Category blog
Hunters Kill Migrating Birds on their 10,000km Journey to Australia By Eduardo Gallo-Cajiao of The University of Queensland It is low tide at the end of the wet season in Broome, Western Australia. Shorebirds feeding voraciously on worms and clams… Continue Reading →
Multi award winning journalist Leigh Sales investigates how ordinary people endure the unthinkable. As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives. But one particular string of bad news stories – and a terrifying… Continue Reading →
By Brigid Magner, RMIT University The Black Summer bushfires may have ended, but the cultural cost has yet to be counted. Thousands of Aboriginal sites were likely destroyed in the 2019 bushfires. But at present, there is no clarity about… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton After years of drought, last year Australia had one of its worst bush fire seasons on record. This year Australians have shivered through the coldest and wettest summer in living memory. The east coast has been inundated… Continue Reading →
Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost On Oxford Street in Central Sydney, where I lived for some months while researching Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost, the homeless, were regularly moved on; rough sleepers driven from public view. Drunks, wayward, schizophrenics, Sydney’s… Continue Reading →
In the summer of 1950, four nuclear physicists were walking to lunch from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Their names were Emil Konopinski, Herbert York, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi. One of them was not human. On… Continue Reading →
By David Haworth, Monash University The black swan is an Australian icon. The official emblem of Western Australia, depicted in the state flag and coat-of-arms, it decorates several public buildings. The bird is also the namesake for Perth’s Swan River,… Continue Reading →
George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the world in Nineteen Eighty-Four “could come to pass in 2024” if artificial intelligence is not better regulated, the President of Microsoft has warned. A new documentary shines light on the dark side of artificial… Continue Reading →
Extract: By Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley We stand in Sydney’s Town Hall Square, two women in our seventies, holding handwritten placards. Meredith’s says, ‘Remember John Pat. 1966–1984’. Nadia’s says, ‘Solidarity! Black Lives Matter’. We have stood here before, many… Continue Reading →
Nine years ago construction worker Anthony Reale had a dream; he wanted to be his own boss, he wanted to run his own cafe. Most dreams never come true, most small businesses fail within the first year. But when it… Continue Reading →
By Scott Hucknull, University of Melbourne. Today, a new Aussie dinosaur is being welcomed into the fold. Our study published in the journal PeerJ documents Australotitan cooperensis – Australia’s largest dinosaur species ever discovered, and the largest land-dwelling species to… Continue Reading →
This is not your standard white-girl-in-Africa tale. I fed no babies, I built no schools, I saved no rhinos. Self-discovery came a distant second to self-preservation on this particular adventure. So says Kirsten Drysdale, who is better known as a… Continue Reading →
An Open Letter to Michael Fuller, Police Commissioner of New South Wales Concerning the Police Enforcement of Ongoing COVID-19 restrictions Illustrated by Michael Fitzjames We are writing to you to raise concerns we have about the use of the police… Continue Reading →
By Denis Muller, University of Melbourne. Katharine Murphy, The Guardian Australia’s political editor, marvelled recently that Scott Morrison pulls what she called a “Jedi mind trick”, rebadging disasters as triumphs – and getting away with it. I don’t know enough… Continue Reading →
By Michelle Fahy: Michael West Media An Australian breakthrough in drone technology that makes it easier to locate hidden enemy on the battlefield could also be used to target civilian protesters. The US government has already used surveillance drones to monitor… Continue Reading →
By Gernot Heiser, Lyria Bennett Moses, UNSW and Vanessa Teague, ANU. Australia’s parliament is considering legislation to give new powers to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) and the Australian Federal Police. These powers will allow them to modify online… Continue Reading →
By Stafford Sanders. The latest from A Sense of Place Publishing. “Halloran!” barked Bascombe as we drew up in front of the stables. There was no immediate response to this, so he repeated more loudly: “Halloran!” And for good measure,… Continue Reading →
By Jack Waterford: Pearls and Irritations Scott Morrison has repeatedly reiterated that all decisions in relation to Coronavirus public health measures have been taken in accordance with medical advice. But the advice itself has frequently been considerably less than transparent,… Continue Reading →
By Douglass S. Rovinsky, Alistair Evans and Justine W. Adams, Monash University The thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, is an Aussie icon. It was the largest historical marsupial predator and a powerful example of human-caused extinction…. Continue Reading →
