Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2024 i Australian Geographic

BRAIDED BEAUTY FOR ALMOST 12 years, home for me has been here at Windorah, south-western Queensland, in the heart of Channel Country. The name Channel Country describes the huge number of intertwined rivulets – braided channels – that form during times of flood across this remarkable more than 200,000 sq.km inland region, which lies mostly in Queensland, but also in parts of South Australia, the Northern Territory and New South Wales. Through my lens I aim to capture the natural beauty of rural life during both good and bad seasons. I’ve been lucky enough to document and celebrate the distinct beauty of this astounding country in drought and in flood, as it was in the winter of 2024. It’s extraordinary to see how the landscape changes constantly, and having it…

AUSTRALIA’S THOUSANDS OF kilometres of rocky coastline and shallow reefs harbour the rusting relics of more than 8000 ships. Of these, none has drawn the attention of paranormal aficionados more than the SS Alkimos, which snapped a towline on 31 May 1963 while being towed from Fremantle in Western Australia to Hong Kong for repairs. Wild weather drove it ashore near Yanchep, about 56km north of Perth. During World War II, the Alkimos transported US soldiers and German POWs and later became a merchant ship. While sailing the high seas, the Alkimos was plagued by misfortune, unexpected breakdowns and – wait for it – onboard ghost sightings. However, it’s primarily due to an uncanny series of events after it ran aground that earned the Alkimos its unwanted moniker as “the…

SOCIETY-SPONSORED EXPEDITION FOR SOMEONE WHO’S spent much of the past seven years alone, Lucy Barnard is clearly a people person. It’s not just her easygoing charm that shines through the instant you start a conversation with her. It’s how she recounts the story of her incredible trek. Woven through her compelling narrative, she speaks with immense love and gratitude of the remote communities, strung out like pearls along lonely South American trails, and the families who took her in, fed and cared for her until she was fit to go on. It’s what’s helped keep Lucy on her arduous path year in, year out. She’s not always so open when starting a chat with a stranger and has learnt to be guarded. Setting off in 2017, aiming to be the…

THERE’S A STORY in every hollow of the grey-white trunks of wandoo woodland at Coomallo Creek, 220km north of Perth in Western Australia. The handsome eucalypts stand like leafy islands in a sea of floral heath. From the 1950s, farmers cut a swathe through the native bush to tame and clear it for agriculture. By 1969 land was released for farming around Coomallo Creek and clearing had begun. That was the year “Cocky Whisperer” Dr Denis Saunders AM first visited Coomallo Creek. Exploring ridge tops and breakaways where the wandoo grows, Denis was transfixed by the open woodland’s beauty and age. He realised the knotted trunks were so old they’d been standing long before Captain Cook arrived in Tahiti to monitor the Sun’s eclipse in 1769. Tree age was important…

ISLAND LIFE 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 fourth instalment in a series exploring the realities of island life. MEL ANDERSON DRIFTS in a little red boat, watching the gum trees and jetties bleed off Dangar Island into the tidal river that surrounds it. To a child, Mel’s red boat might resemble a festive slipper abandoned by a giant elf. Indeed, on summer nights, there can be a kind…

EACH YEAR IN this competition we particularly look forward to the junior category, to see how the newest practitioners of the craft are experimenting with nature photography. Just as the natural world around us is ever-changing, photography is constantly evolving and it’s invariably our junior competitors who truly embrace change. Stylistic shifts and new approaches, trends and technical improvements in the craft reveal novel perspectives that allow us to see nature anew, perhaps helping us feel more connected to the non-human world. Teenager Maya Hughes captured an unorthodox portrait of an Australian pelican sporting a mohawk. Rather than focusing on the bird’s often-photographed bulging eyes and large bill, Maya chose instead to pivot her camera towards the back of its head, capturing the stunning perspective below. Photographing nature can be…

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,…

Whale sharks receive ultrasound Marine scientists have used underwater ultrasounds to monitor the health of whale shark populations at Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. The underwater ultrasounds allowed scientists to capture images of the sharks’ internal organs and evaluate their reproductive health. Freediving scientists were able to position whale sharks for ultrasounds after first removing the copepods – shrimp-like parasites – from their lips and fins. “When we started to scrape the copepods off their lips, the whale sharks slowed down, hung vertically in the water and treated us like giant cleaner fish,” said lead researcher on the project Dr Mark Meekan, from the University of Western Australia’s Oceans Institute. Freediving scientists then swam beneath the sharks and scanned their organs using ultrasound. “It was both an awesome and challenging…

