Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

Anzac Day 2026 arrives in tumultuous times: unresolved conflict in the Middle East, the erosion of the old international order, the famous Doomsday Clock set closer to midnight than ever before.

Without doubt, this brings New Zealand’s defence relationship with its closest neighbour (and only formal ally) Australia into sharp focus.

In March, not long after the initial attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, closer defence relations with Australia were formalised under the Anzac 2035 commitment.

This essentially sets out to “operationalise” previous statements on closer defence relations, and reaffirms the importance of the ANZUS alliance – which also marks its 75th anniversary this year.

Given ANZUS became virtually defunct after New Zealand’s nuclear-free declaration in the 1980s, this is a remarkable turnaround. The vexed question of joining the AUKUS security pact aside, Anzac 2035 aims for a more cohesive and integrated combat-capable force.

This Anzac Day, then, it’s worth putting these latest developments in context. And it is important to understand the risks, as well as the rewards, of closer defence ties with Australia.

The origins of ANZUS

Trans-Tasman military cooperation is often thought to start with Gallipoli in 1915. In fact, it predates that pivotal moment by more than half a century when some 2,500 Australian men enlisted in militia units during the New Zealand Wars.

By 1887, the alliance was formally linked to Britain via a shared naval defence agreement. The Anzacs were born out of the two armies being fused in 1914 as they sailed for Egypt at the start of the first world war.

After the disaster of Gallipoli and the end of the war, New Zealand placed its faith in the peacekeeping role of the League of Nations. But as that began to collapse, Wellington turned again to its traditional friends.

During the second world war it became clear Britain could not protect its old colony, but the United States could. In 1944, New Zealand agreed to a regional zone of defence with Australia.

After the war, New Zealand supported the United Nations but also settled into the secretive Five Eyes intelligence-sharing relationship with Britain, Canada, Australia and the US.

In 1951, the ANZUS agreement with Australia and the US created a relationship based on “continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid” to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack”.

Read more: Is NZ defence and intelligence policy aligning with AUKUS in all but name?

A freeze and then a thaw

By joining America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam, New Zealand was drawn closely into the US sphere of influence. But the Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act in 1987 saw the ANZUS treaty sidelined between Wellington and Washington – though never formally renounced.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Canberra and Washington remained watertight, and has only grown closer – albeit controversially – with the AUKUS security agreement and nuclear submarine deal.

New Zealand’s relationship with the US thawed after it sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001. By 2010, a new strategic partnership emerged with the Wellington Declaration on a New Strategic Partnership.

Since then, the old ANZUS partnership has been reinforced by contributions to the fight against Islamic State in Iraq in 2015, and help training Ukrainian troops in the war with Russia since 2022.

And while New Zealand has so far avoided committing to joining the security monitoring and intelligence sharing provisions of AUKUS Pillar II, it has arguably been moving in that direction anyway.

The government has also pledged to raise defence spending to more than 2% of GDP in the next eight years, and has been deepening military relationships with Britain, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.

A challenging Anzac future

Set against the extreme uncertainty created by American foreign policy under President Donald Trump, New Zealand’s increasing focus on a reliable alliance with Australia makes sense.

There is certainly more that could be done to integrate further, including matching defence spending as a proportion of GDP with Australia’s intention to hit 3% by 2033.

And there remains the possibility of a genuinely combined military that improves efficiency, effectiveness and scale, with New Zealand perhaps becoming responsible for one fifth of a joint force.

But there has to be a caveat.

Given the large American military presence in Australia, there is a high chance those locations could be attacked in the event of a serious global conflict.

New Zealand will need to retain full sovereign control over any military it contributed to a future Anzac force. And it would have to remain committed to the multilateral United Nations model of conflict resolution wherever possible.

Any deepening of New Zealand’s military relationship with Australia also needs to be consistent with its commitments against weapons of mass destruction.

All of this means closely monitoring Australia’s far tighter relationship with the US, which will have serious implications for New Zealand – implications that are becoming clearer. Greater military cooperation with Australia is already happening – it needs to be eyes wide open.

– ref. Anzac then and now: as trans-Tasman defence relations get closer, NZ must be on guard – https://theconversation.com/anzac-then-and-now-as-trans-tasman-defence-relations-get-closer-nz-must-be-on-guard-281109

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Gallagher, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

Every year, millions of visitors stand at the clifftop lookouts along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road and gaze out at the Twelve Apostles. These towering limestone stacks, rising up to 70 metres above the Southern Ocean, are some of Australia’s most recognisable landmarks.

Yet despite their fame, no-one has ever really understood how they came to be. Until now.

In new research published in the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences, my colleagues and I finally answer that question – and the story involves ancient seas, shifting tectonic plates, and a transformation that began millions of years ago.

A window into deep time

The limestone of the Apostles contains an incredible archive of millions of years of history, and in particular climate history. But it has received relatively little attention from scientists.

Each layer was laid down in shallow seas during the Miocene epoch. This period in Earth’s history, marked by a transition from warm to cool climate, lasted roughly from 23 million years ago to 5 million years ago. Each change from one layer to another represents a change in the local conditions such as temperature, chemistry, or movement of the water.

My colleagues and I carefully mapped the cliffs and sea stacks using high-resolution digital imagery alongside traditional fieldwork and sampling, and analysed fossils of microscopic sea creatures called foraminifera trapped in the rock. I calculated that one of the stacks contains around 760 trillion of these fossils.

As a result, we were able to read the layers of rock like tree rings.

This work has given us the most precise dates yet for the Apostles’ limestone. Our fossil analysis shows the oldest layers of limestone are about 14 million years old, and the youngest about 8.6 million.

Beneath the limestone, visible at beach level east of the Apostles, is an older layer of soft, dark material called the Gellibrand Marl. This was deposited at the bottom of deeper, warmer seas around 14 million to 15 million years ago.

On top of the marl, forming the bulk of the cliffs and stacks themselves, is the Port Campbell Limestone. This was deposited in shallower, cooler conditions over the following several million years.

From 14.1 million to 13.8 million years ago, our fossil record captures a moment when the global climate was warmer than today. The layers from that time represent a natural record of what higher temperatures and sea levels look like, preserved in extraordinary detail on the Victorian coast.

Tectonics, tilting, and thrust faults

So how did limestone formed underwater end up standing tens of metres above the sea? The answer lies in plate tectonics.

As Australia drifted northward after splitting from Antarctica, changing stresses in Earth’s crust compressed the region in a roughly northwest–southeast direction.

Starting around 8.6 million years ago, this compression buckled and lifted the limestone out of the sea. It didn’t push the layers up perfectly straight.

If you look closely at the cliffs today, you can see the horizontal layers are tilted by a few degrees. Small faults are also visible in the cliff faces – the scars of ancient earthquakes caused by that same tectonic squeezing.

The cliffs are brand new

Our most surprising finding: while the rock itself is millions of years old, the dramatic coastal scenery we see today is brand new in geological terms.

The actual sea stacks and cliffs only took their present form in the past few thousand years, after sea levels rose about 125 metres following the last ice age, roughly 20,000–23,000 years ago.

As the sea flooded back in, waves began attacking the exposed limestone, which had also been weakened by tectonic forces. The rock fractured and eroded, forming headlands, then arches, which eventually collapsed to leave isolated stacks standing in the surf.

This process is still happening today. There were only seven or eight sea stacks (due to disagreements about what to count) when the Twelve Apostles were given their name – with a bit of poetic licence – in the early 20th century.

One collapsed in 2005 and another crumbled in 2009, leaving a generally agreed number of seven today. The relentless toll of the waves means further collapses are inevitable, so we must pursue further research while we can.

A crucial climate record

The most exciting part of this research is not just what we have found already, but what remains to be read in these cliffs. We are now working to reconstruct the fine detail of how climate, sea levels and ocean conditions changed across those millions of years of history.

At a moment when the world faces urgent questions about our climate, the Twelve Apostles offer us an extraordinary record of where it has been and where we might be heading.

– ref. Scientists finally know how old the Twelve Apostles are – and they’re much younger than anyone thought – https://theconversation.com/scientists-finally-know-how-old-the-twelve-apostles-are-and-theyre-much-younger-than-anyone-thought-281230

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wallace, Professor, School of Politics Economics & Society, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of Canberra

Carbon pricing and the Gillard government are fused together like molten glass in the memory of all those who witnessed the traumatic and consequential policy and political drama surrounding it.

The years-long affair is a cautionary tale of what happens when intense negative campaigning, misinformation and clumsy politicking collide to kill otherwise sound policy – and prime ministerial careers.

The great moral challenge

Climate policy became an increasing concern in the early years of the millennium. The UK government’s Stern Review on the economics of climate change in 2006 galvanised attention. So too did increasingly alarming United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

In Australia, the Howard government, in the thrall of resource sector interests, leant against climate action.

In contrast, Labor Opposition leader Kevin Rudd declared climate change “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

Politics and policy share a love-hate relationship, but we can’t have one without the other. In this six-part series, we’re chronicling how policies have shaped Australia’s prime ministers, for better or worse, and what it means for how politicians tackle today’s big challenges.

Labor promised to establish an emissions trading scheme – a market-based mechanism of the kind already used overseas to speed up decarbonisation of the economy. By bringing the market price closer to the real-world cost of its use, the scheme dampens demand for carbon-based energy over time, and makes other forms of energy more attractive.

