The town of Lone Pine, California, with the Sierra Nevada mountains in the background Lucas and I travelled to California and Nevada in April 2018 to have a look at what others are doing in the field of socially engaged art practice. It took many weeks to line up various people and venues to visit, […]
I was prompted to write this post by a short radio piece on the ABC stating that the Great Barrier Reef is likely to suffer bleaching every two years in the future, because we haven’t acted to stop global warming. Here’s the audio, which was on The World Today, on Thursday 5 July 2018. […]
Parallel with our work in Mackay, Kim Williams and I are doing a research trip to USA to meet with artists whose work is like ours (or vice versa) – trying to soak up methods and share ours with them. Today was special – we visited Newton Harrison (of http://theharrisonstudio.net/) in Santa Cruz. The Harrison […]
It’s mid-March, and we’re back in Mackay to have meetings with quite a few people and organisations. It’s very hot and humid and locals are saying that although there’s been some rain, the usual wet season of March hasn’t really happened. Simon Mattsson, our main cane-farmer collaborator, is hoping for some rainfall for his […]
Kim and I are back in Mackay briefly this week. The image above shows a little something I’ve been growing since our last visit: sugar cane in my vegie garden in Wollongong! Took a while to germinate, but seems quite happy in its multi-species environment… This week we’ve got a packed schedule of meetings to […]
In 1987 I had my first Great Barrier Reef experience, snorkelling on one of the outer reefs off Cairns. Seeing for the first time a wonderland of corals and tropical fish remains one of the most astonishing things I’ve witnessed. It was sheer, glorious, teeming beauty. The second Great Barrier Reef snorkelling trip was in […]
Tuesday 4th October – Lucas and I got an early start this morning to drive from Mackay to Townsville for a 1pm meeting with environmental scientist Jon Brodie at James Cook University. Jon is the Chief Research Scientist, Centre for Tropical Water & Aquatic Ecosystem Research (TropWATER). He has a long list of research articles […]
This article was published in the Daily Mercury yesterday. Here’s a link to it online. And here’s a second article about the “trouble at mill” published on the same day. I have to admit, for me, trying to get my head around those articles is a bit like how my 5 year old daughter Albie […]
This is a shout out to Sonia Ball from Canegrowers, who we had a fantastic meeting with a few weeks ago. A lot of the difficult thinking in my earlier blog post emerged from our discussion with Sonia, who is the Canegrowers Manager of Communications. Canegrowers is “the principal body representing the state’s sugarcane growers”, advocating […]
Over the past month while I’ve been here in Mackay I’ve met many people who are in some way connected with agriculture – soil scientists, environmental scientists, official representatives of the sugarcane industry, local food producers, Australian South Sea Islanders who are descended from the indentured canefield labourers of the last century, a local MP […]