MY PREVIOUS COLUMN (AG 181) was about how, when I was a youngster, a malleefowl helped me understand the importance of protecting the bush, which later led me into the conservation movement. That, in turn, ultimately saw me open an ecotravel business. This is how that came about. It was 6am on Saturday 7 May 1988, and, bleary-eyed, a handful of colleagues and I tumbled, elated and exhausted, down the steps of Victoria’s Parliament House onto Spring Street in Melbourne. First light was attempting to break through the early morning drizzle. And after a night of vitriolic debate, the Legislative Council had finally passed legislation opening the way for some of the most spectacular increases in national parks that Victoria, or indeed Australia, had ever seen. In East Gippsland alone…

WHEN A BRONZE statue of a woman named Charlotte was unveiled in Berrima, New South Wales in December 2023, it sparked conversations about who she was and why she deserved to be commemorated in such a way. Charlotte Waring Atkinson Barton lived from 1796 to 1867. In ways that were pioneering for women of her times, she was an author, educator and great appreciator of nature and the natural sciences, and successfully fought in the NSW Supreme Court for custody of her four children. The youngest of these, born in 1834, was Caroline Louisa Atkinson Calvert, who died just five years after her mother, in 1872. Both Charlotte and Louisa were unconventional, multi-talented women who achieved significant firsts in colonial Australia. Their stories are dramatic and extraordinary, and three prolific…

BACK IN SEPTEMBER 1969 in a laboratory in north-eastern England, a young, newly minted physics graduate was engaged in a job that no more than a dozen people worldwide would be doing. It was a humble task – fabricating a circular polyethylene air-bag 3.9m in diameter and no more than a couple of centimetres thick. What made the job unique was the purpose of this unwieldy plastic pouch. Once pressurised, it would cushion a 16-tonne disc of an exotic glass-ceramic material known as Cer-Vit while it was ground and polished during many months to form the precisely dished mirror of a giant telescope. That starstruck youngster was me and this was my first encounter with the Anglo-Australian Telescope – the AAT – on which construction was just beginning in the…

Chapter 1: A rare vantage During the winter of 2022, while travelling in Queensland, I approached the top edge of a gorge and noticed a wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax) fly into it. Looking to where she appeared to have come from I spotted a nest containing two eggs. Being a nature lover and keen wildlife photographer, I felt incredibly lucky, given that eagle nests are usually beyond our range of sight. Figuring that she was incubating the eggs and wouldn’t be off them for too long, I headed back to the car for my long lens. Sure enough, by the time I’d returned so had she. Dad was on sentry duty across the other side of the gorge and I headed off to camp, returning the next morning after a…

IT’S THE SECOND day of the annual dinosaur dig hosted by Eromanga Natural History Museum (ENHM) and expectations are high. At a dig site at Plevna Downs, a 1210sq.km working sheep and cattle property about 90km south-west of the outback Queensland town of Eromanga, six people are kneeling in the dirt, deftly and patiently wielding trowels, dustpans and brushes to painstakingly clear away the sandy soil grain by grain. Sitting loosely between them on the surface are three tailbones of a sauropod, a herbivorous dinosaur that roamed here during the late Cretaceous, some 95 million years ago (mya). Australia is entering a golden age of dinosaur discovery, following a new appreciation of the continent’s unique geology and how that affects the way we’ve been looking for ancient fossils across the…

ABOUT 130KM WEST of Hobart are the remote remnants of the osmiridium mining settlement of Adamsfield, established in 1925. Nicknamed “ossie”, osmiridium is a naturally occurring alloy found in a few scattered locations across the globe. In the 19th and 20th centuries one of its main uses was to tip the nibs of fountain pens. Tasmanian government geologist William Harper Twelvetrees first discovered osmiridium’s host rock in Adamsfield in 1908 while scouting for potential mineral deposits along the proposed Great Western Railway line. Initially, there was little interest in the discovery. Osmiridium had been known to Tasmanian miners since the gold rush. An entry by Chris Tassell in The Companion to Tasmanian History notes that the alloy was “an undesirable impurity associated with alluvial gold…[and] discarded by the miners”. Russia…

AFTER LESS THAN 60 per cent of the country’s eligible voters turned out for the 1922 federal election, the Australian Parliament amended the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 in 1924 to make voting compulsory. Ever since, voter participation for federal elections has been up around 90 per cent or more. The federal shift to compulsory voting followed the successful introduction of the practice for the Queensland state election of 1915. Now all Australian states and territories have compulsory voting. A major argument for mandatory voting is that it “ensures the legitimacy” of elected governments. Compulsory voting is not, however, a widespread practice worldwide – Australia is just one of 21 countries, out of 195, to have it. The impact can be seen on voter turnout. For example, in the UK and…

