Looking at Ingenuity

Paul Fairweather
3 min readJul 29, 2023

Ingenuity; being clever, original and inventive.

This magnifying glass was made by a man named Halley, a jackaroo from Brucedale, the property my mum grew up on near Roma. Mum tells me the lens came out of a wartime aircraft.
It is made from a lovely piece of silky oak, tapered in one direction.
The lens holder is a piece of galvanised sheet that Halley has used tinsnips to cut notches and fold down tags to hold the lens in place.
I like to think of ingenuity as being the Australian word for Creativity. And as creativity is about putting two or more disparate things together to make something new, this is a simple yet perfect example of this in practice.
Einstein said:

“Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no-one else has thought.”

And not only is the end result was a great outcome of creativity, the product itself if the perfect metaphor at looking at things differently.

Birds of a feather

I have been collecting feathers on my morning walks for Camille to make quills with. While standard-issue at Hogwarts, Camille has had to make our own. She was so…

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