Nature is hiding in every nook of Australia’s cities – just look a little closer and you’ll find it

Thanks to technological advances, citizen science has experienced unprecedented global growth over the past decade. It’s enabled millions of people to get involved in science, whether by gathering data, sharing health information or helping to map galaxies.

And just because you live in a city, it doesn’t mean you can’t observe, learn about and contribute to scientific understanding of the natural world. Sometimes, it just means looking a little closer.

However, our recent study revealed in Australia, the number and diversity of urban ecology citizen science projects is relatively low.

This is despite cities being important places of conservation and discovery. There’s enormous value in citizen science projects that encourage urbanites to learn about what is often, quite literally, on their doorsteps.

Cities Are Important For Conservation

Recent COVID-19 restrictions mean many of us became more intimately connected to the environment around us. But there is still an overriding perception of urban areas as wastelands devoid of rich and diverse species.

It’s true that for many centuries, vegetation in urban areas has been removed to make way for buildings, roads and other human structures. In many cases, this had led to a more homogeneous composition of species and, in Australia’s case, a seeming predominance of introduced plant and animal species.

However, recent literature has shown cities remain vital habitats for many native species. This includes threatened species such as the fringed spider orchid, found only in Greater Melbourne.

Recent research found 39 nationally threatened species live only in Australian cities and towns, including the western swamp tortoise in Perth and the angle-stemmed myrtle in Brisbane.

It’s important to preserve native vegetation remnants in towns and cities, as well as traditional urban green spaces like parks, cemeteries and backyards.

But it’s just as important to understand which species call these areas home and why. That’s where citizen science can play a big role.

What We Found

We set out to examine the extent to which urban ecology projects in Australia harnessed the resources of citizen scientists. We did this by analysing the projects listed in the Citizen Science Project Finder, hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia.

Of 458 active citizen science projects, only 19 (or 5.3%) were focused on urban environments. Given the number of urban residents in Australia, this constitutes a significant under-representation of projects tailored for these people.

Most of the 19 projects focused on four major cities – Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide – while other major cities were notably omitted.

Eight projects focused on broad census approaches – essentially ad hoc observations focused on birds or all flora and fauna in a region. Documenting the presence of various species in urban areas is important. But there’s potential for citizen scientists to help answer more targeted research questions.

For example, grey-headed flying foxes have been documented re-colonising habitat in Melbourne they were once absent from. As cities continue to grow, knowing which species can persist and which have been pushed out is incredibly valuable – and citizen scientists can help in this task.

Also, many of the 19 projects did not provide an easy way to participate, such as easy links to platforms to record and upload data. We were also unable to find scientific papers where results from any of the 19 projects had been published.

Publications would further strengthen the validity of a citizen science approach in urban environments and add another way to measure success.

Citizens Are Good For Science

More than 70% of Australians live in a major city. This offers a large pool of potential participants in citizen science projects.

And cities are home to people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds, ages and mobilities. There is increasing acknowledgement that science is enhanced by increasing the diversity of people involved. So a greater number of urban citizen science projects would be good for science.

What’s more, urban projects can provide data from places not typically accessible to professional scientists such as backyards and school grounds. They also allow for the collection of observation-rich and continuous data, which is rare even in professional settings.

And of course, citizen science projects benefit the participants themselves – encouraging people to get outdoors, get active and connect more deeply with nature.

A Tool For Measuring Change

Increasing citizen science in cities could help to shift an overriding narrative that cities are not important places for biodiversity. This may in turn afford greater concentrated effort towards conserving remaining urban green spaces.

Citizen science could help answer key ecological questions about urban environments. For example, research last year showed how citizen scientists helped document species seeking refuge in urban areas following Australia’s horrific 2019-20 bushfires. Expanding such an approach could lead to a better understanding of how cities function as biodiversity refuges.

And a greater focus on citizen science in cities would also enable residents to engage in their surroundings, share their knowledge and help inform the management of the environment around them.

Erin Roger, Citizen Science Program Lead, CSIRO and Alice Motion, Associate professor, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

100 years ago, this man discovered an exquisite parrot thought to be extinct. What came next is a tragedy we must not repeat

Exactly 100 years ago tomorrow, a bird that had been relegated to extinction made a comeback. The exquisitely beautiful paradise parrot was rediscovered by Cyril Jerrard, a grazier from Gayndah in Queensland’s Burnett district, on December 11 1921.

But its return was fleeting. Scattered pairs were seen around Gayndah until 1929. Some were seen around nearby Gin Gin in the 1930s. After that came only rumour and hope.

Today, the paradise parrot has the tragic status of extinct. It’s the only mainland Australian bird species known to have suffered that fate since colonisation.

On the 100th anniversary of the parrot’s rediscovery, we might revisit the event and consider why the bird’s resurrection was so brief. From that, we may gain insights into how to help the many species threatened with extinction today.

Our ‘Avarice And Thoughtlessness’

In 1924, a few years after rediscovering the paradise parrot, Jerrard identified the reasons for its decline. “Directly by our avarice and thoughtlessness,” he wrote, “and indirectly by our disturbance of the balance so nicely preserved by nature, we are undoubtedly accountable for the tragedy of this bird.”

Although a grazier, he acknowledged “the most fatal change of all” was wrought by the pastoral industry.

Jerrard’s collaborator in trying to save the bird, the journalist and birder Alec Chisholm, also nominated pastoralism – especially the burning of grasslands – as a main factor in the decline, along with trapping for the aviary trade and feral cats.

But while Jerrard and Chisholm could point out why the paradise parrot was sliding towards extinction, they were unable to do much about it. In books, newspapers and magazines, Chisholm publicised the parrot’s plight and pleaded for its preservation. His pleas didn’t exactly fall on deaf ears, but they were inadequate to counter a social ethos that privileged economic gain over avian loss.

Besides, ornithologists in the 1920s and 1930s had a lamentably limited repertoire of strategies to save endangered species.

On the latter issue, things have changed dramatically. We now have comprehensive scientific studies of the risks facing endangered species, and a vast array of remedial measures.

There are gaps in the science and imperfections in the conservation strategies, but there is a potential to rescue endangered species today that was lacking when the paradise parrot was rediscovered.

Lessons For The Golden-Shouldered Parrot

Take, for example, the paradise parrot’s close relative, the golden-shouldered parrot of Cape York Peninsula. Currently listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as endangered, it faces threats similar to those that annihilated its southern cousin last century.

In the heartland of golden-shouldered parrot territory, pastoralists Sue and Tom Shephard are devoted to preserving the parrots on their station, as was Jerrard 100 years ago. But unlike the Gayndah grazier, the Shephards have scientific backup.

From the pioneering studies of environmental scientists in the 1990s to more recent investigations, scientists working on Cape York Peninsula have scrutinised the species’ needs and advised on how to safeguard them. They place particular stress on fire management.

The birds eat seeds from several preferred grasses, which require specific fire regimes to thrive. The availability of seed affects the parrot’s breeding success. Fire also helps maintain the birds’ grassy woodland habitat and leaves fewer places for predators to hide.

But since European colonisation, fire regimes in Australia have changed dramatically across northern Australia. It has meant the golden-shouldered parrot has less food and is more vulnerable to predators.

Chisholm in the 1920s knew fire had something to do with the paradise parrot’s demise, but his writings on the topic were sketchy and vague. There was then no clear understanding of the fire ecology of this land, still less of the role of Indigenous fire regimes or willingness to learn from them.

Now, we have detailed calibrations of the type and intensity of fires needed to ensure breeding success for the golden-shouldered parrot and to minimise its loss to predators. Traditional owners of its territory, the Thaypan and Olkola peoples, collaborate with pastoralists and ecologists, linking traditional knowledge with Western science to reestablish fire regimes beneficial to the parrot.

While we’re better equipped today to rescue endangered species than was the case for the paradise parrot last century, that’s no cause for complacency.

Despite the superior conservation strategies and technologies now available, the drivers of extinction identified by Cyril Jerrard in the 1920s – our “avarice and thoughtlessness” – remain stubbornly persistent.

Prioritising Bird Welfare

If we’re to ensure the golden-shouldered parrot and other endangered species do not go the way of the paradise parrot, we need scientific strategies and technologies.

But we need more than those. Sometimes, at least, we need to subordinate avarice to avian welfare.

For that, we need to connect, emotionally and ethically, with the birds around us. Birds must matter to us – not merely in an abstract or objectified fashion but as beings of intrinsic worth.

That’s what Chisholm was getting at in his 1922 book, Mateship with Birds, the concluding chapter of which was titled “The Paradise Parrot Tragedy”. In the lavish language then fashionable among nature writers, he urged readers to:

“dispute the dangerous idea that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever in a cage or cabinet; and disdain, too, the lopsided belief that the moving finger of Civilisation must move on over the bodies of ‘the loveliest and the best’ of Nature’s children”.

He and Jerrard lacked the tools and technologies to avert the paradise parrot’s tragedy, but not an appreciation of our moral responsibility to try to do so. We now have the tools and technologies, but our moral compass seems as fickle as ever.

Russell McGregor, Adjunct Professor of History, James Cook University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australian forests will store less carbon as climate change worsens and severe fires become more common

Eucalypt forests are well known for bouncing back after fire, and the green shoots that emerge from eucalypts stems as they begin their first steps to recovery provide some of the most iconic images of the Australian bush.

Resprouting allows trees to survive and quickly start photosynthesising again, which keeps carbon “alive” and stored in the tree. On the other hand, if a tree dies and slowly rots, the carbon stored in the tree is released into the atmosphere as a source of greenhouse gas emissions.

But our new research finds more frequent, severe bushfires and a hotter, drier climate may limit eucalypt forests’ ability to resprout and reliably lock up carbon. This could seriously undermine our efforts to mitigate climate change.

Our findings paint a cautionary tale of a little known challenge posed by climate change, and gives us yet another reason to urgently and drastically cut global emissions.

We Need Forests To Fight Climate Change

At the international climate summit in Glasgow last month, more than 100 nations pledged to end and reverse deforestation. This put a much-needed spotlight on the importance of the world’s forests in storing carbon to mitigate climate change.

Victoria’s national parks alone store almost 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. For perspective, that’s roughly a decade’s worth of Victoria’s net CO₂ emissions in 2019 (91.3 million tonnes).

Australia’s forests have forged a tight relationship with bushfire. But climate change is already changing – and will continue to change – the size, severity and frequency of bushfires. In Victoria, for example, over 250,000 hectares have been burned by at least two severe fires in just 20 years.

This unprecendented frequency has led to the decline of fire sensitive forests, such as the iconic alpine ash.

While resprouting eucalypts can be resilient to periodic fires, we know surprisingly little about how they’ll respond to increasingly common severe fires, particularly when combined with factors like drought.

Early evidence shows resprouting can fail when fire is too frequent, as seen in snow gum forests in the Victorian alps.

Understanding why is an area of active research, but reasons could include damaged resprouting buds (as their protective bark is thinned by successive fires), or the depletion of the trees’ energy reserves.

Forests Burned By Two Fires Stored Half The Carbon

If resprouting after fire begins to fail, what might this mean for carbon stores in widespread fire-tolerant eucalypt forests?

In our new paper, we tackled this question by measuring carbon stored in Victoria’s dry eucalypt forests. We targeted areas that had been burned once or twice by severe bushfire within just six years. In these places, severe fires usually occur decades apart.

In general, we found climate change impacts resprouting forests on two fronts:

1. as conditions get warmer and drier, these forests will store less carbon due to reduced growth

2. as severe fires become more frequent, forests will store less carbon, with more trees dying and becoming dead wood.

First, we found carbon stores were lower in the drier and hotter parts of the landscape than the cooler and wetter parts. This makes sense - as any gardener knows, plants grow much better where water is plentiful and it’s not too hot.

When frequent fire was added to the mix, forest carbon storage reduced even further. At warmer and drier sites, a forest burned by two severe fires had about half as much carbon as a forest burned by a single severe fire.

More trees were killed with more frequent fire, which means what was once “living carbon” becomes “dead carbon” - which will rot and be a source of emissions. In fact, after two fires, less than half of the forest carbon was stored in living trees.

The carbon stored in large living trees is an important stock and is usually considered stable, given larger trees are generally more resilient to disturbance. But we found their carbon stocks, too, significantly declined with more frequent fire.

What Do We Do About It?

Given how widespread this forest type is in southern Australia, we need a better understanding of how it responds to frequent fires to accurately account for changes in their carbon stocks.

We also must begin exploring new ways to manage our forests. Reinstating Indigenous fire management, including traditional burning practices, and active forest management may mitigate some of the impacts we’ve detected.

We could also learn from and adapt management approaches in the dry forests of North America, where the new concept of “pyro-silviculture” is being explored.

Pyro-silviculture can include targeted thinning to reduce the density of trees in forests, which can lower their susceptibility to drought, and encourage the growth of large trees. It can also involve controlled burns to reduce the severity of future fires.

With the next, inevitable fire season on Australia’s horizon, such approaches are essential tools in our management kit, ensuring we can build better resilience in forest ecosystems and stabilise these crucial stocks of carbon.

Tom Fairman, Future Fire Risk Analyst, The University of Melbourne; Craig Nitschke, Associate Professor - Forest and Landscape Dynamics, The University of Melbourne, and Lauren Bennett, Associate Professor - Ecosystem Sciences and Forest Carbon, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How more motorboat collisions are leaving turtles shell-shocked and mutilated

As a wildlife ecologist, I have been keeping tabs on the northern map turtles of Lake Opinicon since 2003. One of these turtles is CJV. She is one of more than 1,800 turtles encountered during our monitoring program.

Every spring, we catch as many turtles as we can. Each turtle is measured, examined for signs of diseases or injuries, and marked with a unique combination of small notches on the edge of its shell. This is how I recognized CJV on May 31, 2019.

CJV and I go way back, to May 19, 2005, to be exact, but we haven’t seen each other since. The passage of time has left its marks on both of us. For starters, I am noticeably greyer, balder and less fit. As for CJV, she has grown a few millimetres, but that would be nearly impossible to tell without very accurate calipers.