The Howard government promised such a scheme too, if re-elected, to improve its environmental credentials in the run-up to the 2007 election which Labor looked likely to, and did indeed, win.

Read more: Climate explained: how emissions trading schemes work and they can help us shift to a zero carbon future

A ‘great big tax on everything’

In 2007 Rudd, together with the states and territories, commissioned the Garnaut Climate Change Review. In 2008, the review recommended proceeding with an emissions trading scheme. In December that year, the government announced it would legislate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) with a transitional fixed carbon price.

However, it never came to fruition. Lacking a Senate majority, Labor needed either the Coalition or the Greens to support its passage through the upper house. Rudd did not secure the necessary support.

He failed to grasp a brief opportunity to get Coalition backing under the opposition leadership of Malcolm Turnbull. After Tony Abbott succeeded Turnbull in December 2009, the Coalition’s position changed to trenchant opposition.

Making the perfect the enemy of the good, the Greens also opposed the CPRS on grounds that it didn’t go far enough.

In April 2010, a frustrated Rudd shelved the scheme.

“It seems the government has dropped its policy to deal with climate change […] because it is frightened the public think that this really is just a great big new tax on everything,” Abbott said at the time.

“I’m quite happy for the next election to be a referendum on Mr Rudd’s great big new tax on everything, and he’s frightened of that.”

The ‘real Julia’

This was the situation incoming Labor prime minister Julia Gillard inherited two months later when, in June 2010, she displaced the by now politically paralysed Rudd.

The next month, Gillard called an election for August. She quickly came under pressure in the campaign, squeezed in a pincer movement from the inside by an embittered Rudd and his allies, and on the outside by the Abbott opposition’s hard, negative campaigning.

Labor support slid. It was, she wrote later in her memoir, the “election campaign from hell”.

Attempting a mid-campaign reset, Gillard promised voters would now see the “real Julia” rather than the cautious, advisor-crafted persona seen so far.

This invited the damaging implication that there was an authentic and an inauthentic Gillard – a liar. The Abbott opposition campaigned mercilessly against Gillard during the election with this, and afterwards when she continued as prime minister in minority government.

Carbon pricing was at the eye of this storm.

A broken promise?

Gillard committed to establishing a carbon price in the campaign but ruled out a carbon tax.

The following year the government announced a carbon pricing scheme would begin on July 1 2012, created through the Clean Energy Act, which became law with the support of the Greens.

It established a transitional fixed carbon price that after three years would transition to a floating price set by market forces. The interim fixed price was not a tax but, from an economist’s view, could be characterised as operating like one.

From the moment it was announced, the opposition and media cast the carbon price as Gillard breaking her promise not to introduce a carbon tax.

Writing in 2013 as a recently departed staffer of then-treasurer Wayne Swan, Jim Chalmers observed that:

There was a lot of dishonesty in the carbon price debate, which set dangerous new precedents for the sort of tripe that the media would repeat. Abbott and his Coalition counterpart Barnaby Joyce were the worst offenders, claiming roasts would cost more than a hundred dollars, and entire towns such as Whyalla in South Australia and Gladstone in Queensland would be turned into ghost towns or wiped off the map.

In fact, the implementation went smoothly and the carbon pricing system worked well. Employment and the economy kept growing, emissions fell and, as Gillard later commented in her memoir, “Not one of the horror scenarios sketched by the Tony Abbott-led Opposition came true”.

This did not stop Abbott campaigning hard to “axe the tax” – something Gillard facilitated by unnecessarily conceding “we’ll get there via a three-year fixed price – effectively a tax, a carbon tax”.

At the time, Chalmers described the Gillard government’s carbon pricing initiative as “by far the biggest single environmental measure ever enacted in Australia”.

It did not survive the 2013 election of the Coalition Abbott government, which ended carbon pricing in 2014.

Lasting harm to reform

With searing memories of the carbon tax storm generated by Abbott, the Albanese government has not revisited carbon pricing. Strong advocates remain though, including economist Ross Garnaut whose 2024 book “Let’s Tax Carbon” sends an unequivocal message.

“Emissions trading will be a part of our nation’s future,” Gillard said in her 2014 memoir. “It is inevitable.”

However, Australia still awaits an advocate willing and able to deliver and entrench a carbon price, as Gillard tried and failed to do.

Read more: Economists want a carbon price comeback – but does Australia have the political courage?

An alternative view is that Australia’s energy transition is now moving so fast on the back of rooftop solar and home battery installations that the fight to price carbon is one that, given its fraught history, is now not worth having.

Either way, the florid and at times vicious misinformation campaign the Coalition ran against the Gillard government’s carbon pricing policy caused lasting harm to policy reform in Australia.

It has made government timid in rising to big challenges, just when voters expect more decisive action to meet contemporary needs.

The widening gap is helping fuel the drift of voters to populist political options, and puts the continued dominance of the two-party system at risk.

– ref. The carbon tax debate damaged Julia Gillard’s leadership – and good climate policy for years to come – https://theconversation.com/the-carbon-tax-debate-damaged-julia-gillards-leadership-and-good-climate-policy-for-years-to-come-277092

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Townsend, Lecturer in War Studies, UNSW Sydney

110 years ago this week, Anzac Day was held for the first time. It has been observed annually ever since.

Today, Anzac Day has emerged as an unofficial national day. But what do Australians think about the most significant event in the national commemorative calendar?

Anzac Day important, but engagement levels lag behind

Last year, the War Studies Research Group conducted a national survey, examining public attitudes towards military history. The survey involved 1,500 people and was completed in late February and early March 2025.

Anzac Day remains deeply contested. Academics have shown how critics argue the occasion glorifies war and obscures its more challenging aspects, including veterans’ health issues.

At the time of the Gallipoli centenary in 2015, questions were raised about “centenary fatigue” — the idea that the Australian public would grow tired of commemoration after four years of centenary activities, and disengage from Anzac Day. Reporting has since highlighted differing opinions among young Australians, and studies have identified reduced turnout at Anzac Day services.

Despite these concerns, our survey found the Australian public overwhelmingly believes in the day’s importance within contemporary society. Nearly 90% of respondents said Anzac Day was important to Australians today.

When it comes to engaging with Anzac Day activities, however, responses were more varied. Around two thirds had attended an Anzac Day service at least once. More than half also regularly engaged with the Anzac Day-related activities.

Yet almost a quarter said they don’t regularly engage with Anzac Day activities, and 35% admitted they had never attended an Anzac Day service.

This tracks with other research, which shows that the number of Australians attending Anzac Day dawn services between 2015 and 2019 dropped by 70%.

Younger Australians consider Anzac Day important

Our survey didn’t look at the reasons for engaging (or not), but lagging participation in Anzac Day events has been linked to “broader community disinterest”, particularly among younger Australians.

Yet our survey found younger Australians overwhelmingly consider Anzac Day important. About 85% of those aged under 40 responded favourably – not much lower than older Australians.

The youngest Australians (18–29) in our study were also only marginally less likely than their older counterparts to have attended an Anzac Day service at least once: 72%, compared with around 75% of those aged 60 or over.

Under-40s are also the most likely to engage regularly with Anzac Day activities. This is likely influenced by the fact they are more likely to be physically capable of participating, compared with older Australians.

Veterans crucial to keeping memory alive

Veterans have long been the cornerstone of Anzac Day, whether at the dawn service or Anzac Day marches – and Australians consider them crucial to commemoration.

Our research showed 85% of Australians supported their role in keeping the memory of past conflicts alive. Nearly 70% also found it easier to remember past conflicts when veterans are alive to tell their stories.

This opinion was shared across age groups, genders and locations. It also tracks with some of the broader findings in our survey, including that Australians are most interested in personal stories of war.

While Australians believe in veterans’ role in keeping the memory of their experiences alive, this doesn’t mean they receive a great deal of information about military history from them.

Just under half of Australians trust veterans and veterans’ associations as sources of information on military history, but only 15% said most of their knowledge came from them.

There were also notable age-related differences in this regard. Around a quarter of Australians aged 60 or over identified veterans or their associations as a key source of information on military history. By contrast, only 8% of those aged 30–39 said the same, along with 13% of those aged 18–29.

Crucially, veterans and veterans’ associations were not in the top three sources of military history knowledge for any age group.

The challenges that lay ahead

This raises questions about the role of veterans in increasing public awareness of their contributions and experiences.

Others have emphasised the risk posed by the loss of “tangible connections” to veterans of past conflicts, both distant and recent. In 2025 it was estimated there remained around 1,000 second world war veterans in Australia. The last Australian veteran of the first world war died in 2009.

This means we are now reliant on recorded interviews and written testimony for personal insights into both world wars. Still, both world wars benefit from significant exposure in popular culture and the dominance of the world wars in history.

For more recent conflicts, the challenge is greater. Public awareness of recent conflicts is lacking compared to the world wars, and unlike the second world war, they rarely feature in popular culture. The Anzac legend of the “exceptional digger” also fails to reflect the professional soldier of the modern Australian Defence Force and recent conflicts.

Whether it is distant or more recent conflicts, the voices of veterans are important in maintaining the memory of past conflicts. It is important we ensure their voices are heard now, and recorded for future generations.

– ref. After 110 years of Anzac Days, new research shows Australians remain convinced of its importance – https://theconversation.com/after-110-years-of-anzac-days-new-research-shows-australians-remain-convinced-of-its-importance-281012

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wright, PhD Candidate in Environmental Policy, Macquarie University

For more than a decade, Australia’s emissions reductions have been driven not by the federal government but by the states and territories, often in relative obscurity.

