region of the province (a river and a Texas county are named after Nolan). 

§ someone who undertakes an unauthorised military incursion into a foreign country 

Why was it called the “Ethiopic Sea” and why was it located where it was? (on the other side of the African continent!)

400 words  

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It’s a long way from the Horn of Africa to the South Atlantic Sea. But before it got its present name (the South Atlantic) it went by the name “Ethiopic Sea/Ocean” or “Ethiopian Sea/Ocean”. The puzzling thing of course is the Atlantic runs along the west side of the African continent, whereas Ethiopia, which gives its name to the sea, is on the east side of Africa and is landlocked. Its nearest waterways are the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden which flow into Indian Ocean❶.

On some ancient maps like this one, which Herodotus would be familiar with, the far southern ocean is identified as the “Austral Sea” 

Who do we blame for this geographical anomaly? The ancient Greeks of course…and the state of utterly fanciful cartography in that BC age of only very limited exploration. The Greeks called it Okeanos Aithiopos and although it was wildly inaccurate, it somehow had staying power, hanging around on maps and atlases until the 19th century! it’s highly conceivable this long persistence over millennia of the errant name reflects the paucity of standardised naming on maps prior to the 19th century. 

On this 1710 map it is still being referred to as “Ocean Ethiopien”

As to why it was ascribed in the first place, the Greeks, such as Homer and other Hellenic writers in the archaic era, tended to use the word “Aethiopia” as bit of a broad sweep descriptor for all lands that they surmised lay below Egypt on the African mainland, ie, in sub-Saharan Africa (with an absence of clear borders in antiquity the ancients had a very poor conception of what actually comprised this as yet unknown region)❷. The same went for all the peoples who inhabited them, the ancient Greeks used “Aethiopian” as a catch-all term to identify these various and different peoples with the common trait of dark skin. The etymology is Gk: aitho (“burn”) + –ops (“face”).

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❶ the early Greeks also identified the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantikôi Pelágei or Okeanos Atlantikôi , Latin: Mare Atlantique/Oceanus Atlanticus, but the name seems to have been restricted to the northern part of the ocean and only started to be used to describe it in it’s entirety around the 17th century

❷ Aethiopia gets mentioned several times in both the Iliad and the Odyssey as being at the far ends of the earth, near the ocean stream 

Stoppard the Literary Gymnast Debunks the Conventions of Fiction Theorising

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Stoppardian: (adj.) writing marked by “elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns.” ~ OED, 1978

The death at the end of last month of Sir Tom Stoppard (born Tomáš Straüssler), the modern theatre’s larger-than-life playwright whose plays managed to juggle profundity with introspection, jokes, riddles and philosophical puzzles, prompts me to recall his 1979 visit to Australia.  

The scene is WAIT§, February 1979, Tom—the innovative and original wordplay maven, the mental acrobatics guru—is on an arts panel of the annual Festival of Perth. Stoppard as one of the most prominent Festival guests gets asked a series of not very imaginative questions by eager little college drama students, some of which are dragged out to labyrinthine lengths and tortuously, impossibly convoluted. One question-poser, stumbling over his meandering, increasingly incomprehensible question, suddenly spurts out “you’re a modern writer, writing today and it was so so long ago…in terms of do you dig Shakespeare???” Tom’s response, no doubt with a wry smile, once he recomposes himself at such a facile question, is something along the lines of “Sure…but let’s face it, not every writer in the world whose dead is good!”

Moving on, Stoppard fields another, slightly more germane if obvious question. A question the author of Rosencrantz and Guilderstern had without a doubt heard a 1,000 times before…”But what does your play really mean?”, he is earnestly asked. Being Stoppard, his response is razor-sharp original and clearly one that had been devised, fit for purpose, as a retort for every new iteration of this old hobby-horse question. Unfazed, Stoppard answers with a metaphor: “It’s a bit like going through customs. You put your luggage on the table, the customs official asks if you have anything to declare. You say, no, not really, it’s just a play about two insignificant, dim couriers, who hang around Elsinore doing nothing much and they die. Then the official opens the bag and starts ransacking the contents, intentional fallacies to the right, objective correlatives to the left and all manner of exotic contraband in-between, the nature of God and identity, etc. etc. The official asks you to explain all of these undeclared items and while you can't deny that they're there, you can't for the life of you remember packing them!” Boom-boom!

Tom readies himself for the next genius question at the FoP while his fellow panel members smoke furiously (which shouldn’t surprise anyone as Peter Stuyvesant was one of the Festival’s sponsors and they probably handed out free ciggies to the guests)

🛃  🛃  🛃    🛃  🛃  🛃 

§ West Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University)

There Once was a Teaching Institute in Prestigious, High-End Mosman which Trained Pacific Islanders as Future Administrators and Teachers

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With the much-talked-about 50th anniversary this week of “the Dismissal”, aka the Governor-General’s “extra-constitutional coup” on November 11 1975, it’s timely to touch on an earlier chapter in the career of Sir John Kerr—decades before his term as the queen’s representative in Australia—his time as foundation head of the Australian School of Pacific Administration.

