Walking by the coast yesterday was a bracing experience, to say the least. I think I actually caught a glimpse of conditions when they were in somewhat of a lull, but I was reminded why the rocky outcrop off Coogee is called Wedding Cake Island.
My principal reason for posting this was just to experiment a little with video and my new Blue condenser microphone.
The odd thing about the weather was that a low swung in off the lower Coral Sea, behaving like a tropical cyclone and moving largely against the usual west to east movement of pressure cells. While it wasn’t particularly intense, like a lot of east coast depressions, it brought squally conditions, even a small tornado to the coast south of Sydney, at Kiama. Elsewhere it brought flash floods
Further north near Kempsey a flood surge today brought more substantial flooding to the Macleay River which has spilled over a levee designed to prevent flooding the CBD. Several homes close to the civic centre have already been inundated.
As an after thought, here’s the synoptic chart for Saturday.
Catching a glimpse of the headline in today’s Australian Financial Review (AFR) ‘Power price hikes from gas boom’ I decided to pick up a copy from the local supermarket. It soon became obvious that Australian state governments needed to have a good long look at the volumes of LNG being exported from Australia and the impact this has on domestic energy prices.
Next to the gas story was something that for me was far more interesting, a long article by Ayesha de Krester titled Sold Down a River.
A basic premise in de Krester’s article is that Rio Tinto showed a lack of diligence in preparations for a large coal mining project. Rio Tinto bought the mining lease for a $4 billion coal deposit in the Moatize Basin Tete province Mozambique, from Riversdale. A relatively small Sydney-based miner Riversdale lacked the weight of a Rio when it came to bending a government to its wishes.
An ambitious plan
Operating the lease economically meant gaining the right to dredge the Zambezi River so that barges could be used to ship the coal to a bulk materials handling port to be built on the coast at Quelmane.
Several factors seem to have operated to frustrated Rio’s work:
- delicate relations between Mozambique and neighbour Malawi that depends on back
flows from the Zambezi to support some of its food production;
- close relations between Brazilian coal mining company Vale and the Mozambique
government, possibly strengthened by a shared colonial and linguistic heritage;
- copious untied aid from China;
- China’s Export-Import Bank (Exim) agreeing to invest USD2.3bn in construction of
the 1300-MW Mphanda Nikuwa hydroelectric project; and,
- the discovery that Rio’s coal reserves comprised less high grade coking coal and
rather more high ash bearing coal than originally expected
In the end Vale ‘got the gig’, their plan to rail freight coal through neighbouring Malawi prevailing and being tied to the importance of maintaining sufficient environmental flow in the Zambezi to support Malawi’s agriculture. Dredging would, understandably have lowered flows and increased discharge velocities.
The social and environmental concerns of Justiça Ambiental
Yet other concerns remain and de Krester offers Daniel Ribeiro, from environmental justice group Justiça Ambiental as a source.
According to Ribeiro.
The reason why the barging plan didn’t go forward is because you have two big sectors in this country depending on that river. One is dams, which will prevent transport and transport will prevent dams, so you have two big sides of the government, one pushing dams and money from hydro power and you have the coal sector and you have big influences in both sectors so it ends up being okay, whichever interest is the biggest,
Ayesha de Krester also observes that, Since 2003, the World Bank, the European Bank, the Nordic Bank and African Bank had all considered the proposal, previously named Mepanda Uncua, but ultimately none could consent on environmental grounds given fears it would irreversibly damage the Zambezi’s flow.
Although Rio Tinto’s failure has left them with USD3bn written off the project’s value, I’m drawn to consider the situation of the rural peasantry who depend on the Zambezi continuing to have environmental flows.
This video, Every River has a Story, provides an excellent foundation for understanding the importance of the Zambezi to the rural people of Mozambique and Malawi.
Justiça Ambiental has a Facebook presence. It‘s mission is to engender a culture of civil action in Mozambique both through actions to protect the environment, and by actively engaging in developmental decisions pertaining to issues of environmental justice, here in Mozambique and throughout the rest of the world.
While people like Daniel Ribeiro might be concerned about the environmental flows in the Zambezi, others are not quite so worried and by implication have less concern for a triple bottom line approach. There seems little overt desire to temper the impacts of growth in the energy and mining sectors with concerns for traditional society and the environment.
Sold Down a River is just the beginning of the story
On reading ‘Sold Down a River’, I was left with the impression that the Mozambique and Malawian governments might have been genuinely concerned about the impact of dredging on the lifestyles and traditional economies of the Zambezi catchment. Now after just a small amount of Internet research, I’m not so sure.
It seems that for Malawi, concerns about dredging are more about where rather than if. In July last year, Malawi’s Nyasa Times cited Radio Mozambique as the source of a report that Six companies have submitted bids to draw up a viability study of the Malawian proposal to open the Zambezi and Shire rivers to international shipping . . . connecting the port of Nsanje to the sea.
Six companies have submitted bids to draw up a viability study of the Malawian proposal to open the Zambezi and Shire rivers to international shipping
According to the same report the . . . Mozambican government is worried about the impact of possible spills or collisions on the Zambezi eco-system, a concern cited as lying at the base of their refusal to give Rio Tinto the go ahead.
I’m left wondering about all of this. The Mozambique government certainly doesn’t seem as certain about the environmental impact of another Hydroelectric power dam. Whatever the real politic, this is by no means a transparent affair. Things remain decidedly turbid.
Setting out with seven novice kayakers and one who’d already done a little paddling there were spills right from the start, despite the wide beamed craft. With minor corrections made to the basics, like climbing in and out of kayaks, we were soon paddling about in Blackwattle Bay.
Next it was time to demonstrated basic paddling techniques and then suggest a few strategies to avoid capsizing. We watched a lot of this on YouTube, the week before.
There are many videos like this one available on YouTube.
Another useful YouTube video explained how to climb back into a kayak after capsizing.
Paddling on towards the ANZAC Bridge, the M4 Distributor Freeway, the most common question was, “How deep is the water here?”
The truth is I wasn’t sure. I know that Anzac bridge has a maximum clearance of 28.5 metres above high water and I know Sydney Harbour is deep in places but it’s a drowned river valley, Ria coastline, and in a practical sense I realise that parts of the harbour are quite shallow Bays like Blackwattle Bay, I reasoned, have been so heavily modified and polluted with industrial sediments, I wasn’t sure, but I thought the maximum depths were probably 6 to 10 metres. Later I confirmed, with a visit to the “>OzCoasts website, that the . . . seabed morphology of Sydney Harbour is complex and irregular with a series of deep ‘holes’ up to 45 m deep, and shoals where the water depth can be less than 3 m.
So all I could say was, Well these bays are quite shallow, with a lot of sediment that’s built up in the bottom.
The next question was the inevitable, What about the sharks? Are there any?
Yes, there are. There are Bull Sharks. In fact there’s a lot of research that’s been done on Bull sharks because they’re one species that are known to attack humans. What the research shows is that they’re seldom seen and only likely to be a problem if you were swimming in murky turbid water. Even so they do attack people from time to time.
In 2009 Navy Clearance Diver, Paul de Gelder was attacked by a Bull Shark near Garden Island, losing a forearm and leg in the incident.
As a regular kayaker I often think about sharks yet, considering the extent of swimming and boating in Sydney Harbour, Port Jackson, it is comparatively rare for people to see Bull Sharks. I’ve never seen one. The manager at the marina where I store my kayak, formerly a professional diver who frequently worked in the harbour, has never seen one. Strangely though, my nephew who arrived from the UK last year recently watched from the balcony of a friends apartment as a Bull Shark swam around near Gladesville Bridge.
The Sydney Aquarium has an excellent exhibit on the research conducted on the Bull Sharks of Sydney Harbour.
NSW Department of Primary Industries researchers Dr Amy Smoothey and Dr Vic Peddemors from the Cronulla Fisheries Research Centre studied the bull sharks in Sydney Harbour. Based on her research to date Dr Smoothey believes that a certain amount of mystery surrounds the behaviour of bull sharks, in Australian waters, and that without an extensive amount of research, misconceptions are left unchallenged.
There’s the misconception that every time you put your big toe in the Sydney Harbour, you are going to get it bitten by a shark, Dr Smoothey said.
But that is not the case, sharks and humans can, and will continue to, co-exist in Sydney Harbour.
For example, on Australia Day in 2011, our results showed that seven tagged sharks were in Sydney Harbour at the same time as thousands of people – yet there were no incidents, not even a sighting.
This suggests that bull sharks may not be the voracious predator that we once thought, she said.
Clearing ANZAC bridge, with a light breeze off the Tasman, I wasn’t thinking much about how deep the water was, nor was I concerned about sharks. I was thinking about the bottom of the harbor, wondering just what layers of industrial detritus lay hidden beneath the waters. This to my mind was the greatest hazard in the inner harbour.
He tells us that by 1828, metal foundries, coppersmiths and paint manufacturers were established adjacent to Blackwattle Bay due to readily available water supply.
He goes on to observe that by 1880 the sediments of Darling Harbour, Blackwattle Bay and Rozelle Bay had become moderately contaminated with heavy metals.
Finally by 1922 the sediments in Darling Harbour, Blackwattle Bay and Rozelle Bay had become highly contaminated with heavy metals .
Birch cites the results from a sediment core sample taken from Blackwattle Bay that yielded a maximum of about 2000 μg/g of heavy metals.
Since it had been raining that morning, in fact persistently through January, storm water pollution was the most visible sign and the biggest issue in the harbour at the moment.
Paddling up the Parramatta River several days earlier, shots like this one gave the lie to the flotsam bearing waters that lapped at my kayak. Yet, apart from these very wet periods the water quality in Sydney Harbour has improved greatly since I was a boy. As a whole Sydney Harbour is no longer a working port and this has helped greatly.
Passing under the old Glebe Island Bridge we were soon off the site of the old Colonial Sugar Refinery. Here we did a small drill turning into the slight wash of some passing motorboats. It’s a good place to do this as there’s a 4 knot speed limit in Blackwattle Bay so the wash is minimal. It was an enjoyable drill. The students had a real sense of being in control of their kayaks, turning to face the small waves.
Such a successful drill behind us we paddled on to the old Glebe Island container terminal where HMAS Manoora and HMAS Kanimbla. It’s the same spot where Ex HMAS Adelaide was moored before her unfortunate scuttling off the coast of Avoca.
Suddenly there was a call from behind me. One of the students had capsized, his kayak now half full of water. Tying it to mine I organised for him to hold onto the rear of the strongest paddlers craft while two students paddled close behind him and the rest paddled ahead to a small wharf on the other side of the bay, just below the complex of apartments that have replaced the CSR sugar refinery.
There wasn’t the slightest sense of panic, rather there was a strong practical sense of teamwork. Soon we’d righted the kayak, drained the water and had its occupant back in command of his craft.
Paddling back with the north easter behind us, I heard one of the students say,
When considering the environment geographers tend to distinguish between two aspects, the:
biophysical environment, consisting of those elements that are naturally part of the physical environment (lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere) plus the living things that occupy and interact with that environment (biosphere); and,
built environment, also referred to as the human or the cultural environment.
Biophysical environments achieve a natural equilibrium. This is a sustainable, dynamic equilibrium. Once humans and their cultural processes are introduced, the equilibrium point inevitably shifts. Geographers describe the way humans act on the environment as management. In the absence of humans environmental change is unimpeded, once humans are introduced change has an additional cultural dimension. Now unimpeded natural change is interrupted by human activity.
Under these conditions a new equilibrium point develops, but just where it is, and how sustainable the new equilibrium might be, will depend on the nature of human activity. If the activity is purely extractive or exploitative, this can result in significant disruptions to the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. Under these conditions the biodiversity of the environment will be reduced. In such circumstances there maybe large amounts of land, water and atmospheric pollution as well as great damage to the biosphere. In acute conditions this can also greatly disrupt the human environment and lead to significant physical, psychological and spiritual disturbances.
Disturbances in the environment can become quite significant global issues. Geographers are concerned about the implications of such human induced changes for ecological sustainability, governance, social justice and equity. During their Stage 4 geographical studies all students were expected complete course work in the general topic area of Global Issues and the Role of Citizenship. In covering this topic they were expected to learn to
explain the links between human actions and the consequences for ecological sustainability on a global scale
describe the spatial dimensions of the issue
describe the ecological dimensions of the issue
identify perspectives and bias about the issue, including in media reports
describe the actions of individuals, groups and governments in relation to the issue
communicate appropriately with organisations to participate as a global citizen
Global Issues and the Role of Citizenship constituted the students’ prior learning for this topic Issues in the Australian Environment. Skills development was embedded in the global study with the processes of geographic inquiry along with the written and graphical organization of geographical information being important elements.
Developing the Research Questions
Botany Bay looking to the ENE over the runways at Sydney Airport, and Port Botany Container Terminals to a bulk oil storage area with residential areas in the background.
Asking the right questions is essential in acquiring geographic information, indeed most information. Students are expected to be able to ask geographical questions to support their acquisition of skills and understandings. The geography syllabus scaffolds this by providing a list of the key geographical questions.
Applying these questions to Botany Bay is both challenging and highly relevant. The Bay, its catchment and coastal environment, is a complex area biophysically and culturally. There are many stakeholders whose levels of concern for human impacts on the biophysical environment are varied. All have ideas about the appropriate management of this coastal environment. Resolving conflicts inherent in the different views and agendas of stakeholders involves the consideration of management implications for the economy, the society and the environment.
In heavily industrialised coastal areas like Botany Bay the fundamental questions can be difficult for students to answer, so clear scaffolding was essential. This was the challenge of the field study.
Mapping the Field Study from the Syllabus
This image is in the attached PowerPoint presentation
We quickly developed this chart as our first guide. Eight student outcomes expected in the virtual field study are listed at the bottom. These were taken directly from the syllabus outcomes that apply to this topic.
5.1 identifies, gathers and evaluates geographical information
5.2 analyses, organises and synthesises geographical information
5.3 selects and uses appropriate written, oral and graphic forms to communicate geographical information
5.4 selects and applies appropriate geographical tools
5.5 demonstrates a sense of place about Australian environments
5.6 explains the geographical processes that form and transform Australian environments
5.7 analyses the impacts of different perspectives on geographical issues at local, national and global scales
5.10 applies geographical knowledge, understanding and skills with knowledge of civics to demonstrate informed and active citizenship.