State governments took the lead in driving rapid uptake of renewable energy, driving emissions down even as the federal “climate wars” raged.

But the heavy-lifting era of the states may be coming to an end. Reaching the goal of cutting emissions by 62–70% (relative to 2005 levels) in less than a decade will require much stronger leadership at a federal level.

States drove the first renewable surge

From 2013 to 2022, Australia endured a “lost decade” on climate policy, as successive federal Coalition governments struggled to build durable national climate policy.

But emissions fell regardless. From September 2013 – when Coalition leader Tony Abbott became prime minister – until September 2019, national emissions fell by almost 12%. Emissions then fell sharply as COVID restrictions began in 2020, before a slight bounce, but overall emissions fell almost 20% during 2013–22.

Since then, however, our emissions haven’t changed much at all. Between September 2024 and September 2025, they fell just 1.8%.

What happened during the supposedly lost decade? States took the lead through initiatives such as large-scale renewable energy rollouts in South Australia and Victoria, market-shaping reforms in New South Wales, and a more recent renewables surge in Queensland.

Aided by the federal Clean Energy Finance Corporation, these efforts reshaped the electricity sector. National emissions cuts were delivered to Canberra on a silver platter, making it easier to meet national targets without substantial federal effort.

When the Albanese government came to power, it set a legal target to cut emissions 43% (from 2005 levels) by 2030. But this measure was made possible largely by state action.

State efforts also underpinned the new 2035 targets as well. Modelling last year by Climateworks suggested existing state and territory policies could – by themselves – deliver national emissions reduction of 66–71% by 2035.

But just six months later, these assumptions look shaky. While some state governments have hit sectoral speed bumps, others have shifted to outright backsliding.

What’s happening with the states?

In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, previously debated 2030 targets now lie abandoned.

In Queensland, signs of climate backsliding are clear in the new government’s Energy Roadmap, laying out plans to keep coal power until mid-century. The government has cancelled large renewable projects and wants new gas-fired power stations to fill the gap. The state will likely still reach its 2030 emissions targets, but the 2035 goal now seems close to impossible.

South Australia has long been a leader on renewables. In 2007, renewables supplied just 1% of the state’s power. This year, renewables are forecast to supply 85%. But its efforts to build a green hydrogen industry as a way to create new exports and cut industrial emissions have hit a very rocky patch.

The SA government has disbanded its Office of Hydrogen Power and signed a ten-year contract to power the Whyalla Steelworks with gas. State Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis has acknowledged there are no government-led plans to develop green hydrogen left.

The state’s success in cutting emissions from electricity means transport and farming are now the largest emissions sources. Emissions from these sectors will be much harder for the state to bring down alone.

New South Wales faces a different challenge: whether it can reach its legislated state targets in time. It has to roughly double its current rate of emissions reductions to do so, and questions remain over how fast it can roll out renewables – as well as whether it can cut emissions from coal mining.

The state’s huge Eraring coal station was slated to close in August last year, but this has been pushed back twice and it is now meant to close in 2029. The owners of Vales Point Power coal station similarly hope to extend its life.

Victoria’s nation-leading efforts to move away from gas have reduced fossil fuel emissions 22% since 2005. But the state’s overall emissions have been increasing since 2021. While offshore wind farms may offer new opportunities in the longer term, local and interstate transmission lines, transport and agriculture emissions will remain critical challenges.

Time for federal leadership

The 2035 emissions target is just six months old. But the federal government already faces a real challenge of its convictions.

On May 12, Treasurer Jim Chalmers will hand down his budget. Given the fuel crisis, increases in military spending and cuts to the NDIS, it’s unlikely we’ll see a big boost to renewables.

This would be a missed opportunity, given renewables produce energy locally, boost energy security and act against inflation.

The next test for the government will be the Safeguard Mechanism review in July. This scheme has led to some emission cuts from big industrial facilities, though most cuts come from closures and operational shifts rather than direct reduction on site.

The mechanism could do much more. If the review leads to targeted sectoral reforms, a focus on onsite emissions intensity reductions and long-term signals providing clear investment horizons for onsite mitigation, it may just shift the needle towards real industrial transitions.

States can’t do it all

Australia is at a tricky stage. Federal climate progress has long been underwritten by a free dividend of emissions reductions delivered by state governments.

Going forward, the federal government will likely need to shoulder much more of the heavy lifting and become more willing to intervene – especially as some states baulk at the challenge.

– ref. States have driven climate action until now. It’s time for the Australian government to step up – https://theconversation.com/states-have-driven-climate-action-until-now-its-time-for-the-australian-government-to-step-up-277481

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marg Rogers, Associate Professor in the Early Childhood Education, University of New England

Tens of thousands of Australians are expected to attend Anzac Day marches and services over the weekend.

Many children will also be there with their families or school groups.

Anzac events are often very sombre and can provoke serious questions from children. This year, with conflicts raging overseas, and terrorist attacks at home, the questions may be even more serious.

How can parents and educators best approach these events that focus on grown-up topics such as war and service?

Are these events appropriate for children?

The Australian Curriculum says educators should teach children about commemorations from Year 3 – or around the age of eight or nine. In many schools, children are taught about commemorations through Anzac Day and Remembrance Day services.

These provide a chance to teach children about our history and to learn more about our community and how people participate in it.

Why are we doing this?

Whether you choose to attend these services or watch from home, it is important children understand what they are observing. Thoughtful preparation is key to making the experience meaningful and respectful.

You can start with what your child already understands about the broader purpose of Anzac commemorations.

One way to explain it is: families remember happy things together all the time, including birthdays, religious days and holidays. These are celebrations.

Commemoration is different. It’s how we remember something sad, like the anniversary of a grandparent’s death. Your family might focus on the positives of what that person meant to you, but the feeling is quieter and more reflective. Anzac Day works the same way, but at a community scale.

What’s going to happen?

Anzac events involve moments that may be frightening for young children. This includes the use of ceremonial weapons, the noise of a 21-gun salute and occasionally protestors.

Children may find it easier to cope with these events when they know what to expect.

Knowing what’s coming supports children to understand when they are expected to be quiet and still, and when they can participate (such as singing or laying a wreath), or when simply standing still for a minute is a way of showing their respect.

Government websites like the Australian War Memorial and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs explain the order of service.

There are also useful picture books, online interactives and activities, short age-apropriate videos, and resources for recent immigrant families.

During the ceremony

Keep your child close and let them know they can whisper questions if they need to. A quiet warning before a loud noise, like a bugle call, can go a long way.

Remember younger children take their cues from the adults around them. Model the calm behaviour you wish to see, and offer them a small smile or nod when they behave appropriately.

If they become restless or upset (as young children do), then that’s OK. Quietly stepping to the side or back of the crowd is always an option.

When you’re on your way home

The conversation on the way home after the ceremony can bring up some big thoughts or questions.

Ask your child what they noticed and what they want to know more about. Older children might want to talk about the symbolism, such as the poppies or the rosemary and ask what they stand for.

You can also broaden the picture. Explain that not everyone who has served chooses to attend public services. Some prefer to commemorate in private or not at all, and that is OK.

You can also point out that defence personnel are not alone – others also put themselves in dangerous situations for the benefit of the community. Police, paramedics, fire fighters, volunteers and other first responders also demonstrate values such as sacrifice and mateship.

With older children, you could have a conversations about what is often overlooked or only briefly mentioned at this time of year. This might include the contributions of women and Indigenous service personnel, service families, volunteers and the Australian Frontier Wars.

You could also reflect on how it’s often easier to talk about long-ago wars than recent ones because it’s less confronting.

I don’t want to glorify war for my kids

When you are talking to your children you could mention the many impacts of conflict.

Let them know war hurts people visibly through physical injuries, but also invisibly through mental and moral impacts (if people have done or seen things they think are wrong). These can stay with veterans and their families for a long time.

Those who serve carry their experiences with them, and so do the people in countries where wars are fought.

Honest, age-appropriate answers are sufficient – you do not need to go into graphic details.

Why do we have wars?

Children will sometimes ask the hardest questions on the drive home. Or maybe just before bedtime or days later.

If they ask “why do we have wars?” you could refer to conflict between children and their siblings or friends involving a few people. Usually, they can work out a solution, or agree to disagree, and move forward. When whole countries have conflict, it can become a war if they can’t negotiate.

If they ask “will there be more wars?” you can ask them, “will you ever fight again with your siblings or friends?” Unfortunately, humans tend to have conflict, but we hope negotiators can help solve the conflict so the wars end.

Beyond the day

Lastly, remember attending ceremonies or services is only one way to remember.

You can also do this through supporting veterans, reading books or watching films about conflicts, history projects at school and having conversations about what happened and what we have learned from the past.

– ref. Taking your child to an Anzac service? Prepare for loud noises and big questions – https://theconversation.com/taking-your-child-to-an-anzac-service-prepare-for-loud-noises-and-big-questions-281240

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Walsh, Professor of AI, Research Group Leader, UNSW Sydney

The legendary American bank robber Willie Sutton spent 40 years robbing banks because, as he claimed in his autobiography, he loved doing it. And when asked why he chose banks of all places to rob, he allegedly replied “Because that’s where the money is.”

Back in 2017, I wrote a book predicting it wasn’t just lovable rogues like Sutton who would soon be robbing banks, but artificial intelligence (AI).

