WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.400 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. 2 00:00:01.860 --> 00:00:04.840 Now, I hope we're beginning bang on time. 3 00:00:04.940 --> 00:00:06.220 According to my watch, we are. 4 00:00:06.660 --> 00:00:08.820 Can I do the usual reminder, please, 5 00:00:08.940 --> 00:00:11.600 and remind everybody to turn off their mobile phones and pages 6 00:00:11.600 --> 00:00:14.640 if you haven't already done so, or to switch them on to silent. 7 00:00:16.060 --> 00:00:18.840 I'm Margaret Anderson from the History Trust of South Australia, 8 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:23.120 and it's a great pleasure today to welcome Professor Ian McCalman to Adelaide 9 00:00:23.120 --> 00:00:27.220 and to what I think is his first attendance at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. 10 00:00:27.220 --> 00:00:30.360 Now, you'll know his biography from the book, 11 00:00:30.440 --> 00:00:34.280 but if I can briefly summarise, having been given stern instructions 12 00:00:34.280 --> 00:00:37.200 from one of our participants this afternoon. 13 00:00:37.760 --> 00:00:41.580 Ian is a professorial fellow and the ARC Federation Fellow 14 00:00:41.580 --> 00:00:42.920 at the University of Sydney. 15 00:00:43.200 --> 00:00:46.400 He's a cultural historian with a broad interest 16 00:00:46.400 --> 00:00:49.080 in 18th and 19th century European history 17 00:00:49.080 --> 00:00:52.540 and a more particular interest in popular culture, 18 00:00:52.700 --> 00:00:54.400 in intellectual history, 19 00:00:54.660 --> 00:00:57.040 and not entirely by contrast, 20 00:00:57.220 --> 00:00:58.300 I think he would argue, 21 00:00:58.440 --> 00:01:01.420 what he describes succinctly as low life, 22 00:01:01.700 --> 00:01:05.600 not that there's any intention to suggest that Darwin was low life. 23 00:01:06.320 --> 00:01:09.520 He also has an active interest in the uses of history 24 00:01:09.520 --> 00:01:11.300 in the different media, 25 00:01:11.380 --> 00:01:15.420 and he's participated in a number of projects in that light, 26 00:01:15.500 --> 00:01:19.200 in film, exhibitions in museums, and other multimedia. 27 00:01:19.740 --> 00:01:23.440 He's worked with the BBC, the ABC, and the History Channel, 28 00:01:23.660 --> 00:01:26.740 and with a range of museums in Australia and overseas. 29 00:01:27.560 --> 00:01:31.840 One of those projects was a re-enactment series of Cook's First Voyages. 30 00:01:32.520 --> 00:01:36.200 But it's his most recent book that we are going to hear about today. 31 00:01:36.700 --> 00:01:40.020 And this is his contribution here. 32 00:01:40.160 --> 00:01:41.120 It's in the bookshop. 33 00:01:41.140 --> 00:01:42.860 I urge you to have a look for it. 34 00:01:43.060 --> 00:01:45.540 His contribution to the plethora of publications 35 00:01:45.540 --> 00:01:47.540 which have come out in this year 36 00:01:47.540 --> 00:01:50.100 because of the rather extraordinary coincidence 37 00:01:50.100 --> 00:01:52.760 of the bicentenary of Darwin's birth 38 00:01:52.760 --> 00:01:56.240 and the sesquicentenary of the origin of species. 39 00:01:57.220 --> 00:02:01.320 It's a group biography that has been widely praised 40 00:02:01.320 --> 00:02:04.820 for the fresh perspective it brings to the Darwin story, 41 00:02:05.140 --> 00:02:07.620 which is something of a feat, I think you'll agree, 42 00:02:08.500 --> 00:02:12.160 and the insights it offers into the evolution of those theories 43 00:02:12.160 --> 00:02:14.080 developed by Darwin, 44 00:02:14.900 --> 00:02:18.500 he argues, in association and collaboration with a group of others. 45 00:02:19.340 --> 00:02:22.600 Ian's topic this afternoon is Darwin's Armada, 46 00:02:22.780 --> 00:02:26.860 pushing the intellectual boundaries from academe to trade book 47 00:02:26.860 --> 00:02:27.200 to the world of science. 48 00:02:27.220 --> 00:02:28.260 And TV series. 49 00:02:28.580 --> 00:02:30.000 Will you welcome Ian, please? 50 00:02:34.740 --> 00:02:36.720 Thank you very much, Margaret. 