IF IN THE PAST few years you've chosen to carbon offset a flight, where did you picture your money going? Perhaps you envisaged a thriving green forest with a tree being planted in your name to suck up and store the carbon dioxide (CO2) your travel generated? Think again. If you flew with Virgin Blue, your contribution would've ended up ...

IT WAS WILLIAM Westall's older half-brother Richard - a tutor to Princess Victoria - who whetted Westall's appetite for brush strokes. Richard even helped him get into the Royal Academy in 1799. Although Westall wasn't botanist Sir Joseph Banks' first choice, at just 19 years of age he was given passage south to sketch New Holland.Westall set to work as ...

Each winter, thousands of Australians spend their weekends pacing their back lawns or perched on the edges of their garden benches, eyes cast skyward in feverish anticipation. With binoculars and calculators at the ready, they wait at the finish lines of one of Australia's most all-consuming yet little-known backyard sports: pigeon racing.The emotions of a pigeon racer soar with their ...

FOR A COUNTRY with such a small population, inventions and ideas from Australia exert a massive influence. Worldwide, untold numbers of people navigate their way around using Google Maps. Air travel has been improved by the black box flight recorder, now in every commercial aircraft. The bionic ear is bringing the miracle of sound to the profoundly deaf. The first ...

Kangaroo Island Marine Tours is a nature- based tour company operating throughout the waters of Kangaroo Island. We offer up- close and personal experiences with some of the island's marine creatures and animals.In a typical three-hour tour (such as our Island Explorer tour), you can swim with wild Bottlenose Dolphins in one- to two- metre deep crystal-dear water. Visit a ...

An unhealthy river has a domino effect on all the plants and animals - including us - that depend on it.ECOLOGISTS SAY that the decision to recognise the environment as a legitimate water user is among the most significant of the late 20th century. If a river is clean and healthy, it produces a lot of things that humans need, ...

LIVING DEATH' is more than a grim epithet for leprosy. It was also, not so long ago, an apt description of the existence faced by sufferers of the disease in Australia.Leprosy, or Hansen's disease, entered this country through immigration, particularly during the gold rush of the mid-i8oos, and spread quickly through indigenous communities. By the late 1800s, the dreaded bacterial ...

As ron 'brownie' brown, mounted on his grey camel Pearl, swayed across the gibber plain in the sweltering heat of the desert, this sort of police patrol was already on the way out. It was 1951 and the roar of Land Rovers was heralding the swansong of both horses and cantankerous camels, which were then the key mode of transport ...

In the early 1960s, when the Martu homelands were designated by the British and Australian governments as the spot to land nuclear-test missiles launched from Woomera in sa (Thunder in the Desert, ag 83), cursory efforts were made to bring in or clear out the estimated 250 Martu still living in the area. Nyalangka Taylor, who'd never seen whitefellas before, ...

Author David Unaipon turned his hand to shearing.Australian bank notes are a platform to celebrate our inventors and innovators. Reverend John Flynn, the pioneer of the Royal Flying Doctor service, features on the $20 note, while James Farrier and his Federation wheat graced the phased- out $2 bill. But the man on the $50 note remains a stranger to many ...

For a curious young mind, an emu farm is a fitting place to grow up. sarah venn, 24, knows this well. she spent her childhood revelling in nature on her family's free-range emu farm near Toodyay, 90 km north-east of Perth. By 11 years of age, she'd seen some 10,000 emu chicks raised (AG 58) and a keen interest in ...

I ALWAYS thought I had pretty good vision, but when I put on a pair of Blue-V sunglasses it was like seeing with fresh new eyes.I found I could see right through harsh glare with a striking clarity. Objects appeared sharper, crisper and more defi ned - like a kind of enhanced 3D effect. And colours were brighter, vibrant and ...

Join natural historian and botanist Peter Metcalfe on this 15-day journey and experience the unique and contrasting landscapes, flora and fauna of South Australia. Commence in Adelaide then spend three days exploring the spectacular scenery and geology of the Flinders Ranges where Ediacaran fossils in ancient rocks represent weird early life forms that have long vanished and are no longer ...

Not All Australian Inventions embraced throughout the world have been headline-grabbers. In 1902 Launceston stationer J.A. Birchall literally put one and one together to do away with the disorder of loose-leaf paper - using glue and some cardboard backing to create the humble notepad.Trousers and skirts got a sharp new look in 1957 when CSIRO's Dr Arthur Farnworth discovered a ...

DURING WINTER, the early morning landscapes of the Grampians National Park, in south-west Victoria, are dotted with curious, rectangular silhouettes. They belong to "boulderers', an emerging breed of rockclimbers who carry mattress-like crash pads on their backs as they hike to the area's world-renowned boulders, rock ledges and sandstone overhangs. Boulderers climb without ropes and rely on crash pads and ...

The Tropic of Capricorn sweeps through a host of geological wonders, from the vast Outback, through Central Queensland, to the stunning Capricorn Coast and Great Barrier Reef. These contrasting panoramas are the result of nature's brutal forces over an unfathomable time. Here the secrets of the ages await discovery in the treasures atop and layers below.EXPLORE 'DIG THE TROPIC' COUNTRYLearn ...

Like medieval villagers in fortified communities, some modern Australians are fencing in the things they love and fencing out the things they don't. About 100,000 Australians now live in private walled estates, or gated communities, and their numbers are growing."It's a bit more like a village, in a way," says Kathy Noney, a teacher who lives with her husband Andrew ...

It was boxing day 2004 and Mrs Rinaldiana was walking near her home in Banda Aceh, Sumatra. "Suddenly, I saw the buildings move, shaken hard," she said. People running from the shore shouted that the sea was rising.Mrs Rinaldiana and her family sought shelter in a crowded two-storey house, but it was soon destroyed. "My daughter was hit by the ...

From atop Pier Head, I cast my eyes over the Coral Sea, out beyond where Coral Adventure, the ketch in which I'm travelling, is anchored. The reflection of clouds on the water brings an interesting palette of colours to life as mid-morning light plays across the surface of Stanage Bay. I think about Matthew Flinders and James Cook, both of ...

ON ONE OF THE driest, flattest continents on Earth, the Australian Alps stand out as unique. Although our mountains are midgets by world standards, they create landscapes and ecosystems not found anywhere else in Australia and are home to many endemic plants and animals. While they also inhabit subalpine woodlands, the species living in the Main Range of Kosciuszko National ...

IN A DESICCATED West Australian landscape, where hunting has been a way of life for more than 5000 years, a rifle pokes out the window of a four-wheel-drive. In a marriage of the old and the new, the rifle sight has been expertly attached with kangaroo sinew.Crack! A shot rings out across the burnt-sienna sands and the chase is on. ...

FROM UP HERE, on the granite blocks of Rams Head North's peak, in the thinning summer air 2160 m above sea level, the nascent Snowy River looks like the frayed cracker of a well- used stockwhip. A spongy mass of sphagnum laced with streamlets, snowgrass and boulders, the famous river's birthplace decorates an alpine saddle a few kilometres south of ...

FROM AFAR, it looks like a slight bump on an otherwise flawless horizon. But Aramac, to the locals, is a place of rare splendour: the arid backbone of Aussie myth-making and a breeding ground ofbushmen, drovers and larrikins.The township crouches low in the brittle Mitchell grass of the relentlessly parched, seemingly endless plains of central Queensland, 930 km north-west of ...

Dinosaurs are officially defined as ancient land-dwelling vertebrates with an upright stance. Other anatomical factors used by scientists to define dinosaurs include a hinge-like ankle joint or 'mesotarsal' and a nob-like muscle connector on the thigh bone called the fourth trochanter. The age of dinosaurs also saw the evolution of many marine and flying reptiles. The remains of turtles and ...

At the foot of the timber stairs up Prospect Hill someone has scrawled in texta: "512 steps to the top." But when the views of Kangaroo Island are this good, who's counting? Parked on the island's narrowest point and barely a kilometre coast to coast, this spot cops a belting from Southern Ocean westerlies. They bring sand from nearby beaches; ...