But the biggest change in CJV’s appearance is her shell. After missing in action for 14 years, CJV showed up with a large but partially healed scar running from the left side of her shell to her spine. When and where she got injured is anyone’s guess, but the cause of the injury is clear. No natural predators can slice through her bony armour — but a sharp boat propeller surely can.

Concerning Rates

Lake Opinicon is nested in the Rideau Canal World Heritage Site, and at the heart of the Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve. Unfortunately, these designations are doing little to prevent turtles from being chopped up.

When I first captured CJV in 2005, seven per cent of all the females we examined were scarred. When we met again in 2019, the number had climbed to 13 per cent. But mutilated turtles are not unique to Lake Opinicon.

In 2010, we reported that 13 per cent of female map turtles in the St. Lawrence Island National Park had propeller injuries. Around the same time, researchers from Laurentian University reported that more than 28 per cent of northern map turtles in the Trent Severn Waterway had been struck by a propeller.

There are eight species of freshwater turtles in Canada. All are federally listed as Species at Risk, meaning that to remain a part of our lakes, ponds and rivers, they need protection and conservation efforts.

Betting On The Long Haul

It is not a coincidence that all our native turtles are in trouble — the global group of about 350 species is in a dire situation. Sixty-one percent of turtle species are extinct or threatened by extinction. This grim statistic does not have a single root cause. Like most precarious wildlife, turtles are threatened by the usual suspects of habitat loss, poaching, direct mortality from human activities and pollution.

Unfortunately, turtles have something else going against them: a 200-million-year-old gambling habit. When it comes to procreation, turtles play a numbers game: they lay as many eggs as they can over their lifespan, hoping some will eventually make it.

Turtles do not care for their eggs or young in the same way birds and mammals do, and without any care or protection, most eggs and babies are eaten by predators or otherwise die from cold, droughts, floods or other weather hazards. If a female lays enough eggs, however, some will hatch and grow into adults. Longevity is key here, and turtles evolved remarkably long life spans.

Turtles have successfully gambled their way through the last 200 million years, but the playing field has changed. Human activities are cutting the long lives of these animals too short for many females to have won their reproductive bet against time. So here we are with dwindling turtle populations in our protected areas.

We can’t say for sure if, or how much, collision with boats threatens the persistence of turtles because an important piece of information is still missing: the proportion of turtles dying from their propeller injuries. Finding dead turtles in nature is not easy because biologists have fierce competition from scavengers when it comes to finding animal carcasses.

However, what we do know raises a red flag. Many turtle populations are already experiencing an inflated amount of adult mortality. Roads alone kill countless adult turtles every year so boat mortality need not be high to precipitate the decline of some turtle populations.

Testimonial Scars

The visible scars of turtles are a testimony to the pressure recreational boating exerts on aquatic wildlife. Motorboats affect aquatic wildlife and their habitats in many ways: noise pollution, chemical pollution, wakes, erosion, collisions.

In a recent meta-analysis of 94 studies on the effects of water-based recreation on freshwater ecosystems, researchers found boats to consistently cause negative impacts on wildlife. Some of these impacts can be subtle but nonetheless important: the noise from motors alone can affect the behaviour and physiology of nesting bass. Disturbances from motorboats can also reduce the foraging time of waterfowl.

According to the National Marine Manufacturer Association Canada, the sales of outboard engines increased by 17 per cent between 2019 and 2020, and is now at a record high. With such enthusiasm for recreational powerboating, the impacts on turtles and other wildlife need to be measured. This data will dictate the need for conservation actions such as outreach programs, best practices and, if necessary, regulations such as limiting engine size, or restricting traffic.

Mutilated turtles like CJV are a reminder that lakes and rivers are living and fragile ecosystems. These ecosystems and the species they host — including turtles — provide us with countless cultural, economic, health and aesthetic services. These services are increasingly at odds with certain forms of recreational boating.

Without changes in how we perceive and use our lakes and rivers for recreation, we will find more injured turtles … until we won’t find any turtles at all.

Grégory Bulté, Instructor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Making the tobacco industry pay for cigarette litter could stop 4.5 billion butts polluting the Australian environment

Cigarette butts with filters are the most commonly littered item worldwide, with a staggering 4.5 trillion of them tossed into the environment each year. This is a huge problem; many end up on beaches and in the ocean, and the tar from burnt tobacco in the filter can be toxic to wildlife.

Fixing the problem has focused on changing the behaviour of people who smoke, but a new report shows making the tobacco industry responsible for the litter with a mandatory product stewardship scheme is likely to have a much greater impact.

In Australia alone, it’s estimated up to 8.9 billion butts are littered each year. Under the proposed scheme, we could potentially reduce this by 4.45 billion a year.

So how can it be done in practice? And what would the benefits be from a policy like this?

Social And Environmental Costs

Cigarette filters are made of a bioplastic called cellulose acetate, and they typically take years to break down. Smoked cigarette filters are infused with the same chemicals and heavy metals in the tar that harm humans when they smoke.

Research from 2019 found adding cigarette butts to soil reduces the germination of grass and clover seeds and the length of their shoots. Seaworms exposed to used filters have DNA damage and reduced growth.

And exposure to cigarette filters (even unsmoked ones) are toxic to fish – research with two fish species found adding two to four smoked cigarette filters per litre of water could kill them.

Currently, the tobacco industry does not have to pay for the clean-up of cigarette butts polluting the environment. Rather, the community bears the cost. Cigarette litter and its management costs the Australian economy an estimated A$73 million per year.

Local councils in particular spend large amounts of money cleaning it up. The City of Sydney, for example, has estimated their cleaning crews sweep up 15,000 cigarette butts daily from city streets.

And volunteers spend countless hours picking up cigarette butts from parks, streets and beaches. In its 2020 Rubbish Report, Clean Up Australia Day found cigarette butts accounted for 16% of all recorded items.

Current Strategies Are Ineffective

The tobacco industry response to product waste has been to focus responsibility on the consumer. Tobacco companies have created public education campaigns aimed at increasing awareness of the butt litter problem, supplied consumers and cities worldwide with public ashtrays, and funded anti-litter groups.

But given the amount of cigarettes that continue to be littered, it’s clear these strategies on their own have been ineffective. Many around the world are now calling for stronger industry regulation.

There have also been calls to ban cigarette filters completely. For example, lawmakers in California and New York have attempted to ban the sale of cigarettes with filters, and New Zealand is finalising their Smokefree Aotearoa Action Plan, which may include a cigarette filter ban.

Many jurisdictions in Australia and worldwide are starting to ban single-use plastics such as straws and takeaway containers, and have been criticised for not including cigarette filters in these laws.

If filters were banned, cigarette butt litter would remain, but without the plastic filter. Although, a recent trial of cigarettes without filters found that people smoked fewer of these than when they were given the same cigarettes with filters. More research is needed on the health impact of smoking filterless cigarettes and the environmental impact of filterless cigarette butts.

What Would A Stewardship Scheme Look Like?

The federal government’s National Plastics Plan, released in March this year, committed to initiate a stewardship taskforce that would reduce cigarette butt litter in Australia, and would consider a potential stewardship scheme. However, they proposed the stewardship taskforce be industry led.

Product stewardship schemes can be voluntary or written into law. For example, waste from product packaging is managed through a voluntary scheme, the Australian Packaging Covenant, which sets targets for reducing packaging waste that aren’t written into law. On the other hand, there is a law in Australia requiring companies who manufacture TVs or computers to pay some of the costs for recycling these products.

The new research, commissioned by World Wildlife Fund for Nature Australia, considered four regulatory approaches: business as usual, a ban on plastic filters, a voluntary industry product stewardship scheme, and a mandatory product stewardship scheme led by the federal government.

Each of these options were ranked according to factors such as the regulatory effort required to implement them, their cost, consumer participation and the extent to which they would reduce environmental impacts on land and waterways.

A ban on plastic cigarette filters and a mandatory product stewardship scheme were assessed as having the greatest potential environmental benefit. While uncertainties remain about a filter ban, there is no such barrier to implementing a mandatory product stewardship scheme on cigarette waste.

This scheme could involve a tax that would pay for the recovery and processing costs associated with cigarette butt litter. The study suggested introducing a levy of A$0.004 – less than half a cent – on each smoked cigarette to manage the waste. Other studies from overseas, however, show this cost would need to be higher.

We can look to the UK for an example of where to start. The UK is currently considering implementing an extended producer responsibility scheme to address cigarette litter. In November this year, it released a consultation document on different options.

They proposed a mandatory scheme where the tobacco industry would pay for the full costs of cleaning up and processing cigarette waste. Other costs they might be made to pay are for gathering and reporting data on tobacco product waste, provision of bins for cigarette butts, and campaigns to promote responsible disposal by consumers.

It is time for the federal and state governments in Australia to make the tobacco industry pay for the mess they create.

Kylie Morphett, Research Fellow, School of Public Health, The University of Queensland; Coral Gartner, Director, NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence on Achieving the Tobacco Endgame, The University of Queensland, and William Clarke, Professor of waste management, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why dingoes should be considered native to mainland Australia – even though humans introduced them

Dingoes are often demonised as a danger to livestock, while many consider them a natural and essential part of the environment. But is our most controversial wild species actually native to Australia?

Dingoes were brought to Australia by humans from Southeast Asia some 4,000 years ago. Technically, this means they are an introduced species, and an “alien” species by classic ecological definitions . By contrast, most legal definitions consider dingoes native, because they were here before Europeans arrived.

Though it sounds academic, the controversy has real consequences for this ancient dog lineage. In 2018, the Western Australian government declared dingoes were not native fauna due to crossbreeding with domestic dogs. This potentially makes it easier to control their numbers.

In a new research paper, I find dingoes do indeed fit the bill as an Australian native species, using three new criteria I propose. These criteria can help us answer questions over whether alien species can ever be considered native, and if so, over what time frame.

Why Does Alien Or Native Status Matter?

Humans have been moving animal species around for millennia. Thousands of years ago, neolithic settlers moved rabbits to Mediterranean islands, traders unwittingly took black rats from India to Europe and Indigenous Southeast Asian people took pigs to Papua New Guinea.

The rate of species introductions has ramped up with the movement and spread of people, with many recent arrivals posing a major threat to biodiversity.

Researchers often distinguish between alien and native using the year the species was introduced. There are obvious problems with this, given the dates used can be arbitrary and the fact perceptions of nativeness can be based on how much humans like the species, rather than its ecological impact. For example, there has been strong opposition to killing “friendly” hedgehogs in areas of Scotland where they are introduced, but less cute animals like American mink get no such consideration.

For conservationists, alien status certainly matters. Alien species act differently to native species in their new environments, which can give them an advantage over locals in terms of competition for food, predation and spreading new diseases. This can cause native population declines and extinctions.

As a result, species considered alien in their ecosystems are often targets for control and eradication. But species considered native are usually protected even if they have extended their range significantly, like eastern water dragons or the Australian white ibis.

Native status is, of course, a human construct. Past definitions of nativeness have not directly considered the ecological reasons for concern about alien species.

This is what my new research seeks to address.

An Ecological Definition Of Nativeness

What I propose are three staged criteria to determine when an introduced species becomes native:

1. has the introduced species evolved in its new environment?

2. do native species recognise and respond to the introduced species as they do other local species?

3. are the interactions between introduced and established native species similar to interactions between native species (that is, their impacts on local species are not negative and exaggerated)?

For dingoes on mainland Australia, the answer is yes for all three criteria. We should consider them native.

Firstly, dingoes are not the same dogs first brought here. Dingoes are now quite different to their close ancestors in Southeast Asia, in terms of behaviour, how they reproduce and how they look. These differences have a genetic basis, suggesting they have evolved since their arrival in Australia. Their heads are now shaped differently, they breed less often and have better problem solving skills than other close dog relatives.

Second, it is well established that native prey species on mainland Australia recognise and respond to dingoes as dangerous predators – which they are.

Finally, dingo impacts on prey species are not devastating like those of alien predators such as feral cats and foxes. While hunting by dingoes does suppress prey numbers, they don’t keep them as low (and at greater risk of extinction) as do foxes and cats.

Of course, dingo impacts were unlikely to have always been so benign. Dingoes are linked to the extinction of Tasmanian tigers (Thylacines), Tasmanian devils and the Tasmanian flightless hen, which disappeared from mainland Australia soon after the dingo arrived.

In my paper, I argue such impacts no longer occur because of evolutionary change in both dingoes and their prey. We can see this in Tasmania, which dingoes never reached. There, prey species like bandicoots still show naiveté towards dogs. That means we should not consider dingoes to be native to Tasmania.

Alien Today, Native Tomorrow?

This idea challenges the dogma alien species remain alien forever. This is an unsettling concept for ecologists dealing with the major and ongoing damage done by newer arrivals. Some argue we should never embrace alien species into natural ecosystems.

This makes no sense for long-established introduced species, which might now be playing a positive role in ecosystems. But it’s a different story for recently introduced species like cats, given not enough time has passed to get past the exaggerated impacts on local species.

These ideas are not about considering all species present in an ecosystem to be native. Introduced species should still be considered alien until proven native.

This approach suggests ways of classifying species which might be native to a country but have moved to new places within the country through mechanisms like climate change or re-wilding. For example, we can’t simply assume returning Tasmanian devils to mainland Australia more than 3,000 years after dingoes drove them extinct there would count as reintroducing a native species.

Defining nativeness in this ecological way will help resolve some of the heated and long-running debates over how to distinguish alien and native species.

How? Because it targets the key reason conservationists were worried about alien species in the first place – the damage they can do.

Peter Banks, Professor of Conservation Biology, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why climate change must stay on the news agenda beyond global summits

During last month’s COP26 summit, climate change was a ubiquitous story. News hooks abounded, from unpacking the flurry of non-binding pledges to reporting on the failure of rich nations to honour demands of countries at the frontline, criticising the summit as the “most exclusionary COP ever”.

Even in today’s crowded information landscape, mainstream news media continue to play an important role in shaping how we understand and act on climate change.

Based on research interviews with climate reporters, I argue the main stories are about climate breakdown and climate justice, and entire newsrooms, not just science and environment specialists, need to step up to demonstrate that understanding.

This needs to be reflected in the quantity and quality of climate coverage, well beyond the brief window of COP summits.