51 00:02:36.840 --> 00:02:39.240 And thank you very much, friends from Adelaide, 52 00:02:39.260 --> 00:02:43.200 coming out on a windy Sunday afternoon to hear me. 53 00:02:43.300 --> 00:02:44.540 I'm very privileged. 54 00:02:45.560 --> 00:02:48.860 Pardon me if I do have a bit of a frog in my throat. 55 00:02:48.940 --> 00:02:51.940 I only arrived from the UK last night 56 00:02:51.940 --> 00:02:55.320 and picked up something on the plane. 57 00:02:55.540 --> 00:02:56.680 Not swine flu. 58 00:02:57.680 --> 00:02:58.440 I'm sorry. 59 00:02:58.440 --> 00:02:58.520 I'm sorry. 60 00:02:58.940 --> 00:02:59.700 I'm sorry. 61 00:02:59.700 --> 00:03:00.120 I'm sorry. 62 00:03:00.120 --> 00:03:04.000 Charles Darwin's funeral took place at Westminster Abbey 63 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:07.000 on Wednesday 26 April 1882. 64 00:03:07.720 --> 00:03:12.680 Twenty years earlier, the press had taunted him as the devil's disciple, 65 00:03:13.540 --> 00:03:17.680 the scientist whose theory of evolution had eliminated the divine creator 66 00:03:17.680 --> 00:03:20.760 and turned man into the cousin of a monkey. 67 00:03:21.520 --> 00:03:24.800 Now the Pall Mall Gazette spoke for all 68 00:03:24.800 --> 00:03:27.040 in calling him the greatest, 69 00:03:27.220 --> 00:03:28.640 the most famous Englishman since Newton. 70 00:03:29.720 --> 00:03:34.200 His more than 2,000 mourners at the Abbey made up a who's who 71 00:03:34.840 --> 00:03:36.040 of the Victorian establishment. 72 00:03:36.900 --> 00:03:39.860 So many had applied for admission cards 73 00:03:40.440 --> 00:03:42.080 that the undertakers were hard pressed 74 00:03:42.760 --> 00:03:43.840 to complete the preparations. 75 00:03:45.220 --> 00:03:48.260 The body had arrived at 8 o'clock the evening before 76 00:03:48.900 --> 00:03:53.040 after a long, slow, horse-drawn passage from the village of Down 77 00:03:53.680 --> 00:03:57.200 to Westminster, accompanied for the entire 16 months, 78 00:03:57.200 --> 00:03:58.300 and the rest of the family was left to wait. 79 00:03:58.300 --> 00:04:03.860 The coffin was carried into the dim lamplight of the Abbey's Chapel 80 00:04:04.380 --> 00:04:08.980 of St. Faith to perch like a small wooden ship in dry dock, 81 00:04:09.180 --> 00:04:11.080 awaiting its last voyage. 82 00:04:12.300 --> 00:04:16.080 As the bell tolled noon, the Queen's Chaplain in Ordinary, 83 00:04:16.220 --> 00:04:20.080 Canon George Protheroe, opened the ceremony with the song, 84 00:04:20.260 --> 00:04:24.980 I am the Resurrection, glossing over Darwin's well-known scepticism 85 00:04:25.580 --> 00:04:27.080 about life after death. 86 00:04:27.200 --> 00:04:31.380 Darwin did not hold with the idea of a divine designer. 87 00:04:32.700 --> 00:04:36.040 He believed only in nature's implacable laws of chance, 88 00:04:36.200 --> 00:04:40.260 struggle, change, survival, or extinction. 89 00:04:40.940 --> 00:04:46.120 Man was one fortunate product of that ceaseless historical process. 90 00:04:47.400 --> 00:04:51.840 Ten pallbearers bobbed the coffin slowly up the nave 91 00:04:51.840 --> 00:04:55.860 to its resting place beside the statue of Sir Isaac Newton. 92 00:04:56.120 --> 00:04:56.700 . 93 00:04:57.200 --> 00:05:02.440 Among the dignitaries, three ordinary-looking middle-aged men 94 00:05:02.440 --> 00:05:03.600 gripped the handle. 95 00:05:04.500 --> 00:05:09.780 Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist, aged 57, was tall and thick-set 96 00:05:09.780 --> 00:05:12.360 with a beak-like nose and heavy side whiskers. 97 00:05:12.700 --> 00:05:17.480 Next to him walked botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, aged 65, 98 00:05:17.700 --> 00:05:22.080 spectacled, stooped, and slight, with a fine ruff of hair 99 00:05:22.080 --> 00:05:26.320 looking rather like a lion past his cadaverous face. 100 00:05:26.320 --> 00:05:31.220 Striding at the rear came zoo geographer Alfred Russell Wallace, 101 00:05:31.480 --> 00:05:36.500 aged 59, thin, tall, and wiry, with glinting spectacles 102 00:05:36.500 --> 00:05:37.820 and a heavy white beard. 