Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2019 i Australian Geographic

WHEN WE hear the term deforestation, it is often accompanied by footage of dense tracts of Amazonian rainforests being illegally bulldozed or aerial images of vast palm oil plantations on once thickly forested equatorial mountain slopes that springs to mind. In Australia, it might suit us to believe our highly prized native forests are somehow safe from acts of environmental vandalism, but we would be wrong. In this issue we present a special report from Science and Environment Editor Karen McGhee on Australia’s alarming rate of native vegetation destruction. It’s a record that sees Australia regarded internationally as one of the hotspots of deforestation along with the Amazon, Borneo and the Congo. Landscape-scale tree clearing is a legacy of our colonial agricultural past and a price we paid to build…

In July, we profiled the incredible southern marsupial mole, a peculiar animal of the Australian outback. Here’s what you had to say. TRISH LEE Wow! I never knew about these little creatures; I know they exist but have never heard much about them. Very interesting article. CAROLINE NEWLYN I didn’t even know this animal was one of ours; we have some beauts, but this takes the cake. MICHELE DIX Our cute little marsupial mole looks as if it is straight out of J.K. Rowlings’ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. MAT SPILLARD Let’s hope we don’t make this little fella extinct. DONALD GILLIS If it is really weird and not from the Galapagos Islands it’s usually from Australia. WAYNE TAYLOR Strange even by Australian standards; they could be right…

IN 1910 our nation created its own currency based on the Australian pound. Decimalisation had been considered but we followed the lead of Britain, which was firmly against it. By the late 1950s, however, the Menzies government recognised the sense of converting Australia’s currency to a decimalised one, in keeping with those of many of our trading partners. Support for switching came down to practicalities – like its British counterpart, the Australian pound was divided into 20 shillings, each of 12 pence. Financial transactions were complicated. National productivity was also an issue, with research showing decimalisation would annually save our economy at least £11 million, quickly offsetting the £30 million cost of converting. The main argument against was the Australian pound’s symbolic connection to Britain. But after World War II…

Origin of the name When Benedictine monks established a mission on the banks of the Moore River, WA, they named it New Norcia after Norcia in Italy, the birthplace of the order’s founder, St Benedict. NEW NORCIA IS A little piece of the Mediterranean in the Australian bush. It has a monastery, church, hotel, working farm, beehives, wells, schools and an art gallery and museum. It has remained fundamentally unchanged since it was founded by Spanish Benedictine monks in the late 1840s. One historian has written enthusiastically about the settlement: “The quaint beauty of its setting, the old-world model of its architecture, the number, the size, the real magnificence of some of its buildings, excite wonder and admiration. Nowhere else in Australia is there a place like New Norcia, and…

Glenn Dawes is a co-author of the yearbook Astronomy 2019 Australia (Quasar Publishing). Naked eye A great time to stargaze! In the evening, winter constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius head towards the western horizon. Note the tilting teapot. At about midnight a summer highlight, Orion, is appearing in the east. Look for the saucepan rising. Binoculars Faint patterns visible under dark country skies can become obvious from the suburbs with binoculars. Try Delphinus the Dolphin constellation; look for the bright star Fomalhaut in the mouth of the southern fish; and follow the body running along Grus the Crane. Small telescope Mercury has its best evening return for 2019. In mid-September it charges past brilliant Venus to spend October low in the west close to the end of twilight. Watch its phase…

Nominations aplenty for our 2019 awards Decision time THE AG SOCIETY’S email inbox always makes for an interesting read. It’s where we receive applications for sponsorships and for the Nancy-Bird Walton women’s adventure sponsorship. It’s also where our funding recipients report back to us on the progress of their adventures or research projects. And at this time of the year it’s where we receive nominations for our seven annual awards for conservation and adventure. We enjoy sifting through the nominations and especially finding out about amazing people who we haven’t yet heard of. The deliberations can be difficult, however, because there are so many wonderful and worthy achievements coming through, and it’s never easy to choose the winners. Among some of the fantastic people nominated in 2019 are Katie Sarah,…

MOST OF THE TIME Australia’s inland is dusty and dry. Almost 20 per cent of the continent is true desert, receiving less than 150mm of annual rainfall on average. Despite its harsh dry nature, Australia’s arid inland supports more than 200 bird species. Some exhibit large fluctuations in population numbers; many are highly nomadic, travelling great distances in search of new food and water sources; while others stay within a short flight of farm dams and other artificial water sources. Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, in the north-east of South Australia, is the lowest natural place on the surface of the continent (about 15m below sea level), and is Australia’s largest salt lake. It is located within the 1.2 million sq.km Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre Basin, which can be arid for consecutive years.…

