Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2025 i Australian Geographic

A REEF MANTA ray (Mobula alfredi) known by the name of Cherub glides across the shallow flats of Ningaloo Reef. This animal is #63 in the Ningaloo manta ID catalogue, a database compiled by researchers who use distinctive markings on the bellies of these fish to identify individuals. Cherub was first sighted here as a juvenile and has been regularly encountered at Ningaloo ever since. Reef manta rays are filter feeders that swim with mouths open and cephalic fins – outgrowths from the head – unfurled to funnel plankton-rich water through their gills. They’re often accompanied by a busy entourage of smaller fish, such as the juvenile golden trevally (Gnathanodon speciosus) here, which use these large rays as shelter from predators. Watching Cherub sweep calmly across the sand was a…

Nailing down the facts SOME PEOPLE SPEND a long time focused on a single topic. But how about a third of a century to find out how fast fingernails grow? (Spoiler alert: the short answer is about a 10th of a millimetre per day.) Back in 1941, just before the military attack on Pearl Harbor, William Bean, a 32-year-old medical doctor, became curious about fingernail growth and decided to conduct his own long-term study. Initially, Dr Bean measured all the nails on his left hand (he was right-handed), as well as the right thumbnail and both big toenails. But as life got busy during the war years, he narrowed his focus to just his left thumbnail. Look closely at a fingernail and you’ll notice a few distinct parts. Just above…

Australian Geographic Society PEOPLE POWER ORGANISATIONS AND PROJECTS That encourage or even rely on citizen science to help achieve their aims figured highly among the 2024 Awards for Nature recipients. Innovations such as smartphones and artificial intelligence enable everyday people – keen to be part of the solution – to mobilise for the defence of nature. We’ve been thrilled to hear from our 2024 award recipients about how the Society’s funds helped expand their programs and grow their impact. See page 29 for a project report from the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI), our silver-tier winner. With a creature as mysterious and elusive as the platypus, it’s critical to recruit as many eyes and ears as possible to be able to monitor populations effectively. Each spring, the platy-project enlists the…

PORT ARTHUR HISTORIC Site’s reputation precedes it. The name ‘Port Arthur’ alone evokes a strong emotional response for many Australians due to its connection to two dark yet formative chapters in our nation’s history. Two centuries ago, it was a harsh secondary punishment station for male convicts, and almost 30 years ago it became the site of a horrific massacre that claimed the lives of 35 people. But despite its bleak history and remote location on the southern end of the Tasman Peninsula, Port Arthur is one of Tasmania’s most popular tourist attractions, bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Port Arthur is Australia’s largest and best-preserved convict site, with more than 30 buildings and ruins scattered across the 100ha settlement including guard towers, a penitentiary, churches and private…

WE’VE BECOME ALL too familiar with mass coral bleaching events in the Great Barrier Reef along Australia’s east coast, but the continent’s other great coral reef, Western Australia’s Ningaloo, has been mostly spared. Until now. For many West Aussies – me included – Ningaloo Reef is a cherished part of their identity. Aside from being famous for whale sharks, the reef is part of the Baiyungu, Yinigurdira and Thalanyji peoples’ traditional land and sea country, and also features on the UNESCO World Heritage List. For Exmouth resident Brooke Pyke, Ningaloo is a passion. Brooke works as a whale shark tour photographer, and in her spare time she freedives with her camera. In February, Brooke took to social media to document an unfolding disaster: the mass bleaching of Ningaloo. “I knew…

THERE’S A DEFERENTIAL hush surrounding Melbourne-based master violin-maker Rainer Beilharz as he carefully removes the bottom end block, bridge, strings and tailpiece of a 1717 Stradivarius violin. He then fills the still-sealed body of the instrument with rice, gently swirls it around and tips it out, along with any 300-year-old specks of dust. Insured for $12 million – but in reality, priceless – this is one of only about 600 stringed instruments surviving today that bears the famed Stradivarius name. In what will be a world-first, it’s here today to be photographed – from inside – by Charles Brooks, a Melbourne-based photographer who specialises in capturing images of the interiors of musical instruments. Charles is the only person in the world who does this sort of highly technical specialist photography,…

1 True or false: koalas are native to Western Australia. 2 In what year did the Gold Coast host the Commonwealth Games? 3 Which native marsupial has suffered population declines because of facial tumour disease? 4 Is the Australian Capital Territory an enclave within New South Wales or Victoria? 5 What was the first dam built on the Murray River? 6 Which Australian native is the world’s tallest flowering plant? 7 The Australian Armour & Artillery Museum is located in which state or territory? 8 Which river, thought to be the world’s oldest, ‘flows’ through the Northern Territory and South Australia? 9 Are pythons venomous or non-venomous? 10 The yellow-throated honeyeater (Lichenostomus flavicollis) is endemic to which state or territory? 11 What was convict Francis Greenway’s profession in the New…