103 00:05:38.860 --> 00:05:44.020 Then the coffin sank from sight, and Charles Darwin set out 104 00:05:44.020 --> 00:05:48.780 on his last voyage to meet the earthworms he'd been so recently studying. 105 00:05:49.700 --> 00:05:54.480 He expected no immortality, but the commemoration this year 106 00:05:54.480 --> 00:05:56.300 of the bicentenary of Darwin. 107 00:05:56.320 --> 00:05:59.320 The memory of his birth has resounded all over the world. 108 00:06:00.080 --> 00:06:04.100 How is it, though, that these three particular naturalists, 109 00:06:04.240 --> 00:06:08.660 Huxley, Hooker, and Wallace, came to be carrying Darwin's coffin? 110 00:06:09.500 --> 00:06:12.880 In essence, they were his most intimate friends, 111 00:06:13.240 --> 00:06:17.780 his closest intellectual collaborators, and his fiercest advocates. 112 00:06:18.800 --> 00:06:22.740 All three recognised that this funeral was perhaps the last 113 00:06:23.320 --> 00:06:26.300 and greatest symbolic battle in a war they had fought. 114 00:06:26.320 --> 00:06:32.860 It had been a fierce, unremitting public campaign 115 00:06:32.860 --> 00:06:36.800 in defence of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection 116 00:06:37.320 --> 00:06:41.940 against a host of scientists, philosophers, clergymen, politicians, 117 00:06:42.200 --> 00:06:46.620 and others who found its irreligious implications unacceptable. 118 00:06:48.360 --> 00:06:53.420 By extension, too, theirs was a fight for the kind of non-theological, 119 00:06:53.640 --> 00:06:56.300 fact-gathering, and law-making power that Darwin had. 120 00:07:00.220 --> 00:07:05.640 Huxley, known as Darwin's bulldog, was a biologist, paleontologist, 121 00:07:05.680 --> 00:07:08.540 and social philosopher, among many other things. 122 00:07:09.140 --> 00:07:13.060 He'd been tireless in taking Darwin's ideas out to the public 123 00:07:13.060 --> 00:07:17.400 and in extending the implications of evolution to other spheres 124 00:07:17.400 --> 00:07:20.140 of science, culture, and social thought. 125 00:07:21.280 --> 00:07:25.920 Hooker, botanist and biogeographer, was the man whom Darwin called 126 00:07:25.920 --> 00:07:26.300 the most intelligent man in the world. 127 00:07:26.300 --> 00:07:26.500 He was the one who was the most important figure in the world 128 00:07:26.500 --> 00:07:31.460 to my public and my judge, and whom he depended on for crucial knowledge 129 00:07:31.460 --> 00:07:34.000 of Australia and the Southern Hemisphere. 130 00:07:36.880 --> 00:07:42.980 Wallace, zogeographer and naturalist, was Darwin's true knight, 131 00:07:43.200 --> 00:07:49.320 who in 1858 had arrived independently at the theory of natural selection 132 00:07:49.320 --> 00:07:53.180 while on the island of Julolo in the Malay Peninsula. 133 00:07:53.180 --> 00:07:59.820 It was his discovery that goaded Darwin into writing and publishing 134 00:07:59.820 --> 00:08:01.320 The Origin of Species. 135 00:08:01.980 --> 00:08:05.380 Because Darwin had not then made his ideas public, 136 00:08:05.620 --> 00:08:10.660 the generous young naturalist Wallace accorded all priority and fame 137 00:08:10.660 --> 00:08:11.860 to the older man. 138 00:08:12.560 --> 00:08:17.580 Wallace thought of himself as merely a guerrilla chief of the evolution war, 139 00:08:17.860 --> 00:08:22.760 while Darwin, he said, is the great general who can manoeuvre the largest army 140 00:08:22.760 --> 00:08:25.480 and lead on his formation to victory. 141 00:08:29.400 --> 00:08:34.880 Though Wallace used a military metaphor, a maritime one would have been equally apt. 142 00:08:35.160 --> 00:08:39.960 What had brought these four very different figures together in the first place 143 00:08:39.960 --> 00:08:45.520 was their separate participation as young men in daring scientific voyages 144 00:08:45.520 --> 00:08:50.020 of exploration to the Pacific, Indian and Antarctic seas, 145 00:08:50.320 --> 00:08:52.380 and to the southern lands of Australia, 146 00:08:52.560 --> 00:08:52.740 and to the southern lands of Australia, 147 00:08:52.760 --> 00:08:55.940 New Zealand, New Guinea, South East Asia and Antarctica. 