Sasha Portis
Australia is strange...
I ran into the first article... which led me to the others...
Australia Is Not as Down Under as Everyone Thinks It Is
Sasha Portis
That map of Australia you have? It’s wrong. And the whole country is going to officially relocate to correct the error.
The trouble is caused by plate tectonics, the shifting of big chunks of the earth’s surface. Australia happens to be on one of the fastest-moving pieces of all, and by geological standards it’s practically flying: about 2.7 inches northward a year, with a slight clockwise rotation as well.
People on the ground may not notice, but the Global Positioning System does. So Australia needs to adjust its longitudes and latitudes so they line up with GPS coordinates.
Four times in the last 50 years, Australia has reset the official coordinates of everything in the country to make them more accurate, correcting for other sources of error as well as continental drift. The last adjustment, in 1994, was a doozy: about 656 feet, enough to give the delivery driver an alibi for ringing your neighbor’s doorbell instead of yours.
“You might think, ‘Where’s my pizza?’” said Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia, the government agency that worries about the coordinates. But something bigger is at stake, he said: intelligent transportation systems that rely on the finer accuracy that will come with the next generation of GPS technology.
The next adjustment, due at the end of the year, will be about 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) — not really enough of a discrepancy to throw off consumer-grade satellite navigation systems, which are generally accurate only to within 15 to 30 feet.
But the next generation of GPS devices, using both satellites and ground stations, will be accurate to within an inch or less, and new technologies that depend on precise location will be important to Australia’s future.
The mining company Rio Tinto already has 71 immense ore trucks rumbling around iron mines in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia that are guided remotely from an office in Perth, 930 miles away.
Pilots who patrol the Anna Creek cattle ranch in South Australia must pick out small water bores in the ranch’s 8,880 square miles of dry pasture, an area larger than Israel, where small errors can equate to big misses. “If we get a new pilot, he’s relying on GPS until he finds his way around landmarks,” said the ranch manager, Norm Sims.
Not to mention driverless cars. “If you’re 1.5 meters out,” Mr. Jaksa said, “you’re potentially on the wrong side of the road.”
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The Changing Clock of Australia’s Little Penguins
Little penguins, the smallest penguin species in the world, attract a steady parade of human fans at all hours to the beach at St. Kilda and Phillip Island in Australia. Doug Gimesy
On any given night, as the sun sets at the bottom of the world, dozens to hundreds of people gather along the pier at St. Kilda Beach, just off the coast of Melbourne, Australia. Their black silhouettes punctuate the sherbet sky. But they’re not there for the sunset. They’re there for the penguins.
And when only a dozen or so show up, they are disappointed. Little penguins, the smallest penguin species in the world, are supposed to return to their nests after dark. But the city lights reflecting on the water mean there is never a moment of true darkness, so St. Kilda penguins waddle in at all hours of the night.
“They are fat, lazy, city penguins,” said Zoe Hogg, 81, a retired nuclear physicist and teacher who now organizes research on these penguins. And fat, lazy, city penguins are not inclined to show up on any particular schedule, even if tourists from across the world are waiting.
The penguins took up residence at St. Kilda a couple of decades after Australia built a jetty of volcanic rocks known as the St. Kilda Breakwater for the 1956 Summer Olympics.
For 30 years, volunteers have been conducting research on the penguins. Every two weeks, the volunteer group, Earthcare St. Kilda, ventures out onto the rocks at night to microchip the penguins and weigh them in polka-dot cotton sacks.
Over the years, the researchers have found that this cosmopolitan colony stands out from the typical communities of their species in other ways as well. St. Kilda little penguins don’t go out to sea, for example. They stay close to home and nest more often because they get plenty of food in Port Phillip Bay. And since they don’t have to swim far, their flippers are shorter, too.
But St. Kilda’s little penguins aren’t the only ones in Australia acting a bit differently. Southeast of St. Kilda, on Phillip Island, the parades have become bigger — and younger — as a result, researchers believe, of climate change.
In the past, they started breeding in the middle of spring,” said Andre Chiaradia, a research scientist at Phillip Island Nature Parks. “Now the breeding has advanced a month, sometimes two months, before the long-term average. By doing this, they’ve been more successful.”
That’s because parents avoid dangerous summer storms that affect their ability to find food for their chicks. Some penguins even get the chance to breed twice in the same year.
For now, it’s unclear how these penguins, which are top predators in the area, will affect the rest of the ecosystem. “I realize that it’s a special sort of situation here,” Dr. Chiaradia said.