What became known by the unwieldy acronym ASOPA, had its genesis in the Australian Army’s School of Civil Affairs in 1945. In 1946 it got rebranded as the Australian School of Pacific Administration, with a purely civil purpose. Located on Sydney’s lower North Shore at affluent and leafy harbour-side Mosman§, the institution’s raison d’etre was to train administrators and school teachers from the Papua New Guinean population to fill these professional role in a developing PNG. The trainers were seconded from the NSW Department of Education.

Spartan accommodation of ASOPA

John Kerr is known today to all Australians as the man who became Australia’s most controversial-ever G-G, but 70 years ago he was at the time an officer in the Australian Army. At the end of WWII Kerr was demoted with the rank of colonel and became ASOPA’s first principal in early 1947. Interestingly, it was while at the school that Kerr met the woman who was to become his second wife, Lady Anne Kerr, then Anne Robson. The future Mrs Kerr, known for her “élitiste” inclinations£, was for a period a teacher and researcher at the Mosman-based school.

John Kerr as head of ASOPA tried to forge an association with the proposed new university in Canberra which became ANU in 1949, but was unsuccessful. Not long after Kerr resigned from ASOPA in 1948 and returned to the law, later becoming a member of the judiciary…the rest of his story is well known. Kerr was succeeded as head of ASOPA by another ex-army officer, Colonel Alfred Conlon.

 Into the Fifties and beyond ASOPA continued its role helping PNG to prepare the country and it’s people for independence which occurred in 1975. The scope of the school’s training  was broadened to take in students from other developing Pacific countries as well. In 1973 ASOPA was transformed into the International Training Institute (ITI) (ITI), which continued to provide management training until it closed in late 1997.  

Sources: 

The ASOPA Controversy: A Pivot of Australian Policy for Papua and New Guinea, Journal of Pacific History, 1945-49 pp. 83-99(17), by I.C. Campbell 

‘Sir John Kerr: A legacy complicated by controversy’, Harbour Trust, 22-January-2025, www.harbourtrust.gov.au

§ originally situated within the Commonwealth military facility at Georges Heights, it later moved to nearby Middle Head

£ a perfect match to be sure!

Alexander of Macedon: “Global” Empire with a Surfeit of “Alexandrias”

494 words

Alexander the Great in his short lifetime (356–323 BC) conquered a very large slice of what was then the known world (according to ancient Europeans – see below). Though unprecedented in its breadth—stretching from south-eastern Europe to South Asia and Egypt—and a colossal military achievement, its important to note that Alexander took control of massive areas of land as a result of defeating other imperial powers in the east, especially the Persian Empire. As Pierre Briant argues, the foundation for the Macedonian king’s great conquest was the pre-existing vast empire of the Achaemenid rulers…the empire he won, was already an organised, centralised empire, pacified and controlled by the Persians, which made Alexander’s task of administering and maintaining order in the various regions and satrapies significantly easier than had those advantageous preconditions not prevailed (Pierre Briant, Alexander the Great and His Empire: A Short Introduction, (2012)). 

The ancient Greeks’ concept of the world map

As Alexander relentlessly added to his empire in piecemeal fashion, he founded approximately 70 new cities, his network of Hellenised poleis (ancient Greek city-states) in Asia and Africa, encompassing a host of modern-day states including Türkiye, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Libya,Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of these 70 or so cities founded by Alexander in an expanding empire, not a few were eponymous. The exact number of “Alexandrias” is unknown because the ancient sources provide conflicting and contradictory accounts of them, but we can verify a number of them that either still exist or did exist at one time and have been lost to history. The most famous of course is Alexandria in Egypt, famed as one of the antiquity’s learned seats of culture and wisdom, revolving around its iconic grand library. Others include Alexandria Troas (near the site of ancient Troy), Alexandria in Margiana (Turkmenistan), Alexandria in Arachosia (Kandahar, Afghanistan), Alexandria Eschate (Tajikistan, the northern outpost of Alexander’s empire in Central Asia), and there were more.

Why did Alexander name so many of his cities after himself? The explanation that most people would reach for is that this was a manifestation of the great Macedonian emperor’s overweening vainglory, and of course the hyper-mythologised Alexander’s unsurprisingly oversized ego was part of the motivation. He was honouring his glorious achievements which were without equal, a way of imprinting his personal and lasting legacy across the empire. If we draw on a modern comparison from the world of retailing, it was a kind of branding of the “Alexander product”. The eponymous nomenclature also complimented the Hellenising mission of Alexander and his Macedonian successors, the goal of spreading Greek culture, language and ideas throughout the length and breadth of the burgeoning empire. Having multiple “Alexandrias” across the territories also gave a unifying impulse to the Alexandrian empire, the cities were strategic locations, on important trade routes or defensive positions, chosen to function as key centres for commerce, military control and administration. 