Climate Change Is Every Story

My research, which focused on interviews with journalists who consistently cover climate change, highlights how climate reporting directly challenges journalism’s traditional tendency to divide the world into rounds.

As Kennedy Warne, founder and former editor of New Zealand Geographic, puts it:

The exclusive deployment of science journalists to the climate beat has had the unfortunate problem or effect of scientising the whole thing, when it’s really a human life, human hopes, human dreams, human inter-generational responsibility type of issue.

While specialist expertise does matter, the lion’s share of climate coverage can no longer be left to a handful of science and environment reporters.

When it comes to ensuring climate stories get regular coverage across newsrooms of large media outlets, Stuff is taking a laudable lead. In early 2020, it established a climate desk with a climate editor and reporter. The climate desk journalists, Eloise Gibson and Olivia Wannan, set about embedding climate reporting within the organisation’s outputs.

Newsroom is an example of a smaller organisation in which climate coverage is also a priority and mainstay, with diverse and regular reporting within its climate emergency section.

Specialist Reporters Matter

Specialist climate reporters can build up a base of knowledge in a complex domain. But the journalists I interviewed were clear that media outlets don’t have to have a climate desk to produce more and better climate coverage.

On the science side, explaining the ecosystems and human implications from melting glaciers or freshwater policy is crucial.

In politics, reporters need to continue holding governments accountable to their promises, as many did recently in highlighting the dubious accounting in Aotearoa’s latest emissions reduction pledge.

Reporters are responsible for connecting the consequences of rising emissions for people’s lives.

Stuff’s Charlie Mitchell describes a 2017 story about the impacts of coastal erosion on mostly low-income residents of the West Coast coal-mining town of Granity.

It sticks out for me because climate change can be quite abstract and hard to communicate in some ways. But in that story, it was very real, it was very tangible.

Alex Braae, a former reporter at The Spinoff, picks out a different kind of local story about a meeting on carbon farming in the economically run-down King Country town of Taumarunui. It detailed the concerns of local farmers about planting productive farmland with carbon-absorbing pines at the cost of local jobs and community cohesion.

It took into account the fact that we might know exactly what the scientific solutions to climate change are, but we don’t necessarily know how to turn scientific changes into social and political policy that won’t leave people behind.

Covering Climate Responsibly

The journalists I interviewed highlighted that in order to cover climate responsibly, they aim to:

● Provide accurate and contextualised stories

● strive for fair and diversified representation

● strive for regular and fresh coverage

● maintain emotional awareness

● make coverage interesting and relevant

● remain responsive to audience needs and feedback.

Accuracy is a tenet of responsible journalism. Another principle is balance, but journalists were clear that mainstream editors have understood the dangers of false balance for about a decade now. While climate denial is no longer platformed in a misguided effort to balance a story, this should apply to opinion columns as well.

Stories need to be based on evidence, which can come from Western science or other long-established knowledge systems like mātauranga Māori.

The journalists I interviewed said it was important to them to make a conscious effort to seek out and fairly convey a wide range of perspectives.

Those already marginalised or in vulnerable situations face disproportionate impacts and multiplied inequities.

Jamie Tahana, previously at RNZ Pacific and now RNZ Te Ao Māori, emphasises that being able to tie frontline perspectives into political and scientific climate discussion brings them to life, reminding us that decisions made at political summits like COPs amount to decisions about Pacific Islanders’ lives and livelihoods.

Connecting With Audiences

When Rebekah White, editor at New Zealand Geographic, imagines climate reporting in a decade, she isn’t optimistic about lessening the class divide between mainstream media’s primary audiences and those most affected.

I suspect that it’s going to be much the same as today. A bunch of journalists trying to make something that predominantly affects under-privileged people relevant to the middle-class people who are the main consumers of their media.

Still, climate connects with our daily lives and our choices all the time, whether we acknowledge it or not. Stories about air pollution, house insurance, banking, living in poverty, e-scooters or the best vegan restaurants all have climate angles.

A 2019 Stuff survey garnered 15,248 responses and showed audiences were keen for more accessible and relatable climate coverage.

They asked for more coverage of the impacts of their lifestyle and political choices, reporting that holds politicians and industry to account and more emphasis on the farming sector, especially about how it is adapting.

They were also keen on more forecasting of future climate impacts, as well as hopeful and solutions-based stories.

COVID-19 need not be a deterrent to climate coverage. Globally, around two in three people think climate change is an emergency, even during the pandemic.

Canadian analysis shows while COVID-19 can compete with climate stories within a finite pool of audience attention, it also opens up opportunities to link the two. And a US study shows that while the amount of climate coverage dropped off during the early months of the pandemic, page views on climate stories didn’t.

Off the back of the momentum generated by COP26, it’s incumbent on all of Aotearoa’s newsrooms to ensure climate remains on the news agenda.

Áine Kelly-Costello, , University of Gothenburg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia’s agriculture sector sorely needs more insights from First Nations people. Here’s how we get there

Much of the debate on Indigenous agriculture in Australia has focused on a contested pre-colonial definition as to whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people deserve the English title of “farmer”.

However this view stifles the real story of Indigenous engagement in Western agriculture. It also fails to recognise the inherent need for Indigenous peoples’ involvement in the sector.

In 2020, the Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment conducted a series of roundtables to develop the National Agriculture Workforce Strategy.

The strategy noted the urgency of transforming the agricultural workforce into a “complex, modern, sophisticated sector”.

There is no doubt the agricultural workforce is changing.

However, there’s a worryingly unsophisticated understanding of workforce diversity within the sector – especially in terms of Indigenous involvement in agriculture.

Agriculture Must Connect With Indigenous People

There is a critical and overdue need for agriculture to connect with Indigenous people.

This is best demonstrated through the Indigenous land holdings across the nation.

The Guardian Australia recently noted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people own up to 54.17% of Australia’s landmass.

This is comparable to the National Indigenous Australians Agency estimate of Indigenous land ownership, which puts the figure at around 40%.

This extensive landholding by First Nations people is an essential component of the continued practice of agriculture in Australia. But despite Indigenous people owning these vast areas of land, only 1% of the agricultural workforce identify as Indigenous.

This rate is unacceptably low, given 3.3% of Australia’s population more broadly identify as Indigenous.

The National Agriculture Workforce Strategy identifies solutions to this lack of Indigenous workforce. Solutions such as promoting Indigenous people in agriculture through marketing, and fostering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership in this sector.

However, these proposed strategies fail to acknowledge broader concerns about inadequate Indigenous representation in the sector.

Better Data And A Pipeline Of Indigenous Graduates

To date, there has been no concerted effort across the agriculture sector to understand the size and scale of current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander involvement, nor their agricultural production.

For example, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Agriculture Census does not provide the opportunity for farmers to identify as Indigenous. Agriculture research and development corporations usually don’t collect these data, either.

There are also pipeline issues regarding Indigenous involvement in the sector. A recent study of 15 years of data by one of us (James Pratley) demonstrated universities had a low attraction and retention rate for Indigenous students. Fewer than five Indigenous students graduate in agriculture across Australia each year.

Despite the lack of university graduates, Australia has a growing Indigenous youth demographic, which could contribute to a much-needed workforce in future.

To encourage Indigenous people to enter agriculture, we need to show Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people belong in the sector. They need to feel welcome in our universities and TAFEs and we must better support those entering the industry.

Charles Sturt University has developed an Indigenous agriculture initiative drawing attention to the lack of Indigenous agriculture graduates. It also provides Indigenous students scholarships to study agriculture and/or do postgraduate research on aspects of Indigenous agriculture.

This provides Indigenous people with a pathway into agricultural industries and shows Indigenous people what opportunities exist.

Attracting And Retaining Indigenous Talent

It’s also imperative larger agricultural companies develop Reconciliation Action Plans (detailed, long-term strategies to meaningfully advance reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people within an organisation). Big firms must also start or renew their efforts towards building more diverse workforces and supply chains.

Over 1,100 Australian organisations have followed this path.

Agricultural companies such as Incitec Pivot, OBE Organics and Bayer have recently developed Reconciliation Action Plans. Other agricultural businesses and industries need to ensure their houses are in order too.

Reconciliation Action Plans provide a pathway for organisations to advance reconciliation across their business. This can be done through identified actions such as increasing Indigenous staff and initiatives for staff. Organisations are accountable for these actions through the Reconciliation Action Plan they develop.

As these Reconciliation Action Plans mature, employers in the agricultural sector will seek out Indigenous talent to meet targets and to crucially provide new perspectives.

Indigenous people’s input and talent is vital to modernising the agricultural sector. There is a huge opportunity to build employment pipelines from schools through universities into the broader agrifood industry.

A clear understanding of the size and scale of current Indigenous agricultural contributions is sorely needed.

Industry leaders who work to establish and grow the talent pipelines and develop Reconciliation Action Plans will reap the rewards.

Joshua Gilbert, Researcher (Indigenous Policy) Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research and Higher Degree Research Student at Charles Sturt University, University of Technology Sydney and James Pratley, Research Professor of Agriculture, Charles Sturt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Liquid marbles: how this tiny, emerging technology could solve carbon capture and storage problems

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been touted, again and again, as one of the critical technologies that could help Australia reach its climate targets, and features heavily in the federal government’s plan for net-zero emissions by 2050.

CCS is generally when emissions are captured at the source, such as from a coal-fired power station, trucked to a remote location and stored underground.

But critics say investing in CCS means betting on technology that’s not yet proven to work at scale. Indeed, technology-wise, the design of effective carbon-capturing materials, both solid and liquid, has historically been a challenging task.

So could it ever be a viable solution to the fossil fuel industry’s carbon dioxide emissions?

Emerging overseas research shows “liquid marbles” – tiny droplets coated with nanoparticles – could possibly address current challenges in materials used to capture carbon. And our modelling research, published yesterday, brings us a big step closer to making this futuristic technology a reality.

Issues With Carbon Capture

Under its Technology Investment Roadmap, the Morrison government considers CCS a priority low-emissions technology, and is investing A$300 million over ten years to develop it.

But the efficacy and efficiency of CCS has long been controversial due to its high-operational costs and scaling-up issues for a wider application.

An ongoing problem, more specifically, is the effectiveness of materials used to capture the CO₂, such as absorbents. One example is called “amine scrubbing”, a method used since 1930 to separate, for instance, CO₂ from natural gas and hydrogen.

The problems with amine scrubbing include its high costs, corrosion-related issues and high losses in materials and energy. Liquid marbles can overcome some of these challenges.

This technology can be almost invisible to the naked eye, with some marbles under 1 millimetre in diameter. The liquid it holds – most commonly water or alcohol – is on the scale of microlitres (a microlitre is one thousandth of a millilitre).

The marbles have an outer layer of nanoparticles that form a flexible and porous shell, preventing the liquid within from leaking out. Thanks to this armour, they can behave like flexible, stretchable and soft solids, with a liquid core.

What Do Marbles Have To Do With CCS?

Liquid marbles have many unique abilities: they can float, they roll smoothly, and they can be stacked on top of each other.

Other desirable properties include resistance to contamination, low-friction and flexible manipulation, making them appealing for applications such as gas capture, drug delivery and even as miniature bio-reactors.

In the context of CO₂ capture, their ability to selectively interact with gases, liquids and solids is most crucial. A key advantage of using liquid marbles is their size and shape, because thousands of spherical particles only millimetres in size can directly be installed in large reactors.

Gas from the reactor hits the marbles, where it clings to the nanoparticle outer shell (in a process called “adsorption”). The gas then reacts with the liquid within, separating the CO₂ and capturing it inside the marble. Later, we can take out this CO₂ and store it underground, and then recycle the liquid for future processing.

This process can be a more time and cost-efficient way of capturing CO₂ due to, for example, the liquid (and potentially solid) recycling, as well as the marbles’ high mechanical strength, reactivity, sorption rates and long-term stability.

So What’s Stopping Us?

Despite recent progress, many properties of liquid marbles remain elusive. What’s more, the only way to test liquid marbles is currently through physical experiments conducted in a laboratory.

Physical experiments have their limitations, such as the difficulty to measure the surface tension and surface area, which are important indicators of the marble’s reactivity and stability.

In this context, our new computational modelling can improve our understanding of these properties, and can help overcome the use of costly and time-intensive experiment-only procedures.

Another challenge is developing practical, rigorous and large-scale approaches to manipulate liquid marble arrays within the reactor. Further computational modelling we’re currently working on will aim to analyse the three-dimensional changes in the shapes and dynamics of liquid marbles, with better convenience and accuracy.

This will open up new horizons for a myriad of engineering applications, including CO₂ capture.

Beyond Carbon Capture

Research on liquid marbles started off as just an inquisitive topic around 20 years ago and, since then, ongoing research has made it a sought-after platform with applications beyond carbon capture.

This cutting-edge technology could not only change how we solve climate problems, but environmental and medical problems, too.

Magnetic liquid marbles, for example, have demonstrated their potential in biomedical procedures, such as drug delivery, due to their ability to be opened and closed using magnets outside the body. Other applications of liquid marbles include gas sensing, acidity sensing and pollution detection.

With more modelling and experiments, the next logical step would be to scale up this technology for mainstream use.

Charith Rathnayaka, Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast; Emilie Sauret, Professor, Queensland University of Technology; Nam-Trung Nguyen, Professor and Director of Queensland Micro- and Nanotechnology Centre, Griffith University, and Yuantong Gu, Professor, Mechanical Systems and Asset Management, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How much meat do we eat? New figures show 6 countries have hit their peak

Eating meat comes with an enormous environmental footprint, with food systems responsible for an estimated 34% of global emissions. And yet, in most countries, meat consumption is continuing to rise.

Our new study investigated whether meat consumption increases as income increases. We specifically tested if there’s a point at which improvements in GDP per capita are no longer associated with greater meat consumption. In other words, in a world of increasing GDP, when might meat consumption peak?

After analysing data for 35 countries, we identified such a tipping point at around US$40,000 (A$57,000) of GDP per capita. Only six of the 35 countries, however, had reached this, with other countries continuing on an increasing trajectory.

Overall, we found each person worldwide ate, on average, 4.5 kilograms more meat per year in 2019 than in 2000. While we can’t say what’s behind the general choice to eat more meat, our study identifies some insightful trends.

The Problem With Meat

Emissions from meat production are largely due to land clearing, including deforestation, to create more pasture and grow feed for livestock.

To put it into perspective, human settlements occupy only 1% of the planet’s landmass, while livestock grazing and feed production use 27%. Compare this to 7% used for crop production for direct human consumption, and 26% occupied by forests.

As a result, a recent UK study found a vegetarian diet produces 59% less emissions than a non-vegetarian one. And interestingly, it found that the average diet for men in the UK had 41% more emissions than that of women, because of their greater intake of meat and other animal-based products.

Despite the growing evidence and awareness of the climate impact of our diets, we found the average amount of meat – beef, poultry, pork and sheep – a person ate each year increased from 29.5kg in 2000 to 34kg in 2019.

Poultry is the most popular option (14.7kg), followed by pork (11.1kg) and beef (6.4kg).

Poultry On The Rise

Nearly all countries studied (30 of 35) experienced a steady increase in annual per capita poultry consumption between 2000 and 2019. It doubled in 13 countries, with more than 20kg eaten each year in Peru, Russia and Malaysia.

In addition to the poultry industry’s long-term focus on creating cheap and convenient food, many western consumers are now replacing beef with poultry. One possible reason is because of its smaller environmental footprint: chickens require less land and generate much lower emissions than cattle.

However, this comes at a price. It exposes the world, including Australia, to new virus outbreaks such as the bird flu, and results in the overuse of antibiotics in farm animals. This could lead to antimicrobial resistance developing, and the loss of antibiotics to treat human bacterial infections.

Industrial farming practices have added further pressures, with animals raised in confined spaces where they’re easily exposed to pathogens, viruses and stress, making them more prone to disease.

We have seen similar impacts in China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of pork. Our analysis revealed major dietary fluctuations, such as when pork consumption dropped substantially in 2007 after prices increased by over 50%, following outbreaks of swine influenza and SARS outbreaks in humans at the time.

Which Countries Have Reached Peak Meat?

While meat consumption increased around the world on average, taking a closer look at individual countries reveals a more complicated story.

Of the 35 countries we studied, 26 had a clear correlation between GDP growth and meat consumption levels. For the remaining nine, there was no such a correlation, while six appeared to have reached a meat consumption peak: New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Paraguay, Nigeria and Ethiopia. The reasons for this span both sides of the economic wealth spectrum.

The three western countries may have reduced meat consumption because of conscious preferences for plant-based foods, as the health and environmental benefits become more well known. Most notably, people in New Zealand decreased their average consumption from 86.7kg in 2000 to 75.2kg in 2019.

For the remaining three countries, reaching the peak probably wasn’t voluntary, but related to economic downturn, weather calamities and virus outbreaks. In Paraguay, for example, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2011 resulted in cattle slaughter.

Australia continues to be one of the world’s top meat-eating countries, with an annual consumption of 89.6kg per capita in 2019, up from 88.2kg per capita in 2000. Most of this was poultry.

Outdoor livestock are extremely vulnerable to extreme weather events, such as droughts, heat waves and floods. This is one reason the share of beef in Australia’s meat exports decreased by 15%, due to weather extremes and drought during 2019. Beef consumption in Australia still remains high in relative terms.

Meat Was Left Out Of Climate Talks

Meat consumption was largely left out of the debates at the international climate change summit in Glasgow, Scotland, last month. Our study makes it clear this omission is unacceptable.

The food we eat is a personal choice, but it needs to be an informed personal choice. The climate, environmental and health and welfare implications of our food choices require awareness and role setting not only by climate warriors such as activist Greta Thunberg, but also by policy leaders.

There were two positive developments at the climate summit: the agreement to put a stop to deforestation (which was joined by Australia) and the collective pledges to reduce the levels of methane (which Australia did not join).

The relationships between deforestation and livestock, and between methane emissions and livestock, must be made transparent. Otherwise, it will be difficult to expect people to shift their food preferences towards more plant-based meals.

The change could start with what we put on our plates this holiday season.

Diana Bogueva, Team Manager/ Adjunct Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Sydney; Clare Whitton, , Curtin University; Clive Phillips, Former Foundation Professor of Animal Welfare, University of Queensland, Curtin University, and Dora Marinova, Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How to enjoy a digital detox over Christmas

It is not surprising that many of us have been suffering from digital overload during the pandemic, and taking care of our “digital wellbeing” has become a common theme. Social media, online shopping, making reservations, and even necessary chores like paying bills have meant that technology has pervaded every aspect of our lives.

Whether home schooling or working from home, our mobile phones have never been far from our side. We’ve even embraced video communication technology for keeping in touch with friends and loved ones, whether they live locally or thousands of miles away.

To be frank, it can be very hard to imagine how we can just decide to cut it off. And the constant pressure to always be available – and reply immediately – can be overwhelming.

But with Christmas coming, you may be planning to take a break from work and perhaps even go on holiday. So, why not take the opportunity to have a break from technology and try a digital detox?

In our new work we investigated different ways to reduce tech use on holiday. Here’s what we discovered.

1. Lock It Away

By far the most efficient way to get the most out of the experience is to lock your phone, laptop and tablets away. Of course, you have the option to turn on “do not disturb” mode, or selectively turn off notifications on some apps. However, it is quite a task to turn off notifications for certain groups of apps, and with your phone still in your pocket there’s always an excuse to check Facebook or Instagram, to reply to an email, or upload a photo. This approach means you could still scroll through your phone, and muscle memory means you can open apps without even realising it.

You could consider limiting your phone usage time. For example, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. But our study found that soon you would spend much longer without realising it and find more excuses to be online.

So, the best solution is to go cold turkey and lock your phone in a box or hide it somewhere. This removes the challenges of turning off notifications or limiting your phone time.

At first it might be a bit overwhelming. But after a while you will start to feel the benefits, and will hopefully feel more liberated, freer, or like a weight has been lifted.. You may even find that you want to stay disconnected for longer.

2. Don’t Forget To Plan

It’s very difficult not to unwind in the countryside. There, you don’t need to worry about navigating city streets and the overwhelming digitalised infrastructure of cities (such as apps for booking restaurants, cinema tickets and public transport). So if you can get away, it will make the detox feel much more natural.

But prior planning is essential. Turn on your out-of-office message, let your colleagues, clients and boss know that you are away. Inform your loved ones and friends so you won’t be stressed about them trying to reach you.

You should also print booking confirmations and train, plane and other travel tickets – and get a paper map so you can leave your digital devices behind. If you find the preparation too much of a fuss, you can book your experience with a digital detox holiday provider who will help with the planning and adjustment to a week or two without sensory overload.

3. Find The Positives

As technology is considered the “default” in our lives, you might experience some difficulties disconnecting cold turkey from a world where we are connected 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

At first, disconnecting might throw up some considerable emotional challenges – such as feeling stressed, anxious or frustrated.

We suggest trying to re-frame the struggles in your mind as positive by looking at the experiences as rewards rather than punishments. For example, not being able to use digital apps or websites to navigate around and find highly-rated restaurants can be frustrating – but it can also create a sense of excitement from having the opportunity to explore the unknown, experience unexpected encounters, or master new skills in using paper maps and perhaps even a compass.

You might find hidden gems or more opportunities to talk to locals.

Yes, you won’t be able to share your experience instantly on social media, but you will have more quality time with your companions rather than checking likes and replying to comments on your posts.

The digital detox experience opens up opportunities to reconnect with long forgotten nostalgic childhood memories, and the old times you probably haven’t thought about for a long time. Sometimes humming an old tune or simply playing some childhood games can be enough to take you back.

4. Reflection

The most important tip is to reflect on the digital detox experience. Everyone has their own unique relationship with technology, and you would benefit greatly from finding the best way to achieve a healthier relationship with it. Try to use the experience as an opportunity to reflect on how the digital detox makes you feel, and what would you like to do after returning to the busy connected world to help prevent digital overload from setting in again.

Brad McKenna, Associate Professor in Information Systems, University of East Anglia and Wenjie Cai, Senior Lecturer in Tourism and Hospitality, University of Greenwich

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Private space stations are coming. Will they be better than their predecessors?

A new era of space stations is about to kick off. NASA has announced three commercial space station proposals for development, joining an earlier proposal by Axiom Space.

These proposals are the first attempts to create places for humans to live and work in space outside the framework of government space agencies. They’re part of what has been called “Space 4.0”, where space technology is driven by commercial opportunities. Many believe this is what it will take to get humans to Mars and beyond.

There are currently two occupied space stations in low Earth orbit (less than 2,000km above Earth’s surface), both belonging to space agencies. The International Space Station (ISS) has been occupied since November 2000 with a typical population of seven crew members. The first module of the Chinese station Tiangong was launched in April 2021, and is intermittently occupied by three crew.

The ISS, however, is slated to retire at the end of the decade, after nearly 30 years in orbit. It has been an important symbol of international cooperation following the “space race” rivalry of the Cold War, and the first truly long-term space habitat.

Plans for multiple private space stations represent a major shift in how space will be used. But will these stations change the way people live in space, or replicate the traditions of earlier space habitats?

Commercialising Life In Space

The change is driven by NASA’s support for commercialising space. This emphasis really started about a decade ago with the development of private cargo services to supply the ISS, like SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon, and private vehicles to deliver astronauts to orbit and the Moon, such as SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, Boeing’s Starliner, and Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsules.

Start-up Axiom Space was awarded a $140 million contract by NASA in February 2020 for a private module to be attached to the ISS. Axiom announced Philippe Starck will design a luxurious interior.

Starck compares it to “a nest, a comfortable and friendly egg”. There’s also a huge viewing area with two-metre-high windows for tourists to look out at Earth and space.

The first module is due to be delivered to the ISS in 2024 or 2025, with others following each year. By the time the ISS is decommissioned around 2030, Axiom’s modules will become a free-flying station.

Axiom has signed a contract with French-Italian contractor Thales Alenia Space, which built close to 50% of the ISS’s habitable volume for NASA and the European Space Agency, to produce its habitat.

But there’s more. Three other groups have just been selected for the first phase of NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations competition to build free-flying space stations to replace ISS.

First, a group composed of Nanoracks, Voyager Space, and Lockheed Martin proposed a station called Starlab to provide research, manufacturing, and tourism opportunities. This was almost immediately followed by a competing project called Orbital Reef, by Blue Origin, Sierra Space, and Boeing. A third project, by Northrop Grumman, will be made of modules based on its existing Cygnus cargo vehicle.

But How Are Space Stations Actually Used?

Less clear is whether the private space stations will be more liveable than earlier generations of space stations, like Salyut, Mir, and ISS.

Typically, older space stations were designed to meet engineering constraints rather than starting with crew comfort. What lessons have been learned to make life better in space?

Until recently, there was little research that focused on the lived experience of astronauts on space stations. That’s where social science approaches, such as the ones we are using in the International Space Station Archaeological Project, come in.

Since 2015, we have developed new, data-driven understandings of how ISS crew adapt to life in a context of confinement, isolation, and microgravity. We observe and measure their interactions with built spaces and the objects surrounding them. What are the patterns of usage of different spaces and items?

Asking these kinds of questions reveals information never considered in habitat design before. It turns out the crew don’t necessarily use the spaces inside the ISS the way they were designed - for example, they personalise different areas with visual displays of items that reflect their beliefs, interests, and identity.

The crew also doesn’t use all spaces inside ISS equally. People from different genders, nationalities, and space agencies appear in some modules more than others among the 16 that make up the station. These patterns are related to the way work is divided up between crews and agencies, as well as the layout of the modules themselves.

One big challenge of life in orbit is the lack of gravity. Objects like handrails, Velcro, bungee cords, and resealable plastic bags act as “gravity surrogates” by fixing objects in place while everything else floats around. Our research is mapping how crew adapt these gravity surrogates to make their activities more efficient, and how the placement of the surrogates changes the way different spaces are used.

Society And Culture In Space

Even with added luxury features like large windows, designers and engineers have a long way to go to make space stations efficient, comfortable, and welcoming, especially for the predicted space tourism market.

The plans for privately-owned and -operated space stations are undeniably ambitious and could transform how humans live in this environment. But it’s likely that the companies working on them don’t yet know what they don’t know about how people actually use space habitats.

Only by turning towards new kinds of questions and research from a social and cultural perspective will they be able to make real changes that can improve mission success and crew well-being.

Justin St. P. Walsh, Associate professor of art history and archaeology, Chapman University and Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

80 years on, the attack on Pearl Harbour offers lessons for today

“Pacific Ablaze” read Australian papers on December 8 1941, as the world learned about the monumental events that unfolded only hours before. Japan had simultaneously declared war against the United States and Great Britain, then immediately launched stunning attacks spanning 6,400 kilometres (and the international date line) from Singapore to Hong Kong, Malaya, Bangkok, Guam and the Philippines.

The most iconic attack was on Pearl Harbour. Within the US territory of Hawaii (where it was still December 7), Japanese forces decimated the immense naval base, drawing the US into the second world war that had begun in 1939.

The attack opened the war’s Pacific theatre, spanning the entire ocean. It brought untold devastation, loss and change to the Pacific’s remotest islands and its densest population centres.

Eighty years on, the prodigious history triggered on the “day which will live in infamy” is being revived in increasingly ominous ways.

Japan’s opening attacks triggered a cascading crisis of events. After the December 7 and 8 attacks, Australians were told that halting Japan’s southward expansion “all depends on Singapore”. Singapore fell in a matter of days, on February 15 1942. Prime Minister John Curtin described this event as “Australia’s Dunkirk”, leaving it wide open to invasion. New Guinea was then attacked on February 16.

Three days later, the war came to Australia’s mainland. Darwin was bombed for the first time on February 19, killing more than 230 people and destroying infrastructure.

Bombing raids across northern Australia followed, as did acute fears of Japanese submarine attacks along the industrial and heavily populated east coast. These fears were realised with attacks in Sydney Harbour in May and Newcastle in June 1942.

The arrival of American troops reversed Australia’s desperate situation. The first of nearly 1 million who rotated through Australia (then with a population of 7 million) began arriving in December 1941.