The Port Phillip little penguins are also breeding earlier and more often because of the abundance of food in the bay, where they fish, as well as the island’s unique location and geography, which have protected the penguins from extreme ocean temperature increases and most predators.
To see the parade, go any time of year. Because the nights are longer now, so is the show — if you have the patience to wait in the cold winds from the Southern Ocean. But during the summer months of November, December and January, when the chicks should be feeding, more penguins return to shore, even if the show is shorter.
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Fear Descends Over Australia as Magpie Swooping Season Begins
Illustration by Leif Parsons; photos by Fir0002/Flagstaffoto, Steve Carroll/shutterstock
There are the snakes, the sharks and the spiders, but no one told you about the magpies, did they?
In September and October, Australians band together as if motivated by a national war effort. It’s swooping season for the native magpie. This black-and-white bird with beady red-brown eyes can become aggressive, dive bombing and pecking anything, especially humans, that it deems a threat to its chicks.
During the spring swooping season, victims of attacks update online maps with nest locations in order to warn others of the danger from above. Principals put their bodies on the line to protect students. Talk radio shows are flooded with dramatic swoop stories.
“It is the biggest urban wildlife problem there is in Australia just because of the scale and sheer number of animals involved,” said Professor Darryl Jones, an urban ecologist with Griffith University in Brisbane. He has studied the troubled relationship between magpies and humans for 20 years.
Australians have developed some odd defense methods over the years. When heading into a swoop zone, generations of schoolchildren (including this reporter) wore empty plastic ice cream buckets as hats with crude eyes drawn on. The theory: a magpie won’t attack if it thinks it is being watched, and if it does, you have the ice cream bucket to protect you.
Other methods include waving a stick in the air or opening an umbrella. During the season it is common for cyclists, adults and children alike, to ride around with a forest of zip ties protruding from their helmets.
“Birds do swoop, but they don’t come anywhere near your helmet,” said Professor Jones, who endorses the zip-tie method.
An Australian’s fear of magpies has merit. Each year a handful of attacks cause eye injuries and in some cases permanent sight loss. Cyclists fall off their bikes, breaking bones and dislocating joints.
Professor Jones and his students recently discovered a magpie’s ability to recognize and remember human faces, occasionally singling out individuals for escalated attacks season after season. Mail carriers who buzz around on small motorbikes are hardest hit, victims of more than 200 a day, Professor Jones said.
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‘Hairy Panic’ (a Plant) Strikes Australian Town of Wangaratta
A fast-growing tumbleweed known as “hairy panic” took over a street in the Victorian rural town of Wangaratta on Wednesday, clogging homes and frustrating residents.
By REUTERS on
February 18, 2016. Photo by Channel 7/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Watch in Times Video »
A plant known as hairy panic has left parts of a small town in southeastern Australia overwhelmed with tumbleweeds, and global news media attention, with residents and journalists recording bizarre scenes of dry, yellow grass piling up around cars and doorways.
The windblown grass has become a major nuisance in Wangaratta, in Victoria State, where some people have had to dig their way in and out of their homes, according to Australian news reports. In some cases, they removed the tumbleweeds with leaf blowers.
“It makes it difficult to get the car out in the morning — if you can find it,” one Wangaratta resident, Jason Perna, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Images of hairy panic blanketing parts of Wangaratta were picked up by international news outlets, including the BBC and CNN, bringing an unusual amount of attention to the town with a population of 17,000.
Hairy panic, formally known as Panicum effusum, is a widespread native grass in Australia that thrives in warm, dry conditions. The name Panicum does not refer to fear or anxiety, but rather to a Latin name for millet.
The grass is more of an annoyance than a threat, with a chief risk to sheep and pigs, which can develop photosensitivity from overeating it (a condition known as “yellow big head”).
Residents told the local news media that the source was most likely an untended field. They said they were trying to contact the farmer to have it mowed.
“It’s a first-world problem,” Mr. Perna told the ABC. “We don’t put it on the scale of any of the famine or poverty going on in the world.”
(The embedded video in not the one from the Times article, but straight from Youtube. The Times version -- it is mostly the self-same images -- is available through the link .)
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A good laugh for the day. Having lived in Aussie for some time there are many ''strange'' things that go on there. Kangaroo's invade city, send residents scrambling for cover. They can be quite aggressive, especially the Western Gray, the largest of the various kangaroo species. The males are called ''Boomers'' by the locals, and for good reason.
A very interesting member of the kangaroo family is the ''tree kangaroo''. Yes they live in trees.
Recent DNA testing proved that Australia and New Guinea have the oldest civilizations on earth, some 72,000 years old.