148 00:09:00.800 --> 00:09:06.940 Darwin, Hooker and Huxley had served their informal scientific apprenticeships 149 00:09:06.940 --> 00:09:09.600 on British naval survey ships, 150 00:09:09.880 --> 00:09:13.340 respectively the Beagle from 1831 to 6, 151 00:09:13.640 --> 00:09:16.340 the Erebus from 1839 to 43, 152 00:09:16.720 --> 00:09:19.800 and the Rattlesnake from 1846 to 50. 153 00:09:20.400 --> 00:09:22.740 Darwin travelled in a private capacity, 154 00:09:22.740 --> 00:09:25.660 as the captain's naturalist companion, 155 00:09:26.060 --> 00:09:30.000 while Hooker and Huxley were lowly assistant surgeons, 156 00:09:30.240 --> 00:09:31.200 or surgeon's mates. 157 00:09:32.060 --> 00:09:34.340 Wallace, the poorest of all, 158 00:09:34.440 --> 00:09:38.740 voyaged as a zoological collector in native prows and canoes 159 00:09:39.300 --> 00:09:43.020 up and down the Amazon from 1848 to 52, 160 00:09:43.280 --> 00:09:48.620 and then around the Malay archipelago for more than 14,000 sea miles 161 00:09:48.620 --> 00:09:51.140 between 1854 and 62. 162 00:09:52.740 --> 00:09:57.580 All four experienced their southern journeys as transformative, 163 00:09:57.880 --> 00:10:01.420 of their careers, their scientific ideas, 164 00:10:01.820 --> 00:10:04.620 their personal lives and their characters. 165 00:10:04.900 --> 00:10:09.460 In Darwin's case, we tend to overemphasise the importance 166 00:10:09.460 --> 00:10:13.060 of the Galapagos component of his Beagle voyage 167 00:10:13.060 --> 00:10:15.440 at the expense of what went after. 168 00:10:15.800 --> 00:10:19.140 His less heralded voyaging among the island laboratories 169 00:10:19.740 --> 00:10:22.720 and continents of the Pacific and Indian oceans, 170 00:10:22.720 --> 00:10:28.420 produced a luminous and often underestimated phase of theorising. 171 00:10:28.960 --> 00:10:32.640 This would help to shake him from his orthodox belief 172 00:10:32.640 --> 00:10:37.620 that species were the fixed products of multiple divine creations, 173 00:10:37.740 --> 00:10:40.560 and it would contribute to new understandings 174 00:10:40.560 --> 00:10:43.060 of human societies and ecologies. 175 00:10:44.680 --> 00:10:48.720 During the 1850s, while living the life of an ailing hermit 176 00:10:49.320 --> 00:10:52.340 at Down House, 16 miles from London, 177 00:10:52.340 --> 00:10:57.000 Darwin consciously recruited Hooker, Huxley and Wallace 178 00:10:57.000 --> 00:10:58.660 as friends and collaborators. 179 00:10:59.440 --> 00:11:03.580 Without them, it is doubtful whether he would have published his theory 180 00:11:03.580 --> 00:11:04.840 in his own lifetime. 181 00:11:06.100 --> 00:11:09.980 Fear of the personal, scientific and social opprobrium 182 00:11:09.980 --> 00:11:14.200 that evolution would bring on his head had made him so obsessed 183 00:11:14.200 --> 00:11:18.740 with accumulating definitive evidence that he was bogged down 184 00:11:18.740 --> 00:11:22.320 in an elephantine manuscript called Natural Selection, 185 00:11:22.340 --> 00:11:24.760 that actually never did get published. 186 00:11:25.980 --> 00:11:31.140 Ill and reclusive as he was, Darwin realised that he desperately needed 187 00:11:31.140 --> 00:11:37.100 a cohort of intellectual supporters whose expertise could help him refine his theory, 188 00:11:37.260 --> 00:11:40.980 whose social unorthodoxy could reinforce his own, 189 00:11:41.100 --> 00:11:45.440 and who were ultimately willing to fight the massed array of opponents 190 00:11:45.440 --> 00:11:49.660 whom he knew his heretical theory would generate. 191 00:11:50.640 --> 00:11:56.520 And of course, all the four voyagers were drawn together to each other 192 00:11:56.520 --> 00:12:01.060 by their common memories of hardship and pleasure in the Southern Oceans. 193 00:12:01.580 --> 00:12:07.280 It was a rough, secular freemasonry that bound them together as shipmates, 194 00:12:07.520 --> 00:12:10.640 well-salted in early life, as Huxley put it. 195 00:12:11.540 --> 00:12:15.980 Out of their Southern adventures came their lack of social pretension, 196 00:12:16.240 --> 00:12:18.600 their interlocking scientific interests, 197 00:12:18.600 --> 00:12:23.060 and their common participation in Darwin's evolution war. 198 00:12:23.580 --> 00:12:28.520 It was the training ground for the fleet captains of Darwin's Armada. 