The last two weeks have been nonstop work. For the first time during this whole trip I actually have felt that I am in college. It is almost over though, I just have to finish my final research paper and then I will be free of homework for a while.
We have been in Brisbane for a month and my time with Hayley (my host mum, well me and Melanie say that Hayley is our MUM, because that’s how they say it here. Our real mothers at home are our MOM’s) was fantastic. For the next week we are on spring break. We are given a stipend and we have to figure out our own travel and we can go anywhere we want.
I am on my way to Byron Bay, a small hippy beach town that is about two hours south of Brisbane. I think that it is going to feel like we are back in Seattle/Portland because of all the hippys. Its going to be great. Some of us are staying at this hostile called the Arts Factory and we are going to be sleeping in these big teepees. Sadly we won’t be putting them up ourselves (Ali and Rianna).
After a few days in Byron Bay we will take a long bus/train ride way up the coast to a small town called Gladstone where we will meet back up with the rest of the group. From there we will get on a catamaran to Heron Island to do some marine biology and snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef! I have been told that you can walk around the whole island on the beach in just 20 minuets.
Also some of you will be happy to know that there are Passover plans in the works. So many of us are Jewish that we are going to make our own Seder. It will be one of the very last days of the program and we will be in the middle of a forest in the Glasshouse Mountains I think. I have encountered so little Judaism here; I think that it would have been hard to find a Seder to go to. I was told that there is only one conservative synagogue in the whole country and it is in Melbourne. The lack of Jews in this country stems from the post world war two period when the government excluded Jews from immigrating after the Holocaust. When Australia became a country in 1901 the government initiated the White Australia Policy, which basically meant that nobody who wasn’t European, or white could immigrate here. So the lack of Jewish people sort of comes as a result of that policy. The White Australia Policy did not end until 1973 and even today the government is sort of strange with their approach to multiculturalism.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Dry, Old, Salty and Infertile
Here is the blog post that I wrote for our group blog at lcaustraliaprogram2011.blogspot.com
To our American families I can assure you that we are all enjoying our time with our new Australian families here in Brisbane. Melanie and I are happily settled in a small town house with our new mum and dad, a young couple who enjoy playing card games and touch football (or “footie”), which is a very different game from our American football, but that’s another story. As Katy previously mentioned, we are realizing that much of our time here has miraculously disappeared, but I feel that we still have many things yet to do before returning to our mundane American lives. With projects to prepare, papers to write and tests to study for, we are remembering that we are here first and foremost to go to school. This fact was easy to forget while hiking through the Blue Mountains, following kangaroo tracks in the bush, or swimming at Straddie’s subtropical beaches.
After a free day on Tuesday that was spent studying at the library—with a short break to dip into Allison’s pool—I found myself back in our classroom on Wednesday for a full day of lectures and student delivered presentations. Peter Kopittke, a soil expert from the University of Queensland, gave us a fascinating lecture on the formation and degradation of the Australian landscape. He began by telling us that the most important thing to know about Australia is that the landscape is dry, salty, infertile and old, four conditions that do not sound particularly inviting. The most rainfall that the center of the country got in the past year is just less than two inches. This lack of rain causes harsh living conditions for both plants and animals. The combination of low levels of rainfall and the fact that the water that is stored in the ground (or groundwater) and has high levels of salinity (or salt), adds up to a less than ideal situation for growing crops throughout Australia.
One way that salinity occurs in Australia is through dry land salinity. This takes place when the natural landscape is cleared, often for agricultural purposes, and salty groundwater rises because there are no longer any deep-rooted plants to drink the low-lying groundwater. Another type is irrigation salinity, which occurs when plants are overwatered, so much that the groundwater rises and the salty water kills all of the shallow rooted shrubs and plants. Both situations create a landscape that is impossible to live or grow crops on. In fact, some of the most fertile soil in Australia is in northern Queensland. But it is inhospitable to plants because it has some of the worst salinity in the country.
