Land In Australia Research Articles

Effect of Biochar Application on Soil Microbial Communities in Degraded Lands in Australia

Effect of Biochar Application on Soil Microbial Communities in Degraded Lands in Australia

Framework features enabling faster establishment and better management of privately protected areas in New South Wales, Australia

In response to the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, Australia has committed to protecting 30 per cent of lands and oceans for nature conservation by 2030. Privately protected areas are vital to meeting this target and establishing an ecologically representative and well-connected National Reserve System on land in Australia. As a federated nation, most public and privately protected areas (especially conservation covenants) are established under state or territory (i.e. subnational) legislation, as opposed to national legislation. This paper conducts a review of changes in policy and practice for private land conservation in the state of New South Wales (NSW) that has led to a marked acceleration in the establishment of privately protected areas since 2017. The historical average rate at which privately protected areas were being established in NSW under various schemes prior to the changes in 2017 was about 50 agreements and 12,000 hectares per annum. The new Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016, the Biodiversity Conservation Trust of NSW (BCT), and increased NSW Government funding commenced in August 2017. Since then, the rate of establishment of privately protected areas has accelerated to more than 100 agreements and 45,000 hectares per annum. Not only has the rate of establishment more than tripled (by area) but many more privately protected areas are being established in higher priority bioregions, and the BCT is now able to provide better financial and technical support to privately protected areas, leading to better conservation outcomes overall. Key changes that have strengthened the framework for establishing and managing privately protected areas in NSW include a guide for strategic investment; institutional arrangements that foster effective governance, trust and transparency; substantive NSW Government funding; an accumulating endowment fund model; in-perpetuity payments; and faster and more targeted delivery mechanisms. The paper highlights features that could be adopted in other jurisdictions in Australia to support the vital role that privately protected areas must play in achieving commitments to nature conservation.

Herbicide Fate and Transport in the Great Barrier Reef: A Review of Critical Parameters

Herbicides used for weed management on agricultural land in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef catchments are a key concern for its ecosystem, including the lagoon’s marine plants and corals, whose productivity has been found to decline. The most reliable way to assess herbicide risk is by monitoring a site regularly, but this is costly and time-consuming, so numerical simulations and computer models are an alternative method. Despite the availability of low-cost and less labor-intensive modelling methods, they have been limited in their effectiveness due to a lack of specific herbicide usage data and an inadequate understanding of the breakdown and transport processes of herbicides after application. This paper reviews current findings regarding herbicide risk in all Great Barrier Reef catchments according to their agricultural land use, and the most recent Reef Water Quality Protection Plan recommendations. The various pathways for fate and transport of the herbicides were also examined, and a list of critical parameters was developed to help with computer simulations. The accuracy and reliability of modelling can be improved by including aerial drifts, interceptions by crop residues, mechanisms within the root zone, and subsurface and groundwater contributions to the herbicide load in the GBR lagoon. Moreover, the findings will provide new directions for management practices adoption data with the fate and transport model from paddock to reef and improve the reliability of model results.

Srpska emigrantska književnost u Australiji 1941-1991

The first written records about Serbian people in the land of Australia are dated around 1860, but during the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, there were very little data about this community, even in their land of emigration, and also in their homeland. This article will try to note and identify some members of the Serbian emigration community from 1941 to 1991 who became authors of various literary types in the Serbian language. They tried to express themselves in their first language, about their feelings, homesickness, their thoughts about life, and their political opinion. Their endeavor in literacy mostly stayed unknown to people in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in Serbia, because most of them were considered political dissidents. The Serbian Academy of Science and Arts made the first bibliography of Serb authors in Australia and their work in 2002. This article lists six more authors and two publishers and their works that were previously unknown.

Planning the Energy Transition: A Comparative Examination of Large-Scale Solar Energy Siting on Agricultural Land in Australia

The siting of large-scale solar energy projects on agricultural land has raised questions of how land use risks can be balanced. This balancing exercise creates a regulatory paradox. Solar energy is vital to energy system decarbonisation to mitigate climate change effects and create energy security. Yet, agricultural land may be negatively impacted where solar energy is not sited and regulated effectively to ensure arable land remains productive. The policy goals of facilitating solar energy development and arable land protection fall to planning regulatory regimes in Australia which, to date, have had varying approaches to assessing solar energy development on arable land. This article explores how the twin policy goals of increasing solar energy and arable land preservation can be achieved via planning regimes with effective siting and co-location legal tools. Such planning tools can encourage the development of renewable energy to reach net-zero emissions goals while ensuring appropriate regulatory settings providing co-benefits to agricultural activities. The article provides a comparative analysis of the planning regimes in three Australian states, Queensland, New South Wales (NSW), and Victoria, and their varied approaches to assessing solar energy development on agricultural land. This comparative evaluation is viewed against the backdrop of increasing climate change risks and the need to urgently transition to renewable energy successfully proffered by effective planning regulation.

Anything but common: why Van Diemen’s Land never had commons

ABSTRACT It is sometimes assumed that the concept of the ‘commons’ was transposed directly from Britain to the Australian colonies, and that the term is interchangeable with ‘Crown land’ to describe lands not yet claimed by European settlers. This paper compares British commons with those introduced in the earliest years of the New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land colonies, and asks why the latter failed to reserve land specifically for common grazing in its first thirty years. By comparing these two colonies, it becomes clear that each was driven by different environmental factors and priorities. Moreover, it shows that British commons and Crown lands in Australia were only comparable in a very shallow sense. This piece argues that calling unalienated acres claimed by the Crown in Australia ‘commons’ perpetuates the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands by applying a framework founded in a thousand years of British common law and precedent.

Wakefield's Offspring

Wakefield's Offspring

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Indigenous-Australian Swansong or Songline?

The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong.

Narlim’s Fingerprints: Aboriginal Histories and Rock Art

ABSTRACT This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Aboriginal rock art artists, drawing together insights from the disciplines of archaeology and biography, as well as from Indigenous knowledge-holders, in order to explore the life and work of a relatively unknown rock painter from western Arnhem Land in Australia: Narlim (born c. 1909). His rock art at Warlkarr (Hawk Dreaming) in Kakadu National Park stands as subtle but powerful testament to his life, his family and unbroken connections to Country. Narlim’s art reveals the ways he creatively engaged with new knowledges and skills introduced by the newcomers to his Country, even as he asserted the enduring traditions and ongoing sovereignty of his people. By reading rock art as a historical source alongside other biographical material, in partnership with Traditional Owners of today, we offer a fresh and holistic approach to better understanding rock art.

Transition to Renewable Energy and Indigenous People in Northern Australia: Enhancing or Inhibiting Capabilities?

ABSTRACT This paper uses the capability approach to analyse renewable energy developments on Aboriginal land in Australia’s Pilbara and Kimberley regions. These regions in the north-west of Australia have very high rates of Indigenous land tenure, and are attractive for both solar and wind power generation, particularly as developing technology makes it economically feasible to transport power over large distances. They are also remote from Australia’s electricity networks and often rely on expensive fossil fuels for electricity generation. Resident Aboriginal communities are among the most income-poor in Australia yet live in regions rich in renewable energy. Their ability to benefit from the opportunities offered by a transition to renewable sources of energy varies according to a number of factors. This paper examines the conditions under which Indigenous capabilities may be enhanced or inhibited, through examining three scales of energy generation: large-scale developments for export; remote utility-owned networks; and small-scale standalone off-grid applications. This paper will ask what capabilities can Indigenous people achieve from a just approach to a renewable energy transition in northern Australia, and what capabilities are required in order to gain maximum benefit from this current rapid energy transition?