199 00:12:30.580 --> 00:12:35.860 Well, that was a brief preysy of my recent book, Darwin's Armada, 200 00:12:35.940 --> 00:12:40.680 that Margaret so kindly flourished for you to go out, dash out and buy. 201 00:12:42.080 --> 00:12:47.840 It's been published by different presses in Australia, Britain and the United States 202 00:12:47.840 --> 00:12:52.660 as a trade book, sometimes known also as a crossover book. 203 00:12:53.040 --> 00:12:57.840 That is to say, it's a history aimed at a general educated readership 204 00:12:58.560 --> 00:13:01.120 rather than a specialised academic one. 205 00:13:01.800 --> 00:13:07.960 It's also the basis for an international TV series called Darwin's Brave New World, 206 00:13:08.120 --> 00:13:14.420 which is due to be screened in Australia in three parts in October on ABC television. 207 00:13:17.880 --> 00:13:22.620 Well, a number of my academic friends are puzzled as to why I've chosen to go down 208 00:13:22.620 --> 00:13:25.240 this trade book and TV route. 209 00:13:26.620 --> 00:13:33.360 They argue that the pressures of commercialisation force such works into fatal compromises. 210 00:13:34.260 --> 00:13:39.840 They are dumbed down, they become mere stories, they say, devoid of analysis. 211 00:13:40.720 --> 00:13:45.660 They abandon originality in preference for known and predicted plots. 212 00:13:45.660 --> 00:13:57.300 They favour sensation and romance over complexity and, if you like, sensibility. 213 00:13:58.800 --> 00:14:05.780 No academic, for example, is more criticised or even derided by his peers 214 00:14:05.780 --> 00:14:11.600 than the popular British American historian and TV pundit, Simon Sharma. 215 00:14:14.040 --> 00:14:15.640 What's more, he's been a great critic of the world. 216 00:14:15.660 --> 00:14:21.680 He's become a billionaire on his private work, which is a fate clearly worse than death, 217 00:14:21.860 --> 00:14:23.960 and to be avoided by all academics. 218 00:14:26.280 --> 00:14:29.160 These criticisms are not without foundation. 219 00:14:29.580 --> 00:14:35.380 My last trade history book, called In Australia, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro, 220 00:14:35.540 --> 00:14:38.840 ran into many of these problems that I've just described. 221 00:14:39.380 --> 00:14:44.460 Its eighth ordeal really became dealing with the editors, the PR people, 222 00:14:44.460 --> 00:14:51.160 and marketing people in the world's largest publishing house in the United States. 223 00:14:51.500 --> 00:14:56.140 Although I'm proud that that book has gone into 14 languages now, 224 00:14:56.320 --> 00:15:01.740 I must admit that the publishing process was mostly miserable. 225 00:15:02.300 --> 00:15:08.120 My editor in New York couldn't get it into his head that the book wasn't a novel. 226 00:15:09.280 --> 00:15:14.440 In fact, he constantly described it in all of our correspondence as your novel. 227 00:15:14.460 --> 00:15:18.980 And he couldn't understand then why I wouldn't change the facts 228 00:15:18.980 --> 00:15:22.520 or direct quotations in order to improve the story. 229 00:15:22.740 --> 00:15:24.540 He just thought I was being stubborn. 230 00:15:25.960 --> 00:15:31.180 The marketers also changed the title to The Last Alchemist, 231 00:15:31.260 --> 00:15:35.220 a title so original that the last time I looked on Google, 232 00:15:35.480 --> 00:15:38.680 there were at least three other books by the same title. 233 00:15:41.760 --> 00:15:44.440 Perhaps the worst indignity was that the book was not a novel. 234 00:15:44.460 --> 00:15:47.460 The only thing that they tried to inflict on the book was a cover picture 235 00:15:47.460 --> 00:15:50.240 which was supposed to represent Count Gagliostro. 236 00:15:50.420 --> 00:15:57.980 It had an elderly magician with a wizened face and a kind of curly beard like Merlin 237 00:15:57.980 --> 00:15:59.340 and a wizard's hat. 238 00:16:00.420 --> 00:16:02.920 I tried to point out that Gagliostro, 239 00:16:03.100 --> 00:16:06.940 who's almost certainly the greatest con man in history, 240 00:16:08.220 --> 00:16:13.280 actually looked and behaved more like Tony Soprano than Merlin. 241 00:16:14.540 --> 00:16:18.200 This is a man who managed to con Casanova twice 242 00:16:19.700 --> 00:16:22.560 and Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette, 243 00:16:22.640 --> 00:16:25.080 among another cast of people. 244 00:16:27.900 --> 00:16:33.000 I also have to say that it almost became a film with Miramax. 245 00:16:33.480 --> 00:16:36.840 And although I would have loved the payment, 246 00:16:37.020 --> 00:16:42.960 the script that I saw that they were going to film was so excruciating 247 00:16:42.960 --> 00:16:44.440 that I would never have lived it down. 248 00:16:44.460 --> 00:16:46.140 I would have had to go and live in the Riviera. 249 00:16:49.140 --> 00:16:54.740 So why then did I risk trying to write another trade history in Darwin's Armada? 250 00:16:55.480 --> 00:16:58.920 Well, first and foremost, I did so because I believe 251 00:16:59.460 --> 00:17:02.960 that the historian's most precious and powerful tool 252 00:17:02.960 --> 00:17:07.600 is the ability to tell fresh stories about the past 253 00:17:07.600 --> 00:17:09.660 that speak to us in the present. 254 00:17:12.480 --> 00:17:18.220 In fact, I, above all, would want to be described as a storyteller. 255 00:17:19.060 --> 00:17:25.560 But unfortunately, narrative is sadly out of fashion in historical academe. 256 00:17:26.080 --> 00:17:31.220 We favour a kind of more sociological and arcane form of analysis, 257 00:17:31.640 --> 00:17:34.620 and often one that the general public finds opaque, 258 00:17:35.520 --> 00:17:39.020 using words that seems to me a kind of new priestcraft. 259 00:17:44.680 --> 00:17:48.680 Yet I believe that stories are the most important way 260 00:17:48.680 --> 00:17:51.000 we connect with each other in this world. 261 00:17:51.120 --> 00:17:56.380 They connect and can connect across the boundaries of nation, class, gender. 262 00:17:57.360 --> 00:18:03.240 And I want to be a historian that reaches out beyond his own specialised caste. 263 00:18:04.340 --> 00:18:07.800 I truly believe that we should embrace and, if necessary, 264 00:18:08.160 --> 00:18:09.640 reform our history. 265 00:18:09.640 --> 00:18:14.440 Rather than abandon the forms like the trade book and the TV history. 266 00:18:16.640 --> 00:18:20.300 And I have to say that in writing Darwin's Armada, 267 00:18:20.460 --> 00:18:24.000 the reverse of my previous experience has been true. 268 00:18:24.460 --> 00:18:31.580 My Australian editor, with Penguin, demanded more rather than less science. 269 00:18:32.460 --> 00:18:35.420 He never asked me to dumb anything down. 270 00:18:35.640 --> 00:18:38.220 He simply asked me to clarify it. 271 00:18:38.260 --> 00:18:39.620 Which is, of course, a science. 272 00:18:39.640 --> 00:18:41.320 It's a salutary thing to have to do. 273 00:18:42.880 --> 00:18:46.380 Neither did he, during the bicentenary of Darwin, 274 00:18:46.460 --> 00:18:49.940 try to force me towards a more orthodox interpretation 275 00:18:50.640 --> 00:18:52.620 or more orthodox pieties. 276 00:18:53.640 --> 00:18:58.260 He was delighted that the book gave equal time to what, 277 00:18:58.280 --> 00:19:02.580 for the general public, are the unknowns of Hooker, Huxley and Wallace. 278 00:19:04.640 --> 00:19:09.320 And he also was delighted that Australia, 279 00:19:09.320 --> 00:19:14.220 or Australasia, became as important a part of the evolution story 280 00:19:14.220 --> 00:19:17.100 as South America or the Galapagos. 281 00:19:18.460 --> 00:19:22.760 My title, Darwin's Armada, if not the subtitle, 282 00:19:22.760 --> 00:19:27.420 has also been retained by all the three different publishing houses. 283 00:19:27.960 --> 00:19:31.820 They've all delivered covers that I'm not ashamed of. 284 00:19:32.540 --> 00:19:37.280 Although they did insist on the old bearded Darwin, 285 00:19:37.280 --> 00:19:40.660 instead of the young vigorous Darwin of the Beagle days. 286 00:19:40.900 --> 00:19:42.700 But we'll leave it at that. 287 00:19:44.220 --> 00:19:49.440 And I have to say that the copy editing of Darwin's Armada 288 00:19:49.440 --> 00:19:52.220 was the most rigorous I've ever experienced. 