Jennifer Marohasy

APOLOGIES for not posting so much over the last week:   I have been driving north along the east coast of Australia and this morning I woke up to this magnificent view across to North Keppel Island.  It’s a National Park Island within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.

The Sierra Club believes that national parks and areas like my own cannot be effectively defended if they do not build up a constituency of political support by allowing more and more visitors to enjoy them. In other words, we need to degrade our treasures in order to promote their preservation. This is a pernicious [...]

THE Victorian Premier, John Brumby, has waited until New Year’s Eve to announce the end of timber harvesting and grazing in 83,000 hectares of red gum forest in the Central Murray Valley in north western Victoria, Australia.
The creation of new national parks was a 2006 election promise to secure inner-city votes but is based on a [...]

ON Monday, the first day of summer here in Australia, residents of the little town of Barmah in northwestern Victoria, drove cattle into their forest in defiance of a government ban.  The Department of Sustainability and Environment has threatened legal action, but so far the cattle are still there.
The forest has historically been grazed and the Barmah locals believe [...]

THERE has been much written about Australia’s national character emerging from a bush ethos: the idea that a specifically Australian outlook emerged first amongst workers in the Australian outback.  Banjo Paterson, perhaps more than any other writer, created and defined this cultural heritage.  His story about the shearer and his sheep (the jumbuck) remains our most [...]

We have an enlargement of this image printed on stretched canvas, hanging on the wall of our living room. In its abundance and purity, water underpins the richness of our rainforest home and this image beautifully captures the celebrity of its most central supply.
As a family, we spend a surprising amount of time discussing [...]

“An infamous media type said, ‘In essence we’re a conceited naked ape but in our mind we’re a divine legend and we see ourselves as some sort of God that we can walk around the earth deciding who will live and die and what will be destroyed and saved.’ Wilderness has no gods or one [...]

Last August, a panel of scientists from the Australian Greenhouse Office and the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), called on the federal and state governments to expand the number of nature reserves in Australia in a bid to protect animal populations from climate change.
Following on from Queensland’s climate-linked plan of doubling its declared [...]

Media reports yesterday** correctly drew attention to the fact that there are levy banks within the Macquarie Marshes and that they are depriving key wetland areas of water.
But the stories went on to lump upstream legal and planned irrigation development that makes allocations for environmental flows with legal and illegal levies on grazing land within [...]

Just over a year ago media reports indicated the Blue Gum Forest of the Grose Valley was “hanging in the balance” because of a wildfire made “more intense, unpredictable and extensive by massive backburning operations”.
I trekked into the forest today and was surprised and pleased to see a beautiful forest with little evidence of fire [...]