From this point it was possible to pose research questions in the virtual field study that were consistent with the context, the key geographic questions and the outcomes required for students:
How have humans had an impact on the biophysical and built environment?
What issues have arisen from these impacts?
What measures are used to manage the impacts in ways that ensure sustainability, social justice and equity?
Mapping the structure of the field study
With this basic work-up completed we brain stormed the structure of the field study. We used iThoughtsHD which runs on an iPad. There’s a useful overview of the app’s operation on YouTube. This one isn’t in English but it’s well constructed.
iThoughtsHD is a versatile program that can be exported in a variety of formats. So it’s very easy to email versions of your work to colleagues.
Using iThoughtsHD we mapped out a basic scaffold for the field study. I might add that this was only the second time I’d used the app.
Once this structure was completed it provided us with a clear set of secondary data gathering tasks. We then began searching and book-marking sites that provided useful secondary data.
Our biggest challenge was primary materials. There were several solutions:
a series of six short videos supported by photographs shot in the field
a survey of stakeholders built in SurveyMonkey which provided some genuine primary data.
A collection of 30 original photographs in a virtual museum display. Each image was related to a QR code that allowed students to access short descriptions of the photo.
Shooting and editing the videos
The videos covered:
Bare Island;
Port Botany;
Port Botany Extension;
The Cooks River Mouth;
Lady Robinsons Beach; and
Towra Point.
Here is the first video on Bare Island, by way of example.
bareis
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I prefer to work with iMovie, but could just as easily have used Adobe Premier. They were almost all shot, in a 16:9 HD format to a resolution of 190×1080 pixels, with a Sanyo Xacti hand held digital video camera. Some of the shots did have to be balanced on a monopod. In editing it was possible to digitally remove some of the inevitable hand shake. While the results might not be commercial broadcast standard they are quite adequate for LAN or Internet distribution.
The last of the videos did present some challenges. The day set aside to shoot the video at Towra point was blowing a small to about 35kph from the east. We set out from Dolls Point directly into the wind in two kayaks. Fortunately we’d added a GoPro video camera to our equipment pool that day. If you’ve never used one there’s a short promotional clip from the manufacturers at the end of this post for you to view later.
We shot a brief underwater sequence with the GoPro paddling through the sea grass meadows off Towra Point. It was too wet to spend a lot of time shooting video with the Xacti so we produced a panorama of the shoreline shot with a Lumix Panasonic DMC TZ6 digital camera and panned along this in IMovie. We also shot some reasonable quality 16:9 format HD video with the DMC TZ6. On the day it was just too wet to hang around, so in the end we supplemented the video with an excellent documentary by Tom Zubrycki, Port Botany a Planning Dilemna, shot in 1979. This really added value to the Towra Point work because we were able to demonstrate that many of the issues we were examining in the virtual field study had been under consideration back in 1979. It gave the field study a powerful historical dimension since many of the observations made about biophysical processes, human impacts and management practices had a wider application than just Towra Point.
Developing a student gateway to the field study
Students gained access to the virtual field study through a navigable interface built using Dreamweaver. Given the total size of the digital resources comprising the virtual field study, over 800 megabytes, we had to distributed the field study on USB thumb drives.
When students opened up the Botany Bay virtual field study folder they were directed to a ‘READ THIS FIRST’ file that linked directly to this page.
For a more detailed analysis of this webpage, download the attached PowerPoint presentation.
The left hand side gave students access to the videos while on the right were links to the Data Packs. The central area was a basic field study overview with the assessment task as the last link. It also included a link to a page entitled Survey of Botany Bay Stakeholders. This provided students with summaries of the survey findings.
Data Packs were organised with links to secondary sources organised according to:
biophysical processes;
human impacts; and,
management strategies.
What the students saw when they opened a Data Pack.
Each Data Pack was linked to its own section in a OneNote book that scaffolded students data collection and organisation helping them to shape their data towards the final assessment task by ensuring that it was organised into a form that addressed the basic research questions.
The first page in the OneNote book for a field study site.
There is a downloadable PowerPoint that outlines the steps involved in building this field study. To download the display click Botany Bay Presentation
A brief summative evaluation
There was some outstanding work completed. For the most part levels of student engagement were high and the quality of data was of a very high standard. Selective classes, in particular, enjoyed the challenge and were highly engaged. Students enjoyed student centred learning with teacher facilitation. Inevitably some functional issues arose with laptops, this was often related to aspects of the software build not being up to date and seemed more common amongst students who were less inclined to use their laptops. Other issues were hardware related. These technical issues caused some delays that were addressed by lending students new laptops. In future having a pool of laptops available as back up will be important.
Since this was a first exercise in building a virtual field study, development time was at a premium. We went ahead with what we were able to build in the time available. Subsequent iterations should ensure that there is greater differentiation in the tasks so that all students can enjoy a sense of achievement from completing the virtual field study. Developing more systematic and concrete connections between the OneNote research and the assessment task could facilitate this process.
Botany Bay heads, Cape Banks and Cape Solander, from Bare Island
For many of us teaching geography in the NSW education system, prior to 2010 topics like coastal processes in Botany Bay were treated largely as pen, paper and PowerPoint exercises supported by what little effective contemporary material could be gleaned from textbooks. One colleague in particular created some inspired graphical and map work on whiteboards. Seeing my colleague’s whiteboard work I photographed some of it with my iPhone and added a little detail of my own. Along with a some additional application of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I was able to produce a first generation digital treatment of Botany Bay and its coastal processes. This left me reasonably satisfied, yet it still lacked immediacy and detail and required little active engagement from students.
In June 2011 I was asked to present some ideas for using DER Laptops and their software at the Sydney Region ICT Coordinators meeting.
While this presentation has much in it that has no direct application to this post, what I did try to show, in closing, was that digital tools permitted simple and economic development of pedagogical strategies characterised by richness, accuracy and contemporaneity. It was apparent that with a little effort one could go from whiteboard like this.
to digital video like this:
Coastal Proccesses on a Wave Dominated Sandy Coastline
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Similarly one could easily gather materials from the web that permitted the development of sound secondary data to inform the teaching and learning process.
This satellite image of Botany Bay has some interesting features that are quite easy to identify on a large projection.
Then it’s simply a matter of placing this image in Adobe Illustrator and tracing the wave refraction and reflection patterns in the Bay.
Such skills are comparatively easy to acquire and have cross curriculum applicability. Unfortunately there is very limited time available to teach geography and limited opportunities for pursuing interdisciplinary skills development. Fortunately as geographers we had one ‘ace up our sleeves’, field work, indeed the research cycle, is a mandatory component of the Stage 5 course.
The research cycle followed in the Stage 5 Geography course
Extending Digital Strategies
In August of that year Cherryl Ellis, a colleagues from Sydney Secondary College Leichhardt, and I, planned to take things a stage further by developing a field study activity that would be scaffolded by a strong project based digital foundation and permit rapid infield data collection, supported by augmented reality. It was a grand idea and in the winter of that year we began shooting photos and video of the coastal processes operating in Botany Bay.
Port Botany has become Sydney’s major port and there have been significant changes in the biophysical environment of the Bay and it’s surrounding catchments, so going out on these shoots gave us a great deal of satisfaction as geographers. We were collecting primary materials, some of which I could already begin to compare with materials I’d gathered in pursuing my own photographic interests.
Applying for a grant
Our next step was to apply for a regional Action Research grant to develop and resource the field study. All was running smoothly until we costed the bus transport for the field study. Now, working as we do in a government school with a wide cross-section of clients, it was apparent that our particular socio-economic mix would mean that not all students could afford to go on the field study. This presented insurmountable equity issues. There was only one solution, a virtual field study.
Recently I posted this short clip of what I thought were Cockatoos, on Facebook. Then I was sitting over lunch with some friends visiting from Indonesia when they flew overhead in a cacophony of sound.
“Kakatua”, I exclaimed, for my Indonesian friends.
Then my wife Catherine commented.
“I was talking with someone the other day who said they were something else.”
“Yes, come to think of it”, I thought, “I didn’t see any sulphur crests, perhaps they are.”
Now if you ever want to identify an Australian bird quickly then go no futher than The Michael Morcombe eGuide to the Birds of Australia.
As apps go it might seem to be on the expensive side but don’t be deceived by appearances. This is probably the most functional and useful app I have across iPad and iPhone.
So in a very short time we were able to identify the vast flock that was circling overhead as being Little Corella. These birds are mostly white with a blue/grey eye ring. When in flight you might notice a sulphur coloured wash on the underwing.
At this point I felt a little silly, not having bothered to do more than make a guess at their identity and then in the rush to use my iMovie app and post on Facebook, calling them Sulphur Crested Cockatoos in the short video.
So now I can make amends.
Meanwhile a good friend and colleague, originally from Palm Island, responded to my Facebook post with these words.
Have you heard them going off like that through the night and 2am in the early morning and daytime too! Distressed I don’t know maybe the fires! Flying low and fast on a daily basis around where we live since Xmas. Yep sometimes it’s unsettling and you feel for them and its been like this for thousands of years. I suppose it’s their flight and Cockatoo belonging place.
She crystalised what I’ve been thinking about our impact on this land for a long time. In this land there are many ancient belonging places but the relentless expansion of agriculture, industry and infrastructure has greatly disturbed the ancient relationships between the land and all living things.
