psychology dector

Everybody knows that people in the Antipodes walk on their heads, because they live in an upside-down world. It's true that my Antipodean land of birth, Australia, is quite different to my adopted country, France. • Australia is thought of as an immensely rich land, since all kinds of treasures lie beneath the surface. On the other hand, Australian history and culture are not particularly exciting. The Aborigines, for example, have never produced any written texts. So, it's as if the past only came into human memory a few generations ago. We know next to nothing about their ancient history. Aborigines themselves have invented myths about the past, but they have no precise objective knowledge of the names or life-styles of their ancestors. They simply guess. And their conclusions are probably right, because Australian Aborigines are a people that doesn't seem to evolve considerably in time. • France, on the other hand, cannot be thought of as a rich land, since there are few...

This evening, France 2 showed an amazing documentary, shot in Australia, on the subject of animal intelligence . We saw baby kangaroos being reared in a clinic, a female crocodile examined by echography, clouds of fruit bats in the sky (a familiar scene in Grafton, my place of birth), horses that communicate with humans through emotions, a huge snake being captured in a suburban house, the glorious movements of dolphins, giant turtles and rays, a presentation of the extraordinary cuttlefish... This was one of the most intelligent and exhilarating documentaries from Australia that I've ever seen, totally different to the general touristic rubbish that emerges regularly from Down Under. There wasn't a single shot of koalas, Aborigines,  opal mines or Uluru. We didn't even get a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge or the Opera House. Not even Taronga Park. And no surfers or lifesavers. Viewers were simply presented with a land whose animal diversity surpasses that of all other place...