That day, it appears, could now be about to arrive. Banks around the world are seriously worried cyber criminals will soon take advantage of the latest advances in AI to try to rob them.

The digital back door into the vault

The finance world’s concern rests on the impressive cyber capabilities of a product called “Mythos”. This is the latest and most capable AI model from Anthropic, the company behind the popular Claude chatbot.

As a member of the public, you can’t access or use this model – for now. That’s because Anthropic (and many others) believe Mythos is too capable to launch upon an unsuspecting world.

Internal testing of Mythos has uncovered thousands of severe security vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser.

Some of these vulnerabilities have gone undetected for decades. Many are what tech insiders call “zero day” vulnerabilities – attacks that are so dangerous that developers need to fix them in zero days’ time.

Not for public use

To counter this emerging threat, Anthropic has made the model available to a dozen partners of a defensive coalition that includes Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Apple, Cisco and the Linux Foundation.

The company has also committed US$100 million (about A$140 million) in usage credits and US$4 million (about A$5.6 million) in open-source grants to start finding and fixing these bugs.

In addition, more than 40 additional organisations – including a number of US banks – have also received access. But worryingly, as far as we know, Anthropic has not yet granted access to any banks in Australia, the United Kingdom or Europe.

To add to concerns, on Wednesday, Anthropic confirmed it was investigating claims in a Bloomberg report that a small group of unauthorised users had gained access to Mythos. However, at this stage, there is no suggestion this alleged access was for malicious purposes.

Read more: Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing: why an AI superhacker has the tech world on alert

Should you be worried?

Last week, regulators and policymakers from around the world gathered at the International Monetary Fund spring meeting in Washington. The Iran war was a major focus. But attendees also issued a series of warnings about this emerging cybersecurity threat to the banking industry.

Not only are banks an attractive target, being where the money is, but the industry runs on many legacy systems, decades old technology that may be especially vulnerable to these sorts of attacks.

You personally don’t need to be too worried. Many countries have strong protections for bank customers. In Australia, for example, the first A$250,000 of a customer’s deposits are insured through the government-backed Financial Claims Scheme.

And the Australian Securities and Investments Commission ensures banks investigate and reimburse fraudulent transactions where the customer is not at fault.

So, it’s probably not a wise idea to withdraw your cash and put it under the mattress. But banks should be (and are) rushing to plug these vulnerabilities.

I would recommend you regularly update your computer and smartphone to have the latest operating system and banking apps. There are likely to be many more updates in the near future as new vulnerabilities are uncovered and patched.

And, as I’m sure you have been, you need to be ever vigilant for phishing attacks by email and SMS trying to obtain your banking credentials.

The evolving threat landscape

In the longer term, Mythos exposes the challenge that defence is much harder than attack. Software is one of the most complex products humanity builds. It is therefore almost impossible to ensure it is bug-free.

That puts us in an unending race against the “bad guys” to uncover and fix faults before they get exploited.

For example, with significant fanfare, the European Union just released its age verification app, designed to be a cornerstone to the emerging laws on access to social media, pornography and other age-restricted content. However, within hours, security experts found cyber vulnerabilities that underage users could easily exploit.

In the most critical settings, we can try to prove mathematically that our software is bug-free. For instance, the Beneficial AI Foundation just announced an ambitious “moonshot” project to prove that the popular messaging app Signal is bug-free and protects privacy as claimed.

But such efforts are the exception today rather than the norm. Perhaps further advances in AI could soon help reverse this.

– ref. Why the world’s banks are so worried about Anthropic’s latest AI model – https://theconversation.com/why-the-worlds-banks-are-so-worried-about-anthropics-latest-ai-model-281218

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanja Luckins, Historian, Department of Archeology and History, La Trobe University

Even before the first world war, a high mortality rate from disease, accident and death during infancy meant that Australians were familiar with mourning black.

During a period of mourning, for example after the death of a public figure or after a disaster, it was customary for public buildings to be draped in black and purple, and for both personal and public notepaper and letters to be bordered in black. People would wear black to observe the deaths of family and friends, as well as at the funerals of public figures.

Department stores and drapers expected mourning black would be worn after the outbreak of the war. In October 1914, the trade journal Draper of Australasia reported shops were stocking up on black cloth, “anticipating a scarcity later on when mourning and half-mourning may, unhappily, be more commonwear”.

After the deaths at Gallipoli, commentators began to notice the increasing presence of mourning black. In Spring 1915, Vesta (journalist Stella Allen), the women’s columnist with the Melbourne Argus, confirmed:

We have grown familiar, too, with the sight of sad-faced, black-robed women going about their ordinary tasks.

These women were often anonymous but enough detail was given to convey a sense of individual circumstance. One was spotted by Vesta at a Red Cross centre, a baby clinging to her side. She was a “young mother all in black with a heavy veil hanging down behind”.

It was in this context that mourners dressed in black would be conspicuous on the first Anzac Day in 1916.

Collective mourning

The first public, and most widely reported, collective expression of mourning after Gallipoli was the funeral of Major-General Sir William Bridges, who was shot by a sniper at Gallipoli, held in Melbourne in September 1915.

At the time of Bridges’ funeral, the British and Australian governments had decided against the repatriation of bodies. But Bridges was repatriated because of his status as the Australian commander at Gallipoli. His repatriation was highly symbolic and a unique opportunity to participate in an actual funeral of a soldier who had died overseas.

According to the Argus, Melbourne became a “city of mourning people”. Among the khaki there were “banks of black – the people”.

The first Anzac Day

In early 1916, government and military authorities around Australia began exchanging ideas about commemorating the Gallipoli landing. The proposals included military parades, church and open-air services, recruiting and fundraising activities and school observances (the dawn service was not introduced until the mid-1920s).

At the same time, organising committees faced a groundswell of feeling from the bereaved, who wished Anzac Day to be an occasion for mourning.

Newspaper reports of Anzac Day described the military parade and recorded the speeches. They noted the solemn women carrying wreaths, men with heads bared holding hats against their chests, and children clutching the skirts of women in mourning black.

At St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, women wore “the deep black of mourning”; St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, was notable for the “black-robed figures”; in Singleton, country NSW, buildings were draped in black and purple.

During the Sydney march some women cheered, others were more subdued. One journalist observed,

one old woman in deep mourning let her handkerchief flutter for a minute before wiping her eyes with it.

In Hobart, the weather was inclement but not inappropriate, commented the Mercury: while it was a day to celebrate military achievements, it was “also one of the most mournful”. Following a military parade, there was a laying of wreaths by bereaved women at a temporary broken column in the city’s Domain.

The ubiquity of death in war

Beneath the wartime newspaper headlines trumpeting the military parades and the speeches extolling brave deeds of the Anzacs, we find mourning black.

We know civilian men attended Anzac Day (during the war, they wore battalion pins and brooches in addition to black arm and hat bands), though their emotional impact was minimal. Women in mourning were the focus in newspaper reports. Was this an example of those age-old assumptions that women are naturally disposed towards nurturing and grieving?

In 1917, the Sydney Morning Herald observed:

more women wore mourning than on last Anzac Day, as more will wear it before another Anzac Day comes around.

The Sydney Morning Herald was perceptive, women did continue to wear mourning black on Anzac Day. Yet over the next decade, the jingoistic rhetoric of masculine sacrifice would ultimately prevail, marginalising the bereaved.

While mourning black has never been considered a natural part of Anzac Day history and tradition, 110 years ago it was a stark reminder death in war was more than a heroic concept.

– ref. The first Anzac Day was marked by women wearing mourning black – https://theconversation.com/the-first-anzac-day-was-marked-by-women-wearing-mourning-black-281023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yvette Grant, PhD Candidate in Dance and Dance History Tutor, The University of Melbourne

The story of the Anzacs has been represented through art from the beginning.

The film Hero of the Dardanelles (1915) recreates the landing at Gallipoli. Official war artists were commissioned to document the conflict. One of the most powerful paintings was the ghostly Midnight at Menin Gate (1927) by Will Longstaff.

Banjo Paterson penned an ode to Gallipoli, We’re All Australians Now, in 1915, and novels abound exploring the impacts of war on soldiers and society.

What about dance? As in film, the human body can convey events past. Like fiction, it can present a distinct narrative. Like poetry, it distils human experience. Like paintings, it needs no words to inspire intense emotions.

World War II first inspired some choreographers to convey or critique overseas wars through dance. Here are four different war ballets created in Australia and New Zealand over eight decades.

En Saga

En Saga was choreographed by Laurel Martyn and first performed by the Borovansky Ballet in Melbourne in 1941.

Martyn had grown up in a depressed post-first world war Australia. At the time of this ballet her fiancé, brother and fellow company members were fighting in World War II.

Set in 19th century Finland to Jean Sibelius’ rousing score, the story was inspired by the Australian home front.

En Saga opens with the women farming the land. The men return from war to some celebration, but many are physically and psychologically injured. As the ballet closes, the men are called to fight once more, and the women return to work the land. The cycle begins again.

Martyn adopts a Russian constructivist style – expressionless faces and mechanised patterns – which conjures passive, puppet-like characters. She also incorporates heavier-style Central European Expressionist dance, capturing the weight of war on the women left behind.

En Saga challenges our acceptance of the cycle of war and peace. Against a backdrop of patriotic war fever, Martyn wrote in her journal,

I hate it & cannot revel in it.

G’Day Digger

G’Day Digger, choreographed by Beth Dean for television in 1958, was a short humorous piece set in a pub.

Dean wanted to create a ballet reflecting contemporary life. The result has the feel of a pantomime.

Two larrikin soldiers back from fighting in Tobruk during the second world war – The Digger and his Mate – meet again in Sydney. They attempt to seduce May the Barmaid and her friend Sheila; have a brawl with the effeminate “bodgie” (the new youth masculinity of the 1950s); and are bemused by the local alcoholic.

The only “real men” in the picture are the returned soldiers. The other two exist counter to the homosocial masculinity of the Anzac digger; the women are objects participating in the masculine performance – which does lead to some lovely pas de deux (dance for two).

While popular with audiences, masculine anxieties were present in reviews, some finding it difficult reconcile the idea that soldiers could be represented by ballet dancers.

Critic Alexander Macdonald declared:

the sight of two uniformed diggers prancing to and fro, like a brace of fugitives from Holsworthy, made an impossible demand on the imagination.

1914

The Australian Ballet’s 1914 (1998) centres on the unlikely friendship between working-class Jim, wealthy Ashley and photographer Imogen. Like G’Day Digger, it includes a bar, larrikin behaviour and a brawl. But there the similarities end.

Choreographed by Stephen Baynes, the full-length ballet about the first world war was inspired by David Malouf’s 1982 novel Fly Away Peter.

The friends bond over a mutual admiration of birdlife in the coastal wetlands. Then comes the war: the men enlist and migrate to the other side of the world, like their birds; Imogen is left to face both absence and anguish. The rest of the company play supporting roles as friends, people on the street, soldiers and Jim’s bullying father.

1914 embraces stillness and silence as emotional contrasts. The quiet joy of the opening scenes against the louder, exploding movements and sounds of the battlefront. Jim’s early open, sweeping arms, taking in the wonder of the world, against Imogen’s closed grieving ones in the final scenes. Naive jubilation at the news of the war against the solemn procession of ghosts after battle.

Death is absent in G’Day Digger; it haunts 1914.

Passchendaele

The centenary of the Gallipoli landings in 2015 led the Royal New Zealand Ballet to create a suite of four dances, Salute: Remembering World War I. Two were commissioned for the occasion, including Neil Ieremia’s short but powerful Passchendaele, with music by the New Zealand Army Band.

Ieremia was initially reluctant to create a dance about war. This only adds to the profundity of the piece.

No characters are singled out – the effects of the worst battle for casualties are shared equally by men and women, battlefront and homefront united in loss. Simple costuming in shades of grey intensify the sense of despair and dread, backdropped by a desolate landscape reddened by slaughter.

The piece is framed by the changing rhythms of war, from energetic strength to graceful laments. The men and women are both geographically separated and emotionally attached. The final scenes of women farewelling the dying, followed by the dreaded sound of three knocks on the front door, are simply heartbreaking.

Ieremia wanted to remind us of our humanity: the brutality of war can too easily destroy that. The power of dance conveys such emotional truths about war, and that’s certainly something to reflect on in our own times.

– ref. The theatre of war: how the Anzac story has been retold through dance for 80 years – https://theconversation.com/the-theatre-of-war-how-the-anzac-story-has-been-retold-through-dance-for-80-years-278982

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Iuliana Hartescu, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Loughborough University

Insomnia may have been torturing humanity since ancient times, but over the last 20 years scientists have made progress in their understanding of chronic sleep deprivation.

Today, sleep deprivation is one of the most widespread reported psychological problems in Britain, with about a third of the adult population in England reporting frequent insomnia symptoms.

Insomnia rarely occurs on its own, which brings us to one of the biggest changes scientists have made in our understanding of chronic sleep deprivation. The vast majority of people with insomnia often have other mental and physical health conditions, like diabetes, hypertension, chronic pain, thyroid disease, gastrointestinal problems, anxiety or depression.

In its diagnostic history, insomnia coupled with another illness or disorder was called secondary insomnia. That meant that insomnia was considered a consequence of those other underlying conditions. As such, until fairly recently clinicians did not generally attempt to treat secondary insomnia.

But in the early 2000s, both research and clinical practice evidence started to indicate that this approach was wrong. Scientists argued that insomnia could precede or long survive a primary condition. Abandoning this distinction between primary and secondary insomnia was a major advance in acknowledging that insomnia frequently was an independent disorder, requiring its own treatment.

What’s more, researchers have been accumulating strong evidence that helping people with their sleeping problems could actually lead to improvements in their other health conditions. Chronic pain, chronic heart failure, depression, psychosis, alcohol dependency, bipolar disorder, PTSD, can all improve for patients if they address their sleeping problems.

Who gets insomnia?

Over the past two decades, we have acquired more rigorous and international data illustrating how ubiquitous insomnia is. Insomnia affects almost everyone, though women, older people, and people of lower socio-economic status are more vulnerable to it.

These groups experience a combination of biological, psychological and social risk factors that expose them to long-term sleep-disruption. For example, women often experience acute hormone fluctuations, pregnancy and birth, breastfeeding, menopause, domestic violence, caregiving roles, higher prevalence of depression and anxiety – all of which can lead to more opportunities for prolonged sleep disruption.

Some current issues in insomnia research include the need to understand different types of insomnia symptoms, and their relationship to health and performance risks. For example, there is evidence that difficulty initiating sleep (as opposed to difficulty staying asleep, or waking up too early in the morning) is associated with an increased risk of depression. Similarly, scientists still have questions on changes in things like brain activity, heart rate, or stress hormones that accompany insomnia. In common with all other mental health disorders, we are still yet to find biomarkers of insomnia.

However, research has helped us understand some things people can do to prevent insonmia episodes progressing to chronic insomnia, which is harder to treat. When insomnia symptoms happen more nights than not, and last for more than three months, then a diagnosis of insomnia disorder, or chronic insomnia, can be made.

One of the most common and harmful habits that develop during periods of insomnia is lying in bed, trying to sleep. Scientists have learned that lying in bed awake leads to perpetual cognitive arousal and, in time, it teaches your brain to stop connecting bed and being asleep.

Thus, if you cannot sleep at night, get up and do something else absorbing, but calming – read, write a list for the following day, listen to calming music or do some breathing exercises. When you feel sleepy again, get back to bed. If you are tired the following day, a well-placed short nap is fine, in the afternoon, for a maximum of 20 minutes. However, one must be careful with daytime sleeping, as it may reduce sleepiness at nighttime, and going to sleep may become even more difficult.

For those who do struggle with insomnia, there are effective treatments recommended. The story of the profound changes from secondary insomnia to insomnia disorder speaks of the power of clinical diagnosis in providing a pathway to treatment.

Cognitive behavioural treatment for insomnia (CBTI) is a package of techniques designed to maximise sleepiness at bedtime. It involves structured steps which aim to modify behaviour and mental activity. There are some predictors of treatment success: shorter duration of insomnia symptoms (years, rather than decades), less depression or pain and more positive expectations towards CBTI. But CBTI is broadly effective across all groups of people with insomnia.

Even so, only a tiny proportion of people reporting insomnia symptoms seek medical help. People may consider insomnia symptoms trivial or manageable, or they may be unaware of the options. It may also be due to the unavailability of treatment options. CBTI remains largely unavailable in clinical practice, mainly due to clinicians’ unfamiliarity with the treatment programme, and limited funding.

This pushes patients towards sleeping tablets, which are not an acceptable long-term solution. Sleeping tablets are associated with significant cognitive and motor impairment, increased risk of falls, dependence, tolerance and withdrawal symptoms, daytime lethargy, dizziness and headaches.

The main truly “new” class of sleeping pills are the dual orexin receptor antagonists (DORAs), which have shown a safety profile in many ways better than the traditional sedatives, especially around dependence concerns. But DORAs are not risk free or “mild” pills. They are relatively new to the market, first approved in the UK in 2022. So we lack long-term data to assess their safety for long-term use in people with insomnia.

A decent alternative is online self-delivered CBTI, on platforms such as Sleepful, which are free to access.

We have made great strides in sleep medicine over the past 20 years for people with insomnia, we just need to realise the potential of such profound changes by providing the right help for those suffering with it.

– ref. How scientists changed their view of insomnia – https://theconversation.com/how-scientists-changed-their-view-of-insomnia-279585

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bamo Nouri, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of International Politics, City St George’s, University of London

Let’s begin with a simple question that rarely gets a straight answer: what would victory over Iran actually look like? In Washington and Jerusalem, the answers tend to sound definitive: eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, break its regional power, perhaps even force political change at the top. It’s the language of decisive war, the kind with a clear endpoint.

But shift the perspective to Tehran, and the definition changes completely. Victory, for Iran, is survival. That asymmetry shapes the entire conflict. In wars like this, the side that needs less to claim success often has the advantage – and, right now, Iran needs far less.

There is no denying the military imbalance. The US and Israel can strike with extraordinary precision and reach. They have demonstrated that repeatedly – targeting infrastructure, leadership and strategic assets.

But tactical success has yet to translate into political outcome. Iran’s state hasn’t fractured. Its governing system remains intact, and its networks – military, regional, ideological – continue to function. Even its most sensitive capabilities, including nuclear expertise, remain resilient.

The deeper miscalculation lies in assuming Tehran is playing the same game as Washington. It isn’t. Iran is not trying to defeat the US or Israel outright. It is trying to outlast them, complicate their objectives and raise the cost of progress until it becomes unsustainable.

