Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Bishop, Associate Lecturer, Macquarie University

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

The Australian government has allocated tens of millions of dollars to commemorate the anniversary of Cook’s voyage to the South Pacific and Australia in 1770. Though several events have now been suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic, others will take place online.

This could also be an opportunity for teachers to disrupt the same white-washed versions of colonisation (brave, heroic and necessary) taught in Australian schools for centuries.

Read more: Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, and other myths from old school text books

There is a plethora of education policy mandating teachers incorporate Indigenous perspectives across year levels and subject areas. But in practice, this is much harder to do without Indigenous perspectives becoming trivialised or tokenistic.

Policy isn’t enough

Many teachers don’t feel confident or capable to include Indigenous perspectives in their classrooms.

In our recent study in a cluster of primary and secondary schools, teachers were paired with Aboriginal community members to plan and deliver lessons. Initially, teachers reported feeling ill-equipped to genuinely include an Aboriginal perspective.

One teacher said:

I’ve always felt that I wasn’t very good at embedding Aboriginal perspectives in my lessons. It was always, for me, seen as a tick-box, and I spoke about Dreamtime, I ticked a box, and that’s it[…] you didn’t want to step on any toes, and you didn’t want to offend anyone, so you just touched – you just skimmed the surface.

Teachers involved in the project had the best of intentions and a fierce willingness to learn. Some had been teaching for more than 20 years and openly admitted their ignorance towards Indigenous dispossession and the way schooling was used as a vehicle of colonisation.

Another teacher expressed the problem of not having adequate skills to teach Indigenous perspectives:

I’m blatantly aware how Anglo the room looks. But I guess I don’t want to do something that is tokenistic […] I don’t agree with tokenistic things. I think you’ve got to do it and do it well and I think to just have an Aboriginal flag in the corner, oh and now we’re going to do dot painting and, oh, right, now we’re going to do – you know? It’s kind of a bit insulting, really.

Without Indigenous perspectives in the classroom, or with only tokenistic inclusion, students’ views on Aboriginal peoples, colonialism and “Australian history” are more susceptible to negative media and social attitudes.

This leaves many non-Indigenous students ill-equipped to think critically about the world they live in.

As one teacher said:

If at school we teach it as tokenistic and then the media teaches it as, you know, stereotypical, then how are we going to produce the next generation of people that will work towards reconciliation and recognise the things of the past but move forward without these stereotypes, you know?

Read more: Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, and other myths from old school text books

I’m just following the syllabus

Some teachers feel protective of the formal curriculum. In this instance, Indigenous perspectives become a tick-the-box policy, something to add into the lesson, but not so much that it interferes with the “real” learning outcomes.

But what are these “real outcomes”?

In the NSW curriculum, the stage two (years three and four) unit “First Contacts”, provides the earliest comprehensive glimpse of world exploration and the colonisation of Australia. The key questions for inquiry include:

• why did the great journeys of exploration occur?

• what was life like for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples before the arrival of the Europeans?

• why did Europeans settle in Australia?

• what was the nature and consequence of contact between Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples and early traders, explorers and settlers?

Note the use of presumptive (“great”) and passive (“settle”, “explorers”) language in these questions. The last dot point also raises concerns about how teachers will challenge entrenched whitewashed versions of history.

Read more: A failure to say hello: how Captain Cook blundered his first impression with Indigenous people

Research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students highlights the frustration Indigenous students feel, particularly during history lessons.

As one student said:

You always have to learn from a white perspective, especially in history. Why don’t they learn from us for once?

Another student described the tension in the classroom as their teacher downloaded information from the internet:

Usually half of the class would get into a very heated racial discussion, which we had to sit through. Because the teacher had no idea what he was going on about. Some of the stuff he had on the board, because he just copies it from the Internet, so some of the stuff he has got on the board is racist, and he is teaching us. So it’s like very […] uncomfortable.

What will it take?

Teachers must critically reflect on their own identity and how it potentially influences their personal bias and worldview. They must also be willing to confront the ongoing effects of colonialism in and outside the classroom and listen to Indigenous people.

Read more: ‘They are all dead’: for Indigenous people, Cook’s voyage of ‘discovery’ was a ghostly visitation

Teachers must aspire to adequately and systemically overturn the harm schooling continues to inflict on many Indigenous people. A critical dialogue of Cook’s arrival that familiarises students with topics like racial hierarchies and white supremacy is long overdue.

– ref. ‘I spoke about Dreamtime, I ticked a box’: teachers say they lack confidence to teach Indigenous perspectives – https://theconversation.com/i-spoke-about-dreamtime-i-ticked-a-box-teachers-say-they-lack-confidence-to-teach-indigenous-perspectives-129064

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Buchan, Associate Professor, Griffith University

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

In Vincent Namatjira’s Ramsay Award winning Close Contact (2018), the artist construes Captain James Cook as the reverse image of his own self-portrait. The colonising presence of Cook looking toward a colonial future is satirised by making another present: Vincent Namatjira’s self-portrait looks out in a diametrically different direction.

Towards what, exactly?

Australia’s link to Cook has always been mediated by iconography. Cook was a promise recollected in pigment, bronze and stone to a nation at war with its first inhabitants and possessors.

Cook, and the violence of colonisation in his wake, embodied a claim to a vast inheritance: of Enlightenment and modernity at the expense of peoples already here.

Since his foundational ritual of possession, First Nations people have called for a reckoning with Cook’s legacies, and in recent years First Nations artists have reinvigorated this call.

By invoking the presence of Cook, they ask their audience to recognise how colonisation and empire rendered them all but absent – and his celebration today continues to do so.

Taking possession

In Samuel Calvert’s 1865 print, Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent on Behalf of the British Crown, the noisy presence of the newcomers’ industry and weapons drives two huddled Aboriginal men into the bush.

Wathaurung Elder Aunty Marlene Gilson re-worked Calvert’s image in The Landing (2018): widening the lens to show peoples living in the landscape.

Gilson imaginatively runs together Calvert’s imagery with accounts of Governor Phillip’s later landing. As the flag is hoisted ships hover in the bay. Colonisation was a process of denying who was already there, the First Nations families and figures Gilson captures in lively habitation on land and water.

Gilson challenges the mythology of empire: that empty territory needed no treaty.

Gilson’s image is also a homage to Gordon Bennett’s earlier reworking of Calvert in Possession Island (1991). Bennett deliberately obscured Cook and his companions, with the exception of one dark-skinned servant. The presumptuous act of possession is only glimpsed behind a Jackson Pollock-like forest of lines. Visual static intervenes. Terra nullius interruptus.

This obscurity stands in marked contrast to Christian Thompson’s Othering the Explorer, James Cook (2015). Part of his Museum of Others series, his images invite us to consider the effacement of First Nations people by colonial authority and knowledge.

Thompson superimposes Cook’s head and shoulders on the artist’s own. His choice of images is deliberate, the 1775 Nathaniel Dance portrait of Cook in full naval regalia glowering over his Pacific “discoveries”.

Since European colonisation, the assertion of the discoverer’s right to possess has erased the rich tapestry of prior ownership and belonging. In Thompson’s wry self-effacement, Cook’s superimposition is a reminder of someone already there. This was always the coloniser’s ploy. Presence as absence is a conceit of colonisation.

The presence of absence informs Daniel Boyd’s re-imagination of Cook’s landing in We Call Them Pirates Out Here (2006), a re-working of E. Phillips Fox’s Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay (1902).

Phillips Fox portrayed Cook restraining his men from shooting the distantly pictured “natives”. This was empire as it wished to be seen: peaceful, British, white and triumphant.

Boyd plays on the flattery of imperial self-imagining by exposing the wilful piracy of colonial possession. Boyd’s Cook cuts the same imperial dash, but with an eye patch and skull and crossbones on the Union Jack behind him empire is revealed as the pirate’s resort.

Challenging mythologies

The growing First Nations challenge to Cook’s iconography highlights his continued presence in our nation’s colonial mythology.

It is a challenge to Cook’s elevation as hero of the modern Australia built on Indigenous erasure. Jason Wing’s bronze bust of a balaclava-wearing Captain James Crook (2013) symbolises that challenge.

Wing’s addition of the balaclava forces us to confront Cook’s legacy not as the projected shining icon of Enlightenment, but as a mythic presence built on deliberate theft, dispossession and violence.

These are only a small collection of artists reconsidering the place of Cook in our collective memory. Provocative, challenging, arresting, often satirical and sometimes funny, First Nations artists powerfully challenge us to reconsider Cook and our nation’s iconography.

Within the art lies an open invitation to reflect on who we have become and where we are headed.

This invitation is highlighted in Fiona Foley’s most recent retrospective, named for a song by Joe Gala and Teila Watson performed in Badtjala and English: Who are these strangers and where are they going?

Read more: Tall ship tales: oral accounts illuminate past encounters and objects, but we need to get our story straight

The song weaves together the narratives of the First Nations people who first saw the Endeavour make its way along the coast. Together with the photographs and installations drawn from across Foley’s long career, the retrospective is a powerful affirmation of continuing presence: in 1770, in 1788, and today.

As we confront the Cook commemorations, Foley’s and the Badtjalas’ question, like Namatjira’s double-sided self-portrait, is a nudge to our nation’s future. Who are these strangers and where are they going?

By reminding us that the question was asked of Cook’s sudden presence in 1770, we must ask it again of ourselves to confront the absence his possession still makes present for us 250 years on.

– ref. Terra nullius interruptus: Captain James Cook and absent presence in First Nations art – https://theconversation.com/terra-nullius-interruptus-captain-james-cook-and-absent-presence-in-first-nations-art-129688

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Buchan, Associate Professor, Griffith University

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

James Cook and his companions aboard the Endeavour landed at a harbour on Australia’s southeast coast in April of 1770. Cook named the place Botany Bay for “the great quantity of plants Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander found in this place”.

Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander were aboard the Endeavour as gentleman botanists, collecting specimens and applying names in Latin to plants Europeans had not previously seen. The place name hints at the importance of plants to Britain’s Empire, and to botany’s pivotal place in Europe’s Enlightenment and Australia’s early colonisation.

‘Nothing like people’

Cook has always loomed large in Australia’s colonial history. White Australians have long commemorated and celebrated him as the symbolic link to the “civilisation” of Enlightenment and Empire. The two botanists have been less well remembered, yet Banks in particular was an influential figure in Australia’s early colonisation.

When Banks and his friend Solander went ashore on April 29, 1770 to collect plants for naming and classification, the Englishman recollected they saw “nothing like people”. Banks knew that the land on which he and Solander sought plants was inhabited (and in fact, as we now know, had been so for at least 65,000 years). Yet the two botanists were engaged in an activity that implied the land was blank and unknown.

They were both botanical adventurers. Solander was among the first and most favoured of the students of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and colonial traveller who devised the method still used today for naming species. Both Solander and Banks were advocates for the Linnaean method of taxonomy: a systematic classification of newly named plants and animals.

When they stepped ashore at “Botany Bay” in 1770, the pair saw themselves as pioneers in a double sense: as Linnaean botanists in a new land, its places and plants unnamed by any other; as if they were in a veritable terra nullius.

Botany in ‘nobody’s land’

Terra nullius, meaning “nobody’s land”, refers to a legal doctrine derived from European traditions stretching back to the ancient Romans. The idea was that land could be declared “empty” and “unowned” if there were no signs of occupation such as cultivation of the soil, towns, cities, or sacred temples.

As a legal doctrine it was not applied in Australia until the late 1880s, and there is dispute about its effects in law until its final elimination by the High Court in Mabo v Queensland (No. II) in 1992.

Cook never used this formulation, nor did Banks or Solander. Yet each in their way acted as if it were true. That the land, its plants, and animals, and even its peoples, were theirs to name and classify according to their own standards of “scientific” knowledge.

In the late eighteenth century, no form of scientific knowledge was more useful to empire than botany. It was the science par excellence of colonisation and empire. Botany promised a way to transform the “waste” of nature into economic productivity on a global scale.

Plant power

Wealth and power in Britain’s eighteenth century empire came from harnessing economically useful crops: tobacco, sugar, tea, coffee, rice, potatoes, flax. Hence Banks and Solander’s avid botanical activity was not merely a manifestation of Enlightenment “science”. It was an integral feature of Britain’s colonial and imperial ambitions.

Throughout the Endeavour’s voyage, Banks, Solander, and their assistants collected more than 30,000 plant specimens, naming more than 1,400 species.

By doing so, they were claiming new ground for European knowledge, just as Cook meticulously charted the coastlines of territories he claimed for His Majesty, King George III. Together they extended a new dispensation, inscribed in new names for places and for plants written over the ones that were already there.

Long after the Endeavour returned to Britain, Banks testified before two House of Commons committees in 1779 and 1785 that “Botany Bay” would be an “advantageous” site for a new penal colony. Among his reasons for this conclusion were not only its botanical qualities – fertile soils, abundant trees and grasses – but its virtual emptiness.

Turning emptiness to empire

When Banks described in his own Endeavour journal the land Cook had named “New South Wales”, he recalled: “This immense tract of Land … is thinly inhabited even to admiration …”. It was the science of botany that connected emptiness and empire to the Enlightened pursuit of knowledge.

One of Banks’s correspondents was the Scottish botanist and professor of natural history, John Walker. Botany, Walker wrote, was one of the “few Sciences” that “can promise any discovery or improvement”. Botany was the scientific means to master the global emporium of commodities on which empire grew.

Botany was also the reason why it had not been necessary for Banks or Solander to affirm the land on which they trod was empty. For in a very real sense, their science presupposed it. The land, its plants and its people were theirs to name and thereby claim by “discovery”.

When Walker reflected on his own botanical expeditions in the Scottish Highlands, he described them as akin to voyages of discovery to lands as “inanimate & unfrequented as any in the Terra australis”.

As we reflect on the 250-year commemoration of Cook’s landing in Australia, we ought also to consider his companions Banks and Solander, and their science of turning supposed emptiness to empire.

– ref. Botany and the colonisation of Australia in 1770 – https://theconversation.com/botany-and-the-colonisation-of-australia-in-1770-128469

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today.

Click through below to explore Cook’s journey through the Pacific, his interactions with Indigenous peoples and how that journey led to Australia becoming a penal colony 18 years later.

You can see other stories in the series here.

– ref. Explorer, navigator, coloniser: revisit Captain Cook’s legacy with the click of a mouse – https://theconversation.com/explorer-navigator-coloniser-revisit-captain-cooks-legacy-with-the-click-of-a-mouse-137390

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of an interview with John Maynard for our podcast Trust Me, I’m An Expert. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names of deceased people.

There are a multitude of Aboriginal oral memories about Captain James Cook, right across the continent.

As the research from Deborah Bird Rose shows, many Aboriginal people in remote locations are certainly under the impression that Cook came there as well, shooting people in a kind of Cook-led invasion of Australia. Many of these communities, of course, never met James Cook; the man never even went there.

But the deep impact of James Cook that spread across the country and he came to represent the bogeyman for Aboriginal Australia.

Even back in the Protection and Welfare Board days, a government car would turn up and Aboriginal people would be running around screaming, “Lookie, lookie, here comes Cookie!”

I wrote about Uncle Ray Rose, sadly recently departed, who’d had a stroke. Someone said, “How do you feel?” And he said, “No good. I’m Captain Cooked.”

Cook, wherever he went up the coast, was giving names where names already existed. Yuin oral memory in the south coast of NSW gives the example of what they called Gulaga and Cook called “Mount Dromedary”:

[…] that name can be seen as the first of the changes that come for our people […] Cook’s maps were very good, but they did not show our names for places. He didn’t ask us.

Cook has been incorporated into songs, jokes, stories and Aboriginal oral histories right across the country.

Why? I think it’s an Aboriginal response to the way we’ve been taught about our history.

Read more: Captain Cook wanted to introduce British justice to Indigenous people. Instead, he became increasingly cruel and violent

Myth-making persists but a shift is underway

I came through a school system of the 50s and 60s, and we weren’t weren’t even mentioned in the history books except as a people belonging to the Stone Age or as a dying race.