In the wake of the Pacific-wide attacks of December 7 and 8, Curtin recognised Australia’s grave defence vulnerabilities premised on deeply flawed British imperial plans. He declared “Australia looks to America” as its only hope against invasion.

The arrival of American troops ensured Australian soil would not be the battleground for defeating Japan. Instead, Pacific islands from the Alaska Territory’s Aleutian Islands, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Australia’s colonies of Papua and New Guinea to Japan’s former mandated territories colonies, like the Northern Marianas, saw four years of slaughter.

The blood-letting finally ended with the war’s greatest mass-casualty events of all, the US atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945.

Throughout the war, Australia (first Melbourne and then Brisbane) served as America’s headquarters for prosecuting the war against Japan. The countless bonds forged in war were only solidified after the war’s end with the rapid escalation of the Cold War and the outbreak of proxy wars in the Pacific region involving the US and its allies against Communist Russia and China. These were most notably in Korea (1950-1953) and then Vietnam (1965-1975).

Throughout the postwar era, the 1951 ANZUS Treaty served as the basis for the US and Australian relationship. During these decades, the Pacific islands faded into the geopolitical background, though they were littered with the war’s still deadly refuse. But China’s growing influence from the mid-2000s slowly reignited Australian and US attention to the Pacific Islands.

In 2021 we have seen an intense recalibration of the US-Australia relationship. The surprise September 2021 announcement of the AUKUS agreement between the US, Australia and the UK has led to an avalanche of debate about northern attacks on Australia from an Asian power (this time China), submarines and the Pacific’s nuclear legacies.

Then, on November 29 2021, the US Defence Department announced in its global posture review that it will concentrate military activities and infrastructure in Australia and select Pacific Islands.

There’s no question the US and the UK are returning to the Pacific at levels not seen since the second world war. The AUKUS agreement, initiated by the Morrison government, encapsulates the escalating tensions due to China’s troubling acts. These include its rhetorical and trade war with Australia, aggressions towards Taiwan, military expansion in the South China Sea and its deepening influence in the Pacific islands as a suspected veiled means to project its military power.

Australia’s prime minister and, most recently, defence minister have conjured up the Pacific War, saying “we live in the echoes of the 1930s”, citing “mistakes” that led to the war.

China has lashed back, criticising the Australian government for super-charging fears that history is repeating at a terrifying scale and pace.

The 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbour attack is an opportune moment to take stock and think about some lessons of history. Here are some to consider.

Australia, the US and Britain were all woefully unprepared for Japan’s belligerence from late 1941. Securing Australia’s defences now is sensible, if not overdue.

However, addressing this security need does not have to be accompanied by the beating of war drums or the fracturing of other vital alliances, as with the Morrison government’s diplomatic “own goal” with France over the submarine deal scuttled by the AUKUS agreement. With AUKUS, the Biden administration got a taste of Australia taking the diplomatic lead – an enraged France withdrew its US ambassador for the first time in history. One of the vital mistakes that led to war was the failure of diplomacy.

The Pacific war was ruinous. It caused unimaginable suffering to Japan’s populace both in a defeated Japan and living around the Pacific region. Immediately after Pearl Harbour, Japanese people were “rounded up” into internment camps and their personal assets stripped.

In the case of Hawaii, where one-quarter of the population in 1941 was of Japanese descent, they lived under harsh military law. Pacific Islanders, whose islands were war fronts, also suffered immeasurably from the conflict.

Australian and American soldiers and their families also sustained terrible losses. For many who survived the war, its horrors never ceased.

For China, the war began years before 1941, in the 1930s, with Japanese aggression and a crushing invasion epitomised by searing events, like the 1937 Rape of Nanking.

The brutality and devastation sparked by the Pearl Harbour attacks should not fade from the minds of politicians from all sides. Eighty years on, there remain powerful lessons to be learned.

Patricia A. O'Brien, Visiting Fellow, Department of Pacific Affairs, Australian National University; Adjunct Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC; Adjunct Professor, Asian Studies Program, Georgetown University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art shows how our local differences demand curiosity and care

Review: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art

The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art has earned its rightful place in Australia’s cultural calendar for the ambitious scope of its artistic programming, highlighting the diversity and range of artistic practices across the Asia Pacific region. This 10th triennial, ATP10, features 150 artists and collectives from 30 countries.

The curatorial gambit characterising the triennial since its inception in 1993 has always been highly complex: how to give representation to the region’s complexity, without homogenising or flattening cultural differences?

To answer this question, I would point to two interconnected concerns or themes that distinguish APT10: an emphasis on First Nations’ perspectives and a gentle excavation of underexamined or invisible histories.

Cross-Cultural Conversations

The extraordinary Yolngu/Macassan Project draws attention to the richness of the cultural, social, and spiritual connections between the Macassan sailors from southern Sulawesi in Indonesia and the Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land.

For hundreds of years, this pre-colonial relationship was based on the Macassan trading tamarind in exchange for sea cucumbers (trepang), until the practice was banned in the early 1900s. The project includes a Yolngu-crafted Macassan sail, bark paintings and pottery shards and underscores the enduring influence of the Macassan’s visits on the Yolngu people.

Co-curated by Abdi Karya and Diane Moon, the richness of the Yolngu/Macassan Project accentuates the crucial educational role played by APT10: by investing in research and collaboration, meaningful cross-cultural conversations are reignited and brought to the attention of broader audiences.

Another important curatorial collaboration is Between Earth and Sky: Indigenous Art from Taiwan. Co-curated by Paiwan artist Etan Pavavalung and Makatao curator Manray Hsu, eight Indigenous artists from Taiwan work across mediums to retrieve cultural techniques and criticise the corrosive effects of colonisation.

For over two decades, Yuma Taru has driven the revival of Atayal weaving and dyeing. Seeking guidance from her grandmother and Tribal Elders, Taru established a collective of local women dedicated to preserving traditional weaving practices and techniques.

The spiral of life – the tongue of the cloth (yan pala na hmali) – a mutual dialogue (2021) is a textile-based installation hung from the ceiling and gives visible representation to the Atayal oral language.

According to the Atayal Elders, words must be akin to the cloth’s softness, so thoughts can be conveyed without injury or damage to the listener.

Ideas Of Scale

Themes of migration and displacement are taken up by Suva-born, Melbourne raised Salote Tawale. Tawale has exploited the scale of GOMA’s dramatic central gallery space by installing a large bamboo raft No location (2021).

The raft was inspired by a traditional Fijian watercraft, bilibili, Tawale remembers seeing in the Fiji Museum in Suva as a child. The vessel becomes a metaphor for moving between cultures and the threat of sea-level rise activated by climate change.

Sitting adjacent is Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid’s large-scale installation In Lieu of What Was (2019). Kuwait’s water consumption is amongst the highest in the world, however, it has no rivers and so Kuwait relies on desalination plants and the importation of water.

Farid’s sand-coloured sculptures stand desolately in the gallery space. It is as if they have been excavated from the future as archival “relics” from when the Gulf region still had access to water.

The impressiveness of scale is also at play in Balinese artist I Made Djirna’s installation Kita (2021). Like strings of enormous beads, hundreds of pumice stones hang from the ceiling, evoking an immersive jungle-like experience.

With its textured and layered cascading pumice stones (traces of the island’s volcanic activity), coconut husks and terracotta masks, the spectator’s attention is focused on the installation’s physical and material presence.

Curiosity And Care

Cambodian artist Svay Sareth spent his childhood in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodia border during the devastating war-ravaged years of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79). Sareth has taken up durational performance as a metaphor for Cambodia’s traumatic and violent history.

In the video work Mon Boulet (2011), Sareth wheeled an enormous 80-kilogram metal ball for approximately 250 kilometres. He had no provisions, prompting chance encounters and interactions for obtaining food, water, and shelter with many people over the course of his six-day journey.

An adjacent cinema series Under the Radar highlights film making from across Asia and the Pacific. Combined with a comprehensive children’s program, APT10 promises to provide a range of experiences drawn from both within and around the region over the summer months ahead.

While the global pandemic grinds on in the background, APT10 feels fresh, forward looking and optimistic. After almost two years of closed and restricted borders, the exhibition delivers a poignant reminder: we are all globally interdependent, however, our local differences demand both our curiosity and care.

APT10 is showing at QAGOMA until April 25 2022.

Chari Larsson, Senior Lecturer of art history, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Even in the colourful world of video games, most players demand historical accuracy

Some of the most popular video game series are those that use historical settings, and research has revealed players have extremely high standards when it comes to the accuracy of the history presented.

We surveyed players of the Assassin’s Creed series, one of the most famous video game series to use historical settings, to understand how important accurate depictions of history in video games were for players.

The Assassin’s Creed series depicts a millennia-old conflict between the secret Assassin Brotherhood and Templar Order. In the majority of games, the player takes control of a historical assassin in a historical setting, but with cuts to a modern-day, science-fiction framing story.

The games are known and loved for their historical tourism appeal. The series has allowed players to explore Cleopatra’s Egypt, the Middle East during the Third Crusade and the Italian Renaissance among other settings.

And players expect to see due diligence done when it comes to reflecting real-life historical facts and settings.

Respecting History In Gaming

58% of players felt video game developers should minimise changes to the historical record. Another 21% felt it depended on the game. For example, some respondents accepted developers could and should make changes for alternate history or fantasy games.

One noted, “unless a major part of the gameplay is creating an alternative history, or there’s a major sci-fi/fantasy element making the historical accuracy unimportant, developers should strive to make their games as accurate as possible”.

In general, respondents felt games needed to be fun and entertaining, so changes to history should be made to ensure that. Otherwise, the history developers were using should be respected.

As another respondent put it, “the developers should stay as close as possible [to historical fact] unless doing so would hinder the gameplay or story.”

Some respondents even thought changes to the historical record should be disclosed to players in some way.

Accuracy In Gaming

Video games are one of the newer popular entertainment media but are sometimes still thought of as an industry for adolescents, despite the average age of players in Australia being 35.

Our research shows players have high expectations when it comes to the accuracy of information being presented to them.

With over three billion worldwide players, video games are how a lot of people are being exposed to history.

And they are very influential in shaping players views about history. Video games are interactive which means their players can actively engage with historical events and people and explore historical worlds.

Some of the most popular and long-running video game series, such as Assassin’s Creed, Total War, and Civilization use historical settings as a key part of the game’s plot and appeal. For example, the Assassin’s Creed series alone has sold more than 150 million copies since 2007.

Introducing Audiences To History

It used to be that film was the most influential media for exposing audiences to history. Thanks to the popularity and interactivity of video games, this has shifted somewhat.

Video game developers have embraced historical accuracy when creating their games. For example, during the development of L.A Noire, a film-noire inspired game set in Los Angeles in 1947, over 180,000 sources including newspaper articles, photographs, and police records were examined to ensure the city was recreated accurately.

The Assassin’s Creed series itself is also well-known for hiring historians and academics as consultants and recreating detailed versions of historical cities for its games.

For Assassin’s Creed Unity, set in Revolutionary Paris, developers consulted over 150 maps of the city and spent two years modelling Notre Dame. This even involved tweaking individual bricks and consulting historians to establish which paintings were on display.

The audience hunger for this sort of rigorous research and details in games has created opportunity for video game developers and companies.

Developers can add their use of history to their marketing. Branded podcasts, social media, tie-in books and website content can explore the research developers have undertaken. They can also present information about the actual history and explain why changes were made.

The popular History Respawned podcast, which explores the history presented in popular video games, is one model the industry can use. Another is the in-game historical encyclopaedia the Assassin’s Creed series features, and other games could use.

Video games also regularly offer high-priced collector and limited editions with statues, soundtracks and artbooks included, and these could be another avenue for providing players with the historical information they want.

Including Historical Inaccuracy

However, what is accurate and what is not is not always obvious.

Notre Dame, as it appears in Assassin’s Creed Unity, features the cathedral’s famed spire. However, historically it wasn’t installed yet, and was added after test players felt the cathedral was inaccurate if it wasn’t featured.

When it comes to making video games with historical settings, developers must carefully choose what accurate and inaccurate aspects they include. Sometimes, making a game that matches what a player believes is authentic to the time period actually requires inserting inaccurate aspects.

And, of course, a game has to be fun. The ship-to-ship combat in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, set during the Golden Age of Piracy, is much, much faster than actual naval battles and features tactics real-life pirates would never use. And yet Black Flag is one of the most beloved games of the series.

Developers have a tricky paradox to navigate. To give the players what they want, they sometimes have to give them what it appears they do not want.

Jacqueline Burgess, Associate Lecturer in International Business, University of the Sunshine Coast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Friday essay: Chanel’s complex legacy

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, friend of artist Jean Cocteau and lover of musician Igor Stravinsky, transformed women’s fashion across the world. Pablo Picasso said of her: “Chanel is the woman with the most sense in Europe”. Chanel’s fashion vision transformed both women’s appearances and definitions of luxury for the 20th century.

How did she pull this off, what is the continuing attraction, and how do we recognise her complex background, difficult choices and ongoing legacy?

With the opening of a new show, Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto, at the National Gallery of Victoria, curated by Paris fashion museum the Galliera (supplemented with works drawn from the NGV’s collection), Chanel’s life and work are in the spotlight once more.

Who Was Coco Chanel?

Coco Chanel was born in 1883 in Saumur, France, the illegitimate daughter of a street vendor, who struggled to raise her. She lived for a time with nuns, whose white linen and fine sewing influenced her later approach to good dressing.

Chanel began her life as a singer in cabarets, where she sang a tune that gave her the nickname “Coco”. She took up a series of lovers, not unusual for struggling women in that time, which gave her the capital to become a milliner, an occupation requiring modest investment and little space to set up.

In a foretaste of her later work with serial repetition, Chanel used basic templates, such as the boater or wide brimmed straw hats which she dressed very simply. Her work struck a modern note and was popularised by actresses.

Making The Modern Woman

Chanel opened boutiques at Deauville and Biarritz, fashionable seaside resorts where she observed and wore beach garments made of the wool jersey that she later made her own signature. She took up with wealthy English men who introduced her to hunting dress and the Scottish tweeds that she also transformed into day wear for women.

We associate Chanel with the little black dress of the 1920s, which could be made of wool jersey for day or silk and tulle for evening. A short, tubular garment, it took the world by storm. Vogue called it the “Ford signed Chanel” in 1926, referring to the mass produced and affordable car that also came in only one colour.

