Climb every mountain

It's 152 years (to the day) since Sir Paweł Edmund Strzelecki died, in the fullness of his years, in London. He'd come a long way. He has been claimed as a Hero of Poland. In this case, quite literally as his remains were repatriated to Poznan in 1997 from Kensal Green Cemetery. Polish Wikipedia describes him as "geograf, podróżnik, badacz Australii" i.e. geographer, traveller [not tourist!] and Australian bad-ass. Poland surely vies with Ireland as being MOPE = Most Oppressed People Ever. We moan on about the six-counties, the border-poll, Lloyd-George's finesse of Collins & Griffiths in 1921. 100 years later, Drumcree reminds us that we-the-collective are polarized, intransigent and self-righteous.The irony is that Strzelecki was born just outside of Poznań two years after the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had >!Poof!< ceased to exist in the final chapter of The Partitions of Poland (1772 -1795). Before I became a scientist, I had a year at school pretending to study history. I was…