It was all about discoverers, explorers, settlers and Phar Lap or Don Bradman. But us Aboriginal people? Not there.

We had this high exposure of the public celebration of Cook, the statues of Cook, the reenactments of Cook – it was really in your face. For Aboriginal people, how do we make sense of all of this, faced with the reality of our experience and the catastrophic impact?

We’ve got to make sense of it the best way we can, and I think that’s why Cook turns up in so many oral histories.

I think wider Australia is moving towards a more balanced understanding of our history. Lots of people now recognise the richest cultural treasure the country possesses is 65,000 years of Aboriginal cultural connection to this continent.

That’s unlike anywhere else in the world. I mean no disrespect, but 250 years is a drop in a lake compared to 65,000 years. From our perspective, in fact, we’ve always been here. Our people came out of the Dreamtime of the creative ancestors and lived and kept the Earth as it was in the very first day.

With global warming, rising sea levels, rising temperatures and catastrophic storms, Aboriginal people did keep the Earth as it was in the very first day to ensure that it was passed to each surviving generation.

There was going to be a (now-cancelled) circumnavigation of Australia in the official proceedings this year, which the prime minister supported. But James Cook didn’t circumnavigate Australia. He only sailed up the east coast. So that’s creating more myths again, which is a senseless way to go.

‘With the consent of the Natives to take possession’

Personally, I have high regard for James Cook as a navigator, as a cartographer, and certainly as an inspiring captain of his crew. He encouraged incredible loyalty among those that sailed with him on those three voyages. And that has to be recognised.

But against that, of course, is the reality that he was given secret instructions by the Navy to:

With the consent of the Natives to take possession of the convenient situations in the country in the name of the king of Great Britain.

Well, consent was never given. When they went ashore at Botany Bay, two Aboriginal men brandished spears and made it quite clear they didn’t want him there. Those men were wounded and Cook was one of those firing a musket.

There was no gaining any consent when he sailed on to Possession Island and planted that flag down. Totally the opposite, in fact.

And the most insightful viewpoint is from Cook himself, who wrote that:

all they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.

Cook’s background gave him insight

James Cook wasn’t your normal British naval officer of that time period. To get into such a position, you normally had to be born into the right family, to come from money and privilege.

James Cook was none of those things. He came from a poor family. His father was a labourer. Cook got to where he was by skill, endeavour, and, unquestionably, because he was a very smart man and brilliant at sea. But it’s also from that background that he’s able to offer insight.

There’s an incredible quotation of Cook’s where he says of Aboriginal people:

They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition… they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholsome Air.

Now, Cook is comparing what he is seeing in Australia with life back Britain, where there is an incredible amount of inequality. London, at the time, was filthy. Sewerage pouring through the streets. Disease was rife. Underprivilege is everywhere.

In Australia, though, Cook sees what to him looks like this incredible egalitarian society and it makes an impact on him because of where he comes from.

But deeper misunderstandings persisted. In what’s now called Cooktown there are, at first, amicable relationships with the Guugu Yimithirr people, but when they come aboard the Endeavour they see this incredible profusion of turtles that the crew has captured.

They’re probably thinking, “these are our turtles.” They would quite happily share some of those turtles but the Bristish response is: you get none.

So the Guugu Yimithirr people go off the ship and set the grass on fire. Eventually, there’s a kind of peace settlement but the incident reveals a complete blindness on the part of the British to the idea of reciprocity in Aboriginal society.

Read more: ‘They are all dead’: for Indigenous people, Cook’s voyage of ‘discovery’ was a ghostly visitation

A collision of catastrophic proportions

The impact of 1770 has never eased for Aboriginal people. It was a collision of catastrophic proportions. The whole impact of 1788 – of invasion, dispossession, cultural destruction, occupation onto assimilation, segregation – all of these things that came after 1770.

Anything you want to measure – Aboriginal health, education, employment, housing, youth suicide, incarceration – we have the worst stats. That has been a continuation, a reality of the failure of government to recognise what has happened in the past and actually do something about it in the present to fix it for the future.

We’ve had decades and decades of governments saying to us, “We know what’s best for you.” But the fact is that when it comes to Aboriginal well being, the only people to listen to are Aboriginal people and we’ve never been put in the position.

We’ve been raising our voices for a long time now, but some people see that as a threat and are not prepared to listen.

An honest reckoning of the reality of Cook and what came after won’t heal things overnight. But it’s a starting point, from which we can join hands and walk together toward a shared future.

A balanced understanding of the past will help us build a future – it is of critical importance.

New to podcasts?

Everything you need to know about how to listen to a podcast is here.

Additional audio credits

Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks.

Marimba On the Loose by Daniel Birch, from Free Music Archive.

Podcast episode recorded and edited by Sunanda Creagh.

Lead image

Uncle Fred Deeral as little old man in the film The Message, a film by Zakpage, to be shown at the National Museum of Australia in April. Nik Lachajczak of Zakpage.

– ref. An honest reckoning with Captain Cook’s legacy won’t heal things overnight. But it’s a start – https://theconversation.com/an-honest-reckoning-with-captain-cooks-legacy-wont-heal-things-overnight-but-its-a-start-130389

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Fullagar, Associate Professor in Modern History, Macquarie University

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

Several recent exhibitions on James Cook have sought to include discussions of the Indigenous people who journeyed with him on his Pacific voyages.

In exhibitions marking the 250th anniversary of the Endeavour’s departure from Britain in 2018, for example, both the British Library and the National Library of Australia focused in part on the priest Tupaia, who travelled with Cook from Tahiti to Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in 1769.

These exhibitions emphasised Tupaia’s navigational prowess, but didn’t provide extensive detail on the role he played in the British enterprises.

Likewise, little to no attention has been paid to the islander who journeyed with Cook the longest, Mai, who joined the captain’s second and third voyages.

Shining a light on the islanders who travelled with Cook is necessary to put his achievements in proper context. Cook was more reliant on their assistance for his empire-expanding project than is often acknowledged. And these islanders had more agency during the so-called Age of Discovery than is typically believed.

The stories of Tupaia and Mai highlight the central role Indigenous people played during this period, which for too long has been described as one of only European exploration. And they also question the way Cook has been portrayed throughout history – as a lone genius, connecting the world more closely through his unique abilities.

It turns out many different people contributed to globalisation in the 18th century.

Tupaia’s motivations for joining the Endeavour

Mai, or Omai as he was mostly known by the British, shared many characteristics with Tupaia. Both were motivated to journey with Cook because of intense dramas playing out on their home island of Ra‘iatea in what is now French Polynesia. And both became useful to the British voyagers by brokering introductions with other islanders in the Pacific.

But in other ways, the two men differed. They were from separate social ranks and they experienced very different fates.

Tupaia was of the exalted ari’i rank, a leading priest of the ‘Oro sect that ruled most of the Tahitian archipelago during this era.

Because of his high status, he was directly involved in a tumultuous war between Ra‘iatea and neighboring Bora Bora in the 1760s, which eventually ended in defeat for the Ra‘iateans. After the war, he became a refugee in Tahiti, where he came into contact with the Endeavour and befriended the naturalist, Joseph Banks.

For Tupaia, the motivation to join the Endeavour voyage was complex and political. He saw in the British tallships an opportunity to gain arms, knowledge and possibly even men for a restorative offensive against the Bora Borans at Ra‘iatea.

Some descendants today also suggest he joined the crew as a way of continuing a long-established practice of voyaging – returning to islands he had previously visited in his own waka (canoe) and by his own navigational techniques.

And Banks saw in Tupaia’s adventurousness a chance to fulfill a dream to study man in a so-called “state of nature” back home in Britain.

Tupaia’s assistance during the voyage

Tupaia joined the Endeavour in July 1769. Cook, until now skeptical of including islanders in his crew, acquiesced partly because he saw it appeased Banks and partly because he judged Tupaia

a Shrewd, Sensible, and Ingenious Man.

The captain learned a great deal from Tupaia. Not only did Cook listen to and attempt to document all of Tupaia’s recitations on the scores of islands around Tahiti, he also gained rare insight into Pacific voyaging.

Most of all, he had Tupaia’s help when he met wary islanders in other archipelagos. With Tupaia mediating, these encounters went smoothly.

Tupaia was ill through much of the Endeavour’s stay at Botany Bay. Unfortunately, his health only worsened and he died during the ship’s layover in Batavia, thwarting Banks’ long-term aim of bringing him to Britain.

Perhaps, though, Tupaia fulfilled at least part of his own dream to travel the Pacific once more.

Mai’s fierce determination to join Cook

Banks was not on Cook’s second voyage, but the captain carried with him the memory of the naturalist’s hopes to study a Pacific islander.

As I recount in my latest book, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire, Cook found that man when he encountered Mai in 1773.

Like Tupaia, Mai was also displaced by the Bora Boran invasion of Ra‘iatea. A generation younger than Tupaia, Mai had been a child at the time and also lost his father in the conflict. In Tahiti, his lower social rank meant he had fewer concessions as a refugee.

Arguably these conditions made Mai even more determined to join Cook’s expedition when the chance came.

Mai travelled to Britain on Cook’s second ship, captained by Tobias Furneaux. The Englishman admired Mai and remarked several times on his maritime and culinary skills. Mai also helped translate and mediate with other islanders they encountered. This wasn’t because he sympathised with the British; rather, he was eager to speed up their return to Britain.

Mai’s mission in London and return home

Arriving in London in 1774, Mai met with Banks, who assumed responsibility for his accommodation. Due to his high-profile patron, Mai encountered and bedazzled much of the glamorous set in London, including King George III.

Mai seemed to enjoy himself well enough, but his mind was always focused on his larger mission. Everyone who met him recorded that his aim in Britain was not to impress or assimilate but to gain support for his mission of retaking his home island of Ra‘iatea from the Bora Borans.

Mai found himself aboard Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific in mid-1776, with promises from Banks and the Admiralty to take him home and provide him with British goods to help him achieve his goals.

Once again, he provided critical assistance to the captain during negotiations with other Pacific islanders, as well as with Indigenous people in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). Only when the expedition neared the Tahitian archipelago did Mai start to doubt Cook’s good faith.

He saw Cook give away much of the livestock that had been promised to him and watched as he held long meetings with assorted elders. Mai realised Cook planned to dump him on another island rather than fulfill the Admiralty pledges to land him on Ra‘iatea.

Mai was devastated. After four long years away, his life project had collapsed.

Grand ambitions only partly realised

Historians like to recount the emotional farewell between Cook and Mai in late 1777, noting Mai’s desperate wailing and Cook’s misty eyes. It’s usually depicted as a touching example of how Mai had grown to love the British and, equally, of how Cook had a softer heart than most believed.

From Mai’s perspective, though, the moment likely had a far different meaning.

Neither Tupaia nor Mai had achieved their ultimate goals in joining the Cook voyages, but this does not discount the grandness of their ambitions.

Both undertook epic feats of exploration. And their missions were just as political as Cook’s had been. Instead of imperial expansion, however, these men had sought a continuation of their Indigenous ways of life.

And it’s worth pointing out that Cook failed in his ultimate goal in the third voyage, too. He had been tasked with finding a northwest passage for imperial trade and to deliver Mai home according to his wishes. Instead, he ended up assassinated in Hawai’i.

– ref. The stories of Tupaia and Omai and their vital role as Captain Cook’s unsung shipmates – https://theconversation.com/the-stories-of-tupaia-and-omai-and-their-vital-role-as-captain-cooks-unsung-shipmates-126674

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Darian-Smith, Executive Dean and Pro Vice-Chancellor, College of Arts, Law and Education, University of Tasmania

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison stumbled on the word “re-enactment” when outlining his government’s (now suspended) plans for commemorating the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook’s mythologised “discovery” of Australia.

Certainly, the planned route of the replica HMB Endeavour with 39 stops (and funded at A$6.7 million) could not be described as such: Cook never circumnavigated mainland Australia nor visited Tasmania on the Endeavour.

Morrison quickly clarified that the only gesture of historical accuracy would be a “retracing” of Cook’s voyage up the eastern seaboard.

Historical re-enactments of Cook’s landing are not new to settler Australia. They have focused on Cook’s landfall at Botany Bay, south of Sydney, where the Endeavour’s crew first stepped onto the continent on April 29 1770.

His journal recorded they were greeted by two Dharawal men “who seem’d resolved to oppose our landing”. Cook fired his musket at the men three times, including aiming directly, forcing their retreat.

Cook’s active role in British hostility to Aboriginal peoples was erased from subsequent performances of the Botany Bay landing.

These have also been embellished with Cook claiming the east coast of Australia — this actually occurred some months later at Possession Island in the Torres Strait.

Such popular “re-enactments” of national “foundation moments” have elements of fantasy, compressing time and history into palatable narratives for mainstream Australia.

The history of Cook re-enactments

Cook’s arrival was commemorated as early as 1822, when Sydney’s Philosophical Society erected a plaque at Kurnell, on the headland of Botany Bay. By 1864, the Australian Patriotic Association had located the “exact” site a kilometre away.

Following the 1870 centenary of Cook’s landfall, annual pro-British “celebrations” at Botany Bay involved the presence of the governor, flag-raising, gun salutes, and military displays.

In a society eager to erase its convict stain, Cook was a more acceptable founder than Governor Arthur Phillip, who had established the penal colony in Sydney Cove in 1788.

Considerable confusion existed then – and continues today — about the historical roles of Cook and Phillip. Even during the 1888 Centennial of the First Fleet, the largest triumphal arch in Sydney was adorned with Cook’s image and a model of the Endeavour.

The inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in January 1901 provided the impetus for a major re-enactment at Kurnell, headlined as the “Second Coming of Cook”. The spectacle attracted a crowd of over 5,000, with 1,000 enjoying a champagne luncheon in an enormous marquee.

The re-enactment began with the arrival of the Endeavour, represented by local fishing vessel “Fanny Fisher”. Once ashore, Cook and his sailors and marines encountered 25 Aboriginal men armed with spears and decorated with feathers and ochre. A gun was fired overhead, then Cook ordered a sailor to shoot at the Aborigines before making his imperial claim on the continent. Cook, Joseph Banks and a nymph symbolising Australia gave speeches on the “greatness” and unity of the Britannia of the Southern Ocean.

Although an Aboriginal community lived at La Perouse on the opposite shore of Botany Bay, the re-enactment involved a troupe of Indigenous men from Queensland. They were directed by parliamentarian and entrepreneur Archibald Meston, who had previously toured Indigenous performers in his “Wild Australia” show.

It is unknown under what circumstances the Aboriginal men were recruited for the Federation re-enactment, or if they were paid.

Despite dramatising a beach-side skirmish between the Aborigines and British, the Federation performance cemented Cook as the conquering peacemaker. This was promoted by E. Phillips Fox, who was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria to paint The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1902).

This monumental work is a tableau – or frozen re-enactment — of Cook striding purposefully up the beach, stretching out his hand as he takes territorial possession. It was widely reproduced and circulated, becoming the best-known and influential image of Cook’s landing across Australia.

The evolution of performances

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the anniversary of the Endeavour’s arrival at Botany Bay was marked by performative gestures to the past. Dignitaries arrived by steamship, coming ashore to give speeches situating Cook as founder of the nation.

For instance, in 1930 at the height of the Depression, spectators were exhorted to “practice self-denial and self-reliance as exemplified in Captain Cook’s exploits”.

Although a full-scale re-enactment was staged in 1951 for the Federation jubilee, interest in Cook waned and the formalities were abandoned.

This changed dramatically in 1970, with the bicentenary of Cook’s Australian landing. Cook was suddenly everywhere, with government funding supporting pageants, memorials and other Cook novelties around the nation.

The nationalistic climax of months of events was an elaborate re-enactment at Kurnell, performed for the visiting Queen Elizabeth and her entourage. Directed by musical theatre aficionado Hayes Gordon, the spectacle was designed for global television, with actors selected after a nationwide search. Held on “Discovery Day”, it attracted a crowd of over 50,000 people.