SCIENTIFIC NAME: Casuarius casuarius Originally derived from the Malay “kesuari”, which comes from the Papuan words “kasu”, meaning horned, and “weri”, meaning head. SIZE: Adults grow to 2m tall; males weigh up to 55kg and females up to 76kg. The heaviest ever recorded weighed 85kg. BREEDING: Cassowaries mate in June–October. Females lay clutches of 3–5 pale-green eggs 2–3 months later. Males brood these for a further 50 days before they hatch. CHILDCARE: It was once thought males did all the parenting, but there are increasing accounts of females visiting males and chicks. DIET: Cassowaries have been recorded to feed on at least 238 different plants. They prefer fallen fruits, but will also eat flowers and mushrooms as well as snails, insects, fish, crabs and other small animals. FEATHERS: Cassowary feathers differ…

Thermal protection • Drysuit (to keep the diver’s body completely dry)• Layers of warm undergarments• 7mm-thick neoprene hood (to keep the diver’s head warm)• Heated wetsuit gloves Recording equipment • Surveying gear (compass, wrist notes and dive computer with depth gauge)• Helmet-mounted camera• Knotted guideline (for measuring distances) Diving equipment • Lightweight composite cylinders (two cylinders hold enough breathing gas to fill 1500 balloons)• Nitrox (nitrogenoxygen gas mixture)• Reels of guideline• Silt pegs (for securing guideline)• Helmet with mounted lights• Spare lights• Spare diving mask…

It’s well known that Dutch mariners visited Australia long before Cook charted the east coast in 1770 for Great Britain. However, the myth persists that early Dutch knowledge of Australia – which has been home to Aboriginal Australians for tens of thousands of years – was merely the result of clumsy navigation, with Dutch ships accidentally blundering onto the west coast while en route to Indonesia. That certainly wasn’t the case. Indeed, European exploration of Australia began with a deliberate voyage by Duyfken, a small Dutch ship captained by Willem Janszoon. In 1606 Janszoon and his crew made the first authenticated European sightings of Australia when they reached the western coast of Cape York Peninsula, in far north Queensland. In the decades that followed, more than 40 Dutch ships sailed…

59 Nights | 60 Days Departing Darwin: 7 November 2020 Returning Darwin: 5 January 2021 YOU TOO CAN FOLLOW IN the wake of the Dutch explorers with Australian Geographic Society partner Coral Expeditions. Next year marks the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s landing at Botany Bay, the 200th anniversary of Phillip Parker King’s explorations of the WA coast, and the 35th anniversary of Coral Expeditions. To mark that anniversary, Coral Expeditions will circumnavigate this great land, to see the coast the way that mariners throughout history have seen it, and to explore key historic sites that shaped Australia. Sailing aboard Coral Adventurer, the voyage will undertake a full circumnavigation of Australia’s coastline – a once-in-a-lifetime and never-to-be-repeated expedition. This intimate journey of discovery will be enriched by excellent guest lecturers…

SWAN HILL Pioneer Settlement is the perfect location for one of the Mallee town’s three stone horse troughs, because it still provides water for working horses that are occasionally involved in the living museum’s historic re-enactments. All three Swan Hill troughs bear the inscription “Donated by Annis and George Bills – Australia”, as do more than 300 similar troughs scattered mostly around the country’s southeast, with a few in Western Australia and Queensland. There are even some as far afield as Switzerland and the UK. Each is a simple but enduring monument to an era when horses were a vital mainstay of everyday life. These troughs were financed by the Bills Trust, a fund established after the death of George Bills in 1927. After settling in Australia in the late…

Before the arrival of Europeans, the area was home to the Yued Aboriginal people. In February 1846 Dom Rosendo Salvado and Dom Joseph Serra – accompanied by French monk Leander Fonteinne, English monk Dom Denis Tootle and an Irish catechist – set out to travel north of Perth. They established a mission for local Aboriginal people beside a spring about 8km north of the present site of New Norcia. In 1847 the settlement was moved to the banks of the Moore River and named New Norcia. By 1848 the mission covered more than 1000 acres (404ha) of land and both sheep and cattle were being grazed there. The mission grew in importance in the 1860s and 1870s as the monks established a series of wells in the area and bred…

Nick Gleeson Blind since age seven, Nick (at right with AG Ed Chrissie Goldrick and Unity) is always pushing the limits. He’s climbed Mt Kilimanjaro, run the New York Marathon, and crossed the Simpson Desert. Captain Gary Wilson As well as captaining cruising ships around Australia, Gary sails replicas of historic boats, such as the 17th-century Duyfken and HMS Endeavour, across the globe. Michael Smith The passionate pilot fulfilled a lifelong dream by circumnavigating the globe in his “flying bathtub”. Professor Lyndall Ryan Lyndall has mapped the sites of massacres of Aboriginal people committed in the early days of the nation. Lisa Blair This resilient and record-breaking sailor circumnavigated Antarctica solo. Andrew Tink Andrew sets the record straight about Australia’s involvement in Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. For…