AUSTRALIA’S WILDLIFE AND ecosystems are iconic, integral to our national identity and loved the world over. But they’re often disregarded, destroyed and are suffering decline at alarming rates. More than 100 species extinct and 2000-plus threatened species and ecological communities: This is Australia’s unenviable conservation record since European colonisation, about 240 years ago. I recently returned from Larrakia Country, in the Northern Territory, where I visited Binybara (Lee Point) – a wildlife gem a mere 20-minute drive from Darwin’s centre. More than 260 bird species – over a quarter of Australia’s total – can be found in the area. Since I was last there in mid-2023, centuries-old trees – home to threatened species such as the northern brushtail possum, black-footed tree-rat, and Gouldian finch – have been flattened to make…

MOST AUSTRALIANS ARE Enthusiastic beachgoers, and we all take for granted the waves that wash our shores. But supposing there were seas on other worlds – would they have such waves too? In fact, we know of only one other celestial body where long-lasting reservoirs of liquid pool on the surface, and it’s a very strange world indeed. Saturn’s moon Titan is the second largest in the solar system, eclipsed only by Jupiter’s Ganymede. Its surface is not rock, but ice that’s –180°C. This ice is underlain by a global ocean of liquid water that is, in turn, underlain by a rocky core. Enveloping Titan is an atmosphere that has curious parallels with our own, despite its frigid temperature. Made mostly of nitrogen, it has a similar rainfall cycle to…

Awards season is upon us THANK YOU TO Those who submitted nominations for our Australian Geographic Adventurer of the Year awards for 2024. We look forward to announcing the winners in four categories: Lifetime of Adventure, Adventurer of the Year, Young Adventurer of the Year and Spirit of Adventure. Among the nominations were some familiar names, while others were new to us. Multiple Australian Geographic adventure awardee Lisa Blair has been nominated for Adventurer of the Year once again, this time for her recent record-breaking voyages in the Pacific and around New Zealand. She’s nominated along with Pacific solo rower Michelle Lee, long-distance cyclist Steph Devery and world walker Lucy Barnard (see page 26). Tom Robinson is nominated for Young Adventurer of the Year, along with Alexander Campbell (see opposite…

AUSTRALIA’S MOST ENDANGERED AGS FUNDRAISER RECORDS SUGGEST LARGE flocks of Gouldian finches including many hundreds – possibly thousands – of individual birds, were common across northern Australia’s savannah grasslands in the late 1800s, before pastoralism and collecting the species began having an impact. Little than a century later, this exquisite species – arguably the world’s most beautiful bird – was en route to disappearing forever from the wild. “It was probably on a trajectory to extinction by the 1980s,” says Dr Alexander Watson, a regional ecologist at Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC). “In the late ’90s and early 2000s, people became very concerned about losing the Gouldian finch from the wild forever.” At the time, the species faced several significant threats, including a respiratory parasite that had become prevalent in Gouldians…

FORTY YEARS AGO at 8pm on 3 October 1984, Tim Macartney-Snape breathlessly picked his way onto the summit of Mt Everest. Below him was an ocean of cloud broken by darkened peaks – only his peak, the highest of them all, was still catching the last light of the setting sun. As he waited for Greg Mortimer so the pair would become the first Australians to climb Everest, he recorded his thoughts between ragged breaths on a tape recorder: “This is the summit of Mt Everest, Qomolangma, Mother Goddess of the Earth, the world is staggeringly beautiful from up here. In fact, it’s beyond superlatives.” Greg soon arrived in a state of total exhaustion. In the photos Tim took, Greg, clad in his red down suit, is unfurling a Buddhist…

AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY EXPEDITION REPORT I COUNT 10 as we motor towards Tana Beru, a tiny village on the south-eastern tip of Sulawesi’s western lobe. That’s 10 hulking hulls of magnificent phinisi. These traditional wooden boats are maritime icons of South Sulawesi. Our expedition leader, Dawn, explains that they were used for centuries by the Bugis, a race of seafarers who plied these waters as both merchants and pirates. “They also regularly made the 1500km journey south to trade with First Nations people in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land,” she says, “until British colonial rule banned the practice.” As we approach the village, the timber monoliths loom large, and as we alight from Explorer 1 (one of two vessels that transfer us from ship to shore), we’re dwarfed. Measuring up…

BETWEEN DARWIN AND the South Australian border on the Stuart Highway, there are really only three substantial towns – Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs. The other places – small settlements comprising either a roadhouse, pub and/or service station – are functional stops for people making the 1777km journey. These settlements range from Pine Creek and Ti Tree, which are very small towns, to Daly Waters and Larrimah – little more than a pub and a few residents. The one notable exception is Mataranka, which has two compelling local attractions. It’s a place where you can swim in hot springs all year round and, for those old enough to remember, it’s the setting for Jeannie Gunn’s classic Australian novel We of the Never-Never. The never-never was a term used to…