Promoted as portraying the “birth of modern Australia”, this re-enactment capitalised on the groundswell of popular interest in Australia’s past. Emphasis was placed on historical accuracy, although nothing challenged the well-established nonsense of Cook’s party briefly confronting Indigenous peoples before peacefully claiming the continent.

To show how far the nation had progressed, “multicultural” schoolchildren and boy scouts and girl guides rose and fell in waves along the beach.

Protesting and mourning

Amid this “celebration”, diverse Aboriginal protests were under way, although they were little covered by the press.

At La Perouse, Aboriginal poet and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) was among hundreds of protesters who boycotted the re-enactment and released funeral wreaths into the sea.

A silent vigil had been held the night before, and a “day of mourning” was observed at Sydney Town Hall and in other Australian cities.

In 1970, a second re-enactment was held in Cooktown, also witnessed by the queen. The original Endeavour had spent seven weeks there, undergoing repairs after running into the Great Barrier Reef.

Cooktown has a long record of Cook-related performances, though initially these were sporadic. But from 1960, the Cooktown Re-enactment Association organised an annual event.

The performances evolved from a battle with Aboriginal people to Cook landing and taking possession and, more recently, celebrations of acts of conciliation.

Future direction: same old or new path forward?

Until coronavirus and social distancing made all public events impossible, the federal government had slated to spend A$5.45 million on the Cooktown 2020 Expo, including a re-enactment of the landing of Captain Cook and his interactions with the Guugu Yimithirr bama.

As this historical overview of over a century of re-enactments of Cook’s landing has shown, these events have served to reinforce Australia’s imperial and British connections. They ignore the violence of Cook’s encounters with Aboriginal people and Indigenous resistance, and perpetuate the myth of Cook’s discovery of Australia.

You can hear Kate Darian-Smith discussing these ideas in an episode of our podcast, Trust Me, I’m An Expert, over here.

– ref. Cooking the books: how re-enactments of the Endeavour’s voyage perpetuate myths of Australia’s ‘discovery’ – https://theconversation.com/cooking-the-books-how-re-enactments-of-the-endeavours-voyage-perpetuate-myths-of-australias-discovery-126751

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shino Konishi, ARC Research Fellow, University of Western Australia

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

In The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere describes James Cook as a Kurtz-like figure, inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness.

He suggests Cook initially saw himself as an enlightened “civiliser”, bringing a new vision of the world to the so-called “savage lands” of the South Seas.

But over the course of his three voyages, Cook instead came to embody the “savagery” he ostensibly despised, indulging in increasingly tyrannical, punitive and violent treatment of Indigenous people in the Pacific.

Cook’s evolution was triggered by Indigenous people’s seeming refusal to embrace the gift of civilisation he offered, such as livestock and garden beds sown with Western crops and a justice system modelled after Britain’s.

After revisiting Tahiti on his third voyage, he was dismayed to discover that despite a decade of European encounters and exchanges, he nonetheless found

neither new arts nor improvements in the old, nor have they copied after us in any one thing.

He became increasingly frustrated by their determination to maintain their own laws and manners, especially their tendency to “steal”.

‘Hints’ for fostering good relations

For his first expedition on the Endeavour, Cook received a document called Hints prepared by the Earl of Morton, president of the Royal Society, providing advice on how to deal with Indigenous people.

The earl reminded Cook’s crew that Indigenous peoples were the “legal possessors of the several regions they inhabit” and

No European Nation has the right to occupy any part of their country … without their voluntary consent.

He also advised Cook and his naturalists to:

Exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several lands where the ship may touch. To check the petulance of the Sailors and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms. To have it still in view that shedding the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature.

Cook decided the best way to prevent violence and foster good relations with Indigenous people he encountered was to demonstrate the “superiority” of European weapons, assuming

once they are sensible of these things, a regard for their own safety will deter them from disturbing you.

Cook’s early attempts to promote British justice

Cook was determined, however, to follow Morton’s instructions to the letter and ensure his crew, under threat of punishment, treated Indigenous people respectfully.

He enforced this rule in April 1769 during their first sojourn in Tahiti, when the ship’s butcher threatened to slit the throat of the high chief Te Pau’s wife when she refused to exchange her hatchet for a nail.

Outraged, Te Pau told the botanist Joseph Banks, with whom he had developed a close relationship. Cook then ordered the butcher to be publicly flogged in front of the Tahitians so they could witness British justice.

Yet, instead of being satisfied, the Tahitians were appalled to witness this form of corporal punishment.

A few days later, Cook’s resolve to maintain peaceful relations was tested again when their quadrant was stolen from a guarded tent. This scientific instrument was essential for observing the transit of Venus, a central aim of the expedition.

According to Cook’s journal, his first response was to “seize upon Tootaha” [Tutaha], the chief of Papara in western Tahiti, or

some others of the Principle people and keep them in custody until the Quadt was produce’d.

But he soon realised this would alarm the Tahitians. After realising Tutaha played no role in the theft, Cook ordered his men not to seize him. And Banks, tipped off by Te Pau as to the quadrant’s whereabouts, soon retrieved it.

On these occasions, Cook attempted to demonstrate what he saw as the fairness of British law to the Tahitians.

Johann Reinhold Forster, naturalist on Cook’s second voyage, also suggested Cook’s reactions were tempered by the presence of the naturalists, who were not subject to his authority.

A change in temperament

By his third voyage on the Resolution and Discovery from 1776-80, however, Cook would no longer be so measured in his treatment of Indigenous people.

This was evident during his almost three-month stay in Tonga, then known as the Friendly Islands.

In May 1777, Cook visited Nomuka, and after exchanging gifts with the leading chief, Tupoulangi, he set up a market where the British received great stores of fresh meat and fruit.

Despite the efforts of both Cook and Tupoulangi to ensure order in the market, however, thefts still occurred.

On one occasion, an islander was caught trying to steal a small winch used to make rope, and Cook “ordered him a dozen lashes”. After the man was “severely flogg’d”, his hands were tied behind his back and he was carried to the market where he was

not releas’d till a large hog was brought for his ransom.

William Anderson, a surgeon on the expedition, thought the lashes were a justifiable punishment and deterrent. However, he said what came after would

not be found consonant with the principles of justice or humanity.

Cook later complained the chiefs were ordering their servants to steal from the market and “floging [sic] made no more impression” on them since the chiefs would “often advise us to kill them”.

Reluctant to resort to execution for stealing, Cook’s crew soon found an alternative method of punishment: shaving the heads of offenders. This, he said,

was looked upon as a mark of infamy.

A month later, the expedition moved to the island Tongatapu. Here, there was a radical shift in Cook’s conduct. As anthropologist Anne Salmond described it, he was “guilty of great cruelty” even in the eyes of his own men.

Historian John Beaglehole believes Cook was “at his wits’ end” by the thievery at Tongatapu and responded by applying “the lash as he had never done before”.

Instead of shaving the heads of thieves, Cook again ordered them to be severely flogged and ransomed.

Cut-throat retribution

The Discovery’s master, Thomas Edgar, kept a tally of these punishments and noted that in a two-week span, eight men were punished with 24-72 lashes apiece for stealing items such as a “tumbler and two wine glasses”.

Cook even punished his own men with the maximum 12 lashes for “neglect of duty” when thefts happened on their watch.

He also resorted to punishments which midshipman George Gilbert deemed “unbecoming of a European”, including:

cutting off their ears; fireing at them with small shot; or ball as they were swimming or paddling to the shore; and suffering the people (as he rowed after them) to beat them with the oars; and stick the boat hook into them; wherever he could hit them

Edgar described how one Tongan prisoner who received 72 lashes and then was dealt “a strange punishment” by

scoring both his Arms with a common Knife by one of our Seamen Longitudinally and transversly [sic], into the Bone.

This horrific and excessive carving of crosses into the man’s shoulders is most reminiscent of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness.

Blind hypocrisy

Cook’s increasingly violent punishments reflected his sheer frustration over the refusal of Indigenous people to recognise the superiority of Western ways and Europeans’ concepts of property.

Of course, while they were very protective and jealous of their own possessions, Cook and his crew were blind to any Indigenous concepts of property.

As he journeyed through the Pacific, Cook, like other European voyagers, freely collected water and fruit, netted fish and turtles, hunted birds and game and cut down trees for wood, never thinking Indigenous people would regard these valuable resources as their property nor construe such actions as theft.

When the expedition reached Endeavour River, near present-day Cooktown in far-north Queensland, the Guugu Yimithirr people tried to reclaim turtles Cook’s men had fished from their waters. They were rebuffed by Cook’s men and angrily set fires in retaliation.

Cook, however, did not recognise this as punishment or retribution for the stolen turtles. Instead he thought their actions were “troublesome”, so was

obliged to fire a musquet load[ed] with small short at some of the ri[n]g leaders.

Throughout his voyages, Cook faithfully followed the Earl of Morton’s advice to show off the superiority of European might, but he increasingly failed “to check” his own “petulance” and “restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms”.

Most, significantly, through his administering of rough justice against Indigenous people for apparent thieving, Cook forgot Morton’s edict that

shedding the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature.

– ref. Captain Cook wanted to introduce British justice to Indigenous people. Instead, he became increasingly cruel and violent – https://theconversation.com/captain-cook-wanted-to-introduce-british-justice-to-indigenous-people-instead-he-became-increasingly-cruel-and-violent-127025

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fabien B. Vincent, Research Fellow; Rheumatology Research Group, Centre for Inflammatory Diseases, Monash University

You may have heard about psoriatic arthritis after Kim Kardashian West said last year she was diagnosed with this illness.

Psoriasis is a relatively common chronic skin condition that causes rapid build-up of skin cells, resulting in a rash. Around 20% of sufferers will develop psoriatic arthritis where a person’s joints become inflamed and sore, in addition to the skin symptoms.

Recent evidence suggests that psoriatic arthritis is an autoimmune disease, meaning the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its own skin and joints.

How common is it?

Around 1% of people in the United States have psoriatic arthritis, and it affects men and women roughly equally.

Symptoms usually begin between the ages of 40 and 50, though they can also begin in childhood or older age.

In around 85-90% of patients, psoriasis symptoms start first.

What causes it?

Psoriatic arthritis is caused by a combination of genetic and environmental or lifestyle factors. Infection, stress, obesity, and smoking have been suggested to increase the risk of developing the condition.

Researchers have also investigated a possible link with gut microbiota, the bacteria that live in the digestive tract. Some think changes in gut microbiota diversity may be involved. However, it’s not clear whether this is a cause or a consequence of chronic inflammation.

What are the symptoms?

Psoriasis causes a skin rash of scaly red patches or plaques that can spread all over the body. Typically it affects the knees, elbows, hairline, ears, natal cleft (the groove that runs between the two buttocks), belly button and nails.

It might be painful and itchy. It usually evolves with a period of flare, where the illness gets worse, followed by a period of improvement.

Psoriatic arthritis occurs in one or more joints. It can affect peripheral joints, such as the hands and feet, the spine, and the entheses, where ligaments and tendons attach to bones (such as where the Achilles tendon connects to the heel). In around 40-50% of patients, the entire toe or finger can swell like a small sausage, known as dactylitis. It particularly affects the tips of the fingers and toes, known as the distal joints, as well as the buttocks and lower back.

Arthritis symptoms include pain, redness, swelling, and tenderness of the affected joints. It usually presents with morning stiffness, and joint pain increases while resting and improves while moving. Joint pain can also wake people up at night.

General symptoms can include fatigue, unexplained fever, unintentional weight loss, and loss of appetite. Early diagnosis can be challenging because these symptoms are non-specific and can be mistaken for other illnesses.

Patients can also suffer from eye inflammation and inflammatory bowel disease, where the digestive tract becomes inflamed.

How is it diagnosed?

There is no single blood or imaging test for diagnosing psoriatic arthritis. Patients with symptoms should be referred to a rheumatologist, where they will be examined.

If psoriatic arthritis is suspected, a doctor will investigate the skin, nails, joints, spine, and entheses, the junctions where ligaments and tendons attach to the bones. They’ll also check for any dactylitis, the sausage-like swelling in the hands and toes.

They will request X-rays of affected peripheral joints and the spine to look for cartilage and bone damage, as well as new bone formations. MRI and ultrasound scans may also help.

Read more: What is rheumatoid arthritis, the condition tennis champion Caroline Wozniacki lives with?

Patients will have routine blood tests looking for signs of inflammation, as well as a marker named HLA B27, present in approximately 25% of affected people.

Potential complications

Left untreated, patients can suffer joint deformity and damage to bones, cartilage and organs, potentially leading to permanent disability. Early diagnosis and optimal treatment are key to preventing this.

Patients are at increased risk of heart and blood vessel disease due to metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions including high blood pressure.

Psychological consequences can also impact patients’ well-being and quality of life. The condition is also linked to an increased risk of depression.

How is it treated?

There is no cure for psoriatic arthritis, but treatment can be very effective in controlling symptoms. The challenge is to diagnose early so treatment can begin as soon as possible.

Painful symptoms are treated with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen, but these are generally insufficient to control the arthritis alone.

The clinician may then add a disease modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD). These immunosuppressant drugs aim to control the inflammatory flare ups. Methotrexate is usually used first, while apremilast is an alternative for milder cases.

If these are not sufficient, so-called biological treatments must be used. These target certain inflammation proteins and are often administered via injection using an easy-to-use pen, as diabetics do with insulin. They are generally very effective, well tolerated and have the advantage of easing both joint and skin symptoms.

More recently, innovative treatments have been developed that patients take as a tablet, known as JAK inhibitors. These drugs work by blocking a key pathway involved in inflammation.

There is a risk of side effects when using drugs that suppress the immune system. Primarily, they can leave patients more vulnerable to infections.

Read more: What does it mean to be immunocompromised? And why does this increase your risk of coronavirus?

In addition to medication, it’s important for patients to maintain regular physical activity and a balanced diet.

Given the effectiveness of these treatments, the goals of caregivers have also changed. Clinicians are no longer targeting improvement, but remission, where the signs and symptoms are completely resolved.

– ref. What is psoriatic arthritis, the condition Kim Kardashian West lives with? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-psoriatic-arthritis-the-condition-kim-kardashian-west-lives-with-129899

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sebastian Leuzinger, Professor, Auckland University of Technology

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

If carbon dioxide levels were to double, how much increase in plant growth would this cause? How much of the world’s deserts would disappear due to plants’ increased drought tolerance in a high carbon dioxide environment?

Compared to pre-industrial levels, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere will have doubled in about 20 to 30 years, depending on how much CO₂ we emit over the coming years. More CO₂ generally leads to higher rates of photosynthesis and less water consumption in plants.

At first sight, it seems more CO₂ can only be beneficial to plants, but things are a lot more complex than that.

Read more: Climate explained: why plants don’t simply grow faster with more carbon dioxide in air

Let’s look at the first part of the question.

Some plants do grow faster under elevated levels of atmospheric CO₂, but this happens mostly in crops and young trees, and generally not in mature forests.

Even if plants grew twice as fast under doubled CO₂ levels, it would not mean they strip twice as much CO₂ from the atmosphere. Plants take carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, but that carbon is going straight back via natural decomposition when plants die or when they are harvested and consumed.

At best, you might be mowing your lawn twice as often or harvesting your plantation forests earlier.

The most important aspect is how long the carbon stays locked away from the atmosphere – and this is where we have to make a clear distinction between increased carbon flux (faster growth) or an increasing carbon pool (actual carbon sequestration). Your bank account is a useful analogy to illustrate this difference: fluxes are transfers, pools are balances.

Read more: Climate explained: why your backyard lawn doesn’t help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

The global carbon budget

Of the almost 10 billion tonnes (gigatonnes, or Gt) of carbon we emit every year through the burning of fossil fuels, only about half accumulates in the atmosphere. Around a quarter ends up in the ocean (about 2.4 Gt), and the remainder (about 3 Gt) is thought to be taken up by terrestrial plants.