EVERY SUBSCRIBER to this journal automatically becomes a member of the not-for-profit AG Society. Your subscription helps us fund Australia’s scientists, conservationists, adventurers and explorers. To subscribe, call 1300 555 176 Who are the Australian Geographic Society? Patron: Dick Smith AC Chair: David Haslingden Secretary: Adrian Goss/Page Henty Directors: Kerry Morrow, Jo Runciman Advisory Council: Chrissie Goldrick, John Leece AM, Tim Jarvis AM, Anna Rose, Todd Tai THE SOCIETY runs sponsorship rounds in April and November, during which it considers applications and disperses grants that are funded by the Australian Geographic business. The Society also awards the Nancy-Bird Walton sponsorship for female adventurers and hosts annual awards for conservation and adventure. Each year it gives in excess of $100,000 to worthy projects. The Australian Geographic Society is proudly supported by…

BIRDSONG ISN’T just beautiful to the human ear. Often complex and melodic, it’s a vital tool used by species such as European robins, Australian magpies and silvereyes to communicate with one another, aiding reproduction and survival. Birds with powerful, vibrant songs are more likely to attract mates and protect territories from intruders. We already knew conventional pollution, such as plastics and chemicals, poses a problem to urban wildlife, but it turns out that – for birds at least – noise pollution is also insidious. Several studies have explored this problem, with some even suggesting noise pollution, from sources such as traffic and industry, could be contributing to declining bird populations. One new study, from Queens University Belfast in the UK, found that the behaviour of European robins changed when they…

“It’s an absolute crisis…a source of national shame!” Professor Chris Dickman says in frustration as he leans across his desk at one of Australia’s oldest scientific institutions, the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Sydney University. Chris is an old-school academic – highly esteemed, with a worldwide reputation in his area of expertise built during a career that’s spanned more than three decades. He’s very much a man of science who prefers to air his opinions via peer-reviewed research published in highbrow journals. But the softly spoken, usually mild-mannered, world-leading ecological scientist is angry and, in fact, deeply saddened that parts of Australia have been losing native forests and woodlands at extraordinary rates. Clearly, Chris says, we haven’t learnt from past failures to protect our forests, and the potential…

IN 1602 SEVERAL rival Dutch trading companies were amalgamated into the Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). The VOC was granted a monopoly on Asian trade by the Dutch government to end fierce competition that had forced up the purchase price of spices and glutted the market in Europe. By the mid-1600s, the VOC boasted some 150 merchant ships and 50,000 employees, a private army of some 10,000 soldiers and trading posts from the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea. It was, in effect, a “state outside the state”, with the power to wage war, punish and execute criminals, create new colonies, and strike its own coins. The VOC became a trading colossus; it was the world’s first multinational company…

ON 28 APRIL, after three years of intensive preparation, Victor Vescovo finally reached what’s now the deepest-known part of the planet: 10,928m under the ocean in the Pacific. Nestled inside a purpose-built deep-submergence vehicle (DSV) called Limiting Factor, he dived to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench, reaching 16m further than anyone before. The previous record for a solo dive was 10,908m, set by filmmaker and explorer James Cameron in the Deepsea Challenger in 2012. Victor’s record-breaking dive took him deeper than Mt Everest is high, to a cold, lightless, high-pressure place as inaccessible as outer space. It was the fourth successful leg of his Five Deeps Expedition, which was designed to send a human to the very bottom of each of the world’s five oceans: the Puerto Rico…

MAILBAG WELCOMES FEEDBACK Send letters, including an address and phone number, to editorial@ausgeo.com.au or to Australian Geographic, GPO Box 4088, Sydney NSW 2001. Letters will be edited for length and clarity. WRITE TO US! Send us a great letter about AG or a relevant topic for the chance to be our featured letter and win an AG T-shirt. Featured Letter BOAB MYSTERY My mate Bill Edwards and I drove a split-screen VW Kombi to Port Hedland in 1968. Here is a photo of Bill topping up the tank while parked in the centre of Highway One somewhere near Broome. No need to pull over, there were very few vehicles before the highway was tarred. My recollection is that boabs were fewer, and more solitary. I was surprised when I revisited…

FOR MOST OF US, getting fatter has bad health effects. But it’s good for the bar-tailed godwit, which can double its weight in a week or so, and then burn it off again in the same amount of time. The bar-tailed godwit is a large wading bird that breeds on the Arctic coasts and tundra of Scandinavia, northern Asia and Alaska. Flocks fly south to cross the equator and spend the northern winter in warmer climates, such as in New Zealand. In their search for the eternal summer, forever avoiding winter, they fly north again, leaving New Zealand in March. There are about 1.1 million of the species worldwide, each 37–41cm long (bill to tail), with a wingspan of 70–80cm. The males (190–400g) are smaller than the females (260–630g). When…