By TOTT News Vaccination passports may soon be required for Australians to travel interstate, Prime Minster Scott Morrison has announced in an interview. The comments come as vaccine hesitancy continues to grow across the country, with more citizens beginning to… Continue Reading →
By James Boyce: The Saturday Paper Australians have, on the whole, a traditional respect for other people’s religious beliefs, and believe it is irrelevant to the governing of the country. But Scott Morrison is the world’s only Pentecostal believer, and… Continue Reading →
By Henry-James Meiring, The University of Queensland Modern transhumanism is the belief that, in the future, science and technology will enable us to transcend our bodily confines. Scientific advances will transform humans and, in the process, eliminate ageing, disease, unnecessary… Continue Reading →
By Paul Collits Individual rights, traditionally conceived, exist prior to, and separate from, the State. Not any more, in the age of Covid and lockdown, all that we previously accepted about government has been discarded. And we did it. It… Continue Reading →
By Johan Lidberg, Monash University When the Australian Federal Police (AFP) raided journalists and media organisations two years ago, it showed the balance between national security and journalism is severely out of whack in Australia. To address this, a Senate… Continue Reading →
Luminously intelligent, gifted with a great eye and a startling, incandescent love of beauty, the already celebrated Maria Popova has finally put out a book. Figuring, is now available. For twelve years now Popova’s weekly newsletter Brain Pickings has dazzled,… Continue Reading →
By Brian Toohey: Michael West Media The use of disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks by China and other authoritarian states has rightly attracted much criticism in the mainstream media. However, the US and its democratic allies decades ago pioneered the… Continue Reading →
By Roger Staff and Lawrence Whalley, University of Aberdeen From the algorithms that make our social media accounts function to the sleep-tracking technology in our smartwatches, the world has never seemed so technologically advanced and developed. Which is why it… Continue Reading →
From TOTT News Individuals have long-explored the pages of fiction as a means to discover fundamental eternal truths about the surrounding world and to provide timeless insights into the human condition. Over the last century, dystopian novels have become a… Continue Reading →
By Paul Collits Australians “want to eliminate Covid”. So says the Zero Covid Man, aka the Australian Prime Minister. Perhaps the greatest fear is that he might be right. If so, then comes the question: is it worse to have… Continue Reading →
From one of the world’s most admired war correspondents, Christina Lamb, comes a searing indictment of the West’s involvement in wars against fundamentalist Islam, Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World. The pointless loss of American, British and Australian lives, has achieved nothing; despite the efforts to eliminate the Taliban from the country, their presence has continued to grow. Insurgent attacks have also increased, and the region still struggles against poverty, an unstable infrastructure and a huge number of land mines. Initially billed as the West’s success story by both Bush and Blair, Afghanistan remains a lawless, violent land. The promises made to its people in 2001 have not been fulfilled. Foreign correspondent for one of the world’s leading newspapers, The Sunday Times, educated at Oxford, a Fellow at Harvard University, a member of the National Geographic Society, former British Foreign Correspondent of the year and a multi award winner, Lamb has been reporting on the region of “pomegranates and war” since the age of 21, when she crossed the Hindu Kush into Afghanistan with mujaheddin fighting the Russians and fell unequivocally in love with this fierce country, a relationship which has dominated her adult life. Lamb has fought with the mujahadeen dressed as an Afghan boy, experienced a near-fatal ambush and head-on encounter with Taliban forces and successfully established links with American, British, Afghan government, Taliban and tribal fighters. Her unparalleled access to troops and civilians on the ground, as well as to top military officials has ensured that Farewell Kabul is the definitive book on the region, exposing the realities of Afghanistan unlike anyone before, compelling, moving and impossible to put down.
By Professor Ramesh Thakur: Pearls and Irritations The blanket and punitive travel ban for Australians returning from India is neither justified, nor does it make much sense in the efforts to curb the spreading of the virus. The Indian Coronavirus… Continue Reading →
By Andrew Baker, Queensland University of Technology Australia has a rich diversity of mammals, with around 320 native, land-based species, 87% of which are found here and nowhere else. Many of these mammals are secretive, only active at night, and… Continue Reading →