Australia Day Reflections
On this Australia day, I don’t only remember the impact that colonisation has had on the Aboriginal peoples, I also reflect on the impact modern Australia is having on the ancient relationshops that were once both so universal and also so finely tuned to place. Despite the increasing dominance of the technosphere, the relentless advance of ‘progress’, it’s often possible to encounter the ancient fabric of connections where we least expect it.
While I’d certainly describe my profession as teacher, this blog has not been one in which I have focused on educational issues, to the exclusion of all else. Actually my deeper interests are in the subjects I teach. This is not to say I lack interest in pedagogy, quite the contrary, but rather that what motivates me to write are the processes that I’m trained to observe through my study of history, geography, economics and politics. In the end though my real passions are history and geography.
For a quick view of my preoccupations in 2012 just click on the Wordle thumbnail
Bag It and plastic pollution In January I wrote about the important film Bag It, that I was fortunate to see at the Avoca Cinema. Until I saw this film I thought that there was little about environmental pollution that was likely to surprise me. This film reminded me just how wrong I was and how learning is such an important commitment in life. It must be with us always.
Bali and the plastic bag, a continuing issue. In March I wrote about the introduction of plastics to Bali, with the growth of ‘modernism’ and tourism, highlighting the challenges this presents to irrigation and drainage systems.
A small initiative in teaching School Certificate geography This post was largely a recounting of the impact of the Digital Education Revolution (DER) an initiative that saw provision of laptop computers to students on a 1:1 basis. I made some observations about the varied set of pedagogical responses that followed and provided a link to one initiative that I’d taken in building a the SSC Leichhardt Geography Blog.
Many questions as yet unanswered about chemical toxicity and radiation. In April an old friend long concerned by the 1980 traffic accident on the Pacific highway, outside Laurieton involving radioactive isotopes (Americium 241 and Cesium 137), DDT, a mysterious substance called Strip X found new information on this bizarre and as yet unsolved mystery. This prompted me to write a few words on the strange event. I expect there is more to come on this.
Unravelling the mystery of Lake George: the vanishing lake September saw me still absorbed with mysteries, but in this case one of a very different kind. I was moved to write about Lake George a place I frequently pass when driving to Canberra. My father had 35mm slides of it brim fill of water but for much of my life it seems to have been nothing more than a muddy puddle. Now the mystery has been solved.
Pecha Kucha as an antidote to writers’ block #TMSydney This has not been a big blogging year for me. By September I felt I had a serious case of writers’ block. In truth I’d been quite prolific in building digital project based learning materials for my students. This absorbed vast amounts of time. So the challenge of preparing a Pecha Kucha, focusing on what one would say to their first-year-teacher-self if they had the opportunity to travel back in time, offered a nice balance of the visual and textual. I wrote the text for the presentation and then spoke to it. I hope this was successful public web based contribution.
The Bali Bombings Ten Years On
October was the tenth anniversary of the Bali Bombings of 2002. My own involvement in this act of mass murder was a life changing event for me. For several years I grieved quite openly for those who had suffered or paid the ultimate sacrifice of giving up their lives in this tragic act of terrorism. I learned much about suffering and much about myself.
A few thoughts on teaching about Indigenous Australia. Teaching middle school history, a lifetime of interest in Aboriginal issues and reading Bill Gammage’s The Greatest Estate on Earth – How Aborigines Made Australia, inspired this post. It was provided an opportunity to meet up with the remarkable work of Joseph Lycett ‘Drawings of Aborigines and scenery, New South Wales‘, ca. 1820.
Idenesia Arsip Positif a new Indonesian Website In November I was drawn to a new websiteIdenesia was co-founded by my Twitter friend Dirgayusa Setiawan @dirgayusa . It is a rich and comprehensive online archive of positive ideas from Indonesia. It also has a Facebook page.
The year ahead – 2013
I’m hoping 2013 will be a far more prolific year for me. This year I’m working in the school library and will be focusing on digital literacy, information literacy, digital citizenship and developing strategies for using AR across the school, as well as all the other elements like PBL, 1:1 laptops, BYOD, integratring iPads into the school curriculum and hopefully having opportunities to finish my online book and shoot a lot more video, as well as visit Indonesia with my grandchildren.
Recently I became aware of a website Idenesia Arsip Positifor Idenesia Positive Archive. The title is a clever and typically Indonesian play on words. The word for idea in Indonesia being ‘ ide. So this is an archive of positive ideas from Indonesia. It’s an initiative aimed at gathering and promoting short films and documentaries containing inspirational quality ideas intended to promote the advancement of Indonesia. The media is drawn from global sources but all focuses on Indonesian issues.
Idenesia Arsip Positif has already developed an extensive online library covering a wide array of comtemporary Indonesia social, developmental, educational and cultural issues.
