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.
Indigenous rangers, scientists, conservationists and pastoralists are working together to ensure the Kimberley remains one of the world’s great wildlife havens.
IT’S JUST AFTER lunchtime, the morning rains have finally cleared and the sun begins breaking through the clouds. Max Breckenridge, a captive release project officer with BirdLife Australia (BLA) is slowly walking along a dirt road that cuts through a patch of untouched spotted gum–ironbark forest in the Lower Hunter Valley in New South Wales.
IN 2004, THERE WAS no way David Williams, then an environmental science student at Deakin University, in Victoria, could have predicted the chain reaction a last-minute assignment submission would create. A paper he’d written outlined an environmental management plan that suggested using trained Maremma sheepdogs to protect little penguins from fox predation on Middle Island, off the coast of Warrnambool, in south-western Victoria.
AARON MORGAN is understandably excited about recent international recognition for his homeland. A Gunditjmara man from south-western Victoria, he was in Azerbaijan in July last year, when the state’s Lake Condah and the Tyrendarra fish traps were inscribed on the World Heritage List for their extraordinary cultural and historical values. It was confirmation that these were two of Australia’s most important Aboriginal sites.
IT’S JUST AFTER lunchtime, the morning rains have finally cleared and the sun begins breaking through the clouds. Max Breckenridge, a captive release project officer with BirdLife Australia (BLA) is slowly walking along a dirt road that cuts through a patch of untouched spotted gum–ironbark forest in the Lower Hunter Valley in New South Wales.
There were expectations it would reveal much about the evolution of this continent’s largely unique mammal fauna, and it has. But to most scientists working in Australian wildlife conservation, it didn’t seem to have a lot of practical relevance.
Below the modern Brewarrina Weir in north-western New South Wales, a 2km bend holds the remains of this ancient structure, a complex of dry-stone walls and a site of engineering brilliance. Displaying advanced knowledge of river hydrology and fish ecology, the traps were designed to catch Murray cod, golden and silver perch and other fish, but allow breeding stock to pass through.
THAT FEBRUARY 2011 earthquake, which struck during the city’s lunch hour, was the most destructive in a series. It was the one that broke so many of the Central Business District’s verticals and horizontals – its buildings and the roads, sewers, water and gas pipes. It was shallow and ferocious. Its peak vertical ground acceleration of 2.2G (more than twice the acceleration of gravity) momentarily lifted parts of Christchurch to the sort of face-distorting speeds astronauts experience when they ascend into space.
IT WAS 10 JANUARY 2011 and once again it was pouring with rain. Queensland had already endured its wettest spring and December on record, and yet still the rain kept coming. I was working at the time as a freelance photographer for Queensland’s main newspaper, The Courier Mail. And weary of capturing “wet weather photos”, I’d decided to stay dry inside my Toowoomba office.
Indigenous rangers, scientists, conservationists and pastoralists are working together to ensure the Kimberley remains one of the world’s great wildlife havens.
The short-beaked echidna is found from deserts to mountain peaks; from Tasmania, across the Australian mainland to southern New Guinea. Its unique backwards-pointing feet give it an advantage when digging. Echidnas also use extended claws on the second toes of the hind feet to scratch and groom between the spines.
Linton Burgess performs a traditional dance during patrula, a return of important cultural fire practices to farmland on the midland plains of Tasmania for the first time in 200 years.
IT WAS ABOUT SIX YEARS ago that I first discovered him, purely by chance. At an hour and a half out of Sydney, my commercial flight turned north-west towards Darwin. And there he was in all his rampant majesty. Running Man Rock, I call him.
It’s one of Earth’s most complex natural systems, home to countless animals. And to the rest of the world it’s one of the most identifiably Australian places. We all know what it is – the Great Barrier Reef (GBR)– and that it’s under pressure. But how can we frame its intricate natural architecture in a new way that inspires people to love it enough to care about its future?
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.
IT’S JUST AFTER lunchtime, the morning rains have finally cleared and the sun begins breaking through the clouds. Max Breckenridge, a captive release project officer with BirdLife Australia (BLA) is slowly walking along a dirt road that cuts through a patch of untouched spotted gum–ironbark forest in the Lower Hunter Valley in New South Wales.
There were expectations it would reveal much about the evolution of this continent’s largely unique mammal fauna, and it has. But to most scientists working in Australian wildlife conservation, it didn’t seem to have a lot of practical relevance.
Below the modern Brewarrina Weir in north-western New South Wales, a 2km bend holds the remains of this ancient structure, a complex of dry-stone walls and a site of engineering brilliance. Displaying advanced knowledge of river hydrology and fish ecology, the traps were designed to catch Murray cod, golden and silver perch and other fish, but allow breeding stock to pass through.