Hoon The Oxford English Dictionary records “hoon” as Australian (and New Zealand) slang for a show-off with limited intelligence adding “origin unknown”. Hoon is most often applied to young male drivers who are more interested in attracting attention to themselves than being cautious. Sid Baker, in The Australian Language, suggests hoon might be a contraction from the houyhnhnms (the talking horses in Gulliver’s Travels). The problem is that the horses are civilised – it’s their human slaves, the yahoos, who are the dills. Alternatively, hoon might be a contraction of “hooligan” or, perhaps, a combination of “hooligan” and “goon”. Another proposal is that it’s rhyming slang for “baboon”; while yet another suggestion is that it’s based on “buffoon”. All are possibilities, and none are certainties!…

IF YOU’RE on the shady banks of the Murrumbidgee River at Wagga Wagga, in southwest NSW, and spot a tourist with a surfboard anxiously checking their watch, don’t worry, you aren’t seeing things. Despite being more than four hours drive from the nearest coast, the sight of a wannabe surfer in boardshorts waiting to hang ten at Wagga Beach (yes, that’s its real name) is not uncommon, especially on a balmy summer’s afternoon. They’re likely to be waiting for the town’s infamous five o’clock wave, a sudden surge of water released from Burrinjuck Dam at the same time each day. If some locals are to be believed, it creates a wave so big you can surf it as it travels downstream all the way to Narrandera, some 100km away. “Usually…

Dawn grazer By Simon Cherriman An overnight temperature of–4°C while camping in Wollemi National Park, northwest of Sydney, made Simon Cherriman reluctant to leave his cosy swag. “But when I peered out to see this grazing red-necked wallaby, I leapt up,” he says. “I was very happy it kept feeding long enough for me to dig out my camera from the back of my car.” This is one of the stunning finalists in the 2019 Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the year competition. See page 62 for the full story. TAS WATCH WHALES MIGRATE, SOUTH-EAST OF HOBART A series of vantage points along Great Oyster Bay and Frederick Henry Bay off Tassie’s east coast are great for spotting humpback whales migrating from warmer climes back to Antarctic waters in September–December.…

FOR MORE THAN AN hour I’d been pushing through the silty, submerged tunnel, using the rock walls to guide me. The water was cold and in places the passageway was uncomfortably tight. I was searching for a way through a flooded passage deep within Niggly Cave, on the Junee River near Mount Field National Park, north-west of Hobart, Tasmania. I’d left the expedition team I was part of at the edge of a pool at the cave’s end: known as a terminal sump, it’s the furthest point cavers can access before the tunnel becomes submerged. I was diving alone and looking for an orange string guideline I’d used to mark my route through a different cave, the nearby Growling Swallet, four years earlier. Back then, I’d dived some 500m along…

LESS THAN HALF OF Australia’s remaining native forests are on government-owned land and the concept of legislation to control vegetation clearing on private properties can be unpopular with owners. Nevertheless, laws to control clearing have been introduced since the late 20th century because, as is now well known, natural vegetation has ecological functions that extend well beyond private boundary fences. Most land clearing in Australia is covered by state laws. In Queensland, it’s controlled under the Vegetation Management Act, introduced in 1999 and progressively tightened during the next decade. But in 2012 the newly elected Liberal-National state government began winding back regulations in the Act. It cleared the way for bulldozers to take out large tracts of forests and woodlands that weren’t protected in national parks or other forms of…

OF THE THOUSANDS of VOC ships that sailed to the Indies on the Brouwer Route during nearly two centuries, only four are known to have been wrecked on the Australian coast. The wreckings were horrific and fatal, but the overall safety record is exemplary. The most famous and gruesome wrecking was the first one: Batavia, which was wrecked in 1629 on the Houtman Abrolhos (Abrolhos Islands), about 60km off the coast of Geraldton, in WA. A mutiny among the survivors led to a massacre. In 1656 Vergulde Draeck was wrecked about 180km north of Perth. Seven of the crew managed to sail one of the ship’s boats to Batavia, the VOC’s headquarters on Java, in Indonesia, and report the wreck. Several rescue missions were attempted but no survivors were found,…

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THE CLAIM several years ago that Hyams has the “whitest” sand of any Aussie beach sparked a minor controversy. It led to a Murdoch University study that ultimately disproved the claim. While Hyams’ sand is very white – and famous for it – scientifically speaking the “whitest” is at Lucky Bay in Western Australia. But sand colour is just one stunning feature of Hyams. It lies on the southern shores and crystal-clear waters of Jervis Bay Marine Park, in the Shoalhaven. For yet another reason to visit this pretty region see The old Wool Road on page 114. DJI mavic 2 pr ISO 100 10.26mm f/5.6 1/20 sec Drones. Love ’em or hate ’em, there’s no doubt they are changing the way we do and see many things. You may…