The emphasis on the little black dress has distorted Chanel’s output, which always extended to vibrant but tonal colours, and other materials such as lace and satin for evening.

The Little Black Dress Also Came From Somewhere

The First World War brought with it the death of millions of young men, the disruption of succession in the great landed English estates, and the destruction of huge swathes of Europe. Cultural pessimism was common. Out went the lavish, historical styles associated with the robber barons and the Belle Époque.

France had the greatest casualties of WWI – nearly 2 million were dead. Chanel witnessed the collective mourning of thousands of French women dressed in black. She also saw the large numbers of women working in male occupations who suddenly wore uniforms with trousers, external pockets, overalls, and boiler suits.

The 1920s was a time of living for the moment and “experience culture”: sex, sport, travel, and fast-changing fashion. 1920s French women’s fashion was marked by a new engagement with the street and the notion of repetition. The Italian Futurists proposed cancelling fashion altogether. Chanel was ready for this change, even if her approach was more subtle.

In the 20th century the innovative silhouette and cut of clothes became the most important ambition for designers who wished to present new dress fashions. Cubist painters such as Picasso and Braque fractured the body. Their geometries were also adopted in clothing. Chanel both learned from and inspired the Paris modernist avant-gardes. The poet Colette remarked:

Chanel works with all ten fingers, with her nails, the side of her hand, her palm, pins and scissors, on the dress itself, a white mist with long pleats, spattered with flecks of crystal.

Chanel’s approach was modernist in that she was interested in the idea of a template for day-wear. In the late 1920s she made suits with unlined jackets revealing the selvedge (reinforced edge of the piece of fabric) and overstitching on the seaming.

Her monochrome palette which often used black, blue, red, beige and white was the opposite of the oriental sensuality of fashion design before the Great War. Her wide belts referred to both men’s wear and working wear, as did her famous striped matelots. From military dress she used the concept of the jacket’s lining extending to the revers, or lapel facings.

Chanel once noted: “One wears clothes with the shoulders. A dress should hang from the shoulders”. Like her older contemporary Madeleine Vionnet, she created dresses that seemed diaphanous and sculptural simultaneously. Her use of pin tucks created dresses that clung so closely to the body they appeared almost nude.

Her 1920s dresses appear deceptively simple but include skirts pieced together with up to 20 panels. Although she usually cut on the straight grain, Chanel made clever use of fabrics with tensile qualities, such as lace, tulle, jersey, chiffon, georgette, crepe de chine and loosely woven tweeds, blurring the distinction between the flou (dress-making) and the tailleur (tailoring) by applying techniques from each process to the other.

Chanel did not depart from the lines of the body. The focus on the Chanel suit has deflected attention from her evening wear of the 1930s, which is notable for its hyper-feminine effects using lace and sequins and suggestions of the bustle skirts of the 1870s.

Chanel was interested in a playful and conceptual design approach, in which real gems might be intermingled with fakes, and a practical pocket-book bag, first introduced in 1927, could hold everything a woman required for the day. There was no need to flaunt money in materials and craft, but luxury could be expressed in subtle ways that only other women might recognise.

Yet, this was no “democratic” move in any sense of the word. Chanel’s modern luxury was for those “in the know” and it continued to cost a great deal.

Chanel’s Innovative Luxury

Chanel was probably the person who contributed most to redefining luxury in the first half of the twentieth century.

We associate Chanel with the term chic, although this was not her invention. Théophile Gautier, the French journalist and literary critic, used the term in 1864, calling it “a dreadful and bizarre word of modern fabrication”.

With Chanel, chic came to mean an approach to style that was not simply dependent upon money, although money often helps. This explains her use of simple materials, muted colours, and rigid lines. She claimed that she was not interested in diamonds and pearls — many of hers were in fact fine fakes crafted by the jeweller Verdura.

Chanel’s concept of luxury had as its opposite, vulgarity. She was revolted by the approach to luxury connected with the vibrant Ballets Russes of the early 1910s and the associated fashions, perfumes, and household products retailed most notably by the fashion designer Paul Poiret:

The Ballets Russes were stage décor, not couture. I remember only too well saying to someone sitting beside me: “These colours are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black”.

In the case of Chanel, clothes can been seen as dynamic forces that helped produce the “modern woman” – not the other way around, that is to say the women becoming modern and demanding fresh clothes.

Coco Chanel was among those at this time who argued that luxury was not necessarily physically embodied in artefacts: diamonds could therefore be replaced by imitation paste, silk or velvet by a wool jersey.

Chanel was partisan in a titanic struggle between the protectors of elite forms of luxury (today referred to as “metaluxury” or “über luxury”) and the growing middle class comforts and commodities of the time.

Chanel Number 5

Although known as a couturière, Chanel made her fortune from the sale of Chanel Number 5, a very expensive perfume made with the rarest luxury ingredients from the south of France but with the novelty of adding synthetic ingredients.

The base was an Imperial Russian scent whose heaviness was alleviated by the new aldehydes which gave a sharp floral and ylang ylang kick. It was first released in 1922 in its medicinal looking bottle, stripped of all historical association.

Chanel was not the sole author of these ideas regarding a luxurious simplicity. Clearly associated with wider aesthetic minimalism, they appear also in the popular writings of decorator Elsie de Wolfe, who wrote in 1913 that “the woman who wears paste jewels is not so conspicuously wrong as the woman who plasters herself with too many real jewels at the wrong time”.

Luxury And The Right Wing

Chanel’s redefinition of luxury was part of a wider French debate about twentieth century taste and manufactures. One of her great loves was the French illustrator and entrepreneur Paul Iribe, who designed the famous art deco rose motif.

Iribe also ran a pro-nationalist magazine called The Witness (le Témoin) between 1933-35. Only red, white and blue ink, the colours of the French tri-couleur, was used in the printing. Iribe promoted the idea that France was the pre-eminent centre of luxury and criticised modern German and American design and also Jewish business. Iribe depicted Chanel as Marianne – saviour of the French, on one of the covers of The Witness.

Iribe was also behind an intriguing publication, the Defence of Luxury (1932), a printed manifesto that attacked aesthetic modernism, maintaining that France remained the centre of luxury despite the rise of other societies, particularly North America and Germany.

The Défense also had anti-Semitic and anti-cosmopolitan overtones, suggesting an international conspiracy was attempting to drive away the old value system that had created France as the pinnacle of luxury taste and style. Aristocracy and a “pure” French race were required, Iribe argued, in order for luxury manufacturing to continue.

Chanel’s designs, nonetheless, in their focus on craftsmanship, taste, and elite luxury (they were extremely expensive), were both a reaction to the state of affairs Iribe posited and also a confirmation Paris remained the centre of luxury.

Chanel’s own anti-Semitism, not uncommon for high-society elites of the time, came to stand as a shadow over the subtlety of her designs later in life, as did her relationship with high ranking Nazis, including her lover, during the Occupation of Paris.

Many claims, some disputed, have been made about Chanel’s level of collaboration with the Nazis, but she clearly benefited from her highly placed and opportunistic access to powerful people in France and England.

Chanel worked against the Wertheimer family who risked having their businesses Aryanised (sold to non-Jewish owners), partly because she resented the great profits they made from her house due to their earlier stock control. Following the war, enquiries were made into Chanel’s relationship with the Nazis and with the possible support of Winston Churchill (whose English aristocratic friend had been her lover) she retreated to Lausanne in Switzerland.

Chanel’s Comeback

Returning to work in 1954, Chanel surprised everyone with the famous two piece Chanel suit, worn with a co-ordinating blouse. The irony of the template is that it could be modified with trims and details in order to maintain a sense of something fashionable and timeless (out of fashion) simultaneously. The cost of these simple looking clothes is indicated in a 1965 order for Marlene Dietrich: a white day suit cost US$6000, perhaps US$55,000 today.

The controlled and modernist Chanel chromatic was a striking foil to much 1960s fashion, particularly colourful and more revealing styles for women. Chanel herself once said that she would not be surprised if women might start showing their “ass” in the future; the sight of belly buttons and midriffs was enough to horrify her in the 1960s and 1970s.

Chanel would have been very puzzled by our contemporary bust ops and “facework”: she once said: “I can think of nothing more ageing than trying to make oneself look younger”.

Chanel died in 1971 aged 87. Let’s conclude by giving her the last word, in the grumpy attitude typical of many of her pronouncements of the 1960s:

I have dressed the whole world and, today, it goes about naked.

Peter McNeil, Distinguished Professor of Design History, UTS, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Circus Oz is to close after 44 years. They irrevocably changed Australian circus, and brought it to the world

In 1980, I was in London and working at the Roundhouse performing arts centre.

Thelma Holt, the legendary director of the Roundhouse, told me she had booked an Australian circus to perform. She asked me had I heard of them. I said no. I had been in England for a few years, so I was out of touch with what was happening in Australia. I knew though, of some former peers at Flinders, who had formed something called the New Circus. But I had not heard of Circus Oz.

Given I was the only Australian working at the Roundhouse at the time, I was self-conscious about who this group was, and what they would be like. Typical cultural cringe.

Of course, they were a revelation. So joyous, funny, imaginative, talented and witty. I felt so proud to be an Australian. They took something that was intrinsically Australian and showed it to the world. It was a moment in history when expatriate Australians such as myself could feel proud about who we were, and no longer needed to apologise for being lesser beings.

Established in December 1977, Circus Oz showed the world Australia was unique, Australians were capable of doing incredible things, and they had something special to offer on the world stage.

It brought to the stage a model of circus that didn’t exploit animals but joyously celebrated the human form. Outstanding individuals such as Jonno Hawkes, Robyn Laurie, Tim Coldwell, Anni Davey, Sue Broadway and numerous other wonderful performers, designers, musicians and directors were part of this world. Then there were the individuals on the administrative side, such as Linda Mickleborough, who committed herself to nurturing and supporting the company for more than 20 years.

Today, we heard Circus Oz is to be no more. Why this is happening, I am not sure. The official statement is rather full of management language that obfuscates rather than clarifies. No doubt a backstory will come out, but nevertheless it is very sad. It suggests the funders want the company to become something that is against its very nature. It may also be another arts victim of the past two years.

The End Of An Era

Circus Oz has been doing Australia a service for many years. We have all come to take it for granted. It has been travelling around the world promoting what is unique about Australia and winning acclaim in New York, London, Paris and everywhere in between. It has also been travelling around Australia making Australians feel proud about their culture.

It has shown countless young people there are alternative careers to being stuck in a factory or office. It has celebrated Indigenous culture, and protested about the things Australia is least proud of.

It has encouraged the creation of new circuses and the beauty of physical theatre around the country. Circuses such as the Flying Fruit Fly Circus in Albury/Wodonga, Gravity & Other Myths in Adelaide, Circa in Brisbane and numerous other groups that have been so important to the making of physical theatre in Australia.

Generations of performers have trained with Circus Oz and then gone on to work with them and other circuses around the world. The National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne would not exist without Circus Oz, nor would Cirkidz in Adelaide.

Circus Oz also pioneered how a performing arts group could be organised and be self-managed. Everyone earned the same wage, and everyone participated in decision-making. It was a role model for collective and collaborative leadership. It gave performers a sense of being more than a performer: the artists were treated as adults who had something to contribute to how their world was constructed and managed.

Business, Or Creativity?

Circus Oz was a pioneer in being acknowledged as a major player in Australian performing arts by being accepted into the hallowed framework of the Major Performing Arts Framework at the Australia Council. This meant it joined the opera companies, ballet and theatre companies and was granted on-going guaranteed funding.

But perhaps this acceptance into the mainstream has also been its downfall. It then had to conform to management expectations, that as an entity, are foreign to its own culture and framing. The corporatisation of the arts has been an ever-increasing challenge for arts practitioners. It is foreign to the very making of art when business paradigms rule instead of creativity. It is particularly foreign to an entity that was founded on worker entitlements, collective management models and democratic principles.

Circus Oz has been a special gift to Australia and the world. We will all miss it deeply.

Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Online arts programming improves quality of life for isolated seniors

Older adults, especially those who live in rural areas, are affected by their isolation. In Newfoundland and Labrador, 22 per cent of residents are over the age of 65. These older adults live in the sparsely populated coastal communities or in the small number of more urban centres that are scattered throughout the province.

Social isolation and loneliness negatively influence the quality of life of older adults. The rurality of N.L. threatens older adults’ ability to engage with peers, their community and the health-care system.

Arts-Based Programming

The combination of an aging population and the potential negative health effects caused by social isolation presented a problem that our team — consisting of members from the Regional Health Authority, the Western Regional School of Nursing, health professionals and a local performing arts organization — aimed to address.

We designed opportunities for older adults with mild to moderate frailty or cognitive decline to be socially connected through participation in arts-based activities. Our program aim was to prove that engagement in the arts could help these older adults maintain their cognitive health and improve their quality of life.

SmART Aging was a community-based virtual arts program delivered by local professional artists in western Newfoundland. The program connected socially or geographically isolated older adults with artists and other participants through online sessions that featured a variety of expressive arts disciplines. Local artists developed engaging programming that was specifically aimed at the older adult population.

Eight artist-led sessions were available using virtual technology, and older adults could participate from the comfort of their own home and at no cost. The art sessions ranged in focus from letter writing to painting and drawing, as well as storytelling and theatre skills. Participants could choose to attend only one session, or complete all the sessions.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the program was affected in various ways, including a delayed start, a change from the proposed blended in-person and virtual format to solely virtual, and changes in the recruitment process. Initially, community health nurses identified eligible participants from their existing caseloads. However, due to the impacts of the pandemic, the recruitment process changed to public promotion and self-referral.

Positive Feedback

To measure program effectiveness, the project team offered an anonymous survey to participants that asked them to provide feedback on their experience and satisfaction with the program. Virtual focus groups were also held at the end of the sessions with the project team and the artists to evaluate the program and to identify strengths, opportunities for improvement and the overall sustainability of offering a similar program in the future. The distance that clients would have needed to travel for this program if virtual access was not available was also tracked.

