Travel

Australia’s Amphibian Apocalypse

13 June 2025 / 5 Comments

Ninety years ago this month, Australia embarked on an ambitious but ultimately ill-fated experiment in biological control.

In 1935, Queensland sugar cane farmers faced a relentless enemy—the cane beetle. These voracious insects burrowed into sugarcane roots, devastating crops and threatening an industry vital to the nation’s economy. Desperate for a solution, scientists at the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations (BSES) looked to overseas biological control methods for inspiration.

The man who walked the Bass Strait

9 May 2025 / 10 Comments

The Bass Strait submarine cables

In 1859, the first underwater telegraph cable in the Southern Hemisphere and the longest in the world was laid across Bass Strait.

Planning began in 1853 when discