Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2024 i Australian Geographic

I HAVE WITNESSED my fair share of aurora australis here in Antarctica, having worked eight expedition seasons in the past 14 years. But the solar storm on 25 March 2024 led to the most beautiful auroral display I’ve ever seen. I knew the geomagnetic activity was going to be intense, having read online about the solar storm that was making its way down to Earth. There was no guarantee I would witness this event in its entirety; aurora displays can be obscured by cloud, wind, fog and snow. The light from a full Moon might wash out half of the sky, making it nearly impossible to photograph the full impact of the aurora. It was a full Moon that night – but this didn’t affect the vibrant colours of the…

BY DEFINITION, A final resting place is final, isn’t it? Well, not always, it seems. It certainly wasn’t for Ned Kelly and his fellow felons hanged at Old Melbourne Gaol. Their remains were exhumed from the Gaol’s mass cemetery in 1929 and reinterred at Pentridge Prison, to make way for an expanding Working Men’s College (now RMIT University). Ned’s final wish was honoured in 2013, when he was reburied at Greta Cemetery in Victoria’s High Country. If you think being exhumed is stomach churning enough, spare a thought for Solomon Wiseman and his first wife, Jane, who were reinterred not once, but twice. Really! Convicted in 1805 at the Old Bailey in London for smuggling brazilwood, Wiseman had his death sentence commuted to transportation for life. Seven years later, after…

HONEY RUNS THROUGH Cedar Anderson’s veins. A third-generation beekeeper, the 44-year-old is at the forefront of a global movement championing bees and protecting their habitats in the face of a worldwide biodiversity crisis. In 2015, together with his father, Stuart, Cedar developed the Flow Hive, an innovative Aussie invention providing a non-invasive honey harvesting system that is gentle on bees and easy on beekeepers. Their company, Flow, has grown into a multimillion-dollar business with some 110,000 Flow Hives in use in more than 130 countries. Now it’s giving back. As well as promoting backyard beekeeping, Flow now offers educational online courses for beekeepers and supports habitat regeneration projects worldwide. Through Flow, the Andersons have brought together a global community of like-minded people who support being kinder to bees and caring…

THIS IS A holding place, stockpiling the cells of Australia’s most threatened species for resurrection in a potentially desolate future – a frozen archive held in suspended animation as an insurance policy against biodiversity loss. Welcome to the Ian Potter Australian Wildlife Biobank – a final stronghold against Australia’s extinction crisis. The biobank is like a “frozen zoo” within the Melbourne Museum that is cryogenically freezing live animal cells in a bid to preserve the genetic diversity of Australia’s unique wildlife. Scientists hope to one day reintroduce this genetic material back into wild populations through cloned lab-grown cells, to help boost a population’s genetic diversity – or even bring a species back from extinction. “The idea behind this [the biobank] is being able to preserve cells from all of our…

ASHLEY LOVE IS a bear of a man: tall and solid, with a mop of white-grey hair. He’s also the founding father of the proposed Great Koala National Park (GKNP), although eliciting information from him about the park is akin to spotting its namesake nestled in a tree during daylight – nigh on impossible. By Ashley’s own admission, he is only one person in a colony of committed conservationists who have, for decades, been fighting for the koalas of the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. “Local conservationists were campaigning to protect koala habitat back in the 1970s,” Ashley says. “But it’s taken 50 years of hard graft, and a recent change in classification of the koala – from vulnerable to endangered – to finally protect the most important…

WHY TRAVEL WITH US? ACCESS Travelling with Australian Geographic inspires people to care about the planet by providing meaningful opportunities to explore it. Our experiences are rich in nature and adventure, and our travel partners specialise in small-group experiences. EXPERTISE Australian Geographic’s adventurers, scientists, historians and photographers have brought the world to you for almost 40 years. Now you’re invited to join them in the country’s most intriguing places, from the Great Barrier Reef to the red heart. SUSTAINABILITY Australian Geographic is committed to sustaining the environment, culture and heritage of each place we visit, from addressing climate change to promoting awareness of the world’s oldest continuing cultures and revealing the country’s countless treasures. GIVING BACK All the travel experiences offered raise funds for our Society. As our not-for-profit arm,…

LANCELIN’S GREAT APPEAL lies in its holiday ambience. Once a quiet, sleepy fishing village with a single hotel and a couple of caravan sites, Lancelin has slowly evolved over the years into a popular seaside resort town. Just a 90-minute drive north of Perth, it’s the perfect weekend getaway for people wanting to escape the city. To the south of Lancelin are the even smaller fishing villages of Ledge Point and Seabird that, by comparison, make Lancelin seem like a bustling metropolis. Lancelin transforms each summer as its population of about 800 is tripled during the Christmas-New Year holiday season. In recent years Lancelin has seen a building boom, with lots of modern holiday homes replacing its old fibro weekender shacks. The town actively promotes itself as one of Australia’s…

Near-complete 50,000-year-old kangaroo skeleton retrieved from underground cave Palaeontologists from Museums Victoria have retrieved the fossilised remains of an extinct short-faced kangaroo from a cave system on Gunaikurnai Country near Buchan in East Gippsland, Victoria. With 150 bones – amounting to 71 per cent of the original skeleton – it’s one of the most complete fossil skeletons ever found in Australia. The fossil was first sighted in 2011 by local recreational cavers. Palaeontologist Tim Ziegler visited the cave in 2021 and saw the fossil had begun to degrade so he hastily began planning a way to retrieve it. He marshalled a team of intrepid researchers and adventurers – colleagues from Museums Victoria Research Institute, other palaeontologists and scientists, Parks Victoria rangers and recreational cavers – who were game for the…

WHAT A THRILL it is to have been asked to write about conservation travel for AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC. Most of my life has been dedicated to either conservation or travel and this column gives me an opportunity to share what I’ve learnt about both. In this, my first story, I’d like to share a childhood experience I had with a malleefowl, one of the world’s rarest and most elusive bird species. It was an encounter that changed my life. Of the many places I’ve lived and travelled, the Mallee region, in north-western Victoria, has made the greatest impression on me. The region takes its name from the mallee ecosystems that prevail there. This is dominated by small, multi-stemmed trees and shrubs of the genus Eucalyptus that are highly adapted to the…

IF YOU WERE wading ashore in Australia in 1788 and walked into the forest, what would this forest have looked like? Would it have been an easy stroll because the forest was open and park-like with widely spaced trees and grassy ground cover? Or would the forest have been characterised by closely spaced tall trees and a dense, wet understorey of tree ferns and other mesic plants? There has been much debate about the state of tall, wet forests when the British first arrived in Australia. This matters for several reasons. First, the condition of forests 236 years ago is linked to how they were managed by First Nations people. An open and park-like forest would develop if it was subject to repeated, low-intensity cultural burns and “farmed” by First…

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN If time suddenly began running backwards? Of course, it can’t do that, but the question is one that recently crossed the minds of a team of astronomers in the USA. TO understand why, we have to go back to 1967, when the first of a class of astronomical events known as gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, was observed. Discovered serendipitously by satellites designed to detect gamma-ray flashes from illegal nuclear tests, the bursts were soon identified as coming from space. Moreover, when new spacecraft were introduced in the 1990s, they were found to originate deep in the universe, well beyond the confines of our Milky Way galaxy. As their name suggests, GRBs are short-lived, lasting anything from a few milliseconds to several minutes. Often they are followed by…

THE SPLENDIDLY NAMED Basil de Burgh Newth was part of a small group of mainly young men who, at the end of the 19th century, lived year-round on mainland Australia’s highest point – Mt Kosciuszko, in New South Wales, where a weather station had been established by colourful meteorologist Clement Wragge. From 1897 to 1902 the group sent regular weather records to Wragge and the experience remained with Newth for life – he spent 27 months at the top of Australia, but was still writing about it 50 years later, saying he was “well repaid in interest, experience and adventure… One could write a book about it all.” Born in England, Wragge was dynamic and unconventional and, in 1881, he established a weather observatory on Britain’s highest peak, Ben Nevis,…

GEEBUNG, THE COUNTRY polo club, and the Cuff ’n’ Collars, from the city, battle annually for glory, watched by as many as 3000 spectators, more people than attend the opening of the local ski season. The country team ride their own stockhorses, used for mustering and brumby running. To give the country team a leg-up, the city players are given their horses only an hour before the match. They’re all pretty wild rides, including some that are barely broken brumbies. Ken Connelly and Phil Maguire started it all, while bush poet David Olsson, who played in the very first polo match, has been documenting the characters and action of the annual Dinner Plain Polo match in verse since 1989. Here, we present a selection of his poetic perspectives from the…

AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY EXPEDITION REPORT THE EARLY 20TH century was a time of pioneering aviation achievements. There were, for example, the first flights from England to Australia in 1919, a nonstop transatlantic flight in the same year, and around the world in 1924. That it took five years after the 28-day England to Australia flight for an attempt to be made on the 44-day flight around Australia in 1924 is testament to how difficult a journey it was, and how long stretches of Australia were more remote than, say, India through to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Building the three big R’s – roads, railways and runways around Australia – was great nation-building work at the time. A flight around Australia would not only “prove it could be done”, but…

