Environment and Climate
Libby Robin reviews 'The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat: A rodent history of Australia' by Tim Bonyhady
The enchanting of rats has a long history. The Pied Piper, who enchanted first the rats then the children of Hamelin, is familiar to European readers. Here, Tim Bonyhady brings us a new story of rat enchantment by the Diyari and the Yandruwandha people in the eastern Lake Eyre basin. According to explorer Edwin Welch, they sang ‘in low, weird and dirge-like tones ...
James Dunk reviews 'Wind Turbine Syndrome: A communicated disease' by Simon Chapman and Fiona Crichton
‘Climate change is coming,’ fourth-generation farmer Charlie Prell told an Independent Planning Commission hearing on a proposed expansion of the windfarm near his Crookwell property on 6 June 2019. He and his family constantly hear the noise of the turbines spinning five hundred metres away, generating electricity. They hear the sounds of traffic from the road, ...
Alison Broinowski reviews 'Project RAINFALL: The Secret History of Pine Gap' by Tom Gilling
Since the 1960s, US military bases have continuously occupied Australian territory, with the permission of successive governments. Of the original sites, the missile-launch tracker Nurrungar is closed and North West Cape no longer communicates with US nuclear submarines, but it has since gained space surveillance and military signals intelligence functions. Pine Gap ...
Timothy Neale reviews 'A Future History of Water' by Andrea Ballestero and 'Anthropogenic Rivers: The production of uncertainty in Lao hydropower' by Jerome Whitington
This June I attended a major Aboriginal fire-management workshop in Barmah National Park on Yorta Yorta woka, or Country. Camping on the floodplain of Dhungala – the Murray River – the participants’ discussions of bushfire led repeatedly back to another elemental force: walla, or water. As several elders explained, the flammability of the surrounding red gum forest is inextricably linked to the industrial regulation of the river’s movements. Anthropogenic infrastructures such as Lake Dartmouth have turned the forest’s wetting regime ‘upside down’, repurposing a millennia-old ecological pattern to capture spring floods and create summer flows. One perverse outcome, as Yorta Yorta man Corey Walker said, is that holidaymakers experience the river as rich in water. When urbanites encounter news reports of plunder in the wider Murray–Darling Basin, the channelling of its vitality into irrigation, they think back to summer breaks and long Invasion Day weekends enjoying a generous current, likely unaware that those flows were a gift from water authorities sending a strategic pulse through the system.
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Alexandra Roginski reviews 'Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields' by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies
Drive not too far inland from Melbourne in most directions, past thick bands of ordered suburbia, and you’ll reach bush localities that shiver on breezy days with the sound of gumleaves. At dusk, you might glimpse kangaroos slinking like grey ghosts through blocks of steep, rocky land. Despite this poetry, these bushland escapes represent nature in a third life ...
Graeme Davison reviews 'Asbestos in Australia: From boom to dust' edited by Lenore Layman and Gail Phillips
Wittenoom is no more. The notorious mine has been abandoned and the township, ten kilometres away across the Pilbara, has been demolished and buried. The name has been erased from road signs along Route 95. Blue asbestos – the mineral that created and then condemned the place – is still virulently present in its soil, air, and water. But while Wittenoom is no mo ...
Many climate activists and scientists are becoming desperate. They have devoted decades to warning the world of the danger of climate change and to forging solutions. But nothing has worked. No climate report or warning, no political agreement, no technological innovation has ...
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This year, the Australian bushfire season began in winter. A long, dry summer – the warmest on record – lingered into and then beyond autumn. By spring, more than one hundred uncontrolled fires were raging across the eastern seaboard, reaching into ecological regions unfamiliar with flame. It is alarming how routine such record-breaking extremes have become, and ...
Tom Doig’s Hazelwood begins with Scott Morrison proclaiming to Parliament, ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid … It won’t hurt you’, and concludes, 284 riveting pages later, that ‘the Australian coal industry doesn’t just cause disasters – it is a disaster’. In February 2014, during ‘the worst drought and heatwave south-eastern Australia had ...
... (read more)Kate Griffiths reviews Blackout: How is energy-rich Australia running out of electricity? by Matthew Warren
Australia’s energy transition has been hotly debated for a decade, and it doesn’t look set to cool anytime soon. Blackout: How is energy-rich Australia running out of electricity? offers readers the chance to be an informed participant in the debate. For more than a century, decisions about our electricity system have been left to the experts ...
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