Of mangroves and mudflats WE WANTED SOMEONE who could shoot equally well above and below water for our story on blue carbon (see Bringing in the sea, page 80), and photographer Alex Pike was perfect for that assignment. “You’d never think the landscape north of Adelaide hides something as special as the Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary National Park – Winaityinaityi Pangkara,” Alex says. “Late one afternoon, our guides from The Nature Conservancy, Kylie Moritz and Abby Goodman, promised the perfect spot to photograph mangroves partially submerged at low tide. We’d barely rolled into the gravel car park before I was racing past the corrugated fences of nearby homes (cheered on by a barking kelpie), through the scrub, to lose myself in the most fantastic mangrove forests I’ve ever seen. “In…

The bold and the beautiful New research from The University of Queensland confirms sea slugs with the brightest colouration and most eye-catching patterns are active during the daytime, when their appearance is at its most striking. The study, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology and led by Dr Cedric van den Berg, analysed the colouration and pattern morphology of 45 diurnal and nocturnal east coast species. “[Diurnal] sea slugs use bright, contrasting colour patterns to send messages to potential predators, like: ‘Don’t eat me, I’m poisonous!’” Dr van den Berg said. Scientists have long suspected a link between bold visual signals and daytime activity, but there was “surprisingly little evidence” to back this assumption until now, Dr van den Berg said. “They advertise their underlying defences, such as nasty…

NATURE REVIVES MY spirits when I’m feeling down. Think of watching an eagle soar upwards until it disappears into the blue, leaving the worries of the world behind. Like so many humans, I’m envious of the ability of birds to fly. As a child I emulated eagles by making model airplanes. Gliders were my favourite because they flew at the whim of the wind, which worked for my contrarian nature. I once spent weeks making a glider only to lose it in a thermal – it just kept going up into the sky and I never saw it again. I felt no regret. That was my highest aeronautical achievement, to make something that flew so well it simply disappeared up into the vast beyond, like an eagle. A pair of…

AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY FUNDRAISER (JULY–AUGUST 2025) RED-TAILED PHASCOGALES MAY not be as well-known as their Tassie devil cousins, but these feisty little marsupials deserve their moment in the spotlight. Despite their diminutive size (weighing just 40–60g), these mostly arboreal creatures can leap distances of up to 2m between trees. They’re fast and agile hunters with a voracious appetite for insects and spiders (and the occasional unattended chick in a nest). They rarely drink water, but they do extract moisture from the food they eat. And males expend so much energy during the mating season that they perish as soon as the job’s done. Known as semelparity or suicidal mating, it’s the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the species, leaving females with less competition for food and shelter as they…

WHEN SYDNEY-BASED BIOLOGIST Dr Jurgen Otto became the first person to photograph a Maratus volans peacock spider’s courtship display in 2008, he couldn’t have known these tiny arachnids would one day become the darlings of the internet. Jurgen first became fascinated with these remarkable spiders in 2005 after a chance encounter with one in bushland near Sydney. At the time, not much was known about these elusive jumping spiders; no one had observed the males’ courtship displays, and females were still unknown to science. But Jurgen’s once-amateur interest quickly snowballed into his life’s passion. He has since published scientific papers, described new species, and even introduced them to world-renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough. Today, his photographs and videos of male peacock spiders have taken social media by storm, racking up…

THE ILLAWARRA ESCARPMENT never strays far from the sea in Wollongong, an industrial port city directly south of Sydney. Save for the bulge of Lake Illawarra, rainforested cliffs threaded with rich, black metallurgical coal seams run beside a shimmering ocean dotted with cargo ships – and possibly wind turbines, if plans materialise. Side by side, the city’s coal and steelmaking past – still key to the local economy today – butts up against visions of its clean-energy future. And squeezed in between is a community of innovators, problem-solvers and skilled workers trying to find their place. As I chat to actor-cum-climate-campaigner Yael Stone (see Australian Portrait, page 36) on a baking-hot February day, a train rattles past, injecting itself into our conversation. It knocks along a railway built in the…

THIS QUAINT TOWN, often used as a halfway stopping point between Hobart and Launceston, has dozens of buildings dating back to the 19th century. Its superb collection of Georgian and Victorian structures includes a Gothic manor named The Grange Estate; a former coaching inn turned private residence and bookshop called the Foxhunters Return; and the handsome, convict-built Red Bridge. It’s a town you can experience simply by wandering up and down its main street, the Midland Highway, and taking a stroll along the Elizabeth River. Campbell Town’s 200-year history features some genuinely fascinating moments commemorated by various monuments throughout the town. Inside Valentine Park, in front of The Grange, there’s a statue of Tasmania’s wool industry pioneer Eliza Forlonge, who brought Saxon merino sheep to the district in the early…

ON 26 OCTOBER 1985 the Anangu received the title deeds for Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in a landmark ceremony held at the base of Uluru. It marked the end of a lengthy lobbying campaign by Traditional Owners to receive recognition for their land rights. For at least 30,000 years, the Anangu – a language group comprising several groups in the Western Desert cultural bloc – have lived in Australia’s Red Centre, caring for Country. Achieving legal recognition for their land rights was a fight decades in the making. After European settlement, the area that’s now Uluru-Kata Tjuta NP was spared from pastoralism because of its unsuitability for agriculture. From 1920 to the 1940s it was an Aboriginal reserve named the South-Western or Petermann Reserve. Its isolation meant few non-Aboriginal people…

