Eastern Antarctic Peninsula precipitation delivery mechanisms: Process studies and back trajectory evaluation

Copyright @ 2008 Royal Meteorological SocietyThe atmospheric circulation patterns that result in precipitation events at a site on the eastern Antarctic Peninsula (AP) are investigated using back trajectories (BTs) driven by ERA-40 data. Moisture delivery occurs from the east and west depending on the location of blocking events in the South Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Observations are sparse in this region, so our process studies compare the trajectories (and the ERA-40 fields from which they were derived) with advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) satellite images. It is found that the trajectories represent these transport mechanisms very well and that they are relatively insensitive to the initial trajectory elevation

Nation and Assimilation: Continuity and Discontinuity in Aboriginal Affairs in the 1950s

This publication does not have an abstract

Mateship with birds: an Australian plea for conservation

‘Mateship with Birds’, the title of Alec Chisholm’s first book, epitomises his approach to conservation. He wanted his fellow Australians to bond emotionally with the birds, animals and plants around them, and he framed his advocacy in the nationalist idioms of that country. Nationalism was central to his conservation, as he tried to foster a robust sense of belonging to place for the benefit of both the Australian people and their non-human compatriots

Book review of "Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901" by Tim Rowse. Sydney, NSW, Australia, UNSW Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-74223-557-8

[Extract] Tim Rowse has a rare talent for making us see things anew. He has done it in earlier books, but his latest takes that talent to new heights. It scrutinises the history of engagements between Indigenous and other Australians from federation through to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, with particular attentiveness to the recovery of the Indigenous peoples, demographically, culturally, politically and legally

"People the North": nation-building in 1960s Australia

The People the North Committee, founded in Townsville in 1962, was true to its name. It wanted to treble the population of northern Australia in a decade. Putting people before profits, the committee insisted that Australians had a moral obligation to prolifically populate their northern lands. Neither the ambition nor the rationale was new. In fact, the People the North Committee was the last gasp of a grand demographic aspiration that went back more than a hundred years. Thereafter, through to the present day, proposals for northern development have prioritised economic over demographic gains: profits before people. This article examines the ambitions and advocacy of the People the North Committee, setting them in the longer historical trajectory of the aspiration to people the north. In doing so, it offers a window onto a neglected facet of the nation-building project in Australia

Environment, Race and Nationhood in Australia: revisiting the empty north

For seventy years after federation, Australians fretted over the "empty north" of their continent. This book explains why they were worried and how their anxieties about Australia's tropical regions shaped the self-image of the nation. It offers a timely and compelling account of environmental misgivings that still run through debates about Australia's north

What 'The Birdman of Wahroonga' and other historic birdwatchers can teach us about cherishing wildlife

Since the turn of the 20th century, when birdwatching as a hobby began in Australia, birders have cherished the birds in their backyards as much as those in outback wilds. Birdwatchers admired wild birds anywhere, for one of their big motivations was — and is — to experience and conserve the wild near home

J. A. Leach's Australian Bird Book: at the interface of science and recreation

An Australian Bird Book by J. A. Leach, published in 1911, was the first field guide to Australia's avifauna. Unlike today's field guides, it was not tightly focussed on identification, instead devoting more than half its words to an expansive dissertation on the natural history of birds. This article scrutinises and contextualises Leach's Bird Book to illuminate some of the interconnections between science, birdwatching, recreation and conservation in early twentieth-century Australia. It shows how Leach's heavy weighting on natural history was integral to his promotion of birdwatching as an edifying recreation that would lead people not merely to be able to name the birds they saw but also, more importantly, to understand, cherish and protect them

An oologist at Tinaroo: Sid Jackson’s 1908 expedition to north Queensland

Sid Jackson (1873-1946) was once renowned as a field ornithologist and collector. Beyond his attainments in those domains, he is exceptionally interesting from an historical perspective for the meticulousness with which he recorded not only his ornithological activities but also his subjective state while carrying them out. His diaries offer a window onto the world of a field worker of a bygone age, through which we can glimpse both the similarities and the differences between the ornithological enterprises of then and now. This article, focussing on one of his collecting expeditions, gazes through that window to recount how Jackson conducted his ornithological activities and to explore the passions and ambitions that drove them. It shows that despite the disparities between his modes of birding and those of today, there are many parallels and congruences

Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the doomed race theory, 1880-1939

White Australians once confidently - if regretfully - believed that the Aboriginal people were doomed to extinction. In this challenging analysis Russell McGregor explores the origins and the gradual demise of the 'doomed race' theory, which was unquestioned in nineteenth-century European thinking and remained uncontested until the 1930s. White perceptions had been shaped by Enlightenment ideas about progress, Darwin's new theories on the survival of the fittest, and other European philosophical concepts. These ideas exerted a powerful influence and shaped white Australian attitudes to, and policies for, Aboriginal people