Participant and artist feedback confirmed that the program was successful in engaging participants and enhancing their quality of life. Participants enjoyed the sessions, interacted with others and felt included in the art sessions. Participants were interested in participating in future sessions, and 90 per cent would recommend the program to family and friends. One participant’s feedback reflected the success of the program:

“The artist was fantastic. I felt very relaxed once we got started. And it was so nice to see the other ladies and man on the screen. It was like having company in my house: but I didn’t have to clean up!”

Artist feedback was also very positive, with all of the artist respondents receiving participant feedback that they were engaged in the sessions and enjoyed it. The findings support further program offerings and the possible expansion of the program. One artist wrote:

“I am grateful for the braveness of the participants who stepped into something new! I was amazed to see and feel a shift from ‘chaos’ to ‘calmness’ from the participants after we settled into the activities and a sense of ‘confidence’ by the end. It was great when participants could share their audio and video so we could directly connect in those ways.”

Alleviating Social Isolation

While the pandemic altered both program delivery and recruitment, and decreased the expected participation, overall the program was a success. Even the small number of attendees represented a significant impact on saved travel time and cost.

Collectively, the participants would have had to travel 3,836 kilometres (return) if they had attended in-person art sessions. It is the hope that art-based projects like this will continue to be explored as an option for improving older adult social isolation and positively benefiting health.

Dawn Pittman, PhD Student, Nursing, Memorial University of Newfoundland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

There’ll be a lot more talk before we hear the Indigenous Voice

The Morrison government has claimed it has delivered on its commitment to co-design an Indigenous Voice, but the parliamentary term will end without any such Voice being legislated or in place.

This is despite the Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt saying more than a year ago it was his “aspiration” to have legislation passed this term.

Instead Wyatt, in a statement on Friday, said the government had “delivered” with the release of the Indigenous Voice Co-Design Process Final Report to the Australian Government, which sets out the proposed model.

This report, which the government has had since July, will be the basis for further consultations to set up local and regional Voices.

The report, produced by an advisory group chaired by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma, following extensive consultations with Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, has recommended a structure of local and regional Voices and a national Voice.

It said the local and regional Voices should be established immediately, with the national Voice either following or being set up as an interim body while the local and regional Voices form.

The national Voice would advise the parliament and the government on matters of significance to Indigenous people, engaging with the different stages of the development of laws and policies, the report said.

At this point there is no movement on the national Voice, with the government concentrating on the lower levels.

“It is important to get this right,” Wyatt said. “For the Indigenous Voice to work, it must have a strong foundation from the ground up. That’s why we are taking the next step and starting with the Local and Regional Voice, as per the process in the report.”

Scott Morrison told reporters: “This is about listening to local Indigenous communities and that’s where the Voice must start. It doesn’t start with grandiose gestures, it doesn’t start with big political speeches, it starts on the ground pulling together local Indigenous communities and listening carefully to them so we can get service delivery right.

"It’s about closing the gap. I’m about closing the gap, not setting up political edifices. I’m interested in hearing what’s happening on the ground.”

Wyatt said the government would

• begin discussions with states, territories and local governments to encourage their participation in local and regional Voice arrangements

• appoint an “establishment group” to work with government to form the proposed 35 local and regional Voice bodies

• engage with stakeholders to progress the local and regional Voice.

Wyatt will begin discussions with other jurisdictions next month.

The push for an Indigenous Voice followed the Uluru Statement from the Heart, at a 2017 convention of Indigenous people.

The Uluru statement called for “the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution”.

The government has rejected putting the Voice into the constitution.

The advisory group did not recommend this – it was not part of its terms of reference – but did say the government should “note the support for the enshrinement of the Indigenous Voice in the Constitution that was expressed particularly through the submissions received as part of the consultative process”.

Labor has said it would seek to have the Voice enshrined in the constitution.

The shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, said the government had “promised A Voice to Parliament in this term.

"Today, they’ve announced they’ve failed on that promise.

"The only thing the government has managed to achieve is more delays and more processes. What the government is proposing gives the Voice no security. They even banned their co-design committee from speaking about constitutional recognition,” she said.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

WA’s new Aboriginal Heritage Act keeps mining interests ahead of the culture and wishes of Traditional Owners

Only a year after the 46,000 year-old sacred Aboriginal site Juukan Gorge was destroyed by Rio Tinto, the West Australian Legislative Council in Perth will pass an Aboriginal Heritage Bill that puts the interests of mining companies above the wishes of Traditional Owners.

The Senate inquiry report into the destruction of Juukan Gorge “A way forward” called for a new national framework of Aboriginal heritage protection co-designed with Aboriginal people. It recommended the responsibility for Aboriginal heritage to be reverted to the minister for Aboriginal affairs.

The report also called for a review of the Native Title Act 1993 to address inequalities in the negotiating position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples under the future act regime. The report’s authors were clear future work should recognise the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This new law ensures mining companies can still apply to damage or destroy Aboriginal sacred sites, the minister for Aboriginal affairs still has the final decision making role to approve the damage or destruction of heritage sites, and non-Aboriginal “proponents” (mining companies and developers), can appeal if the result is not in their favour. Aboriginal groups have no such right of appeal if the ruling is not in their favour.

Aboriginal Land Councils Ignored

The ALP majority government led by Premier Mark McGowan disregarded state Aboriginal land councils who expressed the bill was “unacceptable”.

An emergency request to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Race Discrimination outlining how the law entrenches systemic racial discrimination against Aboriginal Traditional Owners, was also ignored.

Aboriginal land council leaders called for a co-designed process to allow for Traditional Owners to increase protection of heritage sites. This was reflected in an Open Letter of Concern signed by 150 Aboriginal cultural leaders and renowned Australians. This letter pointed out the bill was weighted in favour of mining and economic interests over Aboriginal heritage, and breached United Nations treaty law.

However, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Stephen Dawson argued the bill would give better protection for Aboriginal heritage and was the right thing for his government to do.

The main concern with the bill is the ongoing role of the minister to grant approval to mining companies and developers to damage and destroy heritage sites. The new act has replaced the old section 18 process which allowed the approval of more than 1,000 permissions by the state to approve the damage or destruction of Aboriginal heritage sites.

Rarely had the minister refused a section 18 application and protected a site.

Since the Aboriginal Heritage Act commenced in 1972, mining companies and developers have always relied on the Aboriginal Heritage Act - and the minister’s final decision making power - to lawfully damage or destroy heritage sites, as Rio Tinto did with Juukan Gorge.

This new act adopts (and misuses) the language of international human rights law. It does this by referencing Indigenous people must be given the opportunity to provide “free, prior and informed consent” to the damage of sites.

However the United Nations says the test of free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous peoples includes the ability to exercise self determination, including over things which affect their lands. Given Indigenous peoples are not free to say “no” to harm, damage or destruction of their sites, this principle is not met by this bill.

The State’s Relationship With Aboriginal People

Western Australia has made few meaningful attempts to respect First Nations people in its constitutional arrangements or systems of governance.

In 2015 the WA parliament, following extensive consultations, amended the state’s constitution to acknowledge Aboriginal people were the traditional custodians.

When he was opposition leader, McGowan said this was a “long overdue […] act of genuine reconciliation designed to reflect the historical reality of Western Australia.”

This act of genuine reconciliation appears to have been forgotten by the McGowan government during the passage of the Aboriginal Heritage Act.

In 2021 soaring iron ore prices led to a huge $5.6 billion budget surplus – with WA outperforming all other states. A further $2.8 billion was projected for the next financial year and ongoing budget surplus forecast through 2024 -25.

This staggering amount of income from mining underlines the state’s conflict with Aboriginal people who wish to protect significant cultural sites, and might explain why the views of Aboriginal people are not being heard and respected.

Unlike most of Australia, Aboriginal people have never had any land rights legislation in Western Australia. The mining industry’s impact on the state was and continues to be very influential.

We Have A Right To Protect And Preserve Our Lands

In September a group of West Australian First Nations people formally contacted the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination about the urgent action needed to address WA’s new heritage act.

The United Nations Committee on Friday, UN Human Rights Day highlight the concerns, seek a formal response and request they work with an expert body called the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to remedy the act.

What has happened in our state, to heritage lands and sacred sites, highlights our continued dispossession as peoples without recognised sovereignty and Treaty rights. Our peoples’ human rights are at the whim of a state acting with multinational mining interests in mind. Recent history shows the weakness and hypocrisy of the state’s reconciliation promise and symbolic constitutional recognition.

This reminds Aboriginal people we must continue to demand meaningful structural change and reform, as articulated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart’s claim for “Voice, Treaty and Truth”.

Substantive reforms, not hollow promises, are critical to Australia’s realisation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This includes the urgent need to honour our right to protect and preserve our respective lands, and our ancient heritage and culture.

Correction: this piece originally stated the West Australian First Nations people formally contacted the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination this month instead of September.

Hannah McGlade, Associate professor, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Dinosaur embryo discovery: rare fossil suggests dinosaurs had similar pre-hatching posture to modern birds

Dinosaur embryos are key to our understanding of how dinosaurs developed. But they’re also very rare. While remains of dinosaur embryos have been discovered occasionally over recent decades, most of them have been incomplete, with the bones dislocated.

So the discovery of an almost intact dinosaur embryo inside an egg, dating back 72 to 66 million years, has come as an exciting surprise. Based on its anatomy as well as the microscopic features of the eggshell, this little creature has been identified as an oviraptorosaur. Oviraptorosaurs were a group of toothless theropod dinosaurs who lived during the Cretaceous period in Asia and North America.

This fossil from Ganzhou, in the Jiangxi Province of southern China, was hidden in storage for 15 years until the curator of the Yingliang Stone Nature History Museum, Kecheng Niu, discovered it in 2015. When he saw some bones on the broken section of an egg, he arranged for fossil preparation – a process which involves removing the rocky matrix surrounding the bones and cleaning the fossil so it can be studied. This revealed the embryo’s full skeleton.

Recognising the scientific significance of this fossil, the museum invited a team of international palaeontologists (of which I was one) to examine it in depth. We report on what we’ve learnt about the embryo, now named “Baby Yingliang”, in a new paper published in the journal iScience.

The oviraptorosaur embryo, which is 27 centimetres long, lies in a posture unlike what we’ve seen in other dinosaur embryos. Its back is curled along the blunt pole of the egg, while its feet are on each side of its head. This posture is reminiscent of a close-to-hatching modern bird embryo.

This “tucking” is a behaviour that’s controlled by the central nervous system and is critical for hatching success in birds. A position where the head is under the right wing, and the body curled, is suggested to help stabilise and direct the head when a bird is cracking the eggshell with its beak on hatching day. If a bird fails to attain this position, it’s more likely to die due to failure to hatch.

The posture of Baby Yingliang appears similar to a roughly 17-day-old “pre-tucking” chicken embryo. Ultimately a chicken embryo will achieve a tucking posture on the 20th day of development in preparation for hatching on day 21.

Interestingly, we also noticed similarity in the posture of a previously reported oviraptorosaur embryo and a roughly 18-day-old chicken embryo, which is in the first stage of tucking. These observations suggest that oviraptorosaurs may have exhibited similar pre-hatching behaviours to modern birds.

Tucking behaviour is often considered unique to birds. But through detailed comparisons of the embryonic postures of oviraptorosaurs, including the new Baby Yingliang, as well as other dinosaurs and birds, we propose that tucking may have first evolved among theropod dinosaurs – the ancestors of birds – tens or hundreds of million years ago.

This would add to the body of evidence indicating that many characteristics of modern birds evolved in their dinosaurian ancestors.

Pre-hatching behaviour of dinosaurs is a topic rarely explored by palaeontologists, mainly because of the scarcity of well-preserved, articulated embryo skeletons. The fortunate discoveries of Baby Yingliang and other closely-related embryos have allowed us, for the first time, to make a hypothesis on how baby oviraptorosaurs could have behaved before hatching.

And this is just the beginning. We believe more comprehensive comparisons of Baby Yingliang with the embryos of modern birds and crocodiles (the closest living relatives of dinosaurs), accompanied by new fossil evidence, will further build our understanding of the early development of dinosaurs.

Fion Waisum Ma, PhD Student, Palaeobiology, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On the elegance and wry observations of Jeffrey Smart, one of Australia’s favourite painters

Review: Jeffrey Smart, National Gallery of Australia

Although I never met him, Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013) was my first art teacher. As “Phideas” on the ABC Radio’s Argonauts program he told stories of art and artists, explaining ways of seeing to children across Australia.

Two things I remember from my childhood listening. The first was the marvel of the Golden Mean, the magical geometric ratio that governs the western tradition of art. The second was a story of Rembrandt who took his own path as an artist, even though that led to criticism by his peers.

After I discovered Phidias’s identity I could see the Golden Mean writ large in his carefully constructed paintings. But Rembrandt? Jeffrey Smart’s painting surfaces meticulously honour the Italian Renaissance and his composition at times has echoes of the metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico. They have nothing in common with Rembrandt’s painterly approach.

But that wasn’t the point of the story. Smart was speaking in Sydney in about 1960, a time and place when artists were expected to be hard drinking heterosexual men performing painterly abstraction. Smart was not a part of that culture. He had a lifelong allegiance to the classical forms of the Italian quattrocento, especially the exquisite formal geometry of Piero della Francesca. His love of structure, smooth surface, fine detail and his sexuality put him at odds with Australia.

It was only later, years after he retreated to Italy, that his home country came to fully appreciate the elegance of his wry observations. In his old age, this artist once out of tune with his peers, became one of Australia’s most favoured sons.

Now, on the centenary of his birth, the National Gallery’s Deborah Hart and Rebecca Edwards have curated a thoughtful and generous reassessment linking Smart to the places and people who nourished him.

Shape, Line And Colour

It begins in his home town of Adelaide: a city with a well planned urban centre and (back then) a culture of Protestant conformity.

The young Smart painted buildings and industrial waste; the way light and shade makes patterns on surfaces; the contrast between clear constructed shapes and fluid humanity.

Local cinemas introduced him to Alfred Hitchcock, whose films use visual clues to imply tension. Hitchcock was famous for inserting himself as an incidental figure into his narratives. I have always wondered if that solitary of a watching man in so many of Smart’s paintings is in part a tribute to the original master of visual suspense.