Australia hosts one of the most dangerous predators in the world. The salt water croc. Reaching lengths of 20 and weighing in excess of 2,000 lbs you don't want to be near one. Since they do stalk and kill humans.
Oh, and they cut the crusts of sandwichs...And they have blue mountains there.
Fun article Bob.
Having lived in Aussie for some time...
Cool! What circumstances?
Until these last few years, I had little desire to visit Australia... but I'm finding more and more reasons to change my mind.
I was transferred there Bob. Lived in Elizabeth Bay, locals called it EZ Bay. Right on Sydney Harbor. I had operations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Darwin. So I got to see the whole country on a regular basis.
It's a huge country, so if you do travel there, pick out one area to see and enjoy it. Of course that would depend on the amount of time you have.
Interesting note is that it takes longer to fly from Sydney to Perth then it does to fly from Perth to Singapore.
Another interesting note is that Australia has more wild camels than the M/E.
We're retired, so it would be a long visit. Three to six months.
Great, you would have time to see most of the country and throw in a side trip to New Zealand.
If you need any information about Aussie and the better spots to go to, let me know.
Hey Kavika - Australia is one country my husband has always wanted to visit. Maybe in the next year or two we'll make the trip so I'm open to hearing any recommendations you want to offer. Best time of year to visit, what to avoid and what not to miss.
How long did you live in Australia? Any funny stories you want to share?
The first thing to remember is that when you flush the loo's the water swirls the opposite way of here.
Oh, and it's down under so the the seasons are the opposite of the U.S.
Yes, some very funny things to tell, but very long stories.
An Ojibwe Down Under is my favorite.
Lived there 3 years Pj. Kids, grandkids and great grand kids still live there.
An Ojibwe Down Under is my favorite.
So tell it! We're all ears...
We were living in Australia at the time and my wife was an opera fan. Me, not so much, well actually not at all...Really I hated it.
I had been on a business trip to S.E. Asia and had just returned home. We were living in an area of Sydney named Elizabeth Bay, or as we knew it, E Z Bay. I was a bit tired and was looking forward to sitting on the patio and watching the boats sail by with a drink in hand. Just as I settled in the Redhead tells me we are going to the Sydney Opera House to see an opera, some German name. Oh no Red, I'm tired, stressed out and need some rest. I did not want to go watch the ''Fat Lady'' sing.
Needless to say we ended up going to the opera. Black Tie and all. On the way to our seats we stopped and had a glass of wine, this was not a good idea. First off I don't drink, second I was dead tired. Third, well I'll tell you the story.
We were escorted to our seats by a beautiful young lady, this was a good sign. Settling in, let me tell you, the Aussies do a lot of thing right, but making comfortable seats is not one of them. Once settled in, the people around us were chatting. I'm not a chatter and being tired didn't add to my chattyness. Of course the Redhead was all a twitter and talking to everyone.
Soon the lights went down, and the band started. I know it's not a band, it's an orchestra, but I'm a band kind of guy and I'm writing the story so band it will be. Within seconds the stage was covered with some really strange looking people in helmets, hair in braids which I thought was pretty cool. Then the singing started. Oh my, my ears went into revolt, it was horrible. Suffering though this for some time my thoughts began to wander, the wine was taking effect and I was getting pretty mellow. Propping my elbow on the arm support I was suddenly hit the the dreaded ''JET LAG'' effect.
The woman sitting next to me was in her early to mid 40's, and rather well built. As my head leaned against my hand, it struck...JET LAG and I was asleep in a second. The next thing that I knew my elbow had slipped off the arm rest and I went head first into the biggest boobs in Australia. The Redhead was mortified, I was well, comfortable with the pillows that I landed on and the woman was terrified and let out a scream that could be heard throughout the opera house.
Struggling to remove my head from her boobs I made the awful discovery that my head was stuck to her boobs. By now most people in the Opera House were looking at us. What in the hell, why is my head stuck to her boobs...Then the real terror stuck me. My hair, which I wore in a pony tail, was stuck in a broach that she was wearing. The more I tried to pull away only managed to pull her boobs towards me. I was being attacked by the biggest boobs in Australia. Red was beside herself, the woman was hysterical and the audience was really beginning to think that this could turn into an international incident. Of course the ''Fat Lady'' kept singing and the band played on.
Knowing that my life was hanging in the balance, I put my hands on the women's shoulders, held them firm and jerked my head back. I felt like my hair was being ripped out by the roots when a broach went flying by my head and struck the elderly gentlemen sitting in front of us in the back of the head. Red was screaming at me, ''What are you doing'', I have to admit it looked bad, my hands on her shoulders, her dress ripped and one boob dangerously close to jumping out, the old guy in front of us claiming that I had attacked him.