This logic is visible in how the conflict has unfolded. The battlefield extends beyond direct confrontation into shipping lanes, energy markets and regional alliances. Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz are not incidental – they are pressure points with global consequences.

Iran’s strategy is not about dominance but entanglement. It doesn’t need battlefield superiority if it can draw its adversaries into a conflict that is too costly to resolve and too complex to conclude.

When wars stall, the instinct is to escalate: more bombing, strikes on energy infrastructure, even, in extremis, “boots on the ground”. The assumption is that more force will finally produce a different outcome.

But Iran is not a passive target. It has already shown a willingness to retaliate across the region, including against Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, as well as targets in Jordan and Iraq. Strikes on Iran’s energy systems would not stay contained – they would invite retaliation against these same states, widening the conflict.

There is another constraint: American is estimated to have already used up around 45% to 50% of key missile stockpiles, including roughly 30% of its Tomahawk missile inventory. So the stark reality is that escalation is no longer just about willingness, but capacity — and in any wider war, the question may not be how far the US can go, but how much it has left.

The consequences would also extend beyond the battlefield. Iran’s response would be sustained attacks on neighbouring countries, on their power, fuel, and water systems, rendering parts of the region increasingly unlivable as temperatures soar over summer. Huge numbers of people would be forced to leave, risking another large-scale displacement crisis.

Even then, the core reality remains unchanged. Iran is built for endurance – any ground campaign would likely become prolonged and attritional. More importantly, escalation misses the point – the problem is not a lack of force, but the absence of a political objective that force can realistically achieve.

Compounding the problem is a quieter but equally significant reality; the US and Israel do not appear to be fully aligned in their end goals. Israel’s posture suggests a pursuit of maximal outcomes – deep, possibly irreversible weakening of Iran’s system, if not outright regime collapse. The US, by contrast, appears to oscillate between coercion, containment and negotiation.

These are not just differences in emphasis – they are differences in strategy. Wars fought without a shared definition of victory rarely produce victory at all. What they produce instead is sustained military activity without strategic convergence – constant movement, but little progress toward resolution.

No conclusion in sight

At some point, it becomes necessary to describe things as they are. This is no longer a war moving toward a decisive conclusion. It is a conflict settling into a pattern – strikes followed by pauses, ceasefires that hold just long enough to prevent collapse, and negotiations that advance just enough to avoid failure.

And those ceasefires tell their own story. Their repeated extension reflects not progress, but constraint. Washington, under Donald Trump, has strong incentives to keep talks alive, avoid deeper escalation, and end the war sooner rather than later. The alternatives – regional war or global economic shock – are far harder to manage. That dynamic gives Tehran leverage. It does not need to concede quickly when delay itself strengthens its position.

Time, in this sense, is not neutral. The longer the conflict drags on, the more it intersects with the most sensitive pressure points of the global economy. Energy markets are stressed, with supply routes under strain and reserves tightening. Industries that depend on stable fuel flows – aviation, shipping, manufacturing – are increasingly exposed.

What began as a regional conflict has morphed into systemic risk. Even limited disruption can ripple outward, affecting prices, supply chains and political stability. The longer the stalemate persists, the greater the cumulative strain and the closer it edges toward a broader economic shock.

Who really holds the advantage?

In purely military terms, the answer is obvious: the US and Israel retain overwhelming superiority. But wars are not decided by capability alone. They are decided by how goals, costs, and time interact.

In that equation, Iran’s position is stronger than it appears. It has set a lower threshold for success, demonstrated a higher tolerance for prolonged pressure, and shown an ability to impose costs beyond the battlefield. Most importantly, it does not need to win. It only needs to prevent its adversaries from achieving their aims. So far, it has done exactly that.

Which brings us back to the original question: can the US and Israel win this war? If winning means forcing Iran into submission or fundamentally reshaping its strategic posture, the answer is increasingly difficult to avoid – they cannot.

What they can do is continue. Manage the conflict, contain its spread and shape its margins. But that is not victory. It is endurance.

The real danger is not defeat, but the persistence of a belief that just a little more pressure, a little more escalation, or a little more time will produce a different result. If that belief is wrong, then this is not a war on the verge of being won. It is a war that cannot be won at all. A forever war.

– ref. Middle East conflict looks increasingly like a war nobody can win – https://theconversation.com/middle-east-conflict-looks-increasingly-like-a-war-nobody-can-win-281253

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brigid Rooney, Associate Professor (Affiliate), Australian Literature, University of Sydney

David George Joseph Malouf AO, one of Australia’s most accomplished, internationally renowned and beloved writers, has died aged 92.

Malouf’s novels are cherished by readers – from Johnno (1975), An Imaginary Life (1978), Child’s Play (1981) and Fly Away Peter (1982) to Harland’s Half Acre (1984), The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993), Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) and Ransom (2009).

He also wrote numerous short stories, producing four thematically coherent collections. All these works draw from and transmute elements of his own life, his detailed memories of places, people, things and experiences. Yet Malouf always maintained a clear separation between his personal, private life and his public self as a writer.

Malouf made an indelible mark on Australian literature. His many distinguished honours and awards included an Order of Australia, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2000), election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2008) and an Australia Council Award for a Lifetime Achievement in Australian Literature (2016).

He was in every sense a man of letters. He was a great reader and profoundly erudite. He was a sociable, assured and generous contributor to literary and public conversation. These same qualities imbue his writerly voice, his regular invocation of a communal “us” or “we”. His intimacy of address marks his poetry and prose, inviting trust and drawing in readers.

A writer’s life

Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934 to first-generation migrants to Australia, a Lebanese-Melkite Christian father and a European-Jewish mother. The latter had grown up in England, until financial misfortune prompted her family to emigrate to Australia.

His mother’s Anglophilia transmitted itself to the young Malouf. Unable to speak the language (Arabic) of his paternal grandparents, who lived nearby when he was young, Malouf knew of but did not identify with either his Lebanese or Jewish ancestry. He grew up reading the Anglo-European canon and learning several languages, as well as piano and violin.

He saw himself as a writer in English – not as a writer of the migrant experience. Likewise, he did not want his writing to be defined by his sexuality. These aspects of his life are, however, present in his writing, and they mark its character and preoccupations in both subtle and tangible ways.

Having graduated from the University of Queensland, 24-year-old Malouf embarked in 1959 for England, where he taught for the next decade in secondary schools. During this period, he travelled extensively in Europe, worked on his poetry and began early drafts of his first novel, Johnno.

Returning to Australia in 1968, he took up a teaching post in English at the University of Sydney. The next decade was immensely productive, with publication of Johnno and An Imaginary Life and two arresting poetry collections, Bicycle (1970) and Neighbours in a Thicket (1974).

In 1978, Malouf relinquished his university post and went to live for ten months each year in Campagnatico, an isolated village in Italy. There he dedicated himself to writing without distraction, but maintained connections with Australia and his peers.

He returned to Australia in the early 1980s, settling in inner Sydney for the next few decades, close by the university and its library. His last move, in about 2017, was to return close to his home base in Brisbane, to an apartment in Surfers Paradise, near his family and the places of his earliest memories.

Living landscapes

Malouf introduced readers to the subtropical regions of his home state of Queensland, to fertile, watery landscapes imbued with time and memory.

His writing often starts from the small, the inconsequential and the ordinary, and unfolds from there into vibrant particularity. And then it moves outward, opening long perspectives and distant horizons, whether of nation, world or the earth itself. His figures travel towards strangeness and mystery at the edges of the self.

Malouf’s writing is sensitive to living landscapes in both regional and urban settings. His remarkable prose memoir, 12 Edmondstone Street, recalls the now-demolished South Brisbane house that had been the “first place” of his early childhood. It unfolds through successive rooms and tells of its story-laden objects.

The idea of this first house as a storehouse of memory, imagination and writing was central for Malouf. He once described the experience of writing his successive books as like building a house, to which he was adding rooms. Each new room is “part of that house, and not another house”, and yet adds something that reconfigures the whole.

Malouf’s fiction works on multiple levels, engaging with history and collective memory. Johnno, for instance, tells what it was like to grow up in Brisbane during and after the second world war. It is a sensory hymn to a ramshackle town that becomes a city, seen intimately and from afar as it alters beyond recognition. Harland’s Half Acre, Fly Away Peter and The Great World span the generational experiences of Australians involved in the two world wars.

Remembering Babylon and Conversations at Curlow Creek move back to the pre-Federation, colonial era. Their publication coincided with the settler nation’s first tentative reckonings with its brutal colonial history and legacy – a reckoning still far from complete. These novels spurred Malouf’s wider public engagements in the 1990s.

In the wake of writers such as Kenneth Slessor and Patrick White, Malouf forged new pathways for settler Australian literature. Through his writing, he aspired to cultivate interiors – a sense of the mysterious or numinous dimensions of life and things. He sought to reconcile these interior qualities with outer worlds.

This also drove his attempt to imagine an interior history for Australia, to tell the untold stories of inner, collective experience behind or within external events. He believed in the role imagination and storytelling could play in recognising the darkness of settler-colonial history and moving towards reconciliation with Australia’s First Peoples.

In 1998, he presented the Boyer lectures, published as A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness. In these he canvassed the “complex fate”, sensibility and potential of a settler people, “children both of the old world and the new”.

