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Category: Climate change

8 September 2016

An epic journey revisited

On the 19th of December 1982, ‘The Quiet Achiever’, a solar powered car driven by Hans Tholstrup, departed Perth’s Scarborough Beach on a journey across the country. It arrived at the Sydney Opera House on the 7th of January 1983, becoming the first vehicle to be driven across a continent using nothing more than solar energy. Now, a Japanese team has begun a project to build a ‘Quiet Achiever II’.
Categories Climate change/Science/Solar power
6 July 2016

Dinosaurs, whiteboards and curators: Making the ‘Life in Australia’ environmental history gallery

Museum and gallery curators have not been served well by popular representations of their craft. There are two primary archetypes. The first is an introverted, nerdy, lab coat-wearing boffin who prowls corridors of specimens, guarding them with singular and obsessive diligence. The second is a hyper-extrovert who petulantly and arrogantly pursues the realisation of their unimpeachable curatorial vision.
Categories Climate change/Landscapes/Museum practice/Science
8 June 2016

World Oceans Day, 8 June 2016

It is hard not to be impressed by giant clams. In the wild, their size and unique color patterns make them one of the most captivating of sea creatures. Even the shells from dead clams have a powerful impact, one that speaks to their prominent place in the popular imagination about our oceans and the place of humans in them. Sadly, the beauty and cultural power inherent in these animals has helped bring them...
Categories Climate change/Science/Uncategorised/Water
21 April 2016

“If a tree falls in a forest…”: International Mother Earth Day

Friday 22nd April is International Mother Earth Day and the theme for this year is ‘Trees for the Earth’. Earth Day has been around since the 1970s, but since 2009 the day has been reconnected — somewhat quaintly — with the idea that planet earth is feminine. Interesting, but let’s leave that for another blog post. For this year’s Earth Day I decided to conduct an experiment, running a very simple...
Categories Art/Climate change/Landscapes/Plants
13 January 2016

Cool it! The Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, Hong Kong

The first thing I noticed about the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change was the noise. When I arrived, a class of school students had just been released from formal proceedings for some “unstructured time” in the exhibition space, which prompted laughter, squealing and generally excitable tones from otherwise impeccably behaved students. My host and one of the creators of the museum, Dr Matthew Pang, paused at the cacophony. “That is...
Categories Climate change/Museum practice/Science/Water
22 June 2015

Charles Ulm pilots ‘Faith in Australia’: Wakefield Oil and airmail

Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith ended their partnership after the final closure of Australian National Airways in 1933. Both men continued to promote the future possibilities of air services in separate ventures. Ulm purchased ANA’s ‘Southern Moon’ aircraft, rebuilding it and renaming it ‘Faith in Australia’, with a view to securing new airmail contracts. In 1933, he piloted ‘Faith in Australia’ from Sydney, with GU ‘Scotty’ Allan and PG ‘Bill’ Taylor...
Categories Aviation/Climate change/Uncategorised
6 May 2015

Museums as Places for Imagining the Future of Cities

Dr Steven Fleming has been poking the hornets nest that is urban planning for over a decade, with his mission to put cycling on the agendas of architects, politicians, designers and academics. Together with his colleague Professor Angelina Russo, he has been holding a series of provocative workshops around the country to get people thinking about the potential for bicycles to change the shape of our cities and the way we live.  What’s...
Categories Climate change/Cycling/Landscapes/Museum practice
30 October 2014

Buggies, Bicycles and FJ Holdens

Every Australian family wanted one of these. With room for the whole clan on two bench seats, the sleek and robust double Abbott buggy was the FJ Holden of the late 19th century. I like to imagine the Victorian equivalent of the barbecue where ladies chatted about the Abbott’s silky smooth ride and the convenience of its rain hood. Men might have debated their buggy’s top speed with a decent...
Categories Climate change/Cycling/Horses/Uncategorised
12 September 2014

A Botanical life – a new chapter

It’s truly serendipitous how the fabrics of our lives sometimes manage to weave themselves into fortuitous little knots of connection, and it seems that just such a knot led to this guest blog post – exploring two women’s contemporary lives in the bush – by Pappinbarra River valley resident Chay Khamsone and her neighbour-come-colleague Bryony Anderson. You see, not long ago, I wrote an article titled “A botanical life”, which...
Categories Climate change/Landscapes/Uncategorised
30 July 2014

Toxic tales from the Pilliga

The Pilliga is a beaten-up burnt-out forest where the creeks flow underground and the trees grow barely as wide as a child’s arm. Its grasses have been eaten and its soils pulverised, its timber ringbarked and wood-chipped. It is criss-crossed with fire breaks and narrow old logging roads. Wild boars tear out from its sandy watercourses and wind whips dust into your eyes here.

And yet there are a bunch of people lining up to get arrested – to turn their lives upside down – for this ‘scrub’. What’s going on in North West New South Wales?
Categories Climate change/Food/Landscapes
13 June 2014

Cycling revolution? Velo-City Global 2014: a personal view

There’s a scene in the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix that kept jumping into my mind during the annual international cycling conference Velo-City Global held in Adelaide in May. In a flash restaurant, one of Neo’s (Keanu Reeves’) collaborators is making a deal with the enemy, the machines. He bites into a piece of steak admitting that while he knows it is merely a virtual construction that makes it seem juicy...
Categories Climate change/Cycling/Museum practice
12 March 2014

Worms on the roof

Yesterday I visited MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, on the banks of the Derwent River in Hobart, to meet with Reuben Parker-Greer. Reuben is employed by MONA to manage an inspiring initiative that helps local schools develop and maintain kitchen garden projects. MONA sits on the edge of a long established industrial and residential area, where fast-food outlets well outnumber community and school gardens. Moonah Primary School is one of...
Categories Climate change/Gardening
16 December 2013

Stories for Healing

‘the cultural paradigm is both the most obvious and the least developed in fire research’ Stephen J. Pyne 2007 International Journal of Wildland Fire, 16: 273 ‘The mechanisms of storytelling… are our best hope of building a more inclusive and a more responsible citizenship’ Quentin Bryce, ABC Boyer Lectures, 2013 The Victorian Bushfire Project 2009-2013 The Victorian Bushfire Project began with an unexpected story, and it has been fuelled by...
Categories Climate change/Landscapes
6 December 2013

Wrecks on the South Coast

Not what you were expecting? When I walked the beaches of the far south coast a few weeks ago, I wasn’t expecting it either. The usually empty stretches of sand were littered with the dead and dying bodies of hundreds upon hundreds of short-tail shearwaters, commonly called mutton-birds. These events are called ‘wrecks’. They occur when these migratory birds return to Australia to breed after a journey of some 15,000...
Categories Birds/Climate change/Landscapes