The organisation maintains that the most valuable assets possessed by the Indonesian nation are the remarkable ideas for development of the nation that are held by the people themselves
A good place to start exploring Idenesia Arsip Positifis here with the site guide
One film I found particularly interesting was “People, Oil, Policy; Playing between welfare and curse” from the Revenue Watch Institute.
In addition to the digital archives the organisation also operates Idenesia for Schools as another initiative throughout Indonesia. This is directed towards schools that have difficulty accessing the archive. Actually many schools will have difficulty accessing the online archive because of Internet access difficulties are widespread in Indonesia. ” . . . Internet penetration is low in Indonesia, at 9.1% of the population in 2010, compared to some of its neighbours in the region (China 34.3%, Malaysia 55.3% and Vietnam 27.6% (ITU 2011). . .” According to the Deloitte report ‘The Connected Archipelago’.
Ten years ago today I was deeply immersed in the impact of the tragedy of the first Bali bombings of 12 October, 2002.
Prior to this Bali had been a place of peace for me.
This was a life changing event for me. For several years I grieved quite openly for those who had suffered or paid the ultimate sacrifice of giving up their lives in this tragic act of terrorism. I learned much about suffering and much about myself.
Yesterday I was given the chance to reflect in an interview with Scott Levi
You can listen to this interview online, or download it,here
Some recent comment on the bombings 10 years on
The Commemorative Monument to Victims of the Bali Bombings. Image: (Struggle for life; flickr.com / Creative Commons)
The Australian press ran hot with reflections and commemorations. The Bali Bombings 10 Years On – Newsline – ABC Newsprovided a succinct account of the tragedy and some useful analysis of the security situation in Indonesia.
In a story entitled Bali residents recall Horror of Bombs the Jakarta Globe reminded us that “Worshipers at the Ar-Rahmat mosque in the Indonesian town of Kuta, Bali have prayed every night for the past 10 years for the victims of bombs that blew up in their tourist town on Bali island in 2002.”
The first three years were the hardest for me. I was quite self absorbed and introspective. Initially I felt great emotion that sometimes could erupt into moments of unreasonableness, impatience and even anger. Gradually these intense feelings subsided. It took me seven years to prepare for a return to Indonesia. In the interim I made many visits to Coogee the place of my childhood and the site of Sydney’s commemorative monuments to those killed by the blast.
When I eventually arrived in Bali I waited for a few days in Ubud, re-engaging with old friends and gaining a sense of Bali seven years on. Finally I made my way to Sanglah Hospital where I read the prayers for the departed, then to the bomb site to read them again. I returned again the following year and spent time at the site in prayer. This year I returned with members of the Indonesian Orthodox Church and friends from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. We held a Commemorative service for the Departed at the bombing memorial, in Kuta. (I’ll post some images of this shortly – watch this space)
At this sad time I remember the suffering of many and I grieve with those who have lost loved ones or who were maimed. I continue to pray for those who departed this world as a consequence of this dreadful act of violence.
A short while back I started reading The Greatest Estate on Earth – How Aborigines Made Australia. What a remarkable book this is. Its author, Bill Gammage, systematically deconstructs the convenient myth of Aboriginal backwardness in this excellent history. He accumulates layer upon layer of historical source material, drawn from the casual observations of European explorers and settlers who started to move out into the world’s greatest estate from 1788 onwards. He also uses observations from earlier European visitors as well.
“Aborigines using fire to hunt kangaroos” by Joseph Lycett, from the National Library of Australia. Intention to published notified. http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an2962715-s20
Amongst the visual resources of early Australia Gammage relies on the work of the work of Joseph Lycett ‘Drawings of Aborigines and scenery, New South Wales‘, ca. 1820. Lycett’s work wasn’t new to me when I encountered it in the book I’d seen it before in various texts. What I’d always found interesting about it was the clear sense of order in the Australian landscape that Lycett chose to conveys. Mistakenly I’d always interpreted that sense of order an artistic imposition of a European way of viewing the late 18th and early 19th century landscape of Colonial Australia. Not till I read Gammage’s work did I begin to understand that Lycett and others were recognising and recording the order of Aboriginal land management.
Gammage use of the term ‘estate’ is purposeful and its also ironic. An estate is area of land, in the European sense of 1788 it was an extensive area of land in the country, usually with a large house, owned by one person, landed gentry or aristocrat. The term also implied management of the land, of a sequence of steps responding to seasons, of certain land having certain purposes or uses that might change through the seasons. It suggests an orderly system for managing the ownership, exchange and inheritance of land implying that appropriate laws were in place and that there was a general acceptance of the rule of law.
Gammage isn’t casual in applying this term to the Australian landscape, at the outset he explains there are three facts on which this book rests:
1. ” . . . about 70% of Australia’s plants need or tolerate fire (ch3). Knowing which plants welcome fire and when and how much, was critical to managing land. Plants could then be burnt and not burnt in patterns, so that post fire regeneration could situate and move grazing animals predictably by selectively locating the feed and shelter they prefer.”
