It’s the season to clean your home, but right now – in the first week of spring – I’d rather spring-clean my brain. I’d like to throw out all the unused material up there in the attic and replace it with stuff that brings joy. It would be a Marie Kondo clean-up for my head.
First to go would be the Australian explorers. We spent most of primary school learning about them. Who knows why? Most of them were total failures. They “discovered things”, sure, but only after being shown the way by some Indigenous bloke. The rest died in the desert, after refusing help from some other Indigenous bloke.
So out they go, the lot of them.
I’d like to Marie Kondo my mind.Credit: AP
In school geography we spent our time studying the formation of oxbow lakes, a process described in three illustrations that we would dutifully copy again, and again, and again. We were told we had to understand the slow processes of geology, in which time stands still for endless millennia, and of which the geography lesson appeared a good example.
During all the decades since, I have awaited the moment when someone at a party expressed an interest in oxbow lakes, allowing me to shine, reproducing the three illustrations on a piece of paper kept in my pocket for just such an........