Professor Kopittke taught us that there are two ways of dealing with this salinity. The first is to re-plant all of the original vegetation back into the landscape so that the deep roots of native plants will drink the lower and less salty groundwater. The problem here is that you cannot ask a farmer to abandon his crops and re-plant the original, native landscape, especially when farming is most likely his sole livelihood. The other solution is to dig large trenches to drain the salty water. However, the problem then becomes, what do you do with all of the extra salt water? The conclusion being, once again, that Australia is an extremely inhospitable environment for any animal or plant that depends on water. Naturally, we have found it hard to believe that Australians have chosen to dedicate much of their land and economy to sheep, cattle, corn, sugar cane and wheat, investments that are extremely water intensive and foreign to this dry, salty, infertile and old country.
This is an example of how salinity made this landscape in Western Australia inhospitable for its native vegetation.
As we have learned in previous lectures, the earth’s crust is made up of a number of continental plates, and the entire continent of Australia sits in the middle of one of these plates. As a result, continental Australia contains very few mountains because it sits on no plate boundaries where most geologic activity occurs. Most land formation changes have occurred on the eastern coast due to a process called rifting. Rifting occurs when an uplift of magma in the ground causes two continental plates to be pulled apart, which then causes a deep valley to form between the two plates. 95 million years ago, this process occurred between Australia and New Zealand and led to the formation of the Great Dividing Range along the eastern coast of the continent. The consequence of Australia having so few mountains and very little geologic activity is that the soil is very infertile; it no longer has the essential nutrients and minerals for most plants to survive.
Professor Kopittke also demonstrated that another problem that currently plagues the Australian landscape is erosion, which is the process by which soil, rock and water is transported in the natural environment from the source and deposited elsewhere. Erosion is a natural process but it has been increased dramatically by human land use in Australia. It can severely damage a landscape in a very short time. When the natural landscape of an area is destroyed, often by grazing animals, the barren soil is exposed and can easily be eroded by wind that carries the soil and deposits it somewhere else. The result is huge scale dust storms that engulf entire Australian cities.
Here is a dust storm that occurred in South Australia.
Following our very informative, yet slightly discouraging lecture on the harsh conditions of the Australian landscape, we took a short lunch break and then began our second round of neighborhood presentations. Remember way back to when we were in Sydney, we all split into groups to do an in-depth study of specific neighborhoods around the city. We have once again done the same project but this time in Brisbane. First and foremost you should know that the Turrbal people are the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land that we now call Brisbane. The Turrbal mob refers to their land as Mian-Jin, which means ‘place shaped like a spike,’ and they have lived here for tens of thousands of years.
Our four neighborhoods, the CBD/Spring Hill, Fortitude Valley, Kangaroo Point and South Brisbane, are shown on this map.
My group studied the historic Central Business District (CBD) and Spring Hill, the original land that was settled by Europeans in 1823. The CBD/Spring Hill is home to the Queensland parliament house, which you might have learned about in a previous blog, as well as the Spring Hill Baths, the first swimming pool in all of Queensland, and the historic Old Windmill, which is only one of two convict built structures still standing in Brisbane.
Adjacent to Spring Hill is a neighborhood called Fortitude Valley (or just The Valley), which is named after a boat called the SS Fortitude that arrived in the area in 1849 with 249 Scottish Presbyterian migrants. This suburb is known through the city as the center for entertainment, arts and high-end commerce. Due to its Presbyterian past, it is filled with churches, some of which have been converted into bars and nightclubs. It also has less savory venues such as strip clubs. In 1999 residents of The Valley started complaining about the level of noise that had developed and began a campaign called “Save The Music” to stop the residents from shutting down all of the music venues. The police have now created an entertainment precinct so that venues within the precinct are exempt from strict loud noise laws and residents outside the precinct can happily live noise free.
An old Presbyterian church that has now been converted into a bar called ‘The Church.’
