Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2020 i Australian Geographic

THIRTY YEARS AGO the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, on 24 April 1990, into space aboard the space shuttle Discovery from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA. It was deployed into orbit a day later by the shuttle’s five-person crew, opening a historic new window to the universe that has revolutionised knowledge and understanding of outer space for professional astronomers and scientists as well as the general public. Hubble’s stunning celestial images have helped make astronomy engaging, accessible and relevant. According to NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Dr Thomas Zurbuchen, the space telescope’s iconic imagery has redefined our view of the universe and our place in time and space. “Hubble has given us stunning insights about the universe, from nearby planets to the farthest galaxies we…

IN 1912 WORK BEGAN on a new railway line between Port Augusta in South Australia and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. Stretching across 1693km of Australia’s driest and most isolated terrain, the Trans-Australian Railway was completed on 17 October 1917, providing a link between the eastern states and WA and helping to give the newly formed Commonwealth a sense of national unity. The Trans-Australian Railway was the first major work of a federated Australia. Before Federation in 1901, WA had made the construction of a railway linking the nation’s eastern and western colonies a condition for joining the Commonwealth. At that time, the west was linked to the eastern cities only by a rough sea voyage and a single telegraph line. This inhibited commerce between the colonies and made it difficult…

HAVING BEEN in orbit for 30 years now, the Hubble Space Telescope is much lauded for its extraordinary record in probing the Universe from above Earth’s atmosphere. Everything, from nearby planets to the most distant galaxies, has come under the scrutiny of Hubble’s high-resolution cameras. Some of the telescope’s capabilities are less obvious, however. Not only can it detect visible and ultraviolet light, but it also has significant infrared sensitivity, enabling it to measure the heat radiated by distant objects. Repeated observations of the same object over time also allow astronomers to spot subtle changes. All these faculties have come together in the strange case of Fomalhaut b, a planet assumed to be in orbit around the Southern Hemisphere star Fomalhaut at a distance of 25 light-years from the Sun.…

IN APRIL, CCTV cameras caught a kangaroo bounding down King William Street in Adelaide. “Protective Security Officers tracked a suspect wearing a grey fur coat hopping through the heart of the Adelaide CBD this morning,” South Australian police quipped, sharing the footage on social media. Kangaroos are often seen grazing on golf courses and lawns in suburban parts of our cities, but to see one hopping downtown is unusual and was no doubt linked to strict COVID-19 lockdowns that saw many millions of people worldwide holed up in houses and apartments, and countless metropolises devoid of pedestrians and traffic. You’ve likely seen footage of similar incidents across the world. In the USA, coyotes roamed the streets of urban Chicago and San Francisco. In Israel, Nubian ibexes strolled through the resort…

CRUISING IN SCUBA GEAR 20m beneath the ocean’s surface, examining clump after clump of fist-sized ‘reef bursts’, as I call them, is a meditative pursuit. These tiny patches of habitat on coral reef walls, on the outermost seaward slopes of reefs, include sea squirts, hydroids and miniature pink tubular sponges. After half an hour of searching in these waters off the Indonesian island of Seram, I spot a pair of comic googly eyes peering up at me from a kaleidoscopic melange of reef organisms. This is Lynne’s pipefish–cocktail-stick sized and associated only with clumps of particular sponges, which it mimics in colour and texture. It’s just one of many remarkable specialist coral reef species discovered recently. MANY THOUSANDS OF species are supported by coral reefs–Earth’s most biodiverse marine ecosystems. Some…

AT 94 YEARS YOUNG, Tommy Tomasi still skis–better than he walks, he says. Tommy grew up on skis. During World War II, he joined the partisans who used skis to wage underground war near his home town of Bergamo, in northern Italy. He was captured and spent time in a Nazi concentration camp from where he escaped. After the war he migrated to Australia and worked on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. “I wanted the job that paid the most money,” he says. “When they asked me if I could drive a bulldozer I said, ‘Of course!’ I never drove one before!” He stayed with Snowy Hydro for a decade. Over the years, he worked with many European ski enthusiasts and became keen to help found a new ski area…

THE WORD KU MEANS snow in the Ngarigu language. Adding na makes it an adjective (i.e. kuna means snowy). The word ma means make, and the term namadji means mountain. So Kunama Namadji, the Ngarigu term for the Snowy Mountains, directly translates to “snowy making mountains”. That is no coincidence according to Professor Jakelin Troy, a Ngarigu woman, linguist and director of Indigenous research at the University of Sydney. “I suspect the name Snowy Mountains was translated from our language,” she says. People have inhabited Australia’s alpine regions for at least 20,000 years. The NSW High Country has long been home to the Ngarigu and Walgalu people while the Victorian High Country is the year-round home for the Gunaikurnai, Dhudoroa and Jaitmathang people. “We are snow country people,” says Jakelin.…