Malouf’s public commentary on civic and national matters was matched by his quiet work on peace and reconciliation behind the scenes. In 1999, with Jackie Huggins, Malouf co-wrote the draft Declaration for Reconciliation, intended for consultation with the Australian people. He advocated the freedom of writers around the world through his long involvement in PEN Sydney, of which he was a life member. He was a lifetime ambassador of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

A poet from first to last

From first to last, Malouf was a poet. From Four Poets (1962) – a joint endeavour with fellow poets Donald Maynard, Rodney Hall and Malouf’s close friend Judith Green (later Rodriguez) – to Earth Hour (2014) and An Open Book (2018), and many prize-winning collections in between, the luminous quality of Malouf’s poetry belies the complex dimensions it unfurls.

A poetic imagination, as Yvonne Smith says, infuses all Malouf’s writing with music, creating what Ivor Indyk calls its “pulse”. For Vivian Smith, the precise observations in Malouf’s poetry are sensual, “rooted in the tentacular, in the life of the body”.

Malouf is most known around the world, however, for his fiction. His books secured such prizes as the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Prix Femina Étranger and the inaugural International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He was thrice winner of Australia’s oldest literary award, the Australian Literary Society’s (ALS) Gold Medal, a feat so far matched only by Patrick White and Alexis Wright.

But Malouf also possessed a rare ability to work across genres with flair and elegance. He composed libretti for at least four operas, starting with Voss, based on Patrick White’s novel. His play Blood Relations (1987) reworked Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Beyond national horizons

Though anchored in beloved Australian places, Malouf’s writing seeks coordinates beyond national horizons with world literature, from the classics of antiquity to the modern transatlantic canon. His writing converses with the works of, among others, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Honore de Balzac, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner, and with the ancient poetry of Homer, Horace and Ovid. His lifelong love of classical languages is manifest in his writing.

Malouf felt a personal affinity with Ovid, with whom he shared a birthday. His internationally acclaimed second novel, An Imaginary Life, recreated the experience of the ageing Ovid in exile on the remote edge of the Roman empire. Here, through his encounter with his opposite, a wild child, the poet opens himself newly towards experience of the world, and towards his own bodily and mortal being.

Malouf’s last novel, Ransom, circles back to the ancient world. Reworking the last book of Homer’s Iliad, Ransom cultivates the interior history of the epic. While the epic tells of great events in heroic terms, Malouf explores the thoughts and feelings of the aged, grieving King Priam and the furious avenger Achilles. It ultimately returns us to Priam’s companion, an ordinary man and the bearer of the story, the carter Somax, and Beauty, his favourite mule.

Ransom creates, amid hostilities, a little pocket of stilled time. From here, the story expands to the past and the future. New models of being are ventured. The weight of convention, of royalty, of war, is balanced by the myriad “prattling” voices of the living world. The epic finds its counterweight in this novel, which attends to the small, the humble and the inconsequential.

The reality of the small and the inconsequential crystallises once more in Before or After, the very last poem in his last book, An Open Book:

… It is the small,
the muted inconsequential,
at this point that comes closest

to real.

With its evanescent and mysterious refractions, with its threading of connection between ancient and modern worlds, Malouf’s writing gives us a vision of life even at the edge of destruction.

He will be a remembered as a writer of wisdom, grace and generosity, and for the richness of his poetic imagination. He will be remembered for his curiosity and dedication to literature. He’ll be remembered as someone not bowed down, as only lightly touched, by time.

– ref. David Malouf was a writer of wisdom, grace and generosity – https://theconversation.com/david-malouf-was-a-writer-of-wisdom-grace-and-generosity-223011

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Cantrell, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland

Some historical events are so catastrophic they resist comprehension. And yet they compel us to try to understand them, again and again.

Chernobyl is one of them.

On April 26, 1986, at 1:23am, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded, releasing a cloud of radioactive material that drifted across Europe and contaminated land inhabited by around five million people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

Although it is impossible to calculate the total number of deaths attributable to the explosion and its after-effects, 31 people were killed immediately or died due to Acute Radiation Syndrome in the following months, while deaths in the years since could be as high as 10,000. Around 116,000 people were evacuated from the 30-kilometre exclusion zone in the two weeks following the accident.

As the radioactive dust settled on forests and rivers, poisoning water and food supplies, flora and fauna, it also embedded itself, indelibly, in the cultural imagination.

Forty years on, we are still working out what happened – and what it means.

An explosion that never ends

Countless books, documentaries and television dramas, as well as artworks, plays, video games and comics, grapple with the causes of the disaster and its aftermath. They seek to make visible what was invisible at the time: not just radiation and its effects on the human body, but the Soviet government’s attempts to cover up the accident.

This week, Ukrainian writer and illustrator Yevgenia Nayberg published her graphic memoir, Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters – a künstlerroman (artist’s novel) charting her coming-of-age as an artist under Chernobyl’s long shadow. Born and raised in Kyiv, Nayberg was 11 years old and preparing for art school when she heard on the radio that “one of the nuclear reactors was damaged”, but “the situation [was] under control”.

In a recent interview, Nayberg reflected that “the most difficult part” of writing the book was “trying to forget that I know the future”.

In her memoir, she insists on the accuracy of her memories and the truth of her lived experience, set in stark contrast to the secrecy and obfuscation that marked the Soviet government’s response.

“They are just repeating the same thing over and over again,” the young Nayberg declares. “That means they’re hiding something.” Her parents and grandparents arrive at the same conclusion. “They used to pretend that they trusted the news,” she observes. “Not anymore.”

In his 2006 essay Turning Point at Chernobyl, former president of the USSR – and the last Soviet leader – Mikhail Gorbachev argued “the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl […] was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later”. “There was the era before the disaster,” Gorbachev wrote, “and there is the very different era that has followed.”

Yet it was not the meltdown itself that led to “the collapse”, but what it revealed: the extent to which the Soviet government would lie to its own people and to the world. Gorbachev said nothing to the rest of the world until a full week later, when he assured a concerned global audience “the worst is behind us”. At the same time, he denounced the “mountain of lies” purportedly being spread by Western media.

It is hardly surprising, then, that a preoccupation with truth and deception drives almost every cultural retelling of the disaster. In the collective memory, Chernobyl is not an isolated event confined to the past, but a contagion that continues to mutate and spread.

The several books written about the disaster include Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (1997) and Grigori Medvedev’s eyewitness account, Chernobyl Notebook (1987), as well as more recent detailed studies by historians Serhii Plokhy (Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, 2018), and Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl, 2019).

While these books differ in theme, focus, and narrative style, they all ultimately grapple with a crisis of representation: how do we express through language what defies comprehension?

Plokhy, a Harvard professor who grew up downstream from the destroyed reactor and whose thyroid was damaged by radiation exposure, concludes his haunting history of the disaster with a warning: “The world has already been overwhelmed by one Chernobyl and one exclusion zone. It cannot afford any more.”

‘This is how radioactivity looks’

The first documentary about Chernobyl was filmed three days after the explosion.

Directed by Soviet filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko, Chernobyl: Chronicle of Difficult Weeks (1986) documents the cleanup operations undertaken by Ukrainian workers and volunteers, many of whom would later die from the high levels of radiation they were exposed to.

The 54-minute film, the product of three months of continuous shooting, opens with an aerial shot of the destroyed reactor before cutting to grainy footage of a televised speech by Gorbachev on May 14, 1986. “We have been struck by disaster,” he announces, “we have been confronted by danger: atomic energy which has become uncontrollable”.

The documentary deflects the threat to an unknown enemy, clinging to the language of war. The exclusion zone is the frontline, the liquidators are “soldiers performing a great feat” and the deserters who “abandoned their comrades” are “cowards” whose names would be made public “regardless of rank or position”. “Deserters were not executed,” the film assures, “but the people’s contempt would serve as eternal punishment.”

This vain attempt to reaffirm the Soviet myth of heroism – the faultless ability to overcome catastrophe – reveals the state’s attempt to absorb Chernobyl into its own mythology: to make it, in the end, a story about what the Soviet people could endure.

But what we witness, from a safe distance and with the vantage of hindsight, is something far more sinister: the radiation saturating the camera and, by extension, the hand holding it. The on-screen flashes of light, white and crackling, were initially mistaken by Shevchenko and his team for a problem with the film. “We thought this film was defective,” he explains. “But we were mistaken. This is how radioactivity looks.”

Shevchenko himself died from acute radiation sickness less than a year later. His film, suppressed by Soviet authorities and released only posthumously, is sometimes described as the most dangerous film in the world.

For a story so many were determined to silence, there is a surprising wealth of footage. As the recent documentary Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes (2022) explains, “the Soviets […] documented everything believing they would show the world a heroic victory.” In time, the truth would assert itself.

Chernobyl’s children

One year after the incident, in 1987, The Bell of Chernobyl, “an unusually frank work that plainly suggests the Soviets were wholly unprepared for the disaster”, mysteriously failed to arrive in time for its scheduled screening at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The festival’s official journal noted “there are forces in the Soviet Union – and they are not new ones – who would prefer not to have the film screened”.

These nuclear documentaries, according to film studies scholar Helen Hughes, reveal the difficult art of filming a toxic ghost – a danger that cannot be seen, heard or touched, yet whose presence can be “felt in the teeth”.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Pripyat (1996), made ten years after the disaster, marked one of the first occasions when an international film crew was granted access into the 30-kilometre exclusion zone. Shot entirely in black and white, the camera lingers on stunning irradiated landscapes – frozen forests and overgrown streets – depicting a world that is the same, yet different.