2. This meant that grazing “animals could be shepherded in this way because apart from humans they had no serious predators.”
3. “There was no wilderness. The Law – an ecological philosophy enforced by religious sanction – compelled people to care for all their country. People lived and died to ensure this” (1)
The underlying principles of land management in this greatest of all estates, he condenses this into three basic rules:
Ensure that all life flourishes
Male plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable
Think universal, act local. (op cit 94)
“What plants and animals flourished where related to their management. As in Europe the land was managed at a local level. Detailed local knowledge was crucial. Each family cared for its own ground, and knew not merely which species fire or no fire might affect, but which individual plant and animal, and their totems and Dreaming links. They knew every yard intimately, and knew well the ground of neighbours and clansmen, sharing larger scale management or assuming responsibility for nearby ground if circumstances required.” (2)
Uncovering Indigenous pasts in the present
This past winter has been a time of reading, research and digital construction for me. After developing a research unit on the Sioux’s survival, last year , I turned my attention to building a short unit on Aboriginal survival. I wanted this to be a learning project that avoided the generic introduction, typical of many school text books, that imposed a homogeneity to the life of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (ATSI) history before contact. It was also necessary to ensure that the sections dealing with Contact and Post Contact history were constructed so that students were encouraged to draw on the rich digital resources that are now becoming available. I built both the Sioux and the ATSI units learning units using a template supplied by the NSW Teaching and Learning Exchange (TALE) managed by the NSW Curriculum and Learning Innovation Centre
Front page of the learning unit built in PowerPoint
One frequent problem with school texts is their use of the term ‘Dreamtime’, as something that happened back in antiquity that was all ‘done and dusted’ by the time the ‘ Whiteman’ arrived and is now only represented in song and dance. It’s true that some contemporary Aboriginal Australians accept this terminology, but for others The Dreaming is ongoing just as creation is on going. It didn’t only happen back then but is still unfolding now. My challenge was to allow my students to experience the Dreaming in this sense.
Several things help in conveying this sense of the presence of Creation, there are probably many but I chose:
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, in particular his sone Baywara one many equally powerful contributions from the album; and,
I’ve probably said enough about The Biggest Estate on Earth – How Aborigines Made Australia so it’s the other three areas I’d most like to explore.
Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia (MAIA)
I’m not certain just how this work is received by Indigenous Australians, none that I’ve spoken with have been critical of the work, but to date such conversations have been limited to colleagues. Needless to say this work attempts to cover vast subjets. It need to be explored for one to gain a sense of just how much it attempts. Probably the most important understanding I’ve derived from the book, to date, is the background on The Dreaming, that I’ve already addressed.
The MAIA attributes early attempts to describe The Dreaming to Baldwin Spencer.
Reading through the atlas I learned that the term ‘Dreamtime’ was started by an English anthropologist, Baldwin Spencer. Dreamtime is Baldwin’s translation of an Arrernte word altyerre which means both ‘time of creation’ and ‘dream’. From this this limited meaning the idea of the ‘Dreamtime’ was developed. The term is widely used all over Australia by many Indigenous people as well as non-Indigenous people – to refer to the Indigenous time of creation. However, in many – even most – Indigenous languages, there is no connection between the word for ‘dream’ and the word for ‘creation time’, and some Indigenous people object to the use of ‘Dreamtime’. Torres Strait Islanders do not use the term.
Geoffrey Gurumul Yunupingu
Alerted to this wider sense of Dreaming I began to listen more intently to the songs of Geoffrey Gurumul Yunupingu. Several things started to emerge when I did this but two were particularly significant for me. I began to realise that I understood some of his lyrics. While Yolgnu languages are from the Pama-Nyungan family of languages and have connections with other Aboriginal languages there’s also an Austronesian influence in Yolgnu languages. The same influences can be found in Indonesian and in low Balinese for example, a language in which I’ve a small vocabulary. I can’t say whether this influence is from connections with the Macassans and the Bugis alone or whether the connections are more ancient. It seems reasonable to me that this wasn’t the only contact across Manbuynga ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea).
What I understood amounted to mere words and occasionally fragments that I could guess at, but it focused my attention and caused me to look more deeply into his lyrics. It was then I began to realise that he is often singing about The Dreaming, that for him it is in the present as well as in the past. One song that strongly appealed to me is Baywara. The lyrics of speak for themselves.
Here is an example of his work and extraordinary presence. Djarimirri concerns his own creation “I am a child conceived and carried by Wititj a rainbow child ” Wititj is the Ancestor Rainbow Python.
(1) Gammage, B. – The Biggest Estate on Earth – How Aborigines Made Australia. Allen & Unwin. 2011. pp 1-2