Dubbed ‘The Guru’ by fellow United Budgerigar Society members, Alan Rowe first became a budgie fancier as a 16 year old, after seeing “all these colourful little budgies with their big ribbons” at the Royal Melbourne Show. Now aged 80, Alan is like a grandmaster of breeding and showing budgies, having clocked up 16 national championship class wins. He has judged national shows as well as in New Zealand, Germany and England as part of the World Budgerigar Organisation Panel of Judges. In 1994 his achievements earned him a place in the Australian National Budgerigar Council Hall of Fame and although he has now retired from judging, he remains very competitive as a breeder. The appeal, Alan says, lies in the challenge of trying to breed birds that most closely…

There’s huge potential for the continent’s coastal habitats to help balance Australia’s carbon emissions. Australia is ringed by seagrass beds, mangrove forests, tidal marshes and kelp forests, all of which sequester and hold huge amounts of ‘blue carbon’. These coastal ecosystems are driven by photosynthesising plants, so they absorb C02 from the atmosphere just as terrestrial vegetation does. But carbon isn’t stored only in plant tissues in these habitats, it’s also sequestered in huge amounts in their sediments. “So they can hold up to 40 times more than terrestrial forests,” explains Dr Oscar Serrano, a marine ecologist with expertise in biogeochemical cycles at Edith Cowan University’s Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research in Western Australia. Australia is a blue carbon ecosystem hotspot, having about 10 per cent of the world’s total.…

ANCIENT TIMES Greek philosophers Pythagoras and Aristotle both deduce the planet is a sphere. The ancient Greeks also theorise the existence of the landmass Terra Australis Incognita, presuming it balanced land in the north. 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES European explorers probe ever southwards. 1520 Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan finds the strait between Tierra del Fuego and continental South America that now bears his name. 1578 Englishman Francis Drake is blown off course and discovers the Drake Passage. 1592 Englishman John Davis discovers the Falkland Islands. 1616 Dutchman Willem Schouten discovers Cape Horn and is the first to round the southern extremity of South America. 1675 London merchant Antoine de la Roche shelters in the lee of an island–probably South Georgia. “Islands of ice” are noted by mariners; they are later…

Type: Circuit Time: 3–4 days Grade: Moderate Independent/Guided: Independent only TAKE ONE SOUTH ISLAND adventure town–in this case, Te Anau–and add a fantastic three- to four-day amble through spectacular Fiordland NP, and you have one of NZ’s foot-borne success stories: the Kepler Track. Originally created to take the pressure off neighbouring South Island Great Walks, the Milford and Routeburn tracks, the Kepler has proved just as popular. This 60km circuit offers the quintessential Fiordland walking experience of majestic landscapes, DOC Great Walk huts, a well-maintained track that is never ‘too hard’, and the chance to spend a full day walking above the tree line, with views of the Southern Alps and nearby lakes. The Kepler can be walked in either direction. If kicking off from the Lake Te Anau Control…

BIRDWATCHERS VS. TWITCHERS I’d never heard the word twitcher before (Snapshot, AG 156). But when I looked it up I found a reader letter in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, from Julie Fairless of Wooburn Moor in the UK, asking, “Why are bird watchers called twitchers?” The following reply came from Terrence Hollingworth, of Blagnac, France. Any serious birdwatcher will take great exception to being called a twitcher. There’s a world of difference between the two. Birdwatching entails making careful notes about the birds one sees, even if it’s the most common, boring bird imaginable. It entails having the greatest respect for them and making strenuous efforts to minimise disturbance when making observations. These observations then contribute towards our knowledge of birds, their distribution and nesting habits. Such information as is…

IT’S A PUZZLE that’s mystified scientists for decades. Just how does the bogong moth navigate each spring from the hot and arid plains of southern Queensland, north-western New South Wales, western Victoria and South Australia to the cool environment of the Snowy Mountains, and then complete the return journey 3–4 months later? During some years the much-maligned moths are blown off course or attracted by city lights, as famously occurred in September 2000 when the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games was besieged by the flying insects. When, three years later, they descended in their millions on Parliament House in Canberra during a visit by US president George W. Bush, some politicians, annoyed by bogongs swimming in their coffee, called for the use of insecticide to discourage the multitude…

66-YEAR SNOW DEPTH RECORD Spencers Creek season maximum snow depth trend. ALPINE REGIONS are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Although they constitute only 0.15 per cent of the Australian continent, they are home to many rare, endemic and snow-dependent species. Snow records kept by Snowy Hydro Limited indicate that at Spencers Creek in NSW, one of the highest and most snow-prone points in the Australian snowfields (1830m), the total snow amount across a season has declined by 30 per cent since 1954. The same records show a decline of snow depth of about 15 per cent over that period.…

SOPHIA CASANOVA HAS long been fascinated by the night sky, spending lazy summers in suburban Sydney during the late 1990s looking up at the stars. But it was at the age of 10, when her parents bought her a telescope, that she truly fell head over heels for all things space. “That was the tipping point, really,” says the young geologist, recalling how she’d watch the Moon, equally haunted and entranced by its shifting phases. “It’s absolutely incredible to see through a telescope; you see so much detail.” Now a PhD student at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, she’s designing missions to prospect for, and eventually mine, water ice on the Moon and on Mars. When she began her doctorate topic in 2017, it was considered…

DROUGHT HASN’T stopped Peter Yench from reaping almost $1 million a year, pre-tax, from his farm in Cobar, north-western New South Wales, for each of the past three years. With good rainfall this year the 21,000ha property, Bulgoo, is now lush, green and looking, the 75-year-old farmer boasts, “like God’s own country”. But up until late last year it was as parched and grey as hundreds of pastoral properties that had endured years of drought in this semi-arid zone. Peter runs sheep on Bulgoo and from 2016 to 2019 his flock dropped from 8000 to 600 as the property’s carrying capacity dried up along with the water in its dams and its soil. And yet that six-figure cheque kept arriving annually. Better still, it’s destined to keep coming for at…

CAPTAIN JAMES COOK is credited with many discoveries, but Antarctica is not among them. Although Cook, on his 1772–75 voyage, was the first navigator inside the Antarctic Circle and to circumnavigate Terra Australis Incognita, the mythical and unconfirmed great southern land, he never laid eyes on the icy continent. Cook’s published journal of 1777 predicted Antarctica’s existence based on the extensive sea ice he’d encountered. But he concluded that future explorers would likely never venture further south than he had. “Thick fogs, snow storms, intense cold and every other thing that can render navigation dangerous must be encountered; and these difficulties are greatly heightened by the inexpressibly horrid aspect of the country,” he wrote. For years, the matter of the frozen southern land was closed. By 1819 discovery of the…

In good company You can tackle New Zealand’s singleand multi-day walks independently or (on some walks) with a guiding company. Guided walks ensure that your travel logistics are taken care of, and a good knowlegeable guide can greatly improve your experience along the way. They are obviously more expensive than walking independently but are a fantastic option for those who may not be confident stepping out on their own. A guided walk is also less physically demanding; on most, you will only carry clothing and the day’s water. They are also more ‘comfortable’: the lodges used by most guiding companies include in-house chefs, staff, fresh bed linen, warm showers and more. For independent walkers NZ is a goldmine, and its globally renowned 10 Great Walks are rightly popular. Devised and…

Type: Point to point Time: 4 days Grade: Easy–moderate Independent/Guided: Both available THE MILFORD TRACK is the most strictly controlled of the Great Walks. In peak season, only 40 independent and 40 guided walkers are allowed to start the Milford each day, all walking in the same direction: from Glade Wharf (at the head of Lake Te Anau, just north of the township of the same name) to Sandfly Point, at Milford Sound. Dubbed “the finest walk in the world” in 1908 by Englishborn poet Blanche Baughan, it’s not hard to agree: the Milford Track is a microcosm of Fiordland–one of the world’s last unspoilt wilderness areas, where towering waterfalls, dense beech forest, rugged mountains and this wild region’s equally rambunctious (in more ways than one) weather reign. The Milford…

Type: Point to point Time: 4 days Grade: Moderate Independent/Guided: Both available THE HEAPHY TRACK, (pronounced he-fee) located in the north-western corner of the South Island, in Kahurangi National Park, is NZ’s longest Great Walk. It can be walked in either direction (guided options generally start from the east) and offers a mix of landscapes that differ from the primarily alpine scenery further south. On the Heaphy, you’ll traverse grassy flats, beech and tropical forests and pristine beaches. There are seven huts and nine campsites. It’s worth noting that the guided options on the track still require you to bring your own sleeping gear. But with most of the food and cooking equipment supplied at each hut, your pack won’t be as heavy as if you were lugging everything. As…

THE ABOVE MAP shows the tragic fatal journey and the two glaciers that were later named for Mertz and Ninnis. A new memorial to the ill-fated pair of young explorers will soon be unveiled in Mawson Place on Hobart’s waterfront, opposite the Mawson’s Huts Replica Museum. An initiative of the Mawson’s Huts Foundation, and jointly funded by the the Swiss and UK governments and Ninnis’s former regiment The Royal Fusiliers, the monument will feature bronze commemorative plaques set into an imposing, rough-hewn piece of Tasmanian dolerite, geologically identical to the rocks of Cape Denison. The Swiss flag and the crest of the Royal Fusiliers will also adorn the new memorial.…

FOLLOWING A TRAGIC beginning, the quarantine station at Point Nepean, in Victoria, played a critical role protecting Australia from infectious diseases for more than 120 years. The 1850s heralded a surge in emigration to Australia. The gold rush, and the British government’s assisted migration program that was established to fill the labour shortage caused by the exodus of Aussie workers from the land to the diggings, attracted hundreds of thousands of people to Australia’s shores by ship. Overcrowded and unsanitary vessels were hotbeds of infection and disease, and new arrivals were feared as repositories of deadly contagions such as typhoid and cholera. The November 1852 arrival of the ‘plague ship’ Ticonderoga from Birkenhead in Britain, with outbreaks of typhoid, scarlet fever and dysentery aboard, led to the hurried establishment of…

WITH AUSTRALIA’S shortfall of snow and ice, it’s not surprising ice-skating was virtually unheard of here until the 1890s. Those originally from colder climates would nostalgically lament their youthful rosy-nosed, frozen-toed days of gliding across the ice. Rollerskating had become enormously popular in the 1860s when a design innovation led to skates becoming more manoeuvrable and affordable. Skating rinks opened around the country from Kalgoorlie to Cairns, but rollerskating still wasn’t viewed so much as a sport in itself but as a substitute for the delights of ice-skating. Rinks were decorated with alpine scenes, evergreen trees around their edges and glowing coloured lanterns above, with floors often covered in chalk to simulate ice. It was only in the late 1890s that reports of ‘real’ ice-skating in the Australian Alps began…

Early history Informal sign languages evolved among deaf communities worldwide. 1790 Elizabeth Steel, the first known European deaf person in Australia, arrived as a convict on the Second Fleet. 1870 Samuel Watson, superintendent of the NSW Institution for the Deaf & Dumb & the Blind, became Australia’s first recorded sign language interpreter, working at church services in Sydney’s St Andrews Cathedral. 1932 The National Centre for Training of Welfare Staff for the Australian Deaf Societies began training its first interpreter, Wilfred Appleton. 1984 The first interpreted theatre performance took place at Sydney’s Theatre Royal. 1989 The first dictionary of Auslan was published by Dr Trevor Johnston, who coined the name Auslan. 1992 The Broadcasting Services Act 1992 makes closed captioning on news broadcasts a legal requirement. 2006 David Gibson is…

WE WAKE TO A fantasy land. In the pink hues of the early morning, snow gums glisten, frosted in snow; sunlight refracts off crystal-encrusted leaves; and kangaroos puff steamy breaths into the cold air. In the distance, blanketed in white, Australia’s Snowy Mountains beckon. “Move your lazy butt,” shouts Jules, my cabin companion. “We’ll miss it!” Two hours later, we’ve buckled up, clicked on, and made the fourth chair on the chairlift. We’re quickly whisked above the tree line and in no time the race is on! We’re in a mad dash against a hundred or so other skiers to ride the untouched snow as we tumble and bounce to the bottom of the slope. That was the magic of my first ever “Aussie powder day”. It’s a bittersweet memory…

1 THREDBO: Set on the Thredbo River, this charming historic village is the quintessential Aussie ski town. In summer it’s a base for High Country walks and mountain biking, and in winter for downhill snowsports, back country touring, snowshoeing or just a walk through a winter’s tale. 2 THREDBO ALPINE MUSEUM: A must-visit for history buffs, featuring memorabilia of Australian snow life going back to the 19th century. 3 JINDABYNE VISITOR CENTRE: A trove of information on local flora and fauna, as well as Aboriginal history. 4 CHARLOTTE PASS: Surrounded by snow gums, this is the highest village in the Snowy Mountains. It’s snowbound in winter and only accessible by Oversnow Transport. At its heart is the grand old lady of the mountains, the Kosciuszko Chalet Hotel, opened in 1930.…

PETER GLASSENBURY was just a kid in short pants when his dad, Les, famously fronted up to his local bird club in Port Pirie, SA, with a pink budgie. “He had dipped it in beetroot juice as a joke,” Peter, who is coordinator of the Australian National Budgerigar Council (ANBC) colour and standards committee, recalls with a chuckle. More than 60 years on and bookmakers still consider the odds of producing a definitively pink budgie as only marginally less likely than the Loch Ness monster surfacing. The reason the pink budgie remains as elusive as a unicorn is because, unlike 80 per cent of 350 parrot species, there is no red pigment in the genetic makeup of Melopsittacus undulatus. But what the budgie lacks at one end of the spectrum…

THERE’S NO question the word budgerigar is derived from Aboriginal languages, albeit corrupted by clumsy colonial attempts to record it. Since the earliest inhabitants first set foot on Australian soil more than 50,000 years ago they have known the budgerigar. As one of the creatures created by the spirits, the budgerigar ancestor also shines in the heavens of Aboriginal astronomy, and in Dreamtime telling has always been there, which, in a way, it has. The oldest evidence of the budgie is a foot bone found in Rackham’s Roost in the World Heritage-listed fossil ground of Riversleigh in north-western Queensland. It’s estimated to be at least 1.1–2.8 million years old, considerably pre-dating anatomically modern humans. Strongly associated with the getting of wisdom, the budgie is embedded in paintings, stories, songs and…

NASA’s Artemis program aims, from 2024, to begin building a sustainable base on the Moon. This will use a Lunar Gateway station in orbit, crewed landers, robot rovers and human habitats. Key components include the Artemis Base Camp, a long-term foothold for lunar exploration of the Moon’s south pole that will initially house four astronauts for a week. As infrastructure for power, waste disposal, communications, radiation shielding and landing pads are added, the base would help test human survival in the harsh environment, especially during the long and cold lunar nights, and develop technologies to mine and manufacture water, fuel and oxygen. The base would have a terrain vehicle for astronauts to roam the surface, and later a ‘Moon hopper’ that could fly further away and act as a live-in…

Mean annual fluxes 2009-2018 Global CO2emissions are estimated to have reached 41 gigatonnes of CO2 (GtCO2). RECORDS show emissions of CO2, the greenhouse gas that’s driving human-induced climate change, have been rising in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s. Although human sources of CO2 emissions–mostly the burning of fossil fuels–are considerably lower than natural emissions, the difference upsets a natural balance that has existed for millennia and it’s causing global temperatures to rise. Redressing this by protecting and enhancing natural carbon sinks, such as terrestrial and aquatic vegetation and organic carbon in soil and marine sediments, can help. But the only real solution is to drastically reduce fossil fuel use. CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest they’ve been in 800,000 years.…

Type: Point to point Time: 3–4 days Grade: Easy–moderate Independent/Guided: Both available YES, THE WELL-KNOWN Milford Track is right next door, but for those looking to jam in the most of the spectacle that is NZ’s Southern Alps (think snow-clad mountains, wild alpine rivers, thundering waterfalls or beech forests of multiple shades of green), the Routeburn Track ranks, in my view, as the best of the NZ Great Walks. It can be walked in either direction independently, or one-way if you opt for the guided experience. The east–west option for independent walkers starts at the Routeburn Road end in Mt Aspiring National Park (just west of the small town of Glenorchy; there is bus transport that you can book). For independents and guided walkers going west–east, the start’s at The…

NZ’S MULTI-DAY walks are brilliant, but the country also offers some fantastic short walks. Here are five worth stepping out on: LAKE MARIAN, FIORDLAND NP A pristine alpine lake nestled in a hanging valley surrounded by mountains, Lake Marian is a half-day walk located 1km along Lower Hollyford Road (via Milford Sound Highway), in Fiordland NP. The track is steep, but that effort is rewarded with a simply breathtaking lunch location beside the lake. Make sure you check out the waterfalls 10 minutes from the car park. ROB ROY GLACIER, MT ASPIRING NP A brilliant half-day walk to capture magic views of one of NZ’s most famous glaciers, in Mt Aspiring NP’s Matukituki Valley, on the South Island. The start of this 10km return walk (at Raspberry Creek car park)…