While the ocean and the atmospheric sinks are relatively easy to quantify, the terrestrial sink isn’t. In fact, the 3 Gt can be thought of more as an unaccounted residual. Ultimately, the emitted carbon needs to go somewhere, and if it isn’t the ocean or the atmosphere, it must be the land.

So yes, the terrestrial system takes up a substantial proportion of the carbon we emit, but the attribution of this sink to elevated levels of CO₂ is difficult. This is because many other factors may contribute to the land carbon sink: rising temperature, increased use of fertilisers and atmospheric nitrogen deposition, changed land management (including land abandonment), and changes in species composition.

Current estimates assign about a quarter of this land sink to elevated levels of CO₂, but estimates are very uncertain.

In summary, rising CO₂ leads to faster plant growth – sometimes. And this increased growth only partly contributes to sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. The important questions are how long this carbon is locked away from the atmosphere, and how much longer the currently observed land sink will continue.

Read more: Climate explained: how different crops or trees help strip carbon dioxide from the air

The second part of the question refers to a side-effect of rising levels of CO₂ in the air: the fact that it enables plants to save water.

Plants regulate the exchange of carbon dioxide and water vapour by opening or closing small pores, called stomata, on the surface of their leaves. Under higher concentrations of CO₂, they can reduce the opening of these pores, and that in turn means they lose less water.

This alleviates drought stress in already dry areas. But again, the issue is more complex because CO₂ is not the only parameter that changes. Dry areas also get warmer, which means that more water evaporates and this often compensates for the water-saving effect.

Overall, rising CO₂ has contributed to some degree to the greening of Earth, but it is likely that this trend will not continue under the much more complex combination of global change drivers, particularly in arid regions.

– ref. Climate explained: why higher carbon dioxide levels isn’t only good news even if some plants grow faster – https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-why-higher-carbon-dioxide-levels-isnt-only-good-news-even-if-some-plants-grow-faster-137235

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Schuijers, Research Fellow in Environmental Law, University of Melbourne

Independent MP and barrister Zali Steggall recently drew public attention to a federal government program that supports gas, hydro and coal power projects through underwriting.

Writing to Auditor General Grant Hehir, Steggall called for an investigation into the “underwriting new generation investment” (UNGI) program, saying it lacks transparency at a time when visibility of public spending is crucial.

Read more: The government’s electricity shortlist rightly features pumped hydro (and wrongly includes coal)

“Underwriting” is when a degree of financial risk associated with a project is taken on by the government, rather than the project’s proponent.

Amid an economic crisis and a pressing need to transition to lower-carbon energy, people are understandably interested in where government money is being invested within the energy sector, and on what grounds.

As we face mounting job losses and stranded assets from the transition away from coal – and from the COVID-19 pandemic – taxpayers have a right to anticipate that the government’s investments will be strategically sound.

But the UNGI program lacks the important detail needed to assure the public that smart decisions are being made.

UNGI explained

The UNGI program was introduced in 2018. It followed the collapse of Malcolm Turnbull’s National Energy Guarantee and an Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) inquiry, which found competition in Australia’s electricity sector needs to be stronger to reduce prices.

The federal government describes UNGI as “technology neutral”. This means the government’s focus is on supporting “best and lowest cost” energy generation options to get off the ground – whether coal, gas, or renewables.

What’s unclear is the extent to which a costs analysis under UNGI will consider long-term and indirect costs, such as by using social costing metrics.

A holistic analysis like this is important in the context of the climate crisis, which could set the Australian economy back more than A$762 billion in damages by 2050. Only considering short-term and direct costs is a recipe for long-term damage when it comes to energy and the impacts of climate change.

Read more: It’s clear why coal struggles for finance – and the government can’t change that

Half the projects currently shortlisted for potential support are fossil fuel projects. The other half are renewables-powered pumped hydrogen projects.

But as Steggal has written, the government hasn’t been transparent about how they decide on which projects to underwrite.

These 12 shortlisted projects were chosen without any final guidelines published informing the public on the selection process. Preliminary criteria, identified in the request for proposals, hasn’t been converted into a decision-making mandate, despite an indication this would happen.

Does the UNGI program have legal support?

Steggal’s letter to the Auditor General referenced research by the Australia Institute think tank, which has criticised the UNGI program as having no legal foundation.

The institute published advice from barristers Fiona McLeod SC and Lindy Barrett, which outlines hypothetical ways UNGI could proceed. These include via an agreement with states, existing legislation, or new legislation. They concluded that there was no identifiable support mechanism in place at the time of the advice.

More than a year later, there hasn’t been any new legislation. And the government has flagged the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s Grid Reliability Fund as the existing mechanism to support the UNGI program.

So why might that be a problem?

There are restrictions on the types of financial instruments this fund can support, as well as on what types of projects. While the Clean Energy Finance Corporation can provide loans, it may not be able to support the types of contracts envisaged by the early UNGI documents.

As the name suggests, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation could not support a coal project. And yet a coal project has been shortlisted.

The Grattan Institute’s energy program director Tony Wood also expressed concern, saying last year that UNGI appeared “quite different” to what the ACCC inquiry called for: a scheme to provide certainty for debt financing and facilitate new entrants into the wholesale market.

Read more: Scott Morrison’s gas transition plan is a dangerous road to nowhere

And the CEFC is apparently not on the same page as the government that has designated its role in supporting the UNGI program, either. Although it welcomed the funding, CEO Ian Learmonth noted there was no investment mandate, and the Grid Reliability Fund was separate to UNGI.

No transparency

Steggall and the Australia Institute’s main concerns voiced over the past couple of days seem spurred by an unwillingness or inability of the government to provide information around how UNGI is proceeding.

Transcripts from parliament both last year and earlier this month reveal a number of important questions into the program are repeatedly bookmarked.

Still, several of the shortlisted projects, particularly the gas projects, have been promised support. This includes two already the subject of preliminary agreements and one that’s all but guaranteed funding through an agreement with the NSW government. This suggests the government is ploughing ahead with UNGI despite the lack of clear process or identifiable support mechanism.

Do we really need to support more gas?

Energy Minister Angus Taylor has noted growth in gas supply could emerge from natural competitiveness flowed from the effects of COVID-19.

Whether we need to underwrite more gas at this stage is questionable, given the oft-touted role of gas as a transition fuel is not clear-cut. And in any case gas will not have long-term viability in a net-zero emissions context.

Post-COVID-19 recovery stimulus must be focused on markets, industries and technologies that need support, but which also, as Steggall puts it, “have a future”.

Read more: 5 big environment stories you probably missed while you’ve been watching coronavirus

Yes, competitive pricing is important, as is reliable energy supply. But how that’s achieved must not frustrate the ability to address climate change, or compound current economic concerns by locking in future costs.

At the very least, clearer information about how projects are meeting the “best and lowest cost” criteria, and what financial and legal mechanisms are supporting UNGI as it proceeds, is what we require – and deserve.

– ref. The government’s UNGI scheme: what it is and why Zali Steggall wants it investigated – https://theconversation.com/the-governments-ungi-scheme-what-it-is-and-why-zali-steggall-wants-it-investigated-137252

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Zarmati, Lecturer in Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here, and an interactive here.

Approaching the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first journey to the Pacific, The Conversation asked readers what they remembered learning at school about his arrival in Australia.

Most people said they learnt Cook “discovered” Australia – especially if they were at school before the 1990s.

Depending on when you went to school, you may have learnt differently about Captain Cook’s role in Australian history. To find out how the teaching of Cook in Australian schools has changed, I examined textbooks used in the 1950s until today.

School years 1950s and early 1960s

If you were at school after the second world war to the mid-1960s, Australia still had strong links to the British Empire.

Cook was portrayed as a one of the greatest explorers in history and textbooks presented clear messages Cook “discovered” Australia and “took possession” of the land for England.

The 1959 Queensland text Social Studies for Standard VIII (Queensland) by G.T Roscoe said Cook “landed on Possession Island, hoisted the Union Jack, claiming the country for the King of England”.

In Conquering the Continent (1961), C.H. Wright mentions some contact with Indigenous people at Botany Bay, but there is no mention of conflict. Wright writes

The blacks offered little resistance; they quickly stood off after being frightened by gun shots.

School years 1965 to 1979

If you went to school between 1965 and 1979, you were learning during the era of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments.

This was when awareness was beginning to grow of the negative impact of colonisation on Australia’s Indigenous people.

E.S. Elphick’s 1974 Birth of a Nation continued the “discovery and possession” narrative, but acknowledged Indigenous people were in Australia beforehand:

The first Australians came here at least 30,000 years ago, and for all but the last 200 years of this period enjoyed uninterrupted possession of the land they came to[…] The white man, in fact, took a very long time to arrive.

Paul Ashton’s chapter in David Stewart’s Investigating Australian History Using Evidence (1985) encouraged students to “work as historians” by examining primary sources (in this case old maps) and evaluating interpretations of history.

Ashton emphasised the importance of the scientific “discovery”:

Cook’s achievements were indeed great, as were his talents as a navigator. At last, a reasonably accurate chart of the east coast of Australia could be added to European knowledge of the continent, along with a mass of natural and scientific discoveries. However, the discovery was not as yet completed […]

School in 1981 to 1995

If you went to school in the 1980s and early to mid ‘90s, you may have learnt history from a more inclusive perspective that included the lived experiences of those who were largely left out of the traditional narrative, such as children, women and Indigenous people.

But in Australia: All Our Yesterdays (1999), author Meg Grey Blanden presented a benign account of Cook facing no resistance from Indigenous people:

On a small island now named Possession Island, Cook performed the last and most important official task of his entire voyage. Like others of his time, Cook was undeterred by the presence of native people on the island. He noted that they obligingly departed and left the Europeans to get on with their ceremony.

School in 1996 to 2015

In the first decade of the 21st century, history was embedded into social studies in all states and territories, except New South Wales. Australian colonial history focused on “discovery”, foundation and expansion was relegated to years four to six.

Some teachers may have chosen to use critical inquiry to teach about Cook’s expedition in year nine. Most tended to focus on the more complicated 20th century history of world wars and progress in year nine and ten syllabuses.

The Australian Curriculum, which was implemented in all schools from 2012, has maintained this chronological divide of historical knowledge. In year four, students learn about Cook by “examining the journey of one or more explorers of the Australian coastline … using navigation maps to reconstruct their journeys”.

It would be unusual for secondary teachers these days to teach their students about Cook because the topic is not in the secondary curriculum.

This means if children do not learn about Cook’s achievements in the primary years it’s quite possible if they were asked what they learnt about Cook in school, they may not know anything about him.

– ref. Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, and other myths from old school text books – https://theconversation.com/captain-cook-discovered-australia-and-other-myths-from-old-school-text-books-128926

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Beck, Senior Research Fellow, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University

The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically shifted our lives and the ways we move about our cities. Despite tight restrictions on non-essential work and outings, and on social gatherings in every state and territory, governments have listed exercise as one of four essential activities. As a result, we have seen increases in the number of people walking and cycling, including children.

Physical activities such as walking and cycling are perfectly compatible with physical distancing – but only with the right infrastructure. More than 100 Australian health and transport experts have signed an open letter calling on governments to enact urgent measures to support safe walking and cycling and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more: Coronavirus reminds us how liveable neighbourhoods matter for our well-being

Increased numbers lead to crowding

If you have walked or ridden around your neighbourhood, you have probably noticed more people on footpaths and shared walking and cycling paths. This increase in numbers is exposing much of our walking and cycling infrastructure as inadequate. It simply doesn’t provide enough space to follow physical distancing rules, leading to reports of overcrowding on these paths.

The pandemic has highlighted the volume of street space given to motor vehicles, at the cost of space for people to walk and cycle. Given the far lower traffic volumes on roads, cities across the globe have been reallocating road space to enable people to walk and cycle safely while adhering to physical distancing. Australian cities appear to have lagged behind.

Read more: Cycling and walking are short-changed when it comes to transport funding in Australia

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of our local neighbourhoods and the need to provide safe space locally for walking and riding, particularly for our children. As many Australians are staying home, most of our physical activity occurs on the streets and paths around our homes.

Therefore, we must focus our efforts on our neighbourhoods, local streets and shopping centres, where residents need safe and easy opportunities to be active. This includes providing safe routes to children’s schools, activity centres and other hubs.

Experts call for action

The call by more than 100 health and transport experts for infrastructure to enable safer walking and cycling has been supported by key organisations including the Heart Foundation, Public Health Association of Australia, the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, the Australasian College of Road Safety, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Trauma Committee, Kidsafe, the Australasian Injury Prevention Network, Doctors for the Environment Australia, The Committee for Sydney and The Committee for Adelaide.

Across the world we see many examples of the rapid roll-out of social distancing infrastructure to support cycling and walking during the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Paris is rolling out 650km of emergency bicycle lanes

• Milan has announced 35km of streets will be transformed for walking and cycling

• Oakland is allocating 10% of the city’s streets for walking and cycling

• New Zealand has announced significant funding to help councils create more people-friendly spaces in towns and cities.

These are just a few examples. We must also consider lowering the default urban speed limit to 30km/h and reducing traffic on residential streets and around local business areas.

Read more: Cities lead the charge on the coronavirus front lines

Australia lagging behind

Despite the urgent need for connected networks of walking and cycling infrastructure in Australia, we have not seen a similar response from federal, state and territory governments.

At the moment, local councils often don’t have the authority to make changes locally or take road space without the approval of the state or territory government. We need these governments to recognise the need for rapid action and provide temporary delegation powers to local councils to enable quick infrastructure changes to support safe walking and cycling. This has happened in New Zealand and the UK.

The roll-out of this infrastructure will also be critical in reactivating the economy when physical-distancing measures are relaxed.

Financial and planning experts have recommended against investing in major road projects. Instead, they recommend smaller-scale projects that focus on sustainable modes of transport. Such projects will enable people to travel to work and school using transport modes that are both safe and healthy.

A turning point for our cities

Public transport typically moves up to half of all people travelling to work in some city centres. However, physical distancing is often a challenge on public transport. As restrictions are eased, shifting even a proportion of these passengers to walking or cycling trips will have infection-control advantages that limit transmission.

Read more: For public transport to keep running, operators must find ways to outlast coronavirus

If there is not a significant shift to cycling or walking, private car use is likely to increase. The results will be increased congestion and pollution and reduced community amenity.

Never before have we seen such a shift to active modes as our population has sought to stay healthy and active during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our immediate priority must be to tackle the inadequacies of current walking and cycling infrastructure to enable physical distancing.

Beyond this, we must look to the future. To promote active transport, we need more space that encourages these modes. We need space for health.

This is one moment in time to undo the wrongs of past transport policies that promoted the use of private cars and harmed population health and the environment. We must use this opportunity to future-proof our cities, invest in active modes of transport and ensure we provide safe and equitable mobility solutions for people today and for generations to come.

– ref. Physical distancing is here for a while – over 100 experts call for more safe walking and cycling space – https://theconversation.com/physical-distancing-is-here-for-a-while-over-100-experts-call-for-more-safe-walking-and-cycling-space-137374

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Morley, Professor of Macroeconomics, University of Sydney

Governments are being asked to do the near impossible: to deliver on both health and the economy. In many circumstances doing both at the same time would be completely impossible. But fortunately in Australia we have separate instruments we can use to target separate goals.

The health objective is to minimise the number of lives lost and keep the spread of the virus low enough to not overwhelm the health care system. Until there is a vaccine we will need to keep in place many of the current restrictions, including bans on large gatherings and international travel.

The economic objective can be assisted by relaxing other restrictions, such as those on the maximum number of people who can gather in one place, alongside careful monitoring and a readiness to reimpose them where needed. But any relaxing of restrictions won’t be anywhere near enough to restore the economy to its full health.

Why we’ll need more stimulus

That’s where Australia’s two separate tools come in. Restrictions are (for now) the primary means of maintaining health.