Smart would only ever discuss his work in terms of their formal relationship between shape, line and colour. This insistence on formalism goes back to his early studies in Adelaide and the influence of the modernist painter Dorrit Black (1891-1951), who had returned to Adelaide after some years in France. The curators have included her House-roofs and flowers which hangs beside Smart’s early structured Seated Nude. It is easy to see the connection.

There is a sense of wanting to escape in some paintings of his Adelaide period, such as Keswick Siding. This is less so after he moved to Sydney where he found, despite his unfashionable devotion to precision and classical form, his art was accepted as being a part of the Charm School, which it was not. Living and working in Sydney, he also became greatly admired as a teacher at the National Art School and a broadcaster.

Humour And Friends

Even the most structured works of Smart’s maturity include visual jokes and a human touch. In Holiday, 1971, a relentless pattern of balconies and windows is disrupted by the small figure of a woman, lazing in the sun. He always claimed he introduced people in his paintings of buildings to give a sense of scale, an old artist’s trick. I am not sure how that works in the Portrait of Clive James, unless it was to remind the subject of his significance in the scheme of things.

Smart’s relocation to Italy in 1963 saw a lightening of his palette, and a joyous celebration of light with the contrasting geometry of the blocky shapes of the modern world and the human scale of the old. There is a running theme of visual wit, but only for those who notice. Waiting for the train (1969-70) has echoes of compositions by Piero della Francesca, albeit in gloomy tones.

His portrait of Germaine Greer places her against an impastoed wall, a surprising rough painterly texture which could either be a comment on the subject’s character or a riposte to those who considered he was lacking in technical skill as a painter.

Some of the most satisfying works are Smart’s portraits of friends, and here his humour comes into play. The scholarly writer David Malouf is depicted as a workman in overalls, holding a twisting orange pipe. Margaret Olley is at the Louvre, a place she loved, but placed in front of a row of anonymous wooden screens.

Most fascinating of all is The listeners, 1965 where a young man lies in a field of grass, overseen by a surveilling radar. The head is a portrait of Smart’s friend, the art critic Paul Haefliger who had retreated from Australia to Majorca.

It shows visual contrasts between modern technology and nature, between the golden grass, red radar and dark sky and (for those in the know) between the young body of the model and the head of the ageing Haefliger.

Smart’s portraits rarely focus on their subject. The one exception is The two-up game (Portrait of Ermes), 2008, who became Smart’s life partner in 1975. His calm face is backgrounded by the solid geometry of containers on one side and the fluidity of people playing a game of chance, on the other.

In formal terms, his image in the foreground balances the composition. This also seems to be the meaning, the reason for it all.

Jeffrey Smart is at the National Gallery of Australia until May 15 2022

Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A history of destruction: why the WA Aboriginal cultural heritage bill will not prevent another Juukan Gorge-like disaster

Western Australia’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Bill 2021 is set to become law, replacing the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972. The Bill will be read tonight for the third and final time in Western Australia’s state parliament upper house.

It has been spruiked by the McGowan government as a step forward for the management of heritage in WA in the wake of the 2020 Juukan Gorge disaster.

However many First Nations peoples in WA instead fear it will continue a long tradition of Labor and Liberal WA Aboriginal Affairs ministers signing off on heritage destruction.

The key objection to the new legislation is that a single elected official will have the final say on whether a heritage site can be destroyed for development.

A History Of Failure To Protect Aboriginal Heritage

In the 49 years since the existing Act was created, successive ministers on both sides of politics have proven weak on heritage protection in Western Australia. Almost every minister for Aboriginal affairs, on either side of the political spectrum, has failed to protect Aboriginal heritage.

*Look at the history. *

How This Proposed Bill Is More Of The Same

No matter how important the site, the minister for Aboriginal affairs has rarely rejected a development application. Of 463 mining-related applications to impact sites under section 18 of the Act since 2010, none were rejected. This bill gives little reason to expect change.

Much like the old Aboriginal Heritage Act, the proposed bill allows that when a developer wishes to impact a site despite objections by Aboriginal Traditional Owners or custodians, a government-appointed council overseen by the minister will be the one to make decisions.

However the developer can appeal to the state administrative tribunal over ministerial decisions they don’t like. The Aboriginal custodians for that area will not have an equivalent right of appeal.

There is a convoluted process requiring engagement between Aboriginal people and developers. However, developers will be able to decide when they must talk to Aboriginal parties about possible impact on a cultural heritage site. Aboriginal people will not have the right to prevent such an impact, only the right to be told about it.

Aboriginal parties will have no on-going resourcing to fulfil new responsibilities to manage heritage listings and protect sites. This is a concern for smaller and less resourced groups and sets up obvious conflicts if the developer is to fund all costs for managing heritage on a project, as currently proposed.

We Need A Better Way Forward

All this flies in the face of the findings of the recommendations of the report released in October of the federal inquiry into the Juukan Cave disaster, A Way Forward. This report called for, among other things, the right for Indigenous people to withhold consent to destruction of an important place.

This fundamental human right is not a veto against development. Impacting Juukan Gorge was not critical to the success of the Brockman 4 mine proposal. A robust business case does not depend on access to a single site.

Where the Bill fails heritage, it creates risk for business certainty and undermines “social license” - the support that large businesses need in the community. Last month, ACSI and HESTA, representing major funds commanding hundreds of billions of dollars, publicised their concerns about investing in WA projects that would be approved under the proposed system.

Aboriginal community support is thin. In October, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Stephen Dawson was unable to identify any Aboriginal organisation that supports the bill. Since then, one Aboriginal organisation voiced support. Their view must be respected, but this does not represent consensus across affected communities.

A Way Forward sets out better models. For example, in the Northern Territory there is an authority board of Aboriginal law men and women who administer the functions of their Act, with practical independence from the NT Minister for Aboriginal Affairs.

To Premier McGowan and Minister Dawson, we say: If you want to change a history of heritage destruction to a future of heritage protection, Aboriginal people should have an independent right of review for ministerial decisions, and have genuine power to make decisions about heritage sites.

Joe Dortch, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, The University of Western Australia; Anne Poelina, Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow, University of Notre Dame Australia; Jo Thomson, PhD student, The University of Western Australia, and Kado Muir, Chair of National Native Title Council and Ngalia Cultural Leader, Indigenous Knowledge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We are professional fire watchers, and we’re astounded by the scale of fires in remote Australia right now

While southern Australia experienced a wet winter and a soggy spring, northern Australia has seen the opposite. Extreme fire weather in October and November led to bushfires across 120,000 square kilometres of southern savanna regions.

Significant fires continue to burn in the Kimberley, the Top End, Cape York and the northern deserts. And while recent rain across the central deserts has reduced the current fire risk, it will significantly increase fuel loads which creates the potential for large wildfires in summer.

We are professional fire watchers. The lead author of this article, Rohan Fisher, maps and monitors fires across the tropical savannas and rangelands that comprise 70% of the Australian continent. The scale of burning we’re now seeing astounds us – almost as much as the lack of interest they generate.

This continent’s fire ecology is poorly understood by most Australians, despite recent significant bushfire events close to big cities. But as we enter the Pyrocene age under worsening climate change, good fire knowledge is vitally important.

In The Desert, Fire And Water Are Linked

Fires in arid Australia are extensive, largely unmanaged, often destructive and significantly under-reported. Improving their management involvement is crucial to both Traditional Owners and the ecological health of our continent.

To improve pyro-literacy, we developed a mobile app to map fires across most of Australia in real-time.

This year, Western Australia and the Northern Territory experienced serious heatwaves late in the year and a late start to the wet season. This provided the perfect bushfire conditions.

In contrast, central Australia has experienced rare flooding rains, including at Alice Springs which recorded the wettest November on record. This creates dangerous fuel loads heading into summer.

In the desert, water and fire is coupled in both space and time. Fire burns where water flows, because that’s where fuel – in the form of vegetation – is heaviest.

The below satellite image from the Pilbara illustrates this point. It shows the path of an arid-zone fire flowing like water along dry creeks and drainage lines.

Where country is not managed for fire, it can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

The incidence of previous fire also influences fire spread. Without the regular application of fire, large tracts of desert can accumulate heavy fuel loads, primed for ignition.

Over a few months in 2011, our data show more than 400,000 square kilometres in central Australia burned – almost twice the size of Victoria. It was one of the largest single fire events in recent Australian history and coincided with the wet La Nina period in 2010-12.

Watching from satellites in space, we mapped the spread of the fires in near-real time, as this video shows:

Fire Management Through Time

For many thousands of years, Australia’s Indigenous people have skilfully burned landscapes to manage country. Most fires are relatively low-intensity or “cool” and do not burn large areas. This results in a fine-scale mosaic of different vegetation types and fuel ages, reducing the chance of large fires.

Researchers have looked back in time to provide insight into fire management as it once was. This was done using aerial photography taken in the 1940s and 1950s in preparation for missile testing at Woomera in South Australia.

The below aerial photo from 1953 reveals a complex mosaic of burn patterns and burn ages – a result of fine-scale land management by Traditional Owners.

But following the displacement of Indigenous people and the decline of traditional burning practices, fire regimes changed dramatically. The average fire size today is many orders of magnitude greater than those set under Aboriginal management.

The change has been implicated in the decline and extinction of some mammals and plant species. One massive and fast-moving October fire in the Tanami desert – home to endangered bilbies – burned nearly 7,000 square kilometres over a few days, our data show.

Back To Desert Burning

Like everywhere on this continent, fire in our vast deserts must be well-managed. Getting people back on desert country to reintroduce complex fire mosaics is difficult work but will have significant benefits for both nature and Indigenous people.

Challenges include building capacity amongst ranger groups and communities, overcoming legal and insurance hurdles and employing novel techniques to apply “cool” fires at a near-continental scale.

The role of Indigenous ranger groups is critical here. Organisations such as 10 Deserts – a partnership between Indigenous and conservation organisations – are supporting desert fire work.

Peter Murray is chair of the 10 Deserts project and a Ngurrara Traditional Owner from the Great Sandy Desert. On the importance of this work, he says:

Right now, we’re working on Indigenous “right way” cultural burning as a means of preventing wildfires. We’re developing dedicated male and female ranger teams to look after the land and develop tourism. And we’re encouraging traditional owners to return to the desert to share and exchange knowledge as well as collecting and storing that knowledge to pass onto younger generations.

Living In The Pyrocene

As climate change worsens, we’re now living in a global fire age dubbed the Pyrocene. This will bring challenges across the Australian continent.

Throughout remote Australia, increasing extreme fire weather will see more severe bushfires. Good fire management in these landscapes is urgently needed. In the northern tropical savannas, Indigenous-led fire management at the landscape scale is already producing some of the worlds best fire management outcomes.

The challenge is to introduce similar scales of fire management across our vast deserts. These regions are rich with nature and culture, and they deserve far more attention than they’ve received to date. 

Rohan Fisher, Information Technology for Development Researcher, Charles Darwin University and Neil Burrows, Adjunct professor, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rare fossil reveals prehistoric Melbourne was once a paradise for tropical pig-nosed turtles

The pig-nosed turtle, an endangered freshwater turtle native to the Northern Territory and southern New Guinea, is unique in many respects. Unlike most freshwater turtles, it is almost completely adapted to life in water. It has paddle-like flippers similar to sea turtles, a snorkel-like “pig-nose” to help it breathe while staying submerged, and eggs that will only hatch when exposed to the waters of the wet season.

It is also the last surviving species of a group of tropical turtles called the carettochelyids, which once lived throughout the northern hemisphere. Scientists thought pig-nosed turtles only arrived at Australia within the past few millennia, as no pig-nosed turtle fossils had ever been found here – or so we thought.

A 5-million-year-old fossil from Museums Victoria’s collections has now completely rewritten this story. Discovered at Beaumaris, 20km southeast of Melbourne, this fossil lay unidentified in Melbourne Museum’s collection for almost 100 years until our team came across it.

We identified the fossil as a small section of the front of a pig-nosed turtle’s shell, as we report today in the journal Papers in Palaeontology. Although the fossil is just a fragment, we were lucky that it was from a very diagnostic area of the shell.

The fossil shows that carettochelyid turtles have been living in Australia for millions of years. But what was a pig-nosed turtle doing in Beaumaris 5 million years ago, thousands of kilometres from their modern range?

Well, in the past, Melbourne’s weather was a lot warmer and wetter that it is now. It was more akin to the tropical conditions in which these turtles live today.

In fact, this isn’t the first prehistoric tropical species discovered here: monk seals, which today live in Hawaii and the Mediterranean, and dugongs also once lived in what is now Beaumaris.

A Tropical Melbourne?

Millions of years ago, Australia’s eastern seaboard was a tropical turtle hotspot. The warmer and wetter environment would have been perfect for supporting a greater diversity of turtles in the past. This is in stark contrast to modern times; today, Australia is mostly home to the side-necked turtles.

Tropical turtles would have had to cross thousands of kilometres of ocean to get here. But this is not unusual – small animals often cross the sea by hitching a ride on vegetation rafts.

So where are these turtles now? Why is the modern pig-nosed turtle the last remaining species of the carettochelyids? Well, just like today, animals in the past were threatened by climate change. When Australasia’s climate became cooler and drier after the ice ages, all the tropical turtles went extinct, except for the pig-nosed turtle in the Northern Territory and New Guinea.

This also suggests that the modern pig-nosed turtle, already endangered, is under threat from human-driven climate change. These turtles are very sensitive to their environment, and without rain their eggs cannot hatch.

This is true of a lot of Australia’s native animals and plants. In reptile species such as turtles and crocodiles, sex can be determined by the temperature at which eggs are incubated. This is yet another factor that could put these species at risk as the climate changes.

The treasure trove of fossils from Beaumaris shows just how important Australia’s previously tropical environment was for ancient animals. Southern Australia used to be home to many tropical species that now have much more restricted ranges.

Just last year, the discovery of tropical monk seals fossils from Beaumaris completely changed how scientists thought seals evolved. This shows just how much we still have to learn about Australia’s prehistoric past, when it was so different from the sunburnt country we know today.

James Patrick Rule, Research Fellow, Monash University and William Parker, PhD Candidate, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.