ONE OF THE Most profound questions we can ask is whether there are living organisms elsewhere in the universe. So far, there’s no firm evidence of life originating anywhere beyond the confines of our world. In trying to answer the question, astronomers look for biomarkers – attributes of an extraterrestrial environment that can only have originated in the presence of life. And it doesn’t have to be intelligent life; even humble microbes modify their environment in a manner that could be detected by scientific instruments, whether they be laser zappers on a Mars rover or infrared spectrometers on a giant telescope. It’s the second of these that has made headlines in recent months. Of the almost 6000 exoplanets now known beyond our solar system, only a handful qualify as habitable…

AUSTRALIA’S COMMITMENT TO the 30x30 target – a strategy that aims, as part of a global obligation, to protect 30 per cent of the country’s landmass by 2030 – is ambitious, and we remain far from achieving it. An additional 60 million hectares must be added to the national conservation estate within the next five years to meet this goal. Encouragingly, progress is underway with initiatives such as the Private Protected Areas (PPA) program developed by the Queensland Government. To accelerate efforts, we must prioritise the reinstatement of the Nature Positive Plan – the federal government’s reform strategy for laws and policies aimed at protecting the environment – and further incentivise the conservation of private land. Private landholders manage about 60 per cent of Australia’s landmass, making them essential allies…

LIKE SO MANY Australians, Yael Stone was left reeling after the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires that razed much of the east coast. Her anxiety flared, and she began to ask herself what she could do in response. Yael soon found her focus in the history and people of the city she’d recently moved to: Wollongong, in the Illawarra region just south of Sydney. But her idea to launch a not-for-profit organisation called Hi Neighbour – to help locals upskill for clean-energy careers – came after much rumination. Her immediate reaction to the bushfires was very public. The Sydney-born actor, famed internationally for her lead role in the US-based television series Orange is the New Black, decided at the height of her career to turn her back on Hollywood. She relinquished…

NOW IN ITS 60th year and widely considered ‘the Oscars of wildlife photography’, the world-renowned Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition captures images of fascinating animal behaviour, spectacular species and the incredible diversity of the natural world. Canadian marine conservation photojournalist Shane Gross was awarded Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2024 for his image The Swarm of Life, a breathtaking photograph that shines an underwater light on the tadpoles of North America’s western toad. Images in 18 categories showcase earth’s rich biodiversity and highlight the challenges wildlife face today. Three Australian photographers were either category or award winners. Matty Smith, based in Newcastle, New South Wales, won the Underwater category for Under the Waterline, an image of a curious leopard seal beneath the Antarctic ice. As co-founder of Wild Planet…

Tennant Creek’s Indigenous population is living day-to-day in deeply entrenched energy poverty. THE CONCRETE IS hot beneath Nicole Frank’s feet as she pushes her newborn strapped into a pram up the Stuart Highway, in Tennant Creek, almost 1000km south of Darwin. Glowing red numbers on the digital thermometer on the town clock read 39°C. The time is 10.15am. Just 20 minutes earlier Nicole’s electricity cut out, so she’s off to top up her power card. She pushes the pram through the plastic doorway streamers of the store where she can reload the card and then heads home, hoping $60 worth of credit will get her through the next few days. A couple of blocks away on Skipper Street, an elderly woman in a wheelchair is doting over her grandchild. She…

THE OCEAN HAS begun spilling across Bill Drew’s farmland north-west of Adelaide, and he’s ecstatic. The seawater inundation of his 255ha property is an early success story within a larger project restoring saltmarsh and mangrove habitats near Webb Beach, on the eastern side of South Australia’s Gulf St Vincent. Bill is a big, burly country bloke of few words, but he’s clearly revelling in the fish and shorebirds that have begun to appear on his newly saturated property. And he’s buoyed by how his four children, aged from 2–8 years, have been responding to the transformation of land beneath their feet since decades-old blockages were recently removed, bringing the sea back in. “I’ve been telling everybody about it,” Bill says, conceding the land – which his father, also Bill, bought…

THE NAME WHITE City would be familiar to Aussie tennis fans. For almost 80 years, this open-air site in the inner-Sydney suburb of Paddington was the premier tennis venue in New South Wales. Less well-known is that it took its name from an all-but-forgotten amusement park that was as spectacular as it was short-lived. The White City Amusement Park operated for just four years, from 1913–17. It was built by T. H. Eslick, an eccentric Englishman with an impressive (and possibly exaggerated) portfolio of amusement parks and ballrooms worldwide. He helped design Melbourne’s Luna Park and built a second White City Amusement Park in Perth, which operated until 1929. Sydney’s White City was a roaring success, drawing tens of thousands of visitors each day in summer (the only time of…