The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 by Ashley Hay

Author:Ashley Hay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2014-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

What eyeball?

That eyeball in Florida.

N. says – What are you talking about?

M. says – I’ve heard a little over 32 years of silence on the subject of eyeballs in Florida.

B. asks – Specifically?

The eye from the sea.

And then I have the great delight of sending them photographs of the big blue eyeball, glowing in the gloved hands of a scientist. Why, I wonder, does some local fisherman not fess up to having gouged the proverbial leviathan? What a big fish story that would be! Not one of my friends has any useful information, but every one of them confesses to being startled by the eye, to being unable to look away. Perversely, someone has posted a recipe for cooking the eyeball on a forum site. It involves pineapple for tenderising. There is, in fact, a popular eating-fish in Australia called ‘Blue-Eye’, but it is a smaller, schooling fish. I resist the urge to buy a fillet of Blue Eye from the fish markets and try the pineapple method.

During this time my mind keeps returning to a Ted Hughes story, called ‘The iron man’. More specifically, I think often of the beginning of ‘The iron man’, in which the mechanical giant of the title falls off a cliff and is shattered in the surf below. How his eyeball (‘its light glowed blue’) is located by the giant’s hand, after narrowly avoiding being eaten by seagulls, and then the hand goes hopping about over the rocks, looking for the rest of the machine to assemble. It drags pieces of itself up the beach; legs, arms, head. The other eye is slurped back into its socket and lights up there.

This is the dream of the self-identifying monster.

* * * * *

What the atlas makes clear is that, pound for pound, there is more weight of blue on the surface of the Earth than any other colour. Blue is too big to fail. Yet, setting aside the sea and the sky (both of which acquire their colour from spectral refraction), nature doesn’t make much blue. Name a blue mammal. A blue tree; a blue rock. There are not many. In the tropics reptiles and amphibians are sometimes blue and poisonous, but most are not. Blue-ringed octopi, about the size of a baby’s fist, broadcast their venomous intent by flashing blue circles on their limbs – yet they’re easy to miss amidst their weedy, coral kingdoms.

The pure blue rose, meanwhile, has been coveted by generations of horticulturalists. Rudyard Kipling wrote a tragic poem in which he quests for one sapphire bloom while his love lies dying. In 2004 a Japanese whiskey company patented the first genetically engineered blue rose, Applause™ (although it is really an amethyst colour, closer to violet than to blue). There is still big money to be made for the scientist or gardener who manages to cultivate a truly vivid, blue rose. Some people in the world have made it their life’s work.

The German Romantics – in particular, an author known as

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