Without this, Lake Burley Griffin is a characterless waste of space |
I saw you toss the kites on high
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And blow the birds about the sky;
And all around I heard you pass,
Like ladies' skirts across the grass -
I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid.
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all -
- The Wind, by Robert Louis Stevenson
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The thrillingly strong, city-shaking, tree-bending Canberra and region winds of recent weeks and days coincide uncannily with the publication of Simon Winchester's The Breath of the Gods: the History and Future of the Wind.
The vigorous and entertaining Winchester, a polymath, is unavoidably everywhere at the moment being interviewed about his new book. So, for example, he has just rattled-on (pun intended, referencing the ways high winds shake and rattle things) about it on ABC Radio National's Late Night Live in the episode Simon Winchester on wind: the invisible force that we can't live without.
It is very like him that he has taken something, the wind, so present every day in all of our lives but so seldom marvelled at, and has marvelled at it for us, at its roles in history, literature, science, poetry, and engineering.
"Wind finds its way into just about every activity and inactivity of man, beast, plant and thing that exists in the world," he insists, then goes on to prove it. He shows examples how the wind has enabled and thwarted famous seafaring adventures (it defeated the Spanish Armada), how it shapes landscapes (think of sand dunes) while distributing seeds, germs, dust and radioactivity (different winds would have made the Chernobyl horror very........