Huge government spending is the primary means of fending off massive unemployment and a recession worse than any since the Great Depression.

Treasury Secretary Stephen Kennedy acknowledged the scale of what we are facing on Tuesday, telling a Senate committee Australia had “never seen an economic shock of this speed, magnitude and shape.”

Even if we lifted all of its restrictions right now, demand for our exports would remain at global recession levels, pushing our economy backwards.

Adding to the case for enormous extra spending is the additional reality that business cycles are almost always asymmetric: the output lost in a recession isn’t regained in the recovery.

To allow a big recession is to permanently alter our standard of living, and possibly our future growth path; all the more so in downturns caused by pandemics which have been linked to a long-lasting increase in precautionary saving.

Fortunately, fiscal stimulus has been shown to be at its most effective when the economy is massively under-utilising its resources, as it is now.

JobKeeper is a placeholder

The bridging measures undertaken by the government, including JobKeeper, will be critical for mitigating the severity of the recession and maintaining a platform for recovery.

But they will only mitigate the severity of the recession. They won’t avoid it. In common language, they are not “stimulus” measures, but measures that will merely maintain (some of) the status quo.

Even with them, it is entirely reasonable to expect the unemployment rate to climb into double digits as 15-20% of the workforce lose their jobs.

Australia is in the fortunate position of being able to spend big in part because of its prudent policy during the good times and in part because of its comparatively good trade prospects once the global recession is over.

Read more: The charts that show coronavirus pushing up to a quarter of the workforce out of work

And Australia is able to borrow at historically low levels. The Commonwealth government can issue 10 year bonds or longer at an annual interest rate well below 1%.

This means that even A$1 trillion of extra spending (more than one half of Australia’s annual gross domestic product) would carry a price tag of $10 billion a year or about $400 per person.

As the economy grows, partly as a result of this extra spending, net debt will shrink as a proportion of gross domestic product, just as it did after the second world war.

Crucially, it won’t need budget surpluses to do this, just as net debt withered after the war, even though the budget remained in deficit.

Our government went into this crisis with ample capacity to conduct large scale fiscal stimulus, having one of the lowest net debt to GDP ratios in the developed world – just short of 20%.

Err on the high side

But the scale of the stimulus that will be needed is gargantuan, and it will be better to err on the high side – at least 15-20% of GDP per year, for two to three years.

Anything less runs the risk of a debt-default deflationary spiral of the kind seen in the Great Depression, when the ability of households and businesses to pay their debts decreased with deflation and the resulting defaults led to further deflation.

If stimulus is big enough to be successful, financial markets will understand that debt issued by the Commonwealth will ultimately be backed by a higher GDP.

It will be important to signal in advance that the stimulus measures will be in place by the time JobKeeper ends (currently September). The forward guidance should emphasise that the measures will remain well into the recovery and not end at the first sight of it.

The early measures should focus on boosting the capacity of the economy to make it better able to withstand future pandemics.

Examples include

• improving the national broadband network, with a focus on reducing outages and building infrastructure that will allow homes to act as offices, especially in higher density areas

• improving the ability of Australian Post to deliver physical items to households, and the ability of ports and road transport to get things to where they are needed

• building and encouraging the use of the robust technologies that will be needed to ensure keeping the spread of this virus and others low

• labour intensive programs that boost improve local environments, everything from tree planting and waterway cleanups to cycle path construction and dune repair

• online delivery for universities, including investment in materials for overseas students who will be given a commitment to be allowed to travel to Australian campuses once restrictions are removed

• making Australia a world leader in the remote delivery of arts in a way that makes Australian culture available worldwide, and also a world leader in the local delivery of art via labour-intensive public art works

The general point, more important than the specific examples, is that there is a lot of infrastructure that can be created even the under current circumstances.

And consider war bonds

In normal times it might make sense to develop this infrastructure privately or through public-private partnerships, but in the present crisis it can only be done publicly on the scale that is needed. The Australian government has the capacity to do it.

The best way to make that clear would be a set of separate accounts for the emergency, offset by the issuing of long-term “COVID bonds” at low interest rates, much like the war bonds Australia issued during the second world war.

The bonds would allow visibility into the extent to which the Commonwealth government remained prudent in other spending and would use a precedent already established in making a distinction between spending for investment and spending for consumption.

A broad take-up could also engender the political support needed to extend JobKeeper to more than one million casual workers, and temporary visa holders and students.

Denying people who could contribute to Australia’s economic recovery the opportunity to do it risks denying Australia the resources it will need when the crisis is over.

Read more: Which jobs are most at risk from the coronavirus shutdown? 

Announcing these programs as soon as possible and providing guidance on the scale and duration of the planned spending will help prevent further declines in economic activity right now.

The government is delivering an economic statement in a fortnight, on May 12. It would be the right day to start.

– ref. It’s just started: we’ll need war bonds, and stimulus on a scale not seen in our lifetimes – https://theconversation.com/its-just-started-well-need-war-bonds-and-stimulus-on-a-scale-not-seen-in-our-lifetimes-137155

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Page, Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Technology Sydney

Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series here and an interactive here.

On a recent trip to Cape York, I was privileged to sit with Kaurareg/Gudang Yadhaykenu man Uncle Tommy Savage, on a beach in the town of Umagico.

We listened as he sang a song called Markai an Ghule (meaning “ghost ship”), composed by his ancestors when James Cook arrived at Possession Island in August 1770.

A sad lilt permeated the song, an expression of the grief the Kaurareg people felt at having to hide their cultural system, while they determined what the arrival of this preternatural being and his big ship was all about.

We recorded Uncle Tommy’s song for inclusion in The Message, a film commissioned by the National Museum of Australia and opening in April to coincide with 250 years since Cook arrived.

While researching the film, I spent much of last year travelling Australia’s east coast interviewing historians, curators and traditional owners, piecing together stories from the ship and the shore. Here are the stories that have stuck with me.

A voyage of the dead

What is so often described as Cook’s “voyage of discovery” has been viewed consistently by Indigenous people as a voyage of the dead; a giant canoe carrying the reincarnation of ancestral beings.

At the first encounter in Botany Bay, two Gweagal warriors throw stones and spears to Cook, saying “warrawarrawa,” meaning “they are all dead” (not “go away”, as it is often translated).

Perhaps this explains why Banks and Cook write of Aboriginal people persistently declining any of the gifts they were offered. You would have to be crazy to take gifts from the dead!

The warnings about these ghostly visitors were quickly and accurately sent by fire, smoke and message stick up the coast, adding a deeper meaning to the many fires Banks and Cook noted as they travelled north (“Saw several smooks along shore before dark and two or three times afire in the night,” Cook writes).

A collision of beliefs

When the Endeavour smashes into the reef in Cooktown and is forced to stay for 48 days on the river for repairs, Cook and his crew captured “eight or nine” turtles (tellingly, Banks refers repeatedly to “our turtles”).

A contingent of local Guugu Yimithirr men board HMS Endeavour and try to take at least one turtle back, but Cook’s men soon wrest it away – refusing to share or acknowledge the possibility they’d taken too many.

Lamenting this environmental loss, a group of warriors light the grass fires in protest (“I had little Idea of the fury with which the grass burnt in this hot climate, nor of the dificulty of extinguishing it when once lighted”, Banks writes) and Cook shoots one of the Guugu Yimithirr men.

The rising tension is then released by an older man who stands forward in an extraordinary act of governance and breaks the tip off a spear to signify “weapons down”.

‘… in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans’

The incident brought together threads still relevant in Indigenous-settler relations today: environmental care, reconciliation and cultural governance. And this collision of beliefs, it seems, was not lost on Cook.

As he sailed off from the tip of Cape York, Cook wrote an unusual diary entry:

From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland, they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary conveniencies so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them.

They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life; they covet not Magnificent Houses, Houshold-stuff […]

[…] they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholsome Air, so that they have very little need of Clothing and this they seem to be fully sencible of, for many to whome we gave Cloth to, left it carlessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for.

In short they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this, in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no Superfluities —

For a working class man from Georgian England to see and appreciate the cultural values of Indigenous people is remarkable, considering that clarity of understanding is only just dawning on the average Australian.

The role of Joseph Banks

After all the conversations I’ve had over the last year with historians, traditional owners and curators, I’ve come to believe that history has been unkind to Cook. He is blamed for the many wrongs inflicted on my people.

Joseph Banks, however, emerges as a much colder, unkinder figure. It was Banks who convinced the British government that Australia would be perfect for a penal colony, given it could no longer send convicts to America.

Banks’s view that Australia was “thinly inhabited” (and he speaks frequently of savagery and simplicity of its people) fed directly into the declaration of terra nullius. Banks never went inland, but declared with great hubris that it was almost certainly “totally uninhabited”.

In the end, the decisions made in the 18 years between Cook leaving and the First Fleet arriving have shaped modern Australia far more than those early fleeting ethereal encounters.

There are so many lost chapters in the story of Australia.

But as a nation, we can invite Uncle Tommy and his people – and all those other excluded songs and stories – to come out of hiding.

Revealing our shared history is the only way to make peace with those ghostly visitors of the past. But we will only find that peace in the truth and it’s the truth of our history, which will be our new voyage of discovery.

Alison Page was commissioned by the National Museum of Australia to create the film The Message for the museum’s Endeavour 250 exhibition, opening on April 8.

– ref. ‘They are all dead’: for Indigenous people, Cook’s voyage of ‘discovery’ was a ghostly visitation – https://theconversation.com/they-are-all-dead-for-indigenous-people-cooks-voyage-of-discovery-was-a-ghostly-visitation-126430

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland

In classical Western theism, God is said to be both good and all-powerful. So how do we square natural disasters – global pandemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, famines, bushfires, and so on – with a God who, because he is good, would not want natural disasters and, because he is all-powerful, could stop them if he wished?

This was a question asked after the devastating Lisbon earthquake by Voltaire (1694-1778), one of the great philosophers of the European Enlightenment. It led to one of his most famous works: Candide, or l‘Optimisme (1759).

On 1 November 1755, at 9.30am, Lisbon in Portugal was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake, followed by further tremors, fires, a tsunami, and civil unrest. It was All Saints Day and large numbers of people were killed as churches collapsed upon them. Statistics for natural disasters, then as now, are notoriously rubbery. But between 20,000 and 40,000 people died out of a population of some 200,000.

Then, as now, people wondered whether there was a divine plan to the devastation that shook their Christian beliefs and monuments.

Read more: Are you there God? Whether we pray harder or endure wrath depends on the religious doctrine of Providence

Beyond the appearance of evil

In writing Candide, Voltaire had the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in his sights and especially his essays on the goodness of God in Theodicy (1710). For Leibniz, in spite of evils both natural and moral, this was still the best of all possible worlds. It was the best that God could have made. This was because it had both the greatest variety of things and the simplest laws of nature.

Evils both natural and moral, Leibniz declared, were part of an overall universal good. If the “smallest evil that comes to pass in the world were missing in it,” he declared, “it would no longer be this world; which, with nothing omitted and all allowance made, was found the best by the Creator who chose it”.

While Leibniz admitted it was possible to imagine worlds without sin and without unhappiness, “these same worlds would be very inferior to ours in goodness”. God was, in other words, the perfect gardener in spite of the cosmic weeds.

Before God created this world, according to Leibniz, he compared all possible worlds in order to choose the one that was best. Thus, God created a world that was all the more harmonic for some pain, acidity, and darkness rather than being all pleasure, sweetness, and light.

Leibniz wasn’t stupid. He saw that the “appearances” of evil in the world strongly cut against God’s goodness and justice. He refused, however, to allow the evils of the world to count decisively against God. This would be to confuse the surface of the world with its depth.

He believed that the defender of God should proceed from a faith that the world, in spite of its obvious evils, was ultimately good by virtue of its foundation in the goodness of God who had, after all, created it.

Candid comedy

Did Leibniz’s unfailing 18th-century optimism and firm belief in divine goodness fail to take evil seriously? Voltaire thought so. In fact, Voltaire flipped the serious nature of evil on its head; believing that natural and moral evil were so serious they could only be treated satirically.

In Candide, Leibniz was cast as Dr Pangloss, an instructor in “metaphysico-theologico-cosmoloonigology” in the court of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh.

Pangloss was a committed believer in this world as the best of all possible ones, in spite of its natural evils and the moral evils perpetrated in particular by those of religious faiths (Christians, Jews, and Muslims). Whatever happened in the world, Pangloss, like Leibniz, was able to rationalise it as compatible with its being eventually for the best.

Voltaire found this notion of the best of all possible worlds problematic, given the sheer quantity and quality of evil present in it.

This system of All is good represents the author of nature only as a powerful and maleficent king, who does not care, so long as he carries out his plan, that it costs four or five hundred thousand men their lives, and that the others drag out their days in want and in tears. So far from the notion of the best of possible worlds being consoling, it drives to despair the philosophers who embrace it. The problem of good and evil remains an inexplicable chaos for those who seek in good faith.

Read more: Thoughts and prayers: miracles, Christianity and praying for rain

Carrying on

What was Voltaire’s solution? Surprisingly perhaps, it was not despair. Rather, it was a gentle resignation, a philosophical que sera, sera. This meant the quiet cultivation of our gardens as God had originally intended for us in the first Garden of Eden. We were to be like Adam and Eve.

There was to be, therefore, an avoiding of airy philosophical speculations on how to justify the ways of God to man (like this piece of writing is). Instead, Voltaire advocated doing a little good in the hope of our becoming a little better.

This is a solution that may not satisfy believers in the goodness of God. But it will resonate amongst those of us who, in isolation at home, are quietly tilling the soil, labouring in our vegetable patch, or contentedly mowing our lawns. Simple, but somehow satisfying!

– ref. Is God good? In the shadow of mass disaster, great minds have argued the toss – https://theconversation.com/is-god-good-in-the-shadow-of-mass-disaster-great-minds-have-argued-the-toss-137078

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Pattinson, PhD Candidate, University of Sydney

Recent studies have found alongside older age and chronic health conditions, obesity is a risk factor for becoming seriously ill with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

It’s true a number of the health conditions which we know increase the risk of severe illness from COVID-19 are also associated with obesity. These include type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and respiratory disease.

But new research suggests obesity independently is a strong predictor of severe illness, particularly in those aged under 60 years.

This is concerning given two-thirds (67%) of the Australian adult population have a body mass index (BMI) in the overweight or obese range.

Read more: Explainer: how does excess weight cause disease?

BMI is a person’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in metres (kg/m²). While it’s an imperfect measure for an individual person, BMI is very useful in comparing health and weight across a population and between groups.

For adults, overweight is a BMI of 25 or above, but less than 30kg/m². For a woman of average height (162 cm), this would be equivalent to a weight of 66kg or above, and for a man of average height (176 cm), a weight of 78kg or above.

Obesity is defined as a BMI 30kg/m² or above. This equates to a weight of 79kg and above for a woman and 93kg and above for a man, both of average height.

The evidence

One study from China looking at data from 112 patients reported overweight and obesity were almost five times more prevalent in patients with COVID-19 who died (88%) compared to those who survived (19%).

Preliminary data from another Chinese study involving 383 patients, although not yet peer reviewed, suggests overweight or obesity more than doubled the risk of developing severe pneumonia as a result COVID-19, particularly in men.

Researchers in France found almost half of 124 patients admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) with COVID-19 had a BMI in the obese range. This was nearly double the rate of a comparison group of ICU patients with severe acute respiratory disease unrelated to COVID-19.

Further, the need for mechanical ventilation increased with increasing BMI.

A UK surveillance study of patients admitted to intensive care with COVID-19 reported almost three-quarters (75%) of the 6,720 patients had a BMI in the overweight or obese range, which is greater than the population prevalence of overweight and obesity in adults in the UK (around 67%).

Read more: Why are older people more at risk of coronavirus?

Although some of these studies factored in chronic conditions when reporting their results, it’s difficult to separate all of the conditions associated with obesity that may contribute to some degree to the poorer outcomes.

So it’s likely that some – but not all – of the increased risk of severe COVID-19 associated with obesity could be due to people having other chronic conditions.

Young people

It seems obesity may have more of an impact on the severity of COVID-19 in young people, according to two studies from New York.

One study of 3,615 people who tested positive for COVID-19 found those aged under 60 years with a BMI of between 30 and 34 were almost twice as likely to be admitted to ICU compared to patients with a BMI of less than 30. This likelihood increased to 3.6 times in those patients with a BMI of 35 or greater.

In patients over 60 years, the researchers didn’t find a significant link between obesity and severe illness (as indicated by admission to ICU).

Another study, which recorded weight for 178 patients, found obesity was the most common underlying condition for patients aged under 64 years admitted to hospital for COVID-19.

Why the greater risk?

Taken together, the above data suggest there is an association between obesity and more severe COVID-19 illness, particularly in those with a BMI of 35 or greater.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now lists “severe obesity” as a risk factor for serious COVID-19 illness.

We don’t know exactly what role obesity plays in the severity of COVID-19 symptoms. But the mechanisms are likely to be multifaceted, particularly since obesity itself is the result of a complex interaction between genetic, hormonal, behavioural, social and environmental factors.

We know obesity can have a significant impact on lung function. Excess weight around the abdomen can compress the chest, making it more difficult for the diaphragm to move and the lungs to expand and take in air. This can contribute to lower levels of oxygen in the blood, which may exacerbate the symptoms of COVID-19.

We also know obesity results in a chronic state of inflammation which can impair the body’s immune response. This could potentially make it more difficult for the body to fight coronavirus.

Read more: Does anyone know what your wishes are if you’re sick and dying from coronavirus?

The challenges in caring for patients with severe obesity may also affect their outcomes from COVID-19.

For example, it’s more difficult to intubate or perform imaging such as X-rays and CT scans in patients with obesity.

Further, positioning ventilated patients on their stomachs can increase the amount of oxygen entering the lungs. But this is often not possible for patients with severe obesity.

Should I be worried?

The short answer is no. If your body weight is above the healthy range, these results should not be cause for panic or impetus to engage in crash diets to reduce COVID-19 risk.

While the data does suggest obesity is a risk factor for more severe illness, it’s early days in the life of COVID-19 and we need more research before we can definitively say what’s going on.

The most significant thing you can do to lower your risk is to follow the government’s guidelines.

These restrictions can be challenging and might lead to reduced physical activity and eating for comfort or to ease boredom, potentially resulting in weight gain.

If you find yourself with extra time during the pandemic, you may find it helpful to view it as an opportunity to make healthy choices and cultivate new habits to reduce your risk of illness in general and to enhance health and well-being going forward.

Read more: How to stay fit and active at home during the coronavirus self-isolation

– ref. Evidence obesity is a risk factor for serious illness with coronavirus is mounting – even if you’re young – https://theconversation.com/evidence-obesity-is-a-risk-factor-for-serious-illness-with-coronavirus-is-mounting-even-if-youre-young-137081

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

Australia’s relationship with China is fractured. Arguably, this is the worst moment in Sino-Australian relations since Gough Whitlam normalised ties on his election in December 1972.

The Chinese saying “kill the chicken to frighten the monkey” would seem applicable in Beijing’s reaction to Australia’s push for an investigation into the operations of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – and, by implication, China’s responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic outbreak.

Read more: Murky origins: why China will never welcome a global inquiry into the source of COVID-19

Other countries have made similar calls without drawing Beijing’s ire to the same extent.

In an interview with The Australian Financial Review, China’s ambassador, Cheng Jingye, lambasted Australian political leaders and warned of economic reprisals. This marks a new and jagged low in relations between the two countries.

By any standards, this was an extraordinary step by a Chinese official. Cheng would not have taken it without Beijing’s go-ahead.

He accused Australia of “teaming up” with anti-Chinese elements in Washington to “launch a kind of political campaign against China”.

In China’s criticism, Australia is the “chicken” and the US the “monkey” as a recipient of Chinese displeasure.

China’s singling out of Australia for harsh criticism and threats of economic reprisals is designed to convey a message to a potentially vulnerable US ally that costs will accrue to countries that, in Beijing’s view, disrespect Chinese sovereignty.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s lobbying for an inquiry into the WHO in phone calls with foreign leaders, including US President Donald Trump, will have struck the Chinese as more forward-leaning for the leader of a middle power than is necessary.

Read more: Coronavirus shines a light on fractured global politics at a time when cohesion and leadership are vital

A less costly move, diplomatically, may have been for Morrison simply to have joined France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel in entirely legitimate calls for an inquiry.

The WHO is far from blameless. Its initial responses were clumsy. But little purpose would be served by diminishing the credibility of the organisation in the middle of a pandemic.

Once the global health emergency is brought under control – whenever that might be – stakeholders will have ample time to review their investments in the WHO.

In his attempts to shift blame for America’s disastrous initial responses to the pandemic, Trump has sought refuge in criticisms of China and the WHO. Washington’s decision to suspend payments to the organisation is both short-sighted and antagonistic towards global attempts to contain a pandemic whose ravages have far from run their course.

This is another example, if example was required, of America failing to exercise global leadership in a time of crisis.

In the nearly half century since the Whitlam government ended the diplomatic fudge that the Nationalists on Taiwan represented the whole of China, relations between Canberra and Beijing have proceeded relatively smoothly.

On occasions there have been bumps, such as when then Prime Minister Bob Hawke denounced Beijing’s 1989 massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square.

Or when, in 1996, then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer gave Australia’s support to the deployment of two aircraft carriers adjacent to Taiwan after China fired missiles in its direction.

Beijing asserted America’s actions represented a containment threat. However, pushback then against Australia’s support for the US was relatively mild.

In 1996, it would’ve been unthinkable for the Chinese ambassador in Canberra to summon a journalist to receive the sort of pointed criticism – and threats – that have arisen over the WHO issue and China’s culpability for the pandemic.

Underlying China’s unhappiness with Australia and completely separate from the coronavirus argument is the Huawei issue.

Australia’s clumsy lobbying effort to persuade other members of the so-called “Five Eyes” security and intelligence collective to exclude the Chinese telecommunications giant from a build-out of their 5G networks remains a running sore.

The other “Five Eyes” members are Canada, the UK, US and New Zealand.

It is hard to exaggerate Beijing’s displeasure over an Australian anti-Huawei lobbying campaign. Indeed, the Huawei issue underlies much of China’s angst against Australia in this latest period.

Incidentally, no Australian prime minister has visited Beijing in an official capacity since Malcolm Turnbull’s visit in September 2016.

Morrison’s conspicuous bid to hold China to account over its role in the coronavirus outbreak will be viewed in Beijing as of a piece with the Huawei issue.

None of this is to suggest other than that China’s behaviour was unconscionable, first in concealing the coronavirus outbreak from the world and then persecuting those among its citizens who sought to publicise its deadliness.

Read more: Lack of confidence in US leadership adds to coronavirus panic

Beijing’s early mismanagement of the coronavirus will not be forgotten, nor should it.

However, the question for a middle power like Australia – located in an Indo-Pacific in which China will become more dominant – is how best to manage the dragon in the room.

China’s bullying behaviour, its threatened resort to a form of economic blackmail and its attempts to drive a wedge between Canberra and Washington mark a vexed new frontier for Australian diplomacy.

Morrison and his advisers might reflect on how the world might look, as the prime minister puts, “on the other side” of the pandemic. We don’t know, but what we do know is that things will not be the same.

Whether China continues its rise, or slips, is an open question. However, whatever calculations might be made about the future, it has proved a mistake to bet against the Chinese since their opening to the outside world in 1978 following Mao’s death.

Morrison’s marketing of his phone call with Trump in which he, or his spokespeople, sought to portray a prime minister answering a call to arms against China was a mistake insofar as it enabled Beijing to pounce.

China needs little encouragement to drive a wedge between Canberra and Washington. These are opportunities a more sophisticated – and less eager – approach in Canberra would forestall. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Australia’s China policy is in the hands of amateurs, or ideologues, or both.

This brings us to the vulnerability issue alluded to crudely by Ambassador Cheng in his AFR interview. Chinese, he warned, might have second thoughts about consuming Australian products like wine and beef, or sending their kids to Australian universities, if relations remain strained. He said:

The Chinese public is frustrated, dismayed and disappointed with what Australia is doing now.

He did not provide evidence to support such a proposition.

But it is the case that Australia’s economic dependence on China is such that it affords the Chinese what Australian policymakers should recognise as an unacceptable level of leverage, even a stranglehold, in times of stress.

No other comparable country is as dependent on China. In 2019, China accounted for more than one-third of Australian merchandise exports and one-fifth of services trade.

Returning to the chicken and monkey metaphor, it would be wise for future Australian governments to work hard on giving the chicken a few more options – including steering clear of the Washington coop – to avoid ending up on a Chinese chopping block.

– ref. China-Australia relations hit new low in spat over handling of coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/china-australia-relations-hit-new-low-in-spat-over-handling-of-coronavirus-137377

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Corn, Professor, Elder Conservatorium of Music · Director, Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music (CASM) · Director, National Centre for Aboriginal Language and Music Studies (NCALMS), Faculty of Arts, University of Adelaide

Recent weeks have been a blur of livestreams as politicians and chief medical officers have taken to Facebook and YouTube to announce Australia’s emergency measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

But on Saturday evening, I eagerly logged onto Facebook, along with more than 50,000 others, to enjoy a livestream of an entirely different kind. It was the first in a series of four East Arnhem Live music concerts to be streamed weekly.

It not only offers a welcome respite from the social isolation many Australians are now feeling, but it is also an ingenious way for Arnhem Land’s prolific musicians to share their music with audiences around the world.

On location

The Northern Territory’s Arnhem Land is home to dozens of remote Indigenous communities, including the Yolŋu communities in the far northeast. While there are presently no known cases of COVID-19 in Arnhem Land, the region’s economic stability relies heavily on artists’ income, which is greatly supported by local tourism during the dry season and international touring to festivals all year round.

Streamed on Saturday, April 24 and still available online, the first East Arnhem Live concert featured singer Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu, the current frontman of rock band Yothu Yindi, with Arian Pearson on acoustic guitar. To showcase Arnhem Land’s natural beauty, the concert was filmed on location at Gälaru (East Woody Beach) against the sun setting over the Arafura Sea, and incorporated stunning aerial cinematography of Dhamitjinya (East Woody Island).

At a length of four songs over 14 minutes, it was a tantalisingly brief event that left me wanting more. It stirred deep nostalgia for my own experiences in Arnhem Land over the past 25 years and long collaborations with local musicians there.

Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu’s four-song set exemplified the very best of Yolŋu songwriting, building significantly on the heavy traditional influences of the style developed by Yothu Yindi around 1990. The influence of Manikay, the ancestral song tradition performed by Yolŋu communities in their public ceremonies, is ever-present in Yirrŋa’s own songs. This is evidenced by the bilma (paired sticks) he played throughout the concert.

With no more than a few hundred senior Yolŋu Manikay singers alive today, the present threat of COVID-19 brings into sharp relief the rarity and uniqueness of Manikay as a quintessentially Australian musical tradition. This is indeed a national treasure of global significance that deserves to be better supported and cherished in Australia and globally.

An anthem for our time

The concert’s opening song was Sweet Arnhem Land, a balladic ode to the region’s immense beauty that includes a direct quote from the Manikay repertoire of Yirrŋa’s clan, the Gumatj. This Manikay quotation references the great ancestral hunter, Ganbulapula, and its melody should be instantly recognisable to anyone who has attended the Garma Festival and experienced public ceremonial repertoire being performed there by the Gumatj clan.

The second song was a cover of Kind of Life, which was first released by Yothu Yindi on the 1991 Tribal Voice album. It was a fitting homage to earlier pioneers of popular music from Arnhem Land, such as Witiyana Marika and the late Mandawuy Yunupiŋu AC of Yothu Yindi, who were the first to gain global acclaim.

Read more: My favourite album: Yothu Yindi’s Tribal Voice

The third song, We Rise, is nothing short of an anthemic triumph. Its stirring sentiment of solidarity in the face of great change and adversity will readily resonate with many Australians at this challenging time.

Yirrŋa’s final song, Banumbirr (Morning Star), pays respect to his mother’s clan, the Rirratjiŋu. Once again, it includes a direct quote from traditional Manikay repertoire, which this time comes from the Rirratjiŋu clan’s iconic Morning Star song series.

With more than 53,000 views on Facebook since Saturday night, this first East Arnhem Live concert has been an outstanding success. While I greatly look forward to the day when I can fly to Arnhem Land again to see dear friends and hear music there in person, this concert series is a most welcome substitute that offers an unexpectedly intimate and poignant experience. And it shares the great beauty of Yolŋu song against the backdrop of the natural environment from which it sprung.

Read more: Friday essay: how Indigenous songs recount deep histories of trade between Australia and Southeast Asia

Tradition and innovation

The Yolŋu people have long engaged with new technologies while retaining their own sense of autonomy. This latest innovation in streaming concerts via social media platforms is in keeping with their pre-colonial exchanges with visiting Asian seafarers.

It was this same longitudinal dialogue between tradition and innovation that made the music of bands like Yothu Yindi possible.

Musicians Yirrŋa Yunupiŋu and Arian Pearson are to be congratulated heartily for this first East Arnhem Live concert, as are the series’ presenters at ARDS Aboriginal Corporation and Yolŋu Radio, and sponsors at Rirratjiŋu Aboriginal Corporation and Developing East Arnhem.

The next three Saturday nights promise to be equally special with unmissable concerts by the Andrew Gurruwiwi Band on May 2 and Yirrmal Marika on May 9, and an unprecedented closing stream of traditional ceremony by the Rirratjiŋu clan on May 16.

The next three East Arnhem Live concerts will stream on the East Arnhem Land Facebook page at 6.30 pm ACST on Saturday, May 2, May 9 and May 16.

Charles Darwin University’s Gupapuyŋu App provides a Yolŋu language pronunciation guide that is free to download.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Wright, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science, Western Sydney University

Debate about how Australia will emerge from the coronavirus pandemic is heating up. As part of the economic recovery, business groups have renewed calls to cut “green tape” – environmental regulation that new projects, such as new mines, must follow.

In response, federal environment minister Sussan Ley wants to introduce new legislation to cut green tape and speed up project approvals.

Read more: When it comes to climate change, Australia’s mining giants are an accessory to the crime

However a major ten-yearly review of the federal government’s key environment legislation is not due to be finished until October.

Cutting green tape is a long-held aim of the Morrison government, which claims excessive environmental regulation unfairly stifles businesses.

But this isn’t the case. In my 30 years of experience researching water pollution, “green tape” has not translated into effective environmental regulation of industry. In fact, I’m yet to see a coal mining operation that’s effectively regulated after approved through the NSW and federal environmental assessment processes.

Here are five examples that show how existing environmental regulations have done little to prevent pollution and toxic chemicals from entering the environment.

1. Closed mines pollute for decades

My research on water pollution from coal mines in the Sydney basin routinely reveals inadequate environmental regulation. I’ve repeatedly uncovered long-standing environmental issues the industry doesn’t seem to learn from, such as pollution continually leaching from active and closed mines.

Read more: What should we do with Australia’s 50,000 abandoned mines?

As part of my PhD research in 2002/3, I studied Canyon Colliery – a coal mine deep in the Blue Mountains that closed in 1997. The mine constantly releases large volumes of toxic zinc and nickel contaminated water from the flooded underground workings into an otherwise pristine mountain stream.

This caused ecological damage in the Grose River, including a steep reduction in species and numbers of river invertebrates below the entry of the mine wastes into the river.

It’s now 23 years since the mining stopped, but the pollution continues – testimony of weak and ineffective environmental regulation. And it will probably last for centuries.

The Canyon Mine is just one of thousands of contaminated, derelict mining and industrial sites dotted around Australia lacking environmental controls.