289 00:19:52.480 --> 00:19:56.500 Far more rigorous than any of the famous academic presses 290 00:19:56.500 --> 00:19:58.200 that I've worked with in the past. 291 00:19:59.620 --> 00:20:04.400 And making the TV series has also been a really positive experience. 292 00:20:04.400 --> 00:20:08.740 For a start, it was collaborative from beginning to end. 293 00:20:09.360 --> 00:20:13.620 We started to work on the TV series at the same time 294 00:20:13.620 --> 00:20:15.240 as I started to work on the book. 295 00:20:15.620 --> 00:20:19.220 So the book and the TV series went hand in hand. 296 00:20:19.320 --> 00:20:22.560 They informed each other throughout the whole process. 297 00:20:24.360 --> 00:20:28.600 We'd meet once a week in an Erskineville wine bar, 298 00:20:28.800 --> 00:20:32.280 the producer, sometimes with the script writer and others, 299 00:20:32.440 --> 00:20:34.200 buy a bottle of red. 300 00:20:34.400 --> 00:20:35.000 Or two. 301 00:20:35.360 --> 00:20:39.420 And then spend hours arguing about the drafting, 302 00:20:39.540 --> 00:20:40.720 the testing of episodes, 303 00:20:40.940 --> 00:20:44.400 the different emphasis that was going to be put, 304 00:20:44.560 --> 00:20:49.400 and the trying to find a way of expressing in visual terms 305 00:20:49.400 --> 00:20:52.520 the kinds of things that one has been writing about 306 00:20:52.520 --> 00:20:53.940 in the Darwin story. 307 00:20:54.640 --> 00:20:57.240 It turned out to be, in all honesty, 308 00:20:57.400 --> 00:21:02.080 one of the most exhilarating intellectual experiences of my life. 309 00:21:02.220 --> 00:21:02.580 . 310 00:21:03.940 --> 00:21:07.020 This is a lot to do with the producer himself, 311 00:21:07.260 --> 00:21:10.640 and I think he's a remarkable man. 312 00:21:11.580 --> 00:21:14.280 I believe that the result is a genuinely fresh, 313 00:21:14.520 --> 00:21:19.040 original and truthful, as far as we can go, work of history. 314 00:21:19.220 --> 00:21:22.040 It speaks to us in Australasia, 315 00:21:22.120 --> 00:21:24.900 even though it is going to be shown 316 00:21:24.900 --> 00:21:29.720 and is a consortium that is German and Canadian 317 00:21:29.720 --> 00:21:32.120 and the United States as well. 318 00:21:32.920 --> 00:21:36.600 It combines vivid episodes of docudrama 319 00:21:36.600 --> 00:21:38.540 with interviews and discussions 320 00:21:39.440 --> 00:21:42.240 by contemporary scientists and philosophers, 321 00:21:42.440 --> 00:21:44.380 people like Dawkins, of course, 322 00:21:44.480 --> 00:21:46.820 David Suzuki, Jared Diamond, 323 00:21:47.180 --> 00:21:48.860 the great Darwin biographers, 324 00:21:48.960 --> 00:21:51.140 Janet Brown, James Moore and many others. 325 00:21:52.040 --> 00:21:55.420 Above all, the film conveys, it seems to me, 326 00:21:55.500 --> 00:21:58.000 a holistic and human context 327 00:21:58.580 --> 00:22:01.780 for this major intellectual discovery. 328 00:22:02.580 --> 00:22:07.780 It shows how great science is never a truly solitary process. 329 00:22:09.380 --> 00:22:12.940 It's never made in abstraction from society. 330 00:22:13.340 --> 00:22:16.180 It's never free from human pressures 331 00:22:16.180 --> 00:22:19.620 of ego, competition, envy, malice, 332 00:22:19.740 --> 00:22:24.620 of love, compassion, all those things. 333 00:22:25.680 --> 00:22:29.240 Genius does not float in from the heavens, 334 00:22:29.280 --> 00:22:31.560 it's shaped in the social world. 335 00:22:31.560 --> 00:22:35.000 And Darwinian evolution especially so. 336 00:22:35.600 --> 00:22:39.520 Moreover, the medium of the visual moving image 337 00:22:39.520 --> 00:22:41.660 also taught me something important 338 00:22:41.660 --> 00:22:44.000 about the evolution story 339 00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:45.880 that I had not previously realised. 