Reconstructing Aboriginal History and Cultural Identity through Self Narrative: A Study of Ruby Langford’s Autobiography Don‘t Take Your Love to Town

The last decades of previous century has witnessed the burgeoning of life narratives lending voice to the oppressed, dispossessed, and the colonized marginalities of race, class or gender across the world. A large number of autobiographical and biographical narratives that have appeared on the literary scene have started articulating their ordeals and their struggle for survival. The Aboriginals in Australia have started candidly articulating their side of story, exposing the harassment and oppression of their people in Australia. These oppressed communities find themselves sandwiched and strangled under the mainstream politics of multiculturalism, assimilation and secularism.
 The present paper seeks to analyze how life writing serves the purpose of history in celebrated Australian novelist, Aboriginal historian and social activist Ruby Langford’s autobiographical narrative, Don’t Take Your Love to Town. The Colonial historiography of Australian settlement has never accepted the fact of displacement and eviction of the Aboriginals from their land and culture. The whites systematically transplanted Anglo-Celtic culture and identity in the land of Australia which was belonged to the indigenous for centuries. Don’t Take Your Love to Town reconstructs the debate on history of the colonial settlement and status of Aboriginals under subsequent government policies like reconciliation, assimilation and multiculturalism. The paper is an attempt to gaze the assimilation policy adopted by the state to bring the Aboriginals into the mainstream politics and society on the one hand, and the regular torture, exploitation and cultural degradation of the Aboriginals recorded in the text on the other. In this respect the paper sees how Langford encounters British history of Australian settlement and the perspectives of Australian state towards the Aboriginals. The politics of mainstream culture, religion, race and ethnicity, which is directly or indirectly responsible for the condition of the Aboriginals, is also the part of discussion in the paper.

Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, by Philip Steer and

Reviewed by: Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire by Philip Steer Jason Rudy (bio) Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, by Philip Steer; pp. xi + 227. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00, $99.00. “There is a great difference,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in his 1829 Letter from Sydney, “between looking to a place and looking from it” (qtd. in Steer 202). Wakefield would have felt the accuracy of his words, writing his “letter” not from Sydney—a place he had never visited—but instead from London’s Newgate Prison. Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire, Philip Steer’s important analysis of Britain’s settler empire, likewise proves Wakefield true in shifting the predominant view of colonial literature, which generally has found scholars looking [End Page 700] out from the vantage of Britain, to account instead for the perspective from nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand. Steer’s work references a rich context with which scholars of Victorian literature and history will be familiar, including deft readings of works by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. But at its heart, Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature makes an argument for taking seriously the literature of Britain’s nineteenth-century colonial spaces. For Steer, “literature” generally means the novel, and what emerges across his chapters are provocations to engage with works that few in the field will recognize, along with compelling arguments for doing so. There is a certain comfort in all the familiar dishes at the corner bistro—a hearty serving of Great Expectations (1860–61), say—and also a particular delight in savoring the less conventional: for example, Thomas McCombie’s Arabin; or, The Adventures of a Settler in New South Wales (1845) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever (1853), both of which emerge as significant novels in Steer’s able hands. Steer charts an innovative methodological route, overlaying literary analysis, political economy, and the formal features of colonial systems (including Australian transportation and Indigenous dispossession, among others). The results are provocative. In Arabin, for example, Steer locates an important midcentury narrative about how a colonialist might be “convert[ed] . . . from a migratory to a settled state” (54). If land in Australia can be made into private property, and British citizens given the right to own that land, then “the emigrant need no longer be thought of as lost to the body politic” (60). This move toward property—a “stadial model” for Australia built on ideas from John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise of Government and apparent throughout McCombie’s narrative—enabled the shift in perspective away from Australia as a dumping-ground for convicts (79). The rise of free settlement on the continent was a direct result of stadial thinking, as was the tragic disregarding of Indigenous Australians whose conception of land possession never aligned with English notions of private property. The 1851 discovery of gold in Australia was to put pressure on the stadial model, as Steer shows in his second chapter. Here the economics of mineral extraction vied with the impulse toward land ownership and cultivation: “if character came from developing land with labor, as Locke had taught economists and novelists to assume, what happened to a society whose wealth came at random from holes in the ground?” (82). I will note here my suspicion that the stadial model was never truly overtaken by speculation, as Steer argues; both modes seem instead to have competed throughout the nineteenth century, offering different possibilities to readers in both Britain and the Antipodes. Steer nonetheless shows the discomfort of British emigrants in perceiving “nomadic diggers and indigenous populations” as equally removed from “settled society” (102). Spence’s Clara Morison in particular frames the gold rushes as “antisocial” (93), “speculative” (95), and ultimately aberrant behavior that must be rejected in favor of “pastoralism, culture, and [a more fixed system of] capital” (95). Alongside Spence’s novel, Steer situates William Howitt’s Land, Labor, and Gold; or, Two Years in Victoria (1855) and Trollope’s...