2. Wollangambe River

Environmental regulation has become more stringent in the last 25 years thanks to legislation introduced by the Howard government in 1999, and NSW’s Protection of the Environment Operations Act introduced in 1997.

But despite this legislation, many new and active mines that lead to environmental damage have been assessed and approved.

Research by my team at Western Sydney University has documented pollution from an active Blue Mountains coal mine, Clarence Colliery.

The mine caused severe metal contamination and ecological damage to the Wollangambe, a World Heritage River. Our research led to the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) in 2017 imposing more effective restrictions on the release of toxic pollutants from the mine.

Despite approvals from both the NSW and federal governments, it seemed no one had noticed the magnitude of pollution from poorly treated mine wastes until our research was conducted. This caused ecological degradation to more than 20 kilometres of the highly “protected” Wollangambe River.

The Conversation contacted Centennial Coal, which owns Clarence Colliery, for comment. They directed us to their statements in 2017, when the EPA finished a five-year review of Clarence’s Environmental Protection Licence (EPL). Then, the company said:

As a result of this review Clarence will operate under a new EPL which will include agreed reductions in metal concentration limits for all water discharged to the Wollangambe. Salinity targets will also be set at 100 EC (electrical conductivity).

Clarence will also be required to comply with a Pollution Reduction Programme (PRP), also issued by the EPA, which will result in Centennial formalising options to address all water quality issues and to meet specific water quality milestones.

3. Georges River

In 2010 I made a submission as part of the environmental assessment for an extension of BHP Billiton’s Bulli Seam coal mining operations (now owned by South 32).

This involved reading thousands of pages of consultant reports explaining how the expanded operation would attempt to avoid or minimise impacts to the environment.

The mine extension was approved. Despite the many “green tape” hurdles, the approved mine was allowed to discharge wastes which our research discovered contained pollutants that were hazardous to river life in the Georges River. These included salt, nickel, zinc, aluminium and arsenic polluting the upper Georges River.

Environmental groups took the coal mine owner to court in 2012, and I provided my evidence for the court case to the NSW EPA.

The EPA has since worked with the coal miner to reduce pollution from the mine.

4. Coal mining under Sydney’s water supply

Many were stunned on March 16 this year, when the NSW government signed off on new coal mine “longwalls” directly under Woronora Reservoir, part of Sydney’s drinking water supply.

Longwall mining is the continuous mechanical removal of coal in underground mines that allows the roof of the mine to cave in after the coal is removed.

So what can they do to a river? Redbank Creek near Picton – 65 kilometres southwest of Sydney – provides a sad testimony.

For nearly a decade, I documented damage where falling ground levels (subsidence) caused by longwalls led to extensive damage to the creek channel.

The land surface fell more than one meter. This caused cracking, warping and buckling of the creek channel. It now rarely holds water in many stretches. Isolated stagnant pools in the creek now accumulate saline and metal-contaminated water containing little aquatic life except for mosquitoes.

The mine responsible for this damage, Tahmoor Colliery, is seeking to extend its operations and the NSW government is currently considering the development.

This mine also disposes of about four to eight megalitres of poorly treated wastes each day to the Bargo River, a popular freshwater swimming river for south-western Sydney.

5. PFAS contamination

Despite the existence of “green tape”, unforeseen problems have left Australia with many contaminated sites that may never be fully cleaned up.

We’ve seen this in the dozens of locations across Australia where toxic PFAS chemicals have contaminated land, water, ecosystems and people.

Read more: A blanket ban on toxic ‘forever chemicals’ is good for people and animals

These were previously regarded as safe chemical additives, for example in fire fighting foam, particularly at military bases.

Such contamination is very expensive to remediate and in February this year landholders near three defence bases reached a financial settlement for the PFAS damage to their property.

“Green tape” is an emotive word implying unnecessary and slow environmental regulation that delays major projects.

Given my own direct experience involved poorly regulated coal mines, I shudder to imagine the environmental degradation “fast-tracked” environmental regulation will lead to.

The Conversation also contacted SIMEC, which owns Tahmoor Colliery. A spokesperson said:

Mining in NSW is governed by stringent state and federal laws enforced by a number of government departments and regulators. SIMEC Mining acquired the Tahmoor Coking Coal Mine two years ago and takes its environmental, compliance and social responsibilities seriously.

Tahmoor Mine has been operating for well over 40 years. We acknowledge that historical mine activity did impact Redbank Creek and that this was self-reported to the regulator. Since then, SIMEC has worked closely with the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) to enact a comprehensive plan to rehabilitate the creek. Recent rainfall has demonstrated the success of this work and we are confident that the rehabilitation works will restore the creek.

While our operations do produce water as part of the mining process, this is treated and monitored in accordance with our licence conditions. The quality of this water is mandated by our environment protection licence issued and monitored by the NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). Typically, the water monitoring results are well below those limits allowed by the licence. To further improve water quality, SIMEC Mining has committed to the installation of a new water treatment plant.

Water management has been a key focus for SIMEC in the planning of the proposed Tahmoor South extension. We have commissioned extensive specialist assessments to understand any potential impact on ground and surface water. If our extension is approved, these water assets will be carefully monitored throughout the life of the mine to ensure that should any issue occur, it is detected early and resolved efficiently.

– ref. Cutting ‘green tape’ may be good politicking, but it’s bad policy. Here are 5 examples of regulation failure – https://theconversation.com/cutting-green-tape-may-be-good-politicking-but-its-bad-policy-here-are-5-examples-of-regulation-failure-137164

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daiane Scaraboto, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Melbourne

In eight years, US environmentalist and social media star Lauren Singer had never sent an item of rubbish to landfill. But last month, in an impassioned post to her 383,000 Instagram followers, she admitted the reality of COVID-19 has changed that.

I sacrificed my values and bought items in plastic. Lots of it, and plastic that I know isn’t recyclable in NYC (New York City) recycling or maybe even anywhere … why would I go against something that I have actively prioritised and promoted?

Singer wrote that as the seriousness of COVID-19 dawned, she stocked up on items she’d need if confined to her home for a long period – much of it packaged in plastic.

Her confession encapsulates how the pandemic has challenged those of us who are trying to reduce our waste. Many sustainability-conscious people may now find themselves with cupboards stocked with plastic bottles of hand sanitiser, disposable wipes and takeaway food containers.

So let’s look at why this is happening, and what to do about it.

Sustainability out the window

We research how consumers respond to change, such as why consumers largely resisted single-use plastic bag bans. Recently we’ve explored how the coronavirus has changed the use of plastic bags, containers and other disposable products.

Amid understandable concern over health and hygiene during the pandemic, the problem of disposable plastics has taken a back seat.

For example, Coles’ home delivery service is delivering items in plastic bags (albeit reusable ones) and many coffee shops have banned reusable mugs, including global Starbucks branches.

Read more: For decades, scientists puzzled over the plastic ‘missing’ from our oceans – but now it’s been found

Restaurants and other food businesses can now only offer home delivery or takeaway options. Many won’t allow customers to bring their own containers, defaulting to disposables which generate plastic waste. This means many consumers can’t reduce their plastic waste, even if they wanted to.

Demand for products such as disposable wipes, cleaning agents, hand sanitiser, disposable gloves and masks is at a record high. Unfortunately, they’re also being thrown out in unprecedented volumes.

And the imperative to prevent the spread of coronavirus means tonnes of medical waste is being generated. For example, hospitals and aged care facilities have been advised to double-bag clinical waste from COVID-19 patients. While this is a necessary measure, it adds to the plastic waste problem.

Cause for hope

Sustainability and recycling efforts are continuing. Soft plastics recycler Red Cycle is still operating. However many dropoff points for soft plastics, such as schools and council buildings, are closed, and some supermarkets have removed their dropoff bins.

Boomerang Alliance’s Plastic Free Places program has launched a guide for cafes and restaurants during COVID-19. It shows how to avoid single-use plastics, and what compostable packaging alternatives are available.

As the guide notes, “next year the coronavirus will hopefully be a thing of the past but plastic pollution won’t be. It’s important that we don’t increase plastic waste and litter in the meantime.”

Old habits die hard

In the US, lobbyists for the plastic industry have taken advantage of health fears by arguing single-use plastic bags are a more hygienic option than reusable ones. Plastic bag bans have since been rolled back in the US and elsewhere.

However, there is little evidence to show plastic bags are a safer option, and at least reusable cloth bags can be washed.

A relaxation on plastic bag bans – even if temporary – is likely to have long-term consequences for consumer behaviour. Research shows one of the biggest challenges in promoting sustainable behaviours is to break old habits and adopt new ones. Once people return to using plastic bags, the practice becomes normalised again.

In Europe, the plastic industry is using the threat of coronavirus contamination to push back against a ban on single-use plastics such as food containers and cutlery.

Such reframing of plastic as a “protective” health material can divert attention from its dangers to the environment. Prior research, as well as our preliminary findings, suggest these meanings matter when it comes to encouraging environmentally friendly behaviours.

Read more: Stop shaming and start empowering: advertisers must rethink their plastic waste message

Many people are using their time at home to clear out items they no longer need. However, most second-hand and charity shops are closed, so items that might have had a second life end up in landfill.

Similarly, many tool, book and toy libraries are closed, meaning some people will be buying items they might otherwise have borrowed.

What to do

We can expect the environmental cause will return to the foreground when the COVID-19 crisis has passed. In the meantime, reuse what you have, and try to store rather than throw out items for donation or recycling.

Talk to takeaway food outlets about options for using your own containers, and refuse disposable cutlery or napkins with deliveries. Use the time to upskill your coffee-making at home rather than buying it in a takeaway cup. And look for grocery suppliers offering more sustainable delivery packaging, such as cardboard boxes or biodegradable bags.

Above all, be vigilant about ways environmental protections such as plastic bag bans might be undermined during the pandemic, and voice your concerns to politicians.

Read more: We organised a conference for 570 people without using plastic. Here’s how it went

– ref. Using lots of plastic packaging during the coronavirus crisis? You’re not alone – https://theconversation.com/using-lots-of-plastic-packaging-during-the-coronavirus-crisis-youre-not-alone-135553

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marion Terrill, Transport and Cities Program Director, Grattan Institute

Amidst a global pandemic, some people are starting to dream big about infrastructure projects to help get Australia moving again. The decades-old dream of an Australian fast train is back in the headlines. But, as alluring as it sounds, the federal opposition’s idea for a bullet train from Melbourne to Brisbane is not a good use of a generation’s worth of infrastructure spending.

After the coronavirus crisis, there may be good reasons to fast-track infrastructure to create jobs and stimulate the economy. But it remains as important as ever that funding go only to worthy projects. A bullet train does not fit the bill.

Read more: Why the focus of stimulus plans has to be construction that puts social housing first

No silver bullet

Federal Labor claims the train would be an “economic game-changer” for the regions in its path. But a study into the train, commissioned by Labor itself in government in 2010, found no evidence for this.

Any regional development was too uncertain, the authors concluded, to be considered in their cost-benefit analysis. In fact, they found the project could damage towns along the route:

The history of the impact of transport improvement in Australian towns is that they concentrate activity in the larger centres and create commuter towns lacking in higher level services. Without concerted efforts to the contrary, this is also a likely outcome of the introduction of HSR [high-speed rail].

Read more: Regional cities beware – fast rail might lead to disadvantaged dormitories, not booming economies

Of course, as advocates will be quick to point out, the study did conclude total benefits would outweigh costs by a considerable margin: $2.30 in benefit for every $1 of cost. But this rosy calculation was based on a series of assumptions that are either outdated or inappropriate. As our upcoming report on fast rail will explain in more detail, it’s unlikely the train’s benefits would exceed its costs if a rigorous independent assessment were carried out today.

The benefits are also narrowly concentrated. The biggest winners would be business travellers between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Wider benefits to society accounted for only 3% of the total, and the effect on economic growth was expected to be minimal.

That’s because the train would take a very long time to build. According to the study, the project would only be “shovel ready” 15 years after funding was committed. This makes it completely ineffective as a timely stimulus during a downturn.

Read more: We can halve train travel times between our cities by moving to faster rail

Advocates also argue the train would reduce emissions by taking high-emitting planes out of the sky. But a net reduction won’t be achieved for many years – maybe decades – because constructing the line would create so many emissions.

If built, this train would be the most expensive infrastructure project in Australian history. The study estimated the price tag at A$114 billion – A$130 billion in today’s dollars. As our chart shows, this is enough to pay for an entire generation’s worth of infrastructure.

So what should be done?

It is true current low interest rates would make borrowing to pay for such a large project cheaper than ever before, and fast-tracking infrastructure may be justified to aid economic recovery. But that doesn’t give governments a blank cheque to spend on whatever they like. The crisis does not absolve government of its responsibility to scrutinise projects to decide whether they are worthwhile.

A good place to start is by identifying the problem you want to solve.

If regional development is the goal, other options are available to governments that are more likely to be effective than a bullet train. Infrastructure Victoria and Infrastructure NSW both identify better digital connectivity as a pressing need for regional and rural areas. The current strain on the national broadband network as many of us try to work from home is a good reminder of the link between connectivity and productivity.

If governments do want to focus on transport, “smaller picture” projects, though not as glamorous, tend to deliver more bang for buck, as previous Grattan work has argued.

Read more: Our fast-growing cities and their people are proving to be remarkably adaptable

Projects that can be fast-tracked to start construction soon are also more likely to support economic recovery. Infrastructure Australia’s priority list suggests a range of transport projects and initiatives that are much further developed, including improving the Sydney-Canberra rail link. And the priority list includes projects that benefit all states and territories, not just the big three on the east coast.

The coronavirus crisis has upended many of our assumptions about “normal operating procedure” for governments. But it doesn’t mean we throw the old rule book out the window. Governments should only spend public money on projects that have clear and tangible benefits to society – not on grand “nation-building” projects that are big on style but low on substance.

– ref. Look beyond a silver bullet train for stimulus – https://theconversation.com/look-beyond-a-silver-bullet-train-for-stimulus-136834

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Monash University

Over the past few weeks, there has been increasing awareness of the heightened risk of family violence during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, there has been a silence around perpetrators – in terms of the justice system’s ability to hold them to account during the crisis and the wider family violence system’s need to keep them “in view”.

Both are critical to manage and monitor the heightened risk and danger to women and children during this period of uncertainty and isolation.

Keeping perpetrators ‘in view’

In 2016, a government advisory panel report on reducing violence against women recommended numerous steps to hold perpetrators to account and more support to change their behaviours.

Since then, all Australian states and territories have implemented family violence reforms to ensure numerous “check points” are embedded in their systems to keep perpetrators “in view” at all times.

Keeping perpetrators “in view” refers to the process of identifying, assessing, monitoring and managing their risk over time.

Read more: Coronavirus and ‘domestic terrorism’: how to stop family violence under lockdown

This notion of increased perpetrator visibility relies on coordination and information sharing between a range of men’s services, criminal justice agencies, family violence specialists and other support services, such as those dealing with mental health, alcohol and drugs.

But these responses have been significantly hampered by the COVID-19 restrictions, which limit the ability of victims to seek help and highlight the need for others to step in and report suspected abuse.

This raises the very real risk that new perpetrators will remain invisible for longer. Patterns of escalation among known perpetrators may also go “unchecked” unless they are monitored during this time of heightened risk.

Fewer men’s services during lockdown

One of the key ways known family violence perpetrators are held to account and kept in view is through men’s behaviour change programs (MBCPs).

These programs require men to attend weekly, group-based sessions, as well as engage in short or long-term case management programs.

An immediate impact of the coronavirus restrictions has been the suspension of some face-to-face men’s services and many MBCPs. While this has not stopped family violence interventions altogether, it does make known abusers less visible and may prevent them from getting the support they need.

Read more: ‘Cabin fever’: Australia must prepare for the social and psychological impacts of a coronavirus lockdown

Some men’s services are seeing a surge in demand for telephone services. Coinciding with the beginning of the lockdown last month, the Men’s Referral Service, a national telephone counselling service operated by No To Violence, has seen an alarming increase in calls from perpetrators of family violence.