Just across the river is Kangaroo Point, which is cleverly named because it historically had many kangaroos and is shaped like a point. Pretty original. After Brisbane’s discovery, the area of Kangaroo Point was cleared and used for cultivation of crops. By 1843 the first land sale took place and the area became an urbanized suburb with about 80 houses, a wharf, a ferry service to north Brisbane, a sawmill, a brick-works, and a postal receiving box. When large-scale immigration to Brisbane began in the late 1880’s, Kangaroo point became the Ellis Island of the city. An immigration depot called the Yungaba, an Aboriginal word meaning ‘welcome’ or ‘resting place’, provided immigrants with temporary housing. It received its first group of 299 immigrants from England.
South Brisbane, which includes the neighborhood of West End, is the last neighborhood that we learned about and is the home to the GED office. West End, named for its similarity to West End London, was a hub of industry in the early 20th century. Thomas Dixon’s tannery and shoe and boot factory (1908), Tristram’s soft drink factory (1928) and Hume Pipes Co. (1932) are some examples of the industry that took over the neighborhood. Later in 1988 the world expo came to Brisbane and led to the revival of South Brisbane. Many buildings and attractions were erected, including the noticeable Ferris wheel and Sky Needle, which we can see from the GED office, where we attend class everyday. The needle has a bit of an interesting history. It was originally going to be moved to Tokyo Disneyland following the expo. However, it was bought instead by a local hairstylist named Stefan, painted in rainbow colors towards the top as a sign of gay pride, and moved to Stefan’s corporate headquarters in South Brisbane.
The sky needle reminds me of the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington, where I grew up.
For each of our neighborhoods we also studied the effects of the 2011 Queensland floods and previous floods that have affected the area. The general consensus was that the recent floods were detrimental to all of our neighborhoods in some way and hard work was done to transition the city back to a normal state. Here are some photos of the effects of past and present flooding in Brisbane. I am sure that you will agree that these photos touch a full range of emotions:
Someone diving into the water during the 1974 flooding of the CBD
An arial shot of the 2011 flooding in the CBD
Flooding in the streets of the CBD
On Thursday we received a lecture on woman’s suffrage in Australian history from Shirleen Robinson, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland. She reminded us that Australia was the second country in the world, after New Zealand, to allow women to vote. We were then introduced to the two waves of feminism in Australia. The increasing level of female education and employment prompted the first wave from the 1880’s to 1910’s. The second wave, in the 1960’s and 70’s, was partly sparked by the American feminist movement in addition to an incident that happened in a local Brisbane bar. On the 31st of March 1966, three determined women walked into the Regatta Hotel, and when they were refused service, because women were not allowed to be public bars, they chained themselves to the bar and threw the key in the Brisbane River across the street.
Thanks for sticking with us throughout the last two days; I hope you have enjoyed learning about this fascinating and historically rich, yet dry continent as much as we have.
-Hanah Goldov
To our American families I can assure you that we are all enjoying our time with our new Australian families here in Brisbane. Melanie and I are happily settled in a small town house with our new mum and dad, a young couple who enjoy playing card games and touch football (or “footie”), which is a very different game from our American football, but that’s another story. As Katy previously mentioned, we are realizing that much of our time here has miraculously disappeared, but I feel that we still have many things yet to do before returning to our mundane American lives. With projects to prepare, papers to write and tests to study for, we are remembering that we are here first and foremost to go to school. This fact was easy to forget while hiking through the Blue Mountains, following kangaroo tracks in the bush, or swimming at Straddie’s subtropical beaches.
After a free day on Tuesday that was spent studying at the library—with a short break to dip into Allison’s pool—I found myself back in our classroom on Wednesday for a full day of lectures and student delivered presentations. Peter Kopittke, a soil expert from the University of Queensland, gave us a fascinating lecture on the formation and degradation of the Australian landscape. He began by telling us that the most important thing to know about Australia is that the landscape is dry, salty, infertile and old, four conditions that do not sound particularly inviting. The most rainfall that the center of the country got in the past year is just less than two inches. This lack of rain causes harsh living conditions for both plants and animals. The combination of low levels of rainfall and the fact that the water that is stored in the ground (or groundwater) and has high levels of salinity (or salt), adds up to a less than ideal situation for growing crops throughout Australia.