At its centre, however, are the human stories of those who live and work there. Like the lab technician who, upon returning to her former flat in Pripyat, learns her possessions have been stolen by looters. And the safety officer who works at the power plant: “I keep this power plant running,” he jokes. “I am one of the guarantees that nothing will happen.”

When the film was first screened in 1996, audiences were surprised to learn Chernobyl was still operating.

In the 2000s, popular documentaries about the disaster turned to the human cost of Chernobyl, including the so-called generations of Chernobyl children whose lives were stolen from them.

Of these, none proved more confronting than Chernobyl Heart (2003), a 40-minute documentary short directed by Maryann De Leo. It follows Irish humanitarian Adi Roche and her team of aid workers as they travel through Belarus and Ukraine, visiting thyroid cancer wards, overcrowded children’s homes and maternity hospitals where, according to one doctor, only 15-20% of babies are born healthy.

In the Novinki Mental Asylum north of Minsk, we meet Julia, a girl born with her brain outside her skull. Another child, aged four, is the size of a four-month-old. Some children with cerebral palsy spend their entire lives in cots.

“I suppose I’m relieved to see she’s still alive,” Roche says of one child, “but I’m not sure that’s the best thing for her.” Gesturing at another group of children, she says, “we don’t know what’s wrong with them.”

The film, which won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, was criticised for its explicit depiction of children’s damaged and deformed bodies. At the time, the suffering of Chernobyl’s children was typically rendered symbolically – through a broken toy or an abandoned doll – rather than shown directly.

Often, the children themselves were not told what was wrong with them. In one quietly devastating scene, a teenage girl – born three weeks before the explosion – tells the camera she has “some problems” in her neck. As we leave her, the attending doctor reveals she has thyroid cancer. “Of course we don’t tell the children,” he says.

“It was the hardest film I’ve ever made,” De Leo later said. During filming, she was hospitalised for radiation poisoning.

The experience did not deter her. Five years later, her follow-up film, White Horse (2008), shadowed a Ukrainian man as he returned home to Pripyat for the first time in 20 years.

Secrets, lies and untold stories

The most influential retelling is undoubtedly Craig Mazin’s five-part HBO miniseries, Chernobyl (2019), which garnered 19 Emmy nominations and inspired a companion podcast.

The series stars Jared Harris as senior nuclear scientist Valery Legasov: the man tasked with containing the disaster, who took his own life on April 27, 1988 – exactly two years and one day after the explosion.

Reconstructing the timeline of events (before, during and after the explosion), the series is sharply critical of the power wielded by the Soviet government, its nuclear industry and their affiliated forces. It raises enduring questions about nuclear safety, especially emergency preparedness and response, and risk communication.

The series draws in part from Alexievich’s acclaimed book, Chernobyl Prayer, a polyphony of poetic first-person testimonies collected over a ten-year period with more than 500 eyewitnesses, including doctors, soldiers, scientists, helicopter pilots, miners, former party bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens.

As its title suggests, the book gives voice to the individuals who lived through the disaster. Compared to the series, it is a more nuanced and reflective account of the slow forms of violence that persisted long after the reactor was sealed and the cameras left.

One young father who volunteered as a liquidator recalls:

We got home. I took everything off, all the stuff I’d been wearing there, and threw the lot down the rubbish chute. I gave the cap to my little son as a present. He kept asking for it. He wore it non-stop. Two years later, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. You can write the rest yourself. I don’t want to say any more.

Both Chernobyl Prayer and Chernobyl portray the processes that rob people of their human status – forcing them to exist beyond the threshold of human experience. The radioactive particles both inhabit them and haunt them: “Chernobyl, for those who were there, did not end in Chernobyl. They were returning not from war, but almost from another world.”

For this reason, Chernobyl is not just a story of horror. It is also, for instance, a love story: between Vasily, a firefighter exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, and his pregnant wife, Lyudmila, instructed to protect their unborn child from his “scorched” body.

In Alexievich’s book, the nurses tell her, “You mustn’t forget this isn’t your husband, it isn’t the man you love. It’s a highly contaminated radioactive object.” But Lyudmila remains by Vasily’s side – changing his sheets, wiping him down, at one point removing “pieces of lung and lumps of his liver […] coming up through his mouth.”

Alexievich writes that since Chernobyl:

Love has changed. And death, too. Everything has changed, except us.

Like Yevgenia Nayberg, Ukrainian cultural historian Maria Tumarkin was 11 when Chernobyl happened. She turns to Alexievich when it feels impossible to answer the question: “How does a society witness itself? Witness itself failing at its most fundamental duty?”

The most enduring texts about Chernobyl move beyond the disaster as event and attend to it as warning – not sensationalist, but willing to listen to what it still tells us: about power, about the “cost of lies” (as the HBO series puts it), and about the slow violence of catastrophe that does not announce itself – and does not end.

Some of what Chernobyl cost us cannot be measured. It can only be carried. This is why Chernobyl remains a story worth telling. And why it will keep being told, again and again.

– ref. Chernobyl at 40: the lies, the loss and why we can’t let go – https://theconversation.com/chernobyl-at-40-the-lies-the-loss-and-why-we-cant-let-go-280369

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jesse Kearse, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The magnitude of an earthquake depends on how far a rupture travels along a fault line before it stops. For the first time, we have now directly observed how a large earthquake comes to a halt.

By analysing seismic recordings taken within a few kilometres of faults, we have identified a ground motion signal we call a “stopping phase”. It records the moment the earthquake stops.

This discovery, published in Science today, provides direct seismic evidence that large ruptures stop suddenly, rather than slowing down gradually.

It also helps identify where shaking may be strongest along strike-slip faults, which could help with disaster planning and preparation.

Earthquakes grow as the rupture spreads along a fault. The further it goes, the larger the earthquake magnitude becomes. The vast majority of earthquakes stop before they grow large enough to be felt.

For example, the earthquake monitoring network GeoNet has recorded more than 20,000 earthquakes in Aotearoa New Zealand over the past year, but all stopped soon after they began.

A very small percentage of earthquakes keep on going, and can travel for many hundreds of kilometres before coming to a halt, reaching up to magnitude 9 and often causing widespread damage.

Although rupture stopping is clearly important for determining earthquake magnitude, the process itself has been extremely difficult to observe directly.

Our findings now provide planners with a new way of identifying where the most damaging ground motions are likely to happen along a fault line.

A hidden signal of reversed ground motion

Using seismic, GPS and satellite data from 12 large strike-slip earthquakes worldwide, we found consistent patterns of ground motion at the ends of the faults which was not observed at their centres.

We observed that during the final moments of the earthquake, the ground suddenly moves in the opposite direction to the fault’s motion, creating a “whiplash” effect.

It’s like riding in a fast car that suddenly slams on the breaks – your body continues to go forward, but then sharply whips back the other way.

The stopping phase of an earthquake is similar, with the reversal in ground movement signalling a rupture’s abrupt halt.

As the stopping phase arrives at the Earth’s surface from depth, the ground can change direction in a fraction of a second, and move up to a metre or more backwards.

Because it occurs close to the fault and over such a short time, this process has not been recognised before. These signals are only becoming clear with increasingly dense modern seismic monitoring networks.

We simulated earthquakes using numerical models and were able to reproduce the stopping phase observations only when the rupture stopped suddenly. When the model forced a rupture to slow down gradually, the signal disappeared.

Do all earthquakes stop like this?

This research focuses on large strike-slip earthquakes – events where the ground moves sideways along near-vertical faults, rather than up and down.

Because near-fault observations are so rare, the science is severely data limited. Strike-slip faults provide the best opportunity to study these processes because they often rupture all the way to the Earth’s surface, where instruments can capture ground motion close to the source.

Abrupt arrest may also occur on other types of faults, such as subduction zones where one tectonic plate slides beneath another.

But we need further research to confirm whether this process is common to all earthquakes or only strike-slip fault systems such as the San Andreas Fault running along the coast of California in the US or New Zealand’s Alpine Fault.

The domino effect of cascading rupture

Large strike-slip faults are made up of a series of segments, linked together end to end.

To become large events, earthquakes that ride these fault networks must break multiple segments in one go.

In the seismic data from one such event in Turkey-Syria in 2023, we found stopping phases were recorded both at the end of the earthquake and at the edges of internal segments.

This stop-start behaviour during a single event means an earthquake rupture comes to an abrupt halt at the end of one fault segment, before triggering a slip on its neighbouring segment, like a cascade of falling dominoes.

How this helps people living near fault lines

Stopping phases help pinpoint where earthquake shaking may be most intense.

Our research shows these signals occur near the ends of ruptures and at boundaries between fault segments – places where earthquakes are most likely to stop.

This means the strongest and most complex shaking is likely to occur at the edges of fault segments, rather than their centres.

For strike-slip fault systems, this is particularly useful because fault segments and ends can be mapped before an earthquake happens.

This allows scientists and planners to identify locations where damaging ground motions are expected to occur.

Incorporating stopping phases into hazard models will improve how we anticipate shaking for cities near faults, such as New Zealand’s capital Wellington.

– ref. Seismic ‘whiplash’ – new research shows what happens when earthquakes stop suddenly – https://theconversation.com/seismic-whiplash-new-research-shows-what-happens-when-earthquakes-stop-suddenly-280846