Australian Geographic

THE NEW DECADE has certainly made its presence felt, roaring in like a lion and sweeping away all semblance of normality. We embarked on the year battling bushfires of unparalleled ferocity and scale. Then, just as those affected communities began pi

Writer Diana Plater worked on the fire front during the bushfires in January this year, so she was the perfect person to report on the aftermath of the disaster (page 76). “As a firefighter you don’t always get to meet people on the ground, apart fro

The so-called Superman Barn, built in 2005 on a paddock south of Gunnedah in rural New South Wales as part of a film set for a Hollywood blockbuster, provides the perfect photographic foil for the flat landscape of the surrounding Liverpool Plains. T

AARON MORGAN is understandably excited about recent international recognition for his homeland. A Gunditjmara man from south-western Victoria, he was in Azerbaijan in July last year, when the state’s Lake Condah and the Tyrendarra fish traps were ins

There is no visitor information centre at Humpty Doo, so instead see Tourism Top End, 6 Bennett Street, Darwin. Ph: 1300 138 886 CONSIDER THE VALUE of an Aussie ‘Big Thing’. Most Northern Territory visitors roar through the town of Humpty Doo en rout

FOR DECADES scientists have known Earth has suffered bombardment from outer space; not by invading aliens, but chunks of solar system debris swept up by our planet as we orbit the Sun. These can be dust-sized meteors lighting up the night sky as shoo

IN OCTOBER 1905, Australasian Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) members travelled to Adelaide from around the country for their fifth congress. The AOU’s mandate was “to collate and disseminate up-to-date information relating to the avifauna of Australasia

WHEN THERE’S a large and sudden fall in the population of a species, as occurred for many plants and animals due to last summer’s bushfires, its extinction risk increases dramatically. “When a population becomes really sparse a particular set of ecol

There were anxious days in early January when it looked as if the Black Summer fires had caused Australia’s 28th mammal extinction – that the flames had forced the Kangaroo Island dunnart over the brink. Weighing less than 25g when fully grown and wi

As part of the normal ebb and flow of background infectious diseases, an epidemic will sometimes arise. An epidemic is an outbreak of an infectious disease, mostly confined to a local area. The word comes from the Greek epi meaning “upon”, and demos

AS COVID-19 spreads worldwide, humanity faces a crisis on a previously unimaginable scale. But, like many other recent outbreaks, this disease began as a virus in animals that jumped across to people. Data suggest, in fact, that about 70 per cent of

MY EXPERIENCE of isolation has taken many forms over the years. There’s the loneliness of working for myself, of challenging environmental norms, of leadership, where you internalise questioning and self-doubt, and, of course, there’s the undertaking

A SINGLE GIANT SPIDER CRAB can be hard to see. It barely exceeds 15cm across, despite its common name, and its triangular upper shell is covered in spines, hairs and knobs that make it blend into an ocean floor background. It will even make itself mo

Last November’s sponsorship grants and the Nancy-Bird Walton award have been finalised. Here are just a few of the projects we’re supporting throughout the year. Some are underway already, but others will take place once the COVID-19 restrictions are

AT THE AGE OF 13, Matt Daum became “the man of the house” when his father passed away. He began maintaining his family’s lawn and, over the years, discovered he had a knack for keeping it healthy. Now in his 40s, Matt spends about three hours every w

THE CORAL SEA is serene today. Palm trees cast flickering shadows over a golden beach as a family makes its way across a tidal causeway towards a rocky island, fishing rods and buckets in hand. Behind them, on the mainland, hills clad in hoop pine fo

THIS ANCIENT eastern Australian feature perfectly demonstrates that geology is a dynamic and evolving field. The now widely accepted theory of plate tectonics (see right) only emerged in the late 1960s. About the same time, the concept of mantle plum

THE SKY WAS PITCH BLACK as the giant Currowan fire roared over Mt Scanzi and down the hill to Tallowa Dam, on the western fringes of Kangaroo Valley, about 180km south-west of Sydney. It was Saturday 4 January. The fire had already jumped the Shoalha

JELLYFISH USED TO DRIFT under most people’s radars. But in recent years they’ve become hard to ignore, with reports of increasing jellyfish ‘swarms’ along coastlines and in harbours. These events are more accurately known as jellyfish blooms and are

The brightness of a source that emits monochromatic green light, one candela has a radiant intensity of 1/683 watts per steradian (W/sr). Defined in terms of the Planck constant, h, the kilogram is expressed in energy and time. Defined by the speed o

Consider, for example, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter. This US$125 million robotic spacecraft burnt up as it attempted to enter the Red Planet’s orbit in 1999 because a stuff-up between its navigation software, which used metric units, and its altitude-

THE FIRST OF January 2018 was a wake-up call for many Australians. For more than a decade we’d exported millions of tonnes of glass containers, drink cans, cardboard and other recyclable waste to Asia. But that was the day when China, one of the bigg

LOCAL GOVERNMENT waste services include kerbside collection, public place waste management and the provision of recycling and disposal infrastructure. Not all regions in Australia have access to all kerbside services as shown below. However, 95 per c

It’s been two decades since I last visited this celebrated dive site on Ribbon No. 3 Reef, east of Cooktown, on the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). During that time this World Heritage-listed natural wonder has suffered a series of enviro

A MUDDY plume expands across Morobe Harbour as our shimmering white ship, Coral Adventurer, sails into the bay just after dawn on a Sunday morning in mid-November. The recent late onset of monsoonal rains has brought a long dry period to an abrupt en

Come on an adventure with us while raising funds for the AG Society at the same time. Please check directly with the individual operators on the status of these experiences. At the time of press they are going ahead but things may change as a result

AG 15 July–September 1989 FOR THE FRONT cover of each of the first 83 editions of Australian Geographic, from January 1986 to July 2006, we commissioned an original native wildlife illustration. These artworks were always in a photorealistic style an