YOU R AG
conservationists will never oppose
inappropriate use of land controlled
by Aboriginal people (mining of high-
conservation-value land for instance).
Ruined land is ruined land.
The ‘real’ travesty of justice that
Marcia Langton speaks of is that the
very industry she unconditionally
supports is the one that will forever
deny Aboriginal people real land
rights. As long as Aboriginal people do
not have veto [power] over proposed
mines, the concept of land rights will
be largely imaginary. Claiming that
mining will rescue Aboriginal people
and deliver benefi ts forever is the
same logic Europeans have been using
ad nauseum; and the result is a
degraded environment and a human
population in a great deal of trouble.
Instead of fi nding evils in the
conservation community, Professor
Langton should perhaps be joining
their ranks to ensure that something
remains of the natural world that her
ancestors occupied.
CHRIS BELL, FERN TREE, TAS
TRUE MOTIVES
As a long-time reader of the magazine,
I fi nd the content of most issues
interesting, informative and well
written. However, the commentary by
Dr Benjamin Thomas Jones (Embracing
the enemy, AG 116) misrepresented the
facts in saying that the 19th-century
explorers saw themselves as heroes in
the making.
Sturt, Eyre, Stuart (who was
responsible for lifting the ‘veil of
mystery’ over the centre of Australia),
the Forrest brothers, Giles and
Gregory, were self-ef acing and
defi nitely not given to keeping
journals just to “thrill the public with
tales of brave adventure and to ensure
their own celebrity and legacy”.
I have read each of their journals
and all of them are narratives of their
journeys. None of them mention what
must have been privations in the
extreme. Giles was occasionally given
to expressions of imagination and
hopes, but this does not distract from
his very readable journals setting out
his routes and distances. He was driven
by a burning desire Continued page 126 KARL KRUSZELNICKI; NATHAN HOPE
WITH DR KARL KRUSZELNICKIH
ELLO, and welcome
to my first column
here in AUSTRALIAN
GEOGRAPHIC. The loose theme
is Australian innovation. So I
thought that I would start off with
how we Australians brought a new
word into the English language,
and my small part in this discovery.
Back in 2002, Nathan Hope
went out for a mate’s 21st birthday
and had a little accident. On 13
September, he went onto an online
forum (using the pseudonym
Hopey) to ask about the
dissolvable stitches that were now
in his lower lip. People asked him
how he came to get these stitches,
and at 3.19pm, he typed:
“Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped
ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front
teeth coming a very close second ) on a set
of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right
through my bottom lip.”
He then posted this “self-
photograph” (below) showing the
stitches in his lower lip.
And then, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
he posted the very first written use
of the word ‘selfie’, in any medium
(paper or electronic).
And sorry about the image
quality, it was a selfie.The OED is the definitive
record of our rapidly evolving
English language. In November
it declared that the Word of the
Year for 2013 would be selfie.
Over the previous year, the usage
of this word had increased by an
astonishing 17,000 per cent.
This was measured by doing a
statistical analysis of the Oxford
English Corpus, which is an
electronically stored structured
set of texts. Each month some 150
million words are collected. This
database is statistically analysed
every day to track new and
emerging words – and selfie was
the most often used. Runners-up
for the Word of the Year included
‘twerk’ (to dance in a low squat
in a sexually provocative manner,
using thrusting hip movements),
‘binge-watch’ (to watch many
episodes of a TV show in one
bout) and ‘showrooming’ (visiting
showrooms to examine goods
before buying them online).
And what was the forum where
Hopey posted the first-known use
of selfie? It was my very own Dr
Karl Self-Serve Science Forum
on the ABC (www.abc.net.au/science/
drkarl/)!DR KARL is a prolifi c broadcaster,
author and University of Sydney physicist.
His 34th book, Game of Knowns, is pub-
lished by Pan Macmillan. Follow him on
Twitter at: twitter.com/DoctorKarlTHE SELFIE
Inventions
Snap-happy. Karl demonstrates the
‘selfi e’ with a shot from his own phone.Gob-smacking. The fi rst ‘selfi e’, a
term coined in 2002 by Nathan Hope.124 Australian Geographic