Willis's Walkabouts Newsletter 103, July 2019 — The End

13 December 2019 — The End

The end of an era. It's been coming for a long time. It's not the end of Willis's Walkabouts but it is the end of one segment of our business, the end of something which has been of use to bushwalkers since bushwalking began. As of 13 December, paper maps will no longer be available from Geoscience Australia.

Digital maps will remain available but they can't give you the same overview of a large area as you can get from a paper map. Unless you print them, you are at the mercy of a digital device. Digital devices can fail. I've seen GPS units and mobile phones on our trips dropped or drowned. Paper is safer.

If you'd like to purchase a 1:50,000 or 1:100,000 topo map while they are still available, please send us an email.

We sell them for $10 each, quantity discounts available.

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Your Health — Big News On Alzheimers

According to New Scientist, We may finally know what causes Alzheimer's — and how to stop it
It's early days, but why take chances. When I read the article I couldn't help but think of two of my former guides, both in nursing homes, both with dementia, one of whom no longer even knows his own name.

Lack of sleep also seems to contribute to developing Alzheimers as mentioned in Newsletter 94.

Four More To Consider

• Protein Pulsing Is the New Steroid
  It's not just what you eat but when you eat it.
• Nutri-Grain and Milo Cereal lose Health Stars under proposed changes
  Here's what happens if Health Star Ratings focused on added sugar rather than total sugars.
  By the time this newsletter comes out, the decision may have been made. If the change wasn't made or isn't made, it will show that Australian governments are more concerned about large food companies than about the health of the consumer.
  I thought it important enough so I sent an email to the NT Health Minister. If the decision hasn't yet been made and you approve, please let the health minister for your state know.
• Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?
  Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific, controversial new research suggests — and quite possibly even racist. How did we get it so wrong?
  Am I being cynical or could it have been because some people stood to make some money.
• Instant Coffee: Good or Bad?
  I've seen many studies showing that coffee has health benefits. I wondered how instant coffee compared to the real thing. This article answers the question.

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Russell's Special Trips: 2019-20

Next year will be a special one for Willis's Walkabouts. The reason will become obvious in a future newsletter. IF all goes to plan, I'll be offering a number of special trips. But why wait, I'm starting now.

Kakadu, Litchfield and More

With too much time in the office and too little time out bush, I decided that this would be a good year to explore some 4WD tracks I haven't driven in 20 years or more. In one case, it will be completely new. There will be no overnight walks but we will be camping near the vehicle most nights. We might even go for accommodation on one night but, if so, there should be a camping option.

Russell's Top End Special: 18-24 August 2019
Price: $600. But before you get too excited, read the trip notes and see whether or not this is the kind of trip you'd enjoy.

Spain 2020

In my last two newsletters, I've mentioned the possibility of a new trip to Spain. Half would be based around visits to rock art sites. The other half would be based on hut to hut walking. We've had a couple of expressions of interest but need more before we start doing all the work to create a detailed proposal.

If you think there is any chance you might be interested in a trip like that, please send us an email and let us know so we can begin working on a detailed itinerary.

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Farewell Arthur Weston

Arthur Weston, the man who introduced WW style bushwalking trips to Australia well before WW came into existence, passed away peacefully in Perth on 10 July.

Arthur was born in Milwaukee, contracted rheumatic fever as a child and ironically was told not to exercise. He was a conscientious objector during the Korean war but eventually, to spare his father who worked for the Air Force, went in as a noncombatant which meant he spent the war as a psychiatric nurse in a US military hospital in Germany. The money he saved during his days in the Army allowed him to travel for over two years, all through Europe, Asia Minor, Afghanistan India, New Zealand and Australia. He graduated from the University of California Berkeley with a PhD which took him to Costa Rica and Colombia repeatedly. He was opposed to the Vietnam war, to Nixon and left for Australia in 1971. He worked briefly for the government, but could not stomach the bureaucratic nature of the job and resigned to travel for another 2½ years. When he returned, he started Nangar Wilderness Expeditions and Natural History Field Trips. The Nangar program was incredibly varied with weekend trips near Perth and longer trips trips into every state in Australia as well as overseas.