ACCLAIMED VIOLIST, CONDUCTOR and composer Aaron Wyatt is pragmatic about his Noongar heritage. “To totally paraphrase [former prime minister] Julia Gillard, it’s not everything about me but it’s not nothing about me. It’s just one of many parts of who I am.” He had a typical lower-middle-class suburban upbringing; his father was a teacher, mum a librarian. “My Indigenous culture wasn’t a huge part of my life,” he says. “For instance, if I was filling out a form and there was a box to tick if you were Aboriginal, I didn’t, because I didn’t think those details should matter. It’s one of those weird things, I suppose; it’s only recently that I’ve had a chance to re-embrace my cultural heritage, particularly as a composer.” The son of Ken Wyatt AM,…

AMAZINGLY, SOME PEOPLE can manufacture alcohol inside their body from the food they eat – carbohydrates, to be specific. Some do it so well, they can raise their blood alcohol level to eight times the legal driving limit! Fairly accurately, it’s called auto-brewery syndrome. There are only a few dozen cases worldwide. The media love it because it’s so weird. Lawyers love it too – invoking this syndrome may get their clients off drink-driving charges. But how does it work? Normally, your body converts carbohydrates into CO₂, water and lots of energy. But the fungus Saccharomyces cerevisiae does something very different: it turns carbohydrates into CO₂, alcohol and other stuff. We have used this fungus to brew beer for at least 7000 years. The auto-brewery syndrome occurs when this fungus…

You’re invited! WE ARE THRILLED To announce a brand-new public event for Australian Geographic; our first ever Australian Geographic Awards for Nature presentation night. We now know who the three recipients of the $100,000 funding pool will be, and we look forward to announcing those winners at the historic Art Gallery of New South Wales on 17 October this year. Legendary actor, writer and director-turned-conservationist Rachel Ward will be with us that night to present the inaugural awards. Attendees will get the chance to view Rachel’s documentary, Rachel’s Farm, a gripping, heartfelt account of her transformation into a dedicated regenerative farmer in the Nambucca Valley of New South Wales. Afterwards, I will host a Q & A interview with Rachel, which will be an opportunity for the audience to pose…

AUSTRALIA’S MOST ENDANGERED AGS FUNDRAISER EVER HEARD OF a chuditch? Judging by the species’ huge natural range, which includes every mainland state and territory, it should be as familiar to most Australians as the emu or koala. But unless you live near Perth in Western Australia, you’re unlikely to have ever heard of this charismatic little spotted marsupial. The chuditch is another of those small-to-medium-sized mammals that only occurs in Australia, but has been almost completely wiped out during the past 200 years. Their natural distribution has been reduced by more than 90 per cent since European settlement and its last remaining natural strongholds are a handful of isolated populations south of Perth. A few limited translocations earlier this century saw the chuditch reintroduced to South Australia, although it remains…

Less than 1 per cent of Australia’s population lives on the small islands dotted around our continent. This number is growing as more people head across the water after the onset of COVID, rejecting costly city living and office-based work. But is “island paradise” a myth, fuelled by a desperate search for escapism? Or have these far-flung residents truly found the key to happiness? This is the third instalment in a series exploring the realities of island life. ROTTNEST ISLAND RANGER Kaija Antipas stands vigilantly outside her home, a 19th-century lighthouse-keeper’s cottage. The midday sun beats down on the dry bushland and rugged coastline around her. Her eyes strain as she tries to detect movement on the rocky terrain. Every rustle of leaves or chirp of a seabird sends a…

THERE AREN’T MANY places as idyllic as a tropical coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). These hard-to-reach places – natural mounds of white coral sand and rubble that often sprout lush green vegetation fertilised by seabirds – are among the planet’s most picturesque places. But the mood is sombre among the researchers who greet me and photographer Craig Parry as we arrive in early May 2024 on the RV Linckia II at The University of Sydney (USyd) research station on One Tree Island (OTI), a 4ha cay off the Queensland coast, about 100km east of Gladstone. Among them is Dr Steph Gardner, a marine microbial ecologist from The University of Sydney who, like so many reef researchers, has been in love with the GBR – its colour, movement…

1 Under what species of tree does the swagman camp in “Waltzing Matilda”? 2 What is Australia’s largest lizard species? 3 Who was the first Australian-born person to go into space? 4 The Twelve Apostles in Victoria are made from what type of sedimentary rock? 5 Gilbert’s potoroo, or ngilkat (Potorous gilbertii) is endemic to which state or territory? 6 What is South Australia’s largest island? 7 Which modernist artist produced the Ned Kelly painting series in 1946–47? 8 What Big Thing is found in Adaminaby, New South Wales? 9 Who was prime minister of Australia from 1975 to 1983? 10 Which puppet character, created by Norman Hetherington, starred in a popular ABC TV children’s series from 1959 to 1999? 11 What type of animal is a spotted pardalote? 12…