A map of Alexander the Great’s land holdings dotted with “Alexandrias”

Welcome to the Land of Stans

 460 words

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The “land of Stans” is an expression you hear in the media from time to time describing various states and entities that lie within the middle belt of Asia, in a region designated as “Central Asia” or even “South–Central Asia”. The descriptor is actually a tautology, rather like saying, as is the wont of many politicians and commentators in the West, “East Timor”, rather than Timor-Leste❂. The word “–stan” is a Persian-language suffix which means “land of”. As a country or region within a country designation, the “land of stans” probably resonants in most people’s minds in recent times with the five CARS, the Central Asian Republics—Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—formerly SSRs (Socialist Soviet Republics) which came into independent existence when the Soviet Union self-destructed in 1991 and much of its multi-ethnic empire unravelled.The five “stans” of Central Asia share more than a suffix in nomenclature, each has a connexion with the ancient fabled Silk Road as well as sharing historical and cultural ties while possessing distinct languages, cultures, and political systems.

Of course there were already “stans” inked in on the world atlas long before the CARs achieved independent nationhood. The best known, also broadly within the region of South-Central Asia, are not liberated offshoots of the USSR but of the British Raj. These are Afghanistan, which is self-explanatory, “the land of the Afghans”…and Pakistan. Etymologists have their take on the origins of the name “Pakistan”, the word "Pak" (پاک) means "pure" or "clean" in Persian and Pashto, from this we get “Pakistan”, in the Urdu and Persian languages, "the Land of the Pure", a departure from how the CARs got their respective nomenclatures, ie, from the names of the dominant ethnic groups in the location. The coiner of the name “Pakistan” in 1933, Choudhry Rahman Ali, proffers a second explanation for its genesis – as an acronym which encapsulates the entire area of the Muslim-majority regions in the northwest of the Indian sub-continent, which can be unpacked as:

Punjab

Afghania (the Pathan-inhabited Northwest Frontier Province) 

Kashmir 

I§

Sindh

and bookended by the suffix of the name Baluchistan. 

And there are other “stans” on the map which are not sovereign states in their own right but are regions or districts within a country, or across several countries, as with Kurdistan. Then there’s the autonomous zone Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan, and likewise Khuzestan, a province of south-western Iran, among others.

❂ in Bahasa Indonesian the word for "east" is timur, so the name “East Timor” strictly speaking is tautological 

 § the acronym behind the name “Pakistan” is fudged a bit, the “i” was inserted to facilitate the name’s pronunciation, although an alternative interpretation suggests “i” stands for “Indus”, the main river traversing the country 

Who put the X in Scalextric? The Rise and Fall of the Slot Car Craze

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Despite the withering of the years it takes very little tweaking of my childhood memory bank to recall the pre-computer age craze of slot car racing. Its heyday, at least for my generation, the decade of the 1960s, which in Australia coincided with the emergence of big shopping malls. Just about every large shopping centre or mall had a commercial outlet, a whole shop where you could go and race a hired 1/24 or 1/32 model race car (or if you were lucky enough to own your own racer) to your heart’s content at breakneck speeds around the hare-pin bends and high mounted banks of the circuitous race track…my personal haunt was in an out-of-the-way spot down in the basement of the Roselands shopping bonanza.

It seems my gut-feeling that the slot-car craze was the exclusive domain of the Sixties generation is vigorously challenged by various post-boomer respondents on the web who claim the phenomena for their particular “gen-dec”, especially the Seventies and the Eighties. Furthermore, Australia was not ground zero for slot-car racing (1912, England?), nor was it at the zenith of its popularity the epicentre of global slot car mania. That honour goes of course to the USA, the land of the automobile, the real thing on a 1/1 scale…here, the slot car fad among the young (and even those not so young) had its most seismic impact. The popularity of the pastime in America produced an absolute gold mine, yielding at its high-water mark annual sales of US$500 million. Not just race tracks in hobby shops and people’s homes, the number of commercial venues for racing exploded from just two public tracks in 1960 to around 3,000 operating by 1966.

Playland Racing Center, San Francisco, US, 1960s (credit: 

Jon Brenneis/The LIFE Images Collection/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

Slot car racing was a fad that inevitably went out of fashion (as is the wont of fads). There are several other, more tangible factors explaining its eclipse…as the competition on the mini-track hotted up, the high end of racing became high tech and high price. Thus, the average hobbyist player eventually got priced out and drifted away from the hobby; the increase in sales of home sets of slot car courses didn’t help the viability of the commercial operations; operators had high overheads, model scale race tracks require a large rental space to house them; the financial returns made by these businesses diminished, forcing more and more to go out of business, leading inexorably to wholesale closures of centres.

What happened to the endless sections of winding track when the slot car craze went kaput? Some of them ended up in museums and the warehouses of private collectors, there are particularly good collections apparently in LA in the Los Angeles Slot Car Museum and Bernard’s Slot Car Museum. 

In my research I was surprised to discover that  this rare beast, this most satisfying of vicarious juvenile pastimes of the 1960s “golden age”, has not entirely gone the way of the dinosaur. Today, there are still a few places where you can go to race—or just watch—a Scalextric or a Carrera Go model car…many call themselves “hobby shops” these days, such as the Penrith Slot Car and Hobby Centre in Jamisontown and Sloties in Charmhaven (both in NSW), and in the US there are pockets of them scattered around the country, still serving the competitive needs of rusted-on slot car tragics.