One way that salinity occurs in Australia is through dry land salinity. This takes place when the natural landscape is cleared, often for agricultural purposes, and salty groundwater rises because there are no longer any deep-rooted plants to drink the low-lying groundwater. Another type is irrigation salinity, which occurs when plants are overwatered, so much that the groundwater rises and the salty water kills all of the shallow rooted shrubs and plants. Both situations create a landscape that is impossible to live or grow crops on. In fact, some of the most fertile soil in Australia is in northern Queensland. But it is inhospitable to plants because it has some of the worst salinity in the country.
Professor Kopittke taught us that there are two ways of dealing with this salinity. The first is to re-plant all of the original vegetation back into the landscape so that the deep roots of native plants will drink the lower and less salty groundwater. The problem here is that you cannot ask a farmer to abandon his crops and re-plant the original, native landscape, especially when farming is most likely his sole livelihood. The other solution is to dig large trenches to drain the salty water. However, the problem then becomes, what do you do with all of the extra salt water? The conclusion being, once again, that Australia is an extremely inhospitable environment for any animal or plant that depends on water. Naturally, we have found it hard to believe that Australians have chosen to dedicate much of their land and economy to sheep, cattle, corn, sugar cane and wheat, investments that are extremely water intensive and foreign to this dry, salty, infertile and old country.
As we have learned in previous lectures, the earth’s crust is made up of a number of continental plates, and the entire continent of Australia sits in the middle of one of these plates. As a result, continental Australia contains very few mountains because it sits on no plate boundaries where most geologic activity occurs. Most land formation changes have occurred on the eastern coast due to a process called rifting. Rifting occurs when an uplift of magma in the ground causes two continental plates to be pulled apart, which then causes a deep valley to form between the two plates. 95 million years ago, this process occurred between Australia and New Zealand and led to the formation of the Great Dividing Range along the eastern coast of the continent. The consequence of Australia having so few mountains and very little geologic activity is that the soil is very infertile; it no longer has the essential nutrients and minerals for most plants to survive.
Professor Kopittke also demonstrated that another problem that currently plagues the Australian landscape is erosion, which is the process by which soil, rock and water is transported in the natural environment from the source and deposited elsewhere. Erosion is a natural process but it has been increased dramatically by human land use in Australia. It can severely damage a landscape in a very short time. When the natural landscape of an area is destroyed, often by grazing animals, the barren soil is exposed and can easily be eroded by wind that carries the soil and deposits it somewhere else. The result is huge scale dust storms that engulf entire Australian cities.
Following our very informative, yet slightly discouraging lecture on the harsh conditions of the Australian landscape, we took a short lunch break and then began our second round of neighborhood presentations. Remember way back to when we were in Sydney, we all split into groups to do an in-depth study of specific neighborhoods around the city. We have once again done the same project but this time in Brisbane. First and foremost you should know that the Turrbal people are the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land that we now call Brisbane. The Turrbal mob refers to their land as Mian-Jin, which means ‘place shaped like a spike,’ and they have lived here for tens of thousands of years.
My group studied the historic Central Business District (CBD) and Spring Hill, the original land that was settled by Europeans in 1823. The CBD/Spring Hill is home to the Queensland parliament house, which you might have learned about in a previous blog, as well as the Spring Hill Baths, the first swimming pool in all of Queensland, and the historic Old Windmill, which is only one of two convict built structures still standing in Brisbane.
Adjacent to Spring Hill is a neighborhood called Fortitude Valley (or just The Valley), which is named after a boat called the SS Fortitude that arrived in the area in 1849 with 249 Scottish Presbyterian migrants. This suburb is known through the city as the center for entertainment, arts and high-end commerce. Due to its Presbyterian past, it is filled with churches, some of which have been converted into bars and nightclubs. It also has less savory venues such as strip clubs. In 1999 residents of The Valley started complaining about the level of noise that had developed and began a campaign called “Save The Music” to stop the residents from shutting down all of the music venues. The police have now created an entertainment precinct so that venues within the precinct are exempt from strict loud noise laws and residents outside the precinct can happily live noise free.