In addition to the tours, Arthur worked as a botanic consultant. He was an amazing botanist and has a whole genus named after him, Westoniella, which has six species in it. He also had an Australian acacia named after him. He was still doing occasional consulting jobs well into his late 70s.

We met and became friends not long after I began Willis's Walkabouts, providing each other with information about the places we loved. In addition to his own trips, Arthur led a few for Willis's Walkabouts including the only trips we ever managed to run in southwest WA. The trip I did with him there remains a highlight to this day.

For more, see the obituary on the WA Herbarium Facebook page.

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Guns in America — Why Mass Shootings Keep Happening

This is one of the longest pieces I've included in the newsletter. If you want to begin to understand mass shooters in America, it's a must read. I've got a follow up for the next newsletter which shows how much some people benefit from keeping the status quo.

Some years ago, Esquire magazine ran an article by Tom Junod called Why Mass Shootings Keep Happening. The subtitle said it all. "Are we helpless to stop mass shootings? Is anyone even trying to stop them? The good news is that the answers are No and Yes. The bad news: The person loading up hasn't gotten the news." Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite.

• "Mass shootings have become by now American rituals — blood sacrifices, propitiations to our angry American gods, made all the more terrible by our apparent acceptance of them. They have become a feature of American life, and we know very well what follows each one: the shock, the horror, the demonization of the guilty, the prayers for the innocent, the calls for action, the finger-pointing, the paralysis, and finally the forgetting. We know that they change everything only so that everything may remain unchanged."
• "Active shooters, mass shooters, rampage killers, whatever you want to call them: They have supplanted serial killers and possibly even terrorists as our culture's symbol of ultimate evil, seen as unfathomable and hence unstoppable. Part of the shock of any mass shooting is the powerlessness and helplessness we feel in its wake — our inability to answer with anything more than stuffed animals and futile politics."
• "We tend to think of perpetrators of targeted violence as either psychopaths — cold, isolated, highly motivated, and conscienceless — or troubled individuals who one day "just snap." According to the tenets of threat assessment, they are neither. Indeed, according to the tenets of threat assessment, nobody just snaps; everybody follows an explicable course, even those intent on accomplishing the inexplicable. "The people who carry out these attacks typically do them out of a sense of desperation," says Marisa Randazzo, a former Secret Service psychologist who collaborated with Fein and Vossekuil on several papers and is now a partner at Sigma Threat Management Associates. "They typically have been of concern to people who know them for long periods of time. And when we did interviews with school shooters, they expressed a level of ambivalence that surprised me. Part of them felt they had to go through with it; part of them felt they didn't want to at all. Part of them looked for encouragement; part of them looked for someone to stop them. The national mind-set is that they're determined to go through with it no matter what. That is absolutely not the case."
• "Most of the time, the person of concern can't be charged, because he hasn't committed a crime. He can't be committed, because he doesn't meet the stringent criteria for commitment — he doesn't represent an imminent risk to himself or others. He falls, therefore, into what law-enforcement officials tend to call "the gap," the place between knowing that a person represents a threat and knowing what to do about it."
• "The people who do these things are not fully functioning adults — we're all manchildren," says the manchild who once led two other manchildren down the street dressed in black and armed with machetes and military-grade weapons. "All of the authority in the world won't help that kid. What they'll do is just ostracize him even more. What he wants is for someone to accept him for who he is."

Until something changes we'll continue to get mass shootings and stories like Back-to-School Shopping for Districts: Armed Guards, Cameras and Metal Detectors *
The shooting in Parkland, Fla., spurred school districts into reinforcing buildings, hiring armed guards and training staff to handle mass casualty events.

Or how about a video, Don't Get Shot in America. Live in Australia! *

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Our Society

Have the Terrorists Won?

