Just about to head to Sydney to give talks at the University of Western Sydney and the University of New South Wales. Both will be on ‘The Birth of Territory’. The very different audiences – the Centre for Cultural Research at UWS and the Gilbert & Tobin Centre of Public Law,at UNSW should make for interesting discussions.

Because of these talks, and an intriguing invitation to write a short piece for a rather different audience, I’ve stopped working on fossils for a couple of days and gone back to territory. But recently on fossils I’ve been particularly intrigued by the work of Nicholaus Steno (Niels Stenson) and Georges Cuvier.