THAT FEBRUARY 2011 earthquake, which struck during the city’s lunch hour, was the most destructive in a series. It was the one that broke so many of the Central Business District’s verticals and horizontals – its buildings and the roads, sewers, water and gas pipes. It was shallow and ferocious. Its peak vertical ground acceleration of 2.2G (more than twice the acceleration of gravity) momentarily lifted parts of Christchurch to the sort of face-distorting speeds astronauts experience when they ascend into space.
IT WAS 10 JANUARY 2011 and once again it was pouring with rain. Queensland had already endured its wettest spring and December on record, and yet still the rain kept coming. I was working at the time as a freelance photographer for Queensland’s main newspaper, The Courier Mail. And weary of capturing “wet weather photos”, I’d decided to stay dry inside my Toowoomba office.
IN 2004, THERE WAS no way David Williams, then an environmental science student at Deakin University, in Victoria, could have predicted the chain reaction a last-minute assignment submission would create. A paper he’d written outlined an environmental management plan that suggested using trained Maremma sheepdogs to protect little penguins from fox predation on Middle Island, off the coast of Warrnambool, in south-western Victoria.
“I HAD MY LITTLE GRANDSON out in the garden with me the other day,” says Ian Cane, a beekeeper whose family has been in the industry for more than 100 years. “I’d planted some carrots, and I was showing him how the bees go from one carrot flower to the next to pollinate them. They don’t go over to the apple tree and mix up the pollen, and that’s why we don’t get something that’s half an apple and half a carrot. And he said to me, ‘That’s almost magic, isn’t it, Pa?’”
IT WAS A SUMMER no-one in East Gippsland will ever forget. The recent bushfire crisis was the Victorian region’s largest natural disaster and no community was left unaffected. The fires were first reported on 21 November last year and not finally declared contained until three months later, on 20 February. The region’s entire population of almost 47,000 residents – plus thousands of tourists – were directly or indirectly impacted.
THE ERUPTION BEGAN at 9.35pm with big heaves inside the crater. By 10.03pm it was pelting the nearby walking track with projectiles, but withheld its final energy until 10.11pm, when with a whoomph it sent a plume sky-high. A scalding current of steam and debris, coloured green by hydrothermally altered rock, rolled right across the track at 11m/s, and down to the south-eastern bays. This eruption took place on Whakaari/White Island
A sense of frustration was growing in Whakatane, fuelled by outside control swooping in and sidelining local pilots, quarantining tour boats without properly cleaning them of corrosive ash, and suggesting – wrongly – that there was a criminal inquiry into White Island Tours. The town’s diffuse anger found focus on delays in the recovery.
AARON MORGAN is understandably excited about recent international recognition for his homeland. A Gunditjmara man from south-western Victoria, he was in Azerbaijan in July last year, when the state’s Lake Condah and the Tyrendarra fish traps were inscribed on the World Heritage List for their extraordinary cultural and historical values. It was confirmation that these were two of Australia’s most important Aboriginal sites.
A SINGLE GIANT SPIDER CRAB can be hard to see. It barely exceeds 15cm across, despite its common name, and its triangular upper shell is covered in spines, hairs and knobs that make it blend into an ocean fkoor background. It will even make itself more inconspicuous by placing living sponges, hydroids and algae onto its shell from the surrounding temperate reef environment where it lives. But when this species comes together en masse, in aggregations that can exceed 50,000 individuals, it’s difficult to miss.
THE CORAL SEA is serene today. Palm trees cast flickering shadows over a golden beach as a family makes its way across a tidal causeway towards a rocky island, fishing rods and buckets in hand. Behind them, on the mainland, hills clad in hoop pine forests roll towards the shore, their green expanse interspersed with occasional bare, jutting outcrops. On the island’s ocean side, sunlight glints off crystals embedded in black and red rocks.
as the giant Currowan fire roared over Mt Scanzi and down the hill to Tallowa Dam, on the western fringes of Kangaroo Valley, about 180km south-west of Sydney.
It’s been two decades since I last visited this celebrated dive site on Ribbon No. 3 Reef, east of Cooktown, on the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). During that time this World Heritage-listed natural wonder has suffered a series of environmental threats, ranging from over-fishing to agricultural run-off. Many of these are now better managed. But the reef continues to face its biggest threat by far – climate change. Well beyond the realm of local management, this global phenomenon has caused four major coral bleaching episodes since 1988, killing huge swathes of coral and degrading the habitat associated with it (see AG 142). At the time of going to press another major bleaching was underway.
Adventurers, Explorers and Trail Blazers