I had to do something quickly. Pulling myself to my feet and looking at the woman with a stunned look on my face, I said in a very loud voice, ''Well I never expected to be attacked at the Opera, please ma'dam keep your hands to yourself.'' Grabbing the Redhead, who by now was on the verge of a a complete breakdown, by the arm I marched, head held high, to the exit and left the building. An Elvis kind of thing.
I later found out that the broach was worth about $10,000 and the woman was the wife of the deputy under-director of something or other at the U.S. Embassy.
Needless to say my wife never asked me to go to the opera again. Oh, I was sent back to the states shortly thereafter.
This of course is one of many stories about an Ojibwe in the Land of Oz.
The Whispering Wall is another.
We're waiting with bated breath...
I was going to Perth (west Australia) on a business trip, and thought I needed a holiday. So let's mix business and pleasure.
So Red (wife) and I packed up and headed to Perth. On the first day there, we decided to do some touring. Off we went to Kings Park. A beautiful domain (that's what Aussies call a park) and started strolling around. Soon we came to a semi circular wall...
I thought to myself, hmmmm looks like the remains of an old fort out west. As we read the information plaque regarding the wall it became quite interesting.
If you sit at one end of the wall and whisper against it, a person at the other end can hear you clearly..I said no way, the wall is a good 20 meters long, that sounds like spirit stuff. We keep on walking, but in the back of my mind I wanted to try whispering and see if anyone could hear me.
Soon Red had to use the Loo (Aussie for toilet) and off she went in search of a loo.
Ah ha, now was the time as I rushed back to the wall little did I know it would become one of the scariest times of my life.
Arriving back at the wall, I sat myself down and whispered to the wall...Wait, there has to be a person at the other end to hear me...so much for preplanning.
As I sat there a fine looking Sheila (good looking women in Aussie) sat down. Problem solved.
Sooooo with great expectations I whispered to the wall...G'day, may I buy you a mide (glass of beer) Shelia...Waiting for a reply with bated breath.
Soon it came, ''you sure can laddie''...WOW, now what.
Soon the lovely Sheila came walking towards me. With each step she was getting closer to me and well, not so pretty. In my younger days I was known in the tribe as ''hawkeye''. It was the darn sun that had blinded me.
Soon she was standing right in front of me...OMG, the women was 5' 6'' 215, built like a refrigerator with a head.
To may dismay she was a hard rock miner from up Koolagong way. Now what, quick thinking on my part probably saved my life. I said to her, my you are one lovely Shelia, you look just like my wife.
Your married she said in a voice that put chills in my belly. Indeed I am and I thought you were my wife when I whispered sweet nothings, (strong on nothings)...
About that time Red came rushing up to us and I introduced them, and complimented both on their stunning good looks and how much they looked alike.
Well the Frig with a head, headed back to Koolagong and Red gave me one of those looks.
Kavika, I don't know what you were up to, but it was no good. That women didn't look anything like me.
I took my beloved by the arm and said. G'day, may I buy you a mide, you fine looking Shelia.
Red looked at me hard, but soon melted. You smooth talker she said.
No one every said, Indians can't dance.
hahahahaha - and a very nice jig it was! Red must be a saint!
Of course there is the ''Great Alice Springs Camel Race'' adventure. Camels and horses don't ride the same. A grand experience, but rather sobering when it came to camels.
Than the death defying ''Black Water Rafting'' trip in NZ....If Capt. Kirk and the boys thought that space was an adventure, they would have had a grand old time black water rafting.
Kavika repairing his inner tube and wet suit. Just the thought of it sends chills up me back, mate.
One more thing...Waltzing Matilda is not the national anthem..But it is far more popular.
If you know what Slim is singing about without looking up the meanings, you win a non expense paid holiday to Monkey Mea...
Fun article Bob. Loved the Magpie part and youtube clip. That was funny - poor cyclist. Rather interesting that the magpie can recognize and remember faces and I was stunned to lean that they will actually increase their attacks based on that recognition. WOW!
I've read every book by Nevil Shute about Australia, and have always wanted to go there! Just think, someday it will be jammed up against another continent, (millions of years from now), and it will be just a road trip from somewhere!
It never occurred to me that Heckle and Jeckle could be dangerous to humans! I've heard the Kookaburra here at Kentucky Down Under, and would love to have those around... And the sweet little penguins, but no Heckle and Jeckle!
Great article, Bob! Thanks for the enjoyable reading!