Just across the river is Kangaroo Point, which is cleverly named because it historically had many kangaroos and is shaped like a point. Pretty original. After Brisbane’s discovery, the area of Kangaroo Point was cleared and used for cultivation of crops. By 1843 the first land sale took place and the area became an urbanized suburb with about 80 houses, a wharf, a ferry service to north Brisbane, a sawmill, a brick-works, and a postal receiving box. When large-scale immigration to Brisbane began in the late 1880’s, Kangaroo point became the Ellis Island of the city. An immigration depot called the Yungaba, an Aboriginal word meaning ‘welcome’ or ‘resting place’, provided immigrants with temporary housing. It received its first group of 299 immigrants from England.
South Brisbane, which includes the neighborhood of West End, is the last neighborhood that we learned about and is the home to the GED office. West End, named for its similarity to West End London, was a hub of industry in the early 20th century. Thomas Dixon’s tannery and shoe and boot factory (1908), Tristram’s soft drink factory (1928) and Hume Pipes Co. (1932) are some examples of the industry that took over the neighborhood. Later in 1988 the world expo came to Brisbane and led to the revival of South Brisbane. Many buildings and attractions were erected, including the noticeable Ferris wheel and Sky Needle, which we can see from the GED office, where we attend class everyday. The needle has a bit of an interesting history. It was originally going to be moved to Tokyo Disneyland following the expo. However, it was bought instead by a local hairstylist named Stefan, painted in rainbow colors towards the top as a sign of gay pride, and moved to Stefan’s corporate headquarters in South Brisbane.
For each of our neighborhoods we also studied the effects of the 2011 Queensland floods and previous floods that have affected the area. The general consensus was that the recent floods were detrimental to all of our neighborhoods in some way and hard work was done to transition the city back to a normal state. Here are some photos of the effects of past and present flooding in Brisbane. I am sure that you will agree that these photos touch a full range of emotions:
On Thursday we received a lecture on woman’s suffrage in Australian history from Shirleen Robinson, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland. She reminded us that Australia was the second country in the world, after New Zealand, to allow women to vote. We were then introduced to the two waves of feminism in Australia. The increasing level of female education and employment prompted the first wave from the 1880’s to 1910’s. The second wave, in the 1960’s and 70’s, was partly sparked by the American feminist movement in addition to an incident that happened in a local Brisbane bar. On the 31st of March 1966, three determined women walked into the Regatta Hotel, and when they were refused service, because women were not allowed to be public bars, they chained themselves to the bar and threw the key in the Brisbane River across the street.
Thanks for sticking with us throughout the last two days; I hope you have enjoyed learning about this fascinating and historically rich, yet dry continent as much as we have.
-Hanah Goldov
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Straddie
This past weekend we took a trip to North Stradbroke Island (the locals call it Staddie because Aussies shorten everything!!) to learn about sand island ecology. The island is only two hours out of the city, we took a vehicle ferry to get there. Straddie is a sand island, meaning that it was formed by sand dunes building up over many years. We learned that the sand body extends 50 meters below sea level. On sand islands when it rains a film of fresh water laying over the sea level which actually creates fresh water lakes on the island. Basically if you dig in the sand enough in the middle of the island you will always reach fresh water that is super clean.
On our first day on Straddie we went to walk through a Mangrove forest. Mangroves live on the beach in the muddy sand where the tide comes in every day. They have roots that grow down from the trunk and into the ground. The craziest thing about the Mangroves was that every time you take a step your foot sinks about a foot into the mud, it was quite difficult to walk through. Once we got through the forest it opened up into a beach of quick sand. We got sooo stuck, but the funny thing was that we got stuck on purpose… Nat told us to stomp our feet into the ground so that when you lean back your legs are so cemented in the sand that you don’t fall over, did that make any sense? Well it was a lot of fun but we had quite a hard time getting ourselves out of the quick sand. I got my feet out ok but for about 20 minuets my shoes were stuck three feet underground.
The beaches on the island are truly amazing and the water is like bath water. The sand is actually white and because its so fine, when you walk on it, the sand squeaks. We spent our second day there exploring the island with our local teacher Shane as our guide. We went on a hike of the cliffs along the beach that was breathtaking. I always think that this trip couldn’t get any cooler and then we see something that just blows me away more than the last thing. I thought that our beach hike was cool but later that night it got even cooler. A few of us decided to take a walk on the beach after dark. We walked for a while and chased some crabs, which was heaps of fun, but after a guy from the hostel showed us that when you stomp in the sand at night there are bioluminescent organisms (I think???) that light up. We then proceeded to spend a good 30 minuets stomping around in the sand, watching it light up around our feet on every stomp. Pretty cool, right???
In a few weeks we will be going to Heron Island, which is an even more tropical than Staddie and is further north where we will be snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. I am sure I will be blown away by what I see there as well, but for now we have some time in Brisbane with our homestays and lots of homework!
Speaking of homework… Today we had a free day and decided to go on an adventure in Brisbane because we felt that we don’t really know the city at all. We basically got ourselves lost in the city. Brisbane is located on a river and the river is used for transportation. They have catamarans called City Cats that are used like busses for public transport but on the river. Today we decided to get on one and see where it takes us, it was quite fun. Another strange thing about Brisbane is that if you want to get on a bus at a bus stop, the only way that it will stop for you is if you hail it… you know like hailing a cab. I always feel strange waving my hand about and hoping that the bus will stop. We also have noticed that there is very little evidence of the flooding. They must have cleaned the city up incredibly fast because you can’t tell at all that it was under water a couple months ago.
On our first day on Straddie we went to walk through a Mangrove forest. Mangroves live on the beach in the muddy sand where the tide comes in every day. They have roots that grow down from the trunk and into the ground. The craziest thing about the Mangroves was that every time you take a step your foot sinks about a foot into the mud, it was quite difficult to walk through. Once we got through the forest it opened up into a beach of quick sand. We got sooo stuck, but the funny thing was that we got stuck on purpose… Nat told us to stomp our feet into the ground so that when you lean back your legs are so cemented in the sand that you don’t fall over, did that make any sense? Well it was a lot of fun but we had quite a hard time getting ourselves out of the quick sand. I got my feet out ok but for about 20 minuets my shoes were stuck three feet underground.
The beaches on the island are truly amazing and the water is like bath water. The sand is actually white and because its so fine, when you walk on it, the sand squeaks. We spent our second day there exploring the island with our local teacher Shane as our guide. We went on a hike of the cliffs along the beach that was breathtaking. I always think that this trip couldn’t get any cooler and then we see something that just blows me away more than the last thing. I thought that our beach hike was cool but later that night it got even cooler. A few of us decided to take a walk on the beach after dark. We walked for a while and chased some crabs, which was heaps of fun, but after a guy from the hostel showed us that when you stomp in the sand at night there are bioluminescent organisms (I think???) that light up. We then proceeded to spend a good 30 minuets stomping around in the sand, watching it light up around our feet on every stomp. Pretty cool, right???
In a few weeks we will be going to Heron Island, which is an even more tropical than Staddie and is further north where we will be snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. I am sure I will be blown away by what I see there as well, but for now we have some time in Brisbane with our homestays and lots of homework!
Speaking of homework… Today we had a free day and decided to go on an adventure in Brisbane because we felt that we don’t really know the city at all. We basically got ourselves lost in the city. Brisbane is located on a river and the river is used for transportation. They have catamarans called City Cats that are used like busses for public transport but on the river. Today we decided to get on one and see where it takes us, it was quite fun. Another strange thing about Brisbane is that if you want to get on a bus at a bus stop, the only way that it will stop for you is if you hail it… you know like hailing a cab. I always feel strange waving my hand about and hoping that the bus will stop. We also have noticed that there is very little evidence of the flooding. They must have cleaned the city up incredibly fast because you can’t tell at all that it was under water a couple months ago.
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