This included a 94% increase in phone traffic and an average 20% increase in time spent with callers.

Despite the increased need, resources are still lacking. The federal government has announced a $1.1 billion boost in funding for mental health services, Medicare assistance and domestic violence support.

But this package does not specify additional funding to the Men’s Referral Service. Instead, the service makes do with funding from three states (Victoria, NSW and Tasmania).

In the absence of increased funding and availability of men’s services, proactive policing and random household checks of known, high-risk perpetrators will be critical during the lockdown.

Police resources have also been strained by the coronavirus crisis, but these spot checks should be seen as a priority. Victoria Police has recently committed to doing this.

Similarly, the Family Law Court has taken urgent action after reporting a 39% increase in applications relating to parenting orders over the past month.

Both the Family Law Court and Federal Circuit Court will fast-track cases in which there is an increased risk of family violence as a result of COVID-19 social restrictions. This may not guarantee long-term protection to women and children, but it brings perpetrators into view quicker when they are subject to urgent parenting orders during the crisis.

How the family violence system is innovating and adapting

Despite the current challenges, there has been a prompt response from the family violence service sector to the changing environment. For instance, some men’s intervention programs are adapting their strategies to reach known perpetrators who otherwise would be unsupported.

The Men’s Family Violence Intervention Centre in Victoria, for instance, has moved all 200 men in its program to online or telephone services.

To replace MBCP group sessions, facilitators contact each man and conduct a 30-minute phone call to discuss topics usually covered in group, as well as other sources of stress (job loss, financial pressure, isolation at home).

Read more: What governments can do about the increase in family violence due to coronavirus

A pilot MBCP for perpetrators with problematic alcohol or other drug use, developed by TaskForce Community Agency, has taken similar actions.

With a new, in-person group meeting unable to start at the moment, men who had been referred to the service are now receiving a combination of phone support and educational materials via group emails. This allows the agency to “check in” with known perpetrators and keep them “in view” until the next face-to-face group can start again.

There are likely many other examples of adapted and innovative practices in Australia, which has been a leading nation in family violence reform over the last five years.

It is essential the momentum of the work advanced nationally to keep perpetrators in view is not lost during the crisis.

There is no road map to achieve this. But it is clear we must prioritise and provide resources for the monitoring, assessment and management of family violence perpetrators during this time to keep women and children safe.

The National Sexual Assault, Family & Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

– ref. How do we keep family violence perpetrators ‘in view’ during the COVID-19 lockdown? – https://theconversation.com/how-do-we-keep-family-violence-perpetrators-in-view-during-the-covid-19-lockdown-135942

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Collie, Professor, Monash University

More than 31% of people who have lost work during COVID-19 are recording high levels of psychological distress — a rate four times more than employed Australian adults. Many lost work without notice and are facing high levels of financial stress.

These findings are part of our national study of people who have lost their jobs or have had their work hours reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more: How will the coronavirus recession compare with the worst in Australia’s history?

Since late March nearly 800,000 Australians have lost their jobs. Millions more have had their work hours reduced or are working differently.

Unemployment is predicted to rise to between 10% and 15%.

Centrelink has been overwhelmed with people applying for the JobSeeker payment.

The negative impacts of prolonged unemployment on mental and physical health has been long recognised, and unemployment could emerge as the major public health crisis from COVID-19.

Read more: More Australians are worried about a recession and an increasingly selfish society than about coronavirus itself

The early findings from 611 people enrolled in the study are outlined below. The charts show the acute impacts affecting people in the first few weeks after social distancing measures and travel restrictions were introduced and many businesses closed.

Job loss happened very quickly

Almost 36% of our survey respondents lost their jobs, and about 64% are no longer working, though they remain employed.

Two-thirds of people in the study reported losing work, or losing their jobs, with zero or one day’s notice. About 90% lost work with less than one week’s notice.

Incomes have dropped sharply

Before COVID-19 81% of people in the study reported an average weekly income of A$500 or more. The same people reported large drops in their income, with just under 29% reporting more than A$500 of income in the most recent week.

Most of the study data was collected after people lost jobs but before government stimulus payments such as JobSeeker, the coronavirus supplement and JobKeeper reached people’s bank accounts. Accordingly, almost 52% of people reported having no income in the most recent week.

People are under severe financial stress

Not surprisingly given the situation outlined above, many people are already experiencing considerable financial stress. People who have lost their jobs reported significantly higher levels of financial stress than survey respondents who have lost work but have remained employed.

Many also indicated they would find is difficult to raise A$2,000 within a week.

Psychological distress is very high

Rates of psychological distress are much higher in people losing work during COVID-19 than we typically see in working age Australians. More than 30% of people are recording high levels of distress, a rate almost four times that usually observed in employed Australian adults. Another third of study participants have moderate distress, again much higher than we normally observe.

Read more: What if I can’t pay my rent? These are the options for rent relief in Australia

A larger proportion of people who had lost their job reported high levels of distress compared to those who had lost work but were still employed.

Most people are seeking government support

About 66% of study participants had already applied for Centrelink payments, intended to apply or had registered their intent to apply. Once again, more people who have lost their jobs were in this category (77%) than those who had lost work but were still employed (59%).

Read more: JobKeeper payment: how will it work, who will miss out and how to get it?

More than 28% of participants reported that they were not eligible for any Centrelink benefits.

Looking forward to working again

As well as understanding people’s current financial and health status, the study asked people their thoughts about the future. About 71% said they were not confident of being back in paid work in one month’s time.

People were much more positive about their job prospects in three and six months, with almost 68% of people saying they were somewhat confident or very confident they would be back in paid work in six months’ time.

What next?

The high rates of psychological distress show that unemployment is much more than an economic problem. It is also a serious public health dilemma.

The study will track people’s engagement in work and their health over the rest of 2020 to understand who is most affected and how health and work change over time as restrictions ease, businesses reopen and the economy recovers.

If you have lost work or lost your job during COVID-19, and you are aged 18 or over, you can participate in the study by visiting www.covidstudy.net.

Read more: Despite huge coronavirus stimulus package, the government might still need to pay more

– ref. 90% out of work with one week’s notice. These 8 charts show the unemployment impacts of coronavirus in Australia – https://theconversation.com/90-out-of-work-with-one-weeks-notice-these-8-charts-show-the-unemployment-impacts-of-coronavirus-in-australia-136946

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Keith Rathbone, Lecturer, Modern European History and Sports History, Macquarie University

Last week, the NRL announced league play would resume in late May, following the introduction of strict biosecurity rules.

But even with new restrictions in place, the league should not resume until it can guarantee the safety of their players and employees.

The league also needs to ask serious questions about the social role of New South Wales’ biggest sport. Rugby’s return can signal a return to normalcy, but is the NRL sending the right message at the right time?

Read more: Stadiums are emptying out globally. So why have Australian sports been so slow to act?

Setting a bad example

Many clubs are anxious about the short timeframe for restating play. They need enough time to resume operations, rehire personnel, stake out lodging and restart training. They also need time to put in place the proper health precautions.

Although the league claims its rules will be more “stringent than government restrictions”, it is unclear whether the biosecurity measures will be approved at the state or federal level. The league released a 47-page memorandum to clubs on Sunday evening, including additional measures such as:

• increased player testing

• playing in empty stadiums

• a restricted schedule that limits travel

• a mandatory COVID-19 training module

• the social isolation of players inside their homes, except for essential business and travel

• tough sanctions for rule violations.

The premiers of Victoria and Queensland have already voiced concerns about the NRL’s plans. While Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the federal government have no official position on the move, delegating responsibility for oversight of the NRL’s plans to the states, critics say the resumption of play sets a bad example at a time when Australia is on the cusp of eliminating domestic coronavirus transmissions.

Global health expert Adam Kamradt-Scott has said the restart date was “arbitrary” and warned

“if [the NRL] jump the gun and restart things too early we will confront the situation where we will see cases rise again and us having to go back into stronger restrictions.

Do they have a choice?

The NRL’s weakened financial position has played an important role in its decision to resume play. By mid-April, the league only had about $70 million in cash and was losing $13 million per unplayed round.

The league asked the government for a bailout and was denied. Despite having its largest-ever television contracts, the league had not invested in any collateral, such as a stadium or even the land under its own headquarters, and over the past few years, had spent down its rainy-day fund.

Having also not invested in pandemic insurance, it was looking at a certain financial catastrophe.

Read more: A world without sports

The league’s financial woes worsened after a fortnight of sparring with its biggest television partner, Nine, which led pundits to wonder whether the NRL might still have a television home when its current contract ends in 2022.

Both Nine and Foxtel threatened to withhold quarterly payments to the league and until Friday, were cautious about a restart that might fail and leave them searching for content to replace matches.

At the end of the week, the NRL seemed to reach an agreement with Nine. Their rapprochement comes with additional confidence of a forthcoming three-year extension of their television deal, but likely worth less than the last agreement.

By contrast, the NRL’s chief rival, the AFL, had put itself in a position to weather the virus for longer – a fact many rugby fans likely found galling. The AFL also cancelled play and stood down up to 80% of its staff, but it received loans from ANZ and NAB, thanks to the AFL’s ownership of the Docklands Stadium.

The recent departure of NRL Chief Executive Todd Greenberg and the resignation of Rugby Australia Chief Executive Raelene Castle further illustrate how difficult a time it can be for rugby administrators.

Can the NRL police itself?

Of course, there is danger with restarting too soon, as sporting clubs are particularly vulnerable to the spread of diseases.

Before the NBA season was shut down last month, a number of players tested positive for coronavirus, including four members of the Brooklyn Nets. Only one of the Nets was symptomatic, which raises the question: how long might the asymptomatic players continued to play had league officials not postponed the season?

Asymptomatic carriers could be the biggest problem for the NRL, too. A study in the British Medical Journal and a World Health Organisation report suggested that four-fifths of infected people may be asymptomatic.

As such, the NRL’s proposal to use apps to check temperatures and overall player health might miss those who are infected but not showing symptoms.

The NRL has also had significant issues with health technology in the past, such as when its “sideline injury surveillance” technology failed to properly assess head trauma to Matt Moylan after a shocking collision last year. Moylan played for another 10 minutes before being pulled off the field.

Read more: Is the National Rugby League legally liable for the long-term impacts of concussions?

There is also growing scepticism about the NRL’s ability to police itself.

Peter V’landys, the chairman of the Australian Rugby League Commission, promises there will be sanctions for those who violate the biosecurity measures.

We’ve got no option, there must be a deterrent because one reckless act will bring down an entire competition and the livelihoods that come with that.

But has the league developed enough trust? It resisted calls for independent doctors to assess concussions for years and, since agreeing to the checks, has only done them inconsistently. It is not certain that league-affiliated doctors would be any more responsible in their approach to coronavirus.

The league is also relying heavily on buy-in from players, many of whom are known more for their recklessness than responsibility. Just this week, several players were forced to apologise after breaching social-distancing rules on a camping trip.

Nor is it clear that fans will support these changes. How will supporters respond, for instance, if a star player is sanctioned for an unessential trip out of his home?

Another logistical question: does the league plan to keep players and other employees separate from their families for the whole season? In other sports, similar models have proven difficult. Teams on the Tour de France have traditionally tried to keep riders separate from their families, with mixed success.

It has been a month without rugby and the NRL’s decision to resume play promises an end to every sports fan’s purgatory. Even so, the league should strongly reconsider. A longer delay, or even a cancelled season, is better than risking the lives of players, league employees and other Australians if the coronavirus were to spread further.

– ref. The NRL should reconsider its comeback: it’s too soon – https://theconversation.com/the-nrl-should-reconsider-its-comeback-its-too-soon-137079

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arosha Weerakoon, Lecturer, General Dentist & PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

As a dentist, my patients often ask whether they still need to floss even though they brush their teeth. The answer is – that depends.

A review of the research on this topic found flossing, combined with regular brushing, reduced the chance of bleeding gums. But the review could not provide evidence flossing prevented holes (tooth cavities) from forming.

This is likely because all of the included studies were conducted within one to three month periods. A few months is long enough to detect bleeding gums, but not for cavities to grow substantially.

So studies in the review looked at the effectiveness of flossing on preventing gum disease rather than cavities.

Read more: How often should I get my teeth cleaned?

But at the very least, we know regular flossing protects our gum health, which in turn protects our teeth. So it’s definitely worth doing.

The advice may be different if you have certain dental conditions – but we’ll get to that later.

Why should I floss?

Cavities and gum disease are mainly caused by plaque that accumulates on our teeth and gums. Dental plaque is part of a complex ecosystem that includes 800 different types of bacteria found in our mouth.

Our plaque’s unique ecosystem is a like a major city, and brushing is like Godzilla destroying the infrastructure. But plaque bacteria can rebuild infrastructure fairly quickly, which is why we brush frequently.

Brushing, however, isn’t very effective at cleaning in between your teeth. And it’s the plaque that remains in these areas that leads to most cavities and gum disease. So that’s where flossing comes in – to clean between the teeth.

Read more: Curious Kids: why do we make saliva?

If plaque on our teeth and gums are left long enough, the mineral in our saliva hardens it to form a white chalky substance called calculus. The calculus acts as a home to many different types of bacteria that can advance gum disease.

Once formed, calculus is impossible to remove by brushing or flossing alone. It needs to be removed using special tools at the dentist.

What’s the big deal about bleeding gums?

Similar to the way doctors measure health by checking your blood pressure, dentists and hygienists gently poke your gums to see if they bleed.

Bleeding gums often signal the presence of uncleaned plaque and/or calculus in the area. You may even notice bleeding after you brush your teeth or eat certain foods.

To a dental practitioner, bleeding gums indicate you’re at risk of developing advanced gum issues, called periodontal disease. This condition sees the foundations that hold your teeth in your jaw bone deteriorate, eventually causing your teeth to loosen and fall out.

Socially embarrassing by-products of advanced gum disease include:

• loose teeth
• a yellow/brown smile
• large black gaps appearing between your teeth where the gums have shrunk away
• bad breath.

So the act of flossing can serve to safeguard your smile.

Current evidence also suggests periodontal disease is associated with an increased risk of heart disease and diabetes, among other health issues.

Read more: Health Check: why do my gums bleed and should I be worried?

OK, so I should definitely floss then?

This depends on your current situation. Just like you wouldn’t mop your rug or vacuum the shower recess, we have specific tools to suit every cleaning situation. Flossing (effectively) is great if:

• you still have most of your teeth
• your teeth are tightly jammed together
• your gums haven’t receded to leave triangular gaps between your teeth.

While for a lot of us this may be the case, for some of us, simply flossing our teeth and gums will be ineffective. Particularly if you have:

• gaps between your teeth that are too large for floss to clean
• complex dental work such as crowns, bridges and implants
• partial dentures (dentures that replace some missing teeth)
• orthodontic appliances such as braces.

In these instances, we have to start thinking about interdental cleaning, or using other tools to clean between your teeth such as special Christmas tree-shaped brushes or sticks.

Read more: The flossing flap: Mind your dentist, and floss every night

If you don’t think flossing is right for you, ask about interdental (between teeth) cleaning during your next visit to the dentist. Your dentist or hygienist will be able to recommend products and a cleaning routine to suit your needs.

Tips for good flossing

To floss effectively, keep in mind:

• floss at least once a day
• floss before brushing so it becomes part of your routine
• cut 30-40cm of regular floss for each use
• wrap most of it around the finger of one hand and 2-3cm around the finger of another
• slowly move the floss towards the gums to ensure you clean both teeth.

Flossing can cause some bleeding, but this will resolve over time.

Flossing can take some time to master. But the more often you floss, the faster and better you’ll become. And what better time to practise than when you’re stuck at home during a pandemic?

Read more: Can I still go to the dentist? How coronavirus is changing the way we look after our teeth

– ref. Do I need to floss my teeth? – https://theconversation.com/do-i-need-to-floss-my-teeth-133245