340 00:22:47.100 --> 00:22:50.220 In an age when scientists were expected 341 00:22:50.220 --> 00:22:52.060 to illustrate their works 342 00:22:52.060 --> 00:22:54.220 from the pre-television age, 343 00:22:54.540 --> 00:22:58.860 where illustrations were a crucial part of the argument, 344 00:22:59.220 --> 00:23:01.540 the reason there is no evidence 345 00:23:01.540 --> 00:23:03.820 for the origin of species, 346 00:23:04.200 --> 00:23:06.480 there's one diagram, there's no illustration, 347 00:23:06.860 --> 00:23:10.740 is that Darwin could not find any pictures 348 00:23:10.740 --> 00:23:13.540 in his own time that did not mislead. 349 00:23:15.400 --> 00:23:18.420 All the illustrations of his day 350 00:23:18.420 --> 00:23:21.840 were encoded with the idea of creation. 351 00:23:22.300 --> 00:23:25.360 They assumed that species were static, 352 00:23:25.660 --> 00:23:27.820 permanent and divinely designed 353 00:23:27.820 --> 00:23:30.280 to fit particular niches. 354 00:23:30.580 --> 00:23:31.520 Birds were not created, 355 00:23:31.540 --> 00:23:33.640 birds for example were shown by Gould 356 00:23:33.640 --> 00:23:36.840 as kind of Victorian nuclear families, 357 00:23:37.140 --> 00:23:39.700 mother and father in their separate spheres, 358 00:23:40.160 --> 00:23:42.160 daddy being the breadwinner, 359 00:23:42.260 --> 00:23:43.700 mummy doing the nurturing. 360 00:23:44.620 --> 00:23:47.640 No breath of the struggle for survival, 361 00:23:47.880 --> 00:23:51.180 no breath of the struggle over sexual reproduction. 362 00:23:52.960 --> 00:23:55.480 How moreover was Darwin, 363 00:23:55.600 --> 00:23:56.680 let's think about this, 364 00:23:56.840 --> 00:23:59.540 how was he to depict visually 365 00:23:59.540 --> 00:24:02.840 something that was not an event but a process, 366 00:24:03.580 --> 00:24:06.860 something that was invisible in the present. 367 00:24:06.940 --> 00:24:09.180 It occurred only, as he said, 368 00:24:09.360 --> 00:24:10.880 in the mind's eye, 369 00:24:11.140 --> 00:24:13.780 not in the visible eye. 370 00:24:15.620 --> 00:24:19.260 It's a process that worked by minute variations 371 00:24:19.260 --> 00:24:21.380 over eons of time. 372 00:24:21.620 --> 00:24:24.960 How are we to illustrate something like that? 373 00:24:25.600 --> 00:24:27.460 And because of the film, 374 00:24:27.500 --> 00:24:29.320 I suppose because of this visual medium, 375 00:24:29.320 --> 00:24:32.420 I became aware how innovative 376 00:24:32.420 --> 00:24:35.160 Darwin, Huxley, Hooker and Wallace 377 00:24:35.160 --> 00:24:38.740 had been in trying to manipulate and adapt 378 00:24:38.740 --> 00:24:41.120 the visual traditions of their day. 379 00:24:41.360 --> 00:24:44.400 The use of cartoons, the use of melodrama, 380 00:24:44.640 --> 00:24:48.940 use of non-elite forms of visual culture, 381 00:24:49.040 --> 00:24:52.280 something that Darwin excelled at 382 00:24:52.280 --> 00:24:53.440 and is little noticed. 383 00:24:54.340 --> 00:24:55.980 I think he would have loved 384 00:24:55.980 --> 00:24:58.880 to be able to have had moving images, 385 00:24:58.880 --> 00:25:03.360 images and CGI in order to support his arguments. 386 00:25:05.940 --> 00:25:09.020 When we think about some of the processes 387 00:25:09.020 --> 00:25:13.720 for which Darwin had to expend volumes in explaining, 388 00:25:14.880 --> 00:25:17.100 we were able to show visually 389 00:25:17.880 --> 00:25:19.740 in a matter of four or five seconds. 390 00:25:20.680 --> 00:25:22.640 Just to give you a few examples, 391 00:25:22.920 --> 00:25:25.280 Darwin argued from the 1840s onwards 392 00:25:25.880 --> 00:25:27.740 about the affinity between 393 00:25:27.740 --> 00:25:30.240 the human hand, a bat's wing, 394 00:25:30.640 --> 00:25:33.140 a whale's fin and so on. 395 00:25:33.860 --> 00:25:36.180 A very complicated argument 396 00:25:36.740 --> 00:25:40.640 which we using CGI can show in the film 397 00:25:40.640 --> 00:25:42.340 when he holds up his hand 398 00:25:42.340 --> 00:25:44.620 and it turns into a bat's wing. 399 00:25:47.460 --> 00:25:48.800 Darwin struggled, 400 00:25:48.980 --> 00:25:51.040 tried to show the affinities 401 00:25:51.040 --> 00:25:54.540