Effects of the 21 June 2020 Solar Eclipse on Conjugate Hemispheres: A Modeling Study

AbstractAn annual solar eclipse occurred on 21 June 2020. The maximum eclipse path of this solar eclipse covers the geomagnetic latitude 10–20°N in East Asia. The geomagnetic conjugate region of the eclipse region covers most of the land in Australia. It provides a valuable opportunity to study the ionospheric responses not only in the solar eclipse region but also in the conjugate region. Utilizing a coupled ionosphere and thermosphere model, we modeled global ionospheric responses and identified significant variations in electron density and electron temperature in both the eclipse region and its conjugate region. The simulated results show a significant enhancement in electron density and large decrease in electron temperature at high altitudes in the conjugate region. Two control simulations were carried out to study the main reason for the ionospheric disturbances in the conjugate hemisphere by cutting off transhemisphere photoelectron transport and thermal conduction process along field lines. The simulated results suggest that the ionospheric disturbances in the conjugate hemisphere are caused by the combined effects of transhemisphere photoelectron transport, thermal conduction, and thermospheric wind changes. Furthermore, the thermal conduction process along filed lines should be the main reason.

Multiple and sequential land use: A national policy for Australia?

The closest the Australian Government has come to a national land use policy was for multiple and sequential use that was proposed in 1992 as one pathway to sustainable development of land in Australia over space and time. Under this national strategy governments in Australia’s federalist system would undertake several actions but it was never resourced. In 2013 the Multiple Land Use Framework (MLUF) was developed but still has little promotion by governments and has not noticeably reduced disputes on land use developments. Trial programs that support multiple uses, especially nature conservation, on privately operated land have been moderately successful but limited in scope. Sequential land use, largely applicable to post-mining recovery, appears limited so far, but may succeed in facilitating alternative land uses as the mining industry moves to life-of-mine planning. Some possible reasons for this lack of government response are discussed.

Vertebrate biodiversity on indigenous-managed lands in Australia, Brazil, and Canada equals that in protected areas

Declines in global biodiversity due to land conversion and habitat loss are driving a ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ and many countries fall short of meeting even nominal targets for land protection. We explored how such shortfalls in Australia, Brazil and Canada might be addressed by enhancing partnerships between Indigenous communities and other government agencies that recognize and reward the existing contributions of Indigenous-managed lands to global biodiversity conservation, and their potential contribution to meeting international treaty targets. We found that Indigenous-managed lands were slightly more vertebrate species rich than existing protected areas in all three countries, and in Brazil and Canada, that they supported more threatened vertebrate species than existing protected areas or randomly selected non-protected areas. Our results suggest that overall, Indigenous-managed lands and existing protected areas host similar levels of vertebrate biodiversity in Brazil, Canada, and Australia. Partnerships with Indigenous communities that seek to maintain or enhance Indigenous land tenure practices on Indigenous-managed lands may therefore have some potential to ameliorate national and global shortfalls in land protection for biodiversity conservation using a mix of conventional protected areas and Indigenous-managed lands.