It's not a total victory, but it is a partial one. Anti-terror rules and precautions are crushing community events with sky-high costs

Women Then and Now

• Hidden women of history: Tarpe Mills, 1940s comic writer, and her feisty superhero Miss Fury
• I'm a Climber, and a Mother, and Doing Great, Thank You *
  Among many of my peers, being pregnant was seen as a big problem. But not by my sponsors.

Two Endings: One Sad, One a New Beginning

• Mad Magazine, Irreverent Baby Boomer Humor Bible, Is All but Dead *
  "Mad magazine, the class clown of American publishing, is being shuffled off to the periodical equivalent of an old-folks home at the age of 67.After the next two issues, a publication that specialized in thumbing its nose at authority will no longer include new material, except in year-end specials, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. Instead, the 'usual gang of idiots,' as the staff has long called itself on the masthead, will fill the magazine's pages with old material."
• The World According to Mad Magazine *
  Grown-ups who worried it was a subversive influence on America's youth were 100 percent correct.
• New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out *
  Works by Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie and Robert Frost entered the public domain on Jan. 1. And that's just the first wave. I wonder how it affects Australia.

Only in America?

• People Are Taking Emotional Support Animals Everywhere. States Are Cracking Down. *
  "More Americans are saying they need a variety of animals — dogs, ducks, even insects — for their mental health. But critics say many are really just pets that do not merit special status.
• 5 Ways to Make Money with Your Body
• Everything Is for Sale Now. Even Us. *
  The constant pressure to sell ourselves on every possible platform has produced its own brand of modern anxiety. "35 percent of the American work force that now works freelance in some capacity, either as a main source of income or as some kind of side hustle. This number is growing constantly — 94 percent of the new jobs created in the last decade or so were freelance or contract-based."
  "The authors describe this new-normal mind-set as a 'sense of self overwhelmed by pathological worry and a fear of negative social evaluation.' Hmm. Maybe I should make that my personal brand story."
  While it is not as bad here in Australia, we seem to be moving in that direction. I know a number of people who haven't been able to get more than short-term work contracts for years.

Please Touch Me

Please Touch Me *
Has intimacy gone so far out of style that it's poised for a comeback?

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WW on Facebook and Instagram

Facebook

We've been on Facebook for quite some time. We don't post as regularly as we should but what we do post should be interesting. Quite a lot of it remains relevant months after it gets posted.

I did some experiments with night photography on my last trip. Have a look at our Facebook page and scroll down to the post on 15 July to see what I got.

Instagram

Thanks to one of the clients on our recent trip to Litchfield, we now have an Instagram page. Please have a look if you have Instagram, please follow the page. The more followers we get, the more likely it is that we can get the new clients we need to keep offering our trips.

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Photos, Videos & Just for Fun

Video

• Giant Squid, Phantom of the Deep, Reappears on Video *
  "Seven years after scientists caught the elusive deep-sea cephalopod on video, they saw another. Then lightning struck a third time." The video is a link in the story.
• Snowball the dancing parrot stuns scientists with 14 separate moves to Eighties classic hits
  "the 12-year-old sulphur-crested bird is shown spontaneously performing a repertoire of 14 moves including the 'down-shake', 'body roll' and 'downward/head-foot sync', in time to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."
• In May, we had the 75^th anniversary of D-Day in WW II. Reading something on that led me to the 1938 commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg
• Chasing Monsters
  Ever considered trying to photograph a storm with over 200km/h winds? Experience the adrenaline-fuelled moments as photographer Nick Moir tracks America's wildest tornadoes to capture the images of nightmares.

Photos — Africa

• Get to Know the Aardvark
  I've done something like a dozen trips to southern Africa. I've seen only one aardvark.
• Giraffe pictures 101: how to get the perfect shot
• Places to Stay
  • Stay Between The Flowers
  • Dreamy desert stays in our beautiful parks
  We often stay at places like those shown on our Africa trips. We'll definitely be offering at least one Africa trip in 2020.

Photo and Video

As mentioned in the previous section, if you visit our Facebook page and scroll down, you'll see a heap of photos and videos from our trips.

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