‘Guugu Yimithirr’ is an Australian aboriginal language of the Guugu Yimithirr people of Far North Queensland. The highlight of my week may well be coming across an article about it in the New York Times. (Thank you, Tom Vanderbilt, for the great tip off.)

Why the joy?

Guugu Yimithirr is an extremely space conscious language and its speakers do not refer to the position of things relative to themselves, but relative to the cardinal points. It is always turn east or west, not left or right. Always ‘pass the salt, its just to the north of you’, not ‘it is under your nose’. This constant ‘cardinal awareness’ means that speakers of Guugu Yimithirr must remain aware of directional clues at all times, even if this is just the layout of their village, but it also means that they experience the world in a different way too.

When everything from dance moves (move your east foot to the south…) to television pictures (the characters on TV move north, south, east and west too) is governed by directional understanding and awareness the human experience becomes alien, puzzling and perhaps richer from a western perspective. One of the few things that we can probably all agree appears is that our perspective is western.

It is likely a beautiful coincidence that it was a Guugu Yimithirr tribe that watched one of the best known navigators of history, Captain James Cook, approaching the shore of Queensland at what became known as Cooktown. Although, of course, he was not so much ‘approaching the shore’ as moving northwest.

Tom Vanderbilt

His account will be appearing in the US magazine, ‘Outside‘, in due course so I won’t spoil the fun here, but I will write it up and publish it on this website once Tom’s Outside article has run. Suffice to say that Dartmoor did not pull any punches and a meteorologically intense time was enjoyed.

The Natural Navigator book is being published in the US on 1st January 2011.

My father-in-law and I took great pleasure in resting on the ramparts and identifying the navigational marks out at sea, using a pair of binoculars. ‘There, I have the Giffard Port marker!’ One of us would cry as the waves pounded at the rocks below and their mist mixed with the smoke rising up from the freshly caught mackerel on the BBQ at our feet. The red and white stripes of the tower are themselves an aid to navigation, easily identified by shipping near and far.

For the two days we were living in the tower we used it as a base for trips out to ‘Les Ecrehous’, an extraordinarily wild archipelago northeast of Jersey.

Standing and taking in the dawn for a few moments this morning it felt like a rule that was in need of a little breaking. I stood there in my standard uniform for this time of day: pyjamas, Ugg boots, thermal jumper and hat. Quarter of an hour must have passed. Naughty, naughty boy! Get in that shed at once!

For those who don’t yet know TGO (formerly The Great Outdoors), it is the magazine for independent hillwalkers and backpackers. It has a loyal and very knowledgable readership and Emily has just taken over at the editor’s desk from Cameron McNeish after his near-two-decade reign. Cameron moves on to the ‘Editor-at-Large’ role.

TGO includes amongst its stable of contributors writers like Jim Perrin, and so it is fair to say that it is considered a cut above mainstream.

Challenging and exciting times for Emily and I wish her the best at this great walking institution.

“What sort of people come on your courses?”

It is both an easy and difficult question to answer. The difficult part is that the backgrounds of those who have an interest in natural navigation is extremely diverse. It is tempting to say that it could not be more diverse, but that is not true; by the time someone finds themselves on one of my courses they have selected themselves as someone who can reach the UK (typically) and also someone who either is willing and able to spend some income on a rare skill or is close to someone who is willing to do that for them as a present. Put another, more flippant way, I don’t get many subsistence farmers from Africa or Asia on my courses.

It is fair however to say that within the subset of professional British people, the diversity would be hard to beat and this is something that I have blogged about before.

The easy part to answer is that, without exception, those who have come on my courses to date have been of a positive and kind nature. I have honestly yet to come across an individual on one of my courses who makes me question a long-held belief that those that have at least some curiosity and interest in nature and the outdoors will not be found amongst subset of humanity’s worst. I am no doubt being hopelessly romantic and naive, but I like to believe that the two circles of the Venn diagram do not intersect.

What has all that got to do with a photograph of a tyre? On the course on Saturday, I had to drive partly up a bank to allow a tractor to pass on a steep road. Two minutes later as we disembarked I heard a hissing, twenty minutes after that I returned to a Land Rover with a flat tyre. As you will see from the treads in the picture, it was an off-road tyre and the culprit is that determined flint protuding from the rubber. Could it have been an arrow or spearhead from an earlier civilisation, the area is rich with archaeological treasures… were not the thoughts entering my head at the time. Something altogether less cultured went through my mind.

Weighing up the best approach, I offered those on the course the opportunity to leave me to change the tyre while they had lunch in the pub and we would continue the course afterwards with the spare in place.

They would hear none of it and insisted in helping me change the tyre, which was both generous and fortuitous as one timely observation stopped me raising the jack through the floor of the vehicle at one point.

My thanks to those involved!

Although standard practice in aerial navigation at the time, it is now remarkable to consider that the most powerful weapon in the history of warfare was guided using the stars. The Enola Gay dropped its atomic bomb payload on Hiroshima after an 1800 mile flight where the aircraft’s position was checked using the stars. From the Guardian article:

‘Van Kirk’s role was navigator: “We did things the old-fashioned way: celestial navigation, telling your position by the stars. We had a dome up top of the plane to sit up in and shoot the stars with a bubble sextant.”

The full article can be read in the Guardian Online.

Since Venus is relatively close to the sun and is only visible as a bright object when the sun is below the horizon, it follows that Venus is normally seen in the east or west – hence its reputation as a morning or evening ’star’.  Jupiter’s orbit around the sun is much larger than our own and so it follows no such rules and can be found close or far from the sun. This morning, when I saw it, it was a very bright object due south of me and this is something that can never be claimed of Venus from these latitudes. Whenever Venus is due south of you then the sun will be well above the horizon.

I managed to catch one quick and photo of it above some beech trees, before it disappeared behind cloud. The waning crescent moon was the only other very bright object in the sky, but that disappeared behind cloud too as the crumpled duvet of stratocumulus headed eastwards.

If you are not a NYT reader, but would like to be then my natural navigation article can be found here.