Property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation: Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust redux

ABSTRACTIn this ‘Thinking Space’ essay we revisit Maurie Daly’s 1982 book Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust, fuelled by concern for how Australian cities are being transformed by financialised real estate. Daly's insights remain highly relevant to Sydney and other cities around Australia and the world today. Poorly planned densification, inflated property markets, land speculation, and housing poverty are all outcomes of the (global) capitalist intersection of finance and land in Australia. The overwriting of Aboriginal country with colonial-capitalist systems of land ownership set in train a process of land and housing booms, bubbles and busts that are better understood by their circular continuity rather than as a set of ephemeral ruptures. It is the property and finance system itself, rather than any ruptures to it, that reproduces unequal and alienating social relations. Researchers investigating property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation, we argue, ought to revisit this key text to inform their contemporary analyses. Moreover, those wielding power over Australian urban affairs would do well to read it too, lest its lessons be ignored for another generation.

Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc

With this paper, I first of all acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the traditional owners of the land in Australia. I go on to mention early radical actions by lesbians and womyn, including setting up the Queen Victoria Women’s Hospital in 1896, and how lesbians and feminists in Victoria joined the worldwide Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) to fight for womyn’s rights from 1969 onwards. The paper explains why there was a need to set up a WLM Archives in the first place, the herstory of the Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives (VWLLFA) and the reasons for maintaining and adding to the collection into the new millennium.The Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc was established in 1983 with the objective of collecting any and all of the material relating to the WLM in Victoria from 1969 onwards; to store, archive and preserve this material for posterity and make it accessible for research and other purposes.Now housed at the University of Melbourne Archives, the VWLLFA is a unique record of the enormous amount of political work lesbians and feminists in Victoria have done over the past 50 years.

Beyond Recognition: Lessons from Chile for Allocating Indigenous Water Rights in Australia

Australian water law frameworks, which authorise water use, have historically excluded indigenous people. Indigenous land now exceeds 30 per cent of the total land in Australia. Yet indigenous water use rights are estimated at less than 0.01 per cent of total Australian water allocations. In the limited situations where water law frameworks have engaged with indigenous interests, they typically conceive of such interests as falling outside of the ‘consumptive pool’ of water applicable to commercial uses associated with activities on land such as irrigation, agriculture, industry or tourism.

Establishment and impact of insect agents deployed for the biological control of invasive Asteraceae: prospects for the control of Senecio madagascariensis

Several invasive Asteraceae have been targeted for biological control worldwide, with variable success. Senecio madagascariensis Poiret, which invades agricultural lands in Australia and Hawaii, is a recent target. Since several potential insect agents were recorded in the plant’s native range in South Africa, we assessed biocontrol efforts against asteraceous weeds to determine those most likely to deliver success. Some 108 insect species, from five orders and 23 families, were deployed against 38 weed taxa, mostly in the mainland USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Coleoptera (mainly Curculionidae and Chrysomelidae), Diptera (Tephritidae) and Lepidoptera (Tortricidae) featured the most. Despite high establishment success (73% of releases across countries), only 37% of successful releases achieved meaningful impact. Although root-feeding and stem-feeding insects appeared to be the best candidates, neither insect family nor feeding guild significantly influenced the probability of success. This synthesis of the global contribution of different guilds of specialist herbivores to the management of invasive Asteraceae is guiding the selection of candidate agents for the biocontrol of S. madagascariensis in Australia.

Mapping Indigenous land management for threatened species conservation: An Australian case-study.

Much biodiversity lives on lands to which Indigenous people retain strong legal and management rights. However this is rarely quantified. Here we provide the first quantitative overview of the importance of Indigenous land for a critical and vulnerable part of biodiversity, threatened species, using the continent of Australia as a case study. We find that three quarters of Australia’s 272 terrestrial or freshwater vertebrate species listed as threatened under national legislation have projected ranges that overlap Indigenous lands. On average this overlap represents 45% of the range of each threatened species while Indigenous land is 52% of the country. Hotspots where multiple threatened species ranges overlap occur predominantly in coastal Northern Australia. Our analysis quantifies the vast potential of Indigenous land in Australia for contributing to national level conservation goals, and identifies the main land management arrangements available to Indigenous people which may enable them to deliver those goals should they choose to do so.