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24 April 2014

The darkside: endurance cycling in Australia

It’s 11pm on a Saturday night and I’ve arrived at Eaglehawk Service Station (about 10 kilometers to the north of Canberra) a little worse for wear. Desperately hungry, I devoured a giant sausage roll and a number of the other “healthy” options on offer. No, this wasn’t the end of a day-long pub crawl or buck’s night. I had, in fact, just spent the day cycling over 300 kilometers with...
Categories Cycling/Landscapes/Uncategorised
17 February 2014

Horse prose: Banjo Paterson’s legacy

Today marks 150 years since the birth of Australian poet Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson. Given that the talented horse rider took his pen name ‘Banjo’ after a racehorse owned by his family, it is not surprising that Paterson’s work was filled with lively descriptions of horses and riders in various settings, in particular the high country of New South Wales and Victoria. Paterson’s passion for his subjects can be found in each word...
Categories Horses/Landscapes
7 February 2014

Riding with ‘Hernia’: Biking Rottnest Island

I first met Darrell Hick on Rottnest Island in 2007 while I was doing some research with the island’s heritage officer, Patsy Vizents, for the National Museum of Australia’s Landmarks gallery. Darrell had just undertaken some conservation work on an historic firearm that had been on display in the Oliver Hill WWII gun battery. I was enjoying a pie from the ever-popular bakery. He asked me what kind of objects...
Categories Cycling/Landscapes/Museum practice/Uncategorised
21 January 2014

Collecting & reflecting: inviting thoughts on art & agriculture

Museums enable the drawing of meaning and understanding from the material world. Visitors to the National Museum of Australia encounter objects strategically grouped by curators and designers, beside text carefully written and edited, near images selected for their relevance to the objects on display and processed for maximum visual effect. But of course, visitors have their own, particular capacities to make sense of things they find in exhibitions or inside museum storage repositories, and objects have their...
Categories Food/Landscapes
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
4 December 2013

Light’s vision hit for six

As the second Ashes test on Australian soil for the 2013-14 series begins in Adelaide tomorrow, I wonder what Colonel Light would think of the growth of his city and in particular the re-development of Adelaide Oval. Since 1938, the statue of Colonel Light has watched over the city of Adelaide, perfectly positioned on Montefiore Hill. The view towards the city, with Adelaide Oval in the foreground, is known as Light’s Vision and has for many...
Categories Landscapes/Uncategorised