I have a Batchelor of Science and a PhD from the University of Queensland. I have worked at universities, with the Indonesian Bureau of Meteorology, run a research station in Madagascar, implemented an environmental audit for the Queensland sugar industry, and I am currently a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne-based think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, hoping to make more short documentary films about environmental issues.
Finding Porites (2021)
https://youtu.be/ZENS9xyK1a8
Clowns on the Ribbon’s Edge (2020)
https://youtu.be/XLZa4dP_oto
Beige Reef (2019)
https://youtu.be/HqFFqBuFVqU
I have been based in Noosa for the last five years where I enjoy paddle boarding in Weyba Creek, jogging through the national park, swimming at Sunshine Beach and before Covid there was Frank’s gym and Vivienne at Yoga Circle.
Over the last two years I have supported Peter Ridd in his quest for some quality assurance of Great Barrier Reef science. So, despite Covid, over the last two years, I have Scuba dived coral reefs from the northern Ribbon Reefs all the way south to the reefs fringing Lady Elliot Island. I have mostly targeted reefs reported as worst affected by climate change. The Ribbon reefs, which grow as underwater cliff faces along the continental shelf, are the true barrier reefs defining the outside edge of the Great Barrier Reef. This northern section was reported as worst bleached in 2016.
Politics
Libertarians oppose arbitrary power. I much prefer appeals to reason, logic and evidence – rather than authority. I am certainly not a conservative. I am perhaps an old-style feminist. I appreciate that the culture in which I was raised did not give women, for example, the right to vote. We had to fight for it.
I have read a lot of C.G. Jung, who has written extensively on the need for individuals to resist the collective forces of society.
I have also been influenced by the writings of John Ralston Saul who argues that our democracy is only superficially based on the individual. He makes the case that we live at a time where legitimacy increasingly lies with special interest groups, and that decisions are made through constant negotiation between these groups. This is also a strong theme in the work of Robert Reich, particularly his book Saving capitalism for the many not the few. A consequence is the increased dependence on government. Yet it is innovation* that is central to our continued wealth, health and prosperity as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain in a most important book Why Nations Fail – The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty.
Early years
I was born in Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia. My parents were farmers at Coomalie Creek near the uranium mine of Rum Jungle. They grew tomatoes and pasture seed, ran buffaloes and cattle. My earliest memories are of wildflowers emerging from ground still charred-black from a bushfire, and swimming with indigenous friends in the billabong just down from our mud-brick home.
I started school at Batchelor, but by second grade Mum and Dad had sold-up, and we left the Northern Territory in a Holden station wagon towing a caravan. After nearly a year of travelling with many months spent in beach front caravan parks, our family moved into a home nestled in the Conondale ranges overlooking the headwaters of the Mary River. That house is now the community centre for the alternative lifestyle village of Crystal Waters. After Conondale, I was sent to Clayfield College, a boarding school in Brisbane, and during school holidays visited my parents in diverse locations mostly overseas. I was later moved to Brisbane Girls’ Grammar school where I completed high school, and then went on to complete a science degree at the University of Queensland majoring in Botany and Entomology.
Career
While at University I had a variety of jobs from interpreter for the Asian Development Bank in Indonesia to ‘bug checker’ on the Darling Downs in Australia. On graduation I was employeed by the Alan Fletcher Research Station, and within a couple of years was running their field station in Toliara in south west Madagascar. The success of the biological control project that I worked on in Madagascar is documented in the book entitled ‘Reclaiming lost provinces: A century of weed biological control in Queensland’ (Queensland Dept of Natural Resources and Mines, 2005).
During the 1990s, I published in Australian and international scientific journals and completed a PhD. In 1997 I took up a position as Environmental Manager for the Queensland sugar industry. It was in this position that I became interested in environmental campaigns and, in particular, anomalies between fact and perception regarding the health of coastal river systems and the Great Barrier Reef.
In 2003, I signed a three year contract with the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) to work on Murray River issues. My monograph Myth and the Murray: Measuring the Real State of the River Environment is of enduring relevance, and was published within the first six months of that appointment.
I was subsequently the spokesperson for the Myth and the Murray Group, which campaigned in 2011 against the 7.6 kms of sea dyke currently dividing the Murray River’s estuary. I am concerned that both sides of Australian politics have policies that prevent the restoration of this estuary. Furthermore, rather than report with integrity on this issue, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) either denies the very existence of the sea dykes, or reports on them with bias and agenda.
After a period living in the Blue Mountains, just to the west of Sydney, I moved to Yeppoon in central Queensland in about 2009, and began working with John Abbot then at Central Queensland University. We initially worked on Great Barrier Reef issues, and after the flooding of Brisbane in 2011 began developing a technique for medium-term monthly rainfall forecasting using artificial neural networks (ANNs), a form of artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning.