"Ion" is one of many plays by Euripides in which he tried to show his Athenian audience what the gods were liked when judged by ordinary human standards. In this play, Apollo, the god of truth, brutally rapes a helpless young girl, Creusa, and then abandons her. Creusa has a son, whom she abandons in a cave; when she goes back to find the child, he is gone. Years later she marries Xuthus, a solider of fortune who becomes king of Athens. At the start of the play Xuthus and Creusa are childless and go to Delphi for aid. There they are told that Ion, a young temple servant who has been raised from infancy, is the son of Xuthus. Creusa, outraged that Apollo let their own son die but preserved the life of a child begotten by Xuthus on some Delphian woman, tries to have Ion killed. Of course, in reality, Ion is her own child, abandoned in that cave. Condemned to death by the Delphians, Creusa escapes Ion's vengeance by taking refuge at Apollo's altar. There the priestess presents the tokens that allow Creusa to recognize Ion as her own son. Telling him the truth about his father, Ion tries to enter the temple to demand of Apollo the truth.

There is debate over how much "Ion" reflects the noted skepticism of Euripides. After all, we can certainly believe that Creusa was raped by a human and that he child died in that cave and that the priestess who bore Ion was simply setting up a convenient fiction that would make her son the prince of Athens. However, I have always taken "Ion" as being one of the best examples of Euripides's cynical view of the gods the Greeks were supposed to be worshipping. Athena forestalls a confrontation between Ion and Apollo, but this particular example of deus ex machina certainly rings hollow. After all, Delphi is Apollo's holy place and if Athena's words are true, he should be there to reveal the truth to his son instead.

The Rum Rebellion on Australia Day, 1808 was the outcome of the head-on collision between two of the most determined personalities in Australian history. One was Captain William Bligh R.N., Governor of the Penal Colony of New South Wales: the other was John Macarthur, at one time an officer in the infamous New South Wales Corps, and later a very wealthy and influential merchant and pastoralist.

That the penal colony was established on 26 January, 1788 was a direct result of the American War of Independence, for it would thereafter not be possible for people sentenced to penal servitude in Britain to be sent into exile in the Colonies of New England.

The beginnings of the first European settlement in Australia were therefore altogether inauspicious. Those who arrived in the First Fleet were either convicted felons or the soldiers of the New South Wales Corps who were to be their jailers. The King of England and his government were represented in the Colony by the Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, R.N..

In the absence of any free settlers and in particular of anything resembling a merchant class, the officers of the Corps were able to control the distribution of all kinds of commodities, including food, that were brought into the colony.

Of particular historical importnce among those commodities was rum: rum which was so generally sought after in the colony that the Corps officers, by their illegal trafficking, were able to establish it as a de facto currency.In rum, wages were paid, other goods were bought and sold and contractual obligations discharged.

No one profited from this ruinous commerce more than John Macarthur who, by virtue of his dominant personality, became the acknowledged leader and spokesman of the officers as well as others, including some emancipated convicts, engaged in the rum trade.

It was only natural then that, when Governor William Bligh arrived in the colony in August, 1806 under instructions to pursue a policy favourable to the small farmers of the Hawkesbury Valley and unfavourable to the interests of the rum traffickers in Sydney, these latter should look to Macarthur to lead their challenge against the Governor and lawful authority.

In large part the conflict between the rum traffickers and the proper authority of the governor manifested itself in a series of legal actions brought by Macarthur against anyone who seemed to threaten his previously unfettered monopoly, and found expression in formal reports by the Governor to the Colonial Office in London as well as in less formal despatches from Macarthur to influential members of the English aristocracy whom he considered likely to support his cause.

The crisis came on 26 January, 1808, exactly twenty years after the establishment of the settlement in Sydney Cove. On that day, the officers of the Corps led their soldiers - most of them emboldened be liberal quantities of rum - in a march upon the Governor's residence. It was, as Evatt wrote "... an organised attack, not only in military array, but by officers and soldiers with loaded guns, fixed bayonets and all the panoply of war."

Governor Bligh was arrested and supplanted in executive control of the colony by a junta of military officers and John Macarthur.

It is one of the more bitter ironies of Australian history that this treasonous outrage occurred on the very day upon which, every year since Federation in 1901, Australians celebrate their nationhood.

Bligh has been much maligned by popular history both in Australia and elsewhere, and Evatt's book did much to set the record straight. It brought to bear upon the events and relationships narrated the objectivity of analysis and the fair-mindedness one would hope should characterise an author of such eminence. Dr. Evatt has, in addition, performed the estimable service of making otherwise cloudy legal vistas clear and accessible to any interested lay reader.

A distinguished jurist, Dr. Evatt was, at various times, a Justice of the High Court of Australia, Attorney-General and Foreign Minister and, in 1948-49, the President of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organisation.

This book, first published in 1921 in Britain and New Zealand, and now reissued in the United States with a generous and enthusiastic introduction by William Cronon, is certainly one of the strangest and at first sight most unpromising works of environmental history ever written. The book is basically an extraordinarily detailed account of the environmental history of a single sheep "station" (sheepfarm) on the East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand written by the lessee of the property, Herbert Guthrie-Smith. He describes in great detail the environmental transformations that he himself brought about as he cleared the forest cover from the steep hills, grassed the slopes and stocked the property with sheep. In many ways Guthrie-Smith regretted what he had to do in order to make a living.The book describes everything: clearing the land, changes in birdlife, the local geology and archaeology, the spread of noxious weeds, accelerated erosion, the complexities of exporting wool, etc etc. Guthrie-Smith was from Scotland and the book is written in an old-fashioned heavily literary style, but it is well worth persisting with. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Guthrie-Smith's descriptions of his Maori landlords, from whom he leased his farm but who were a lot poorer than he was. One can see from his pages how the present day sheepfarming landscape of the North Island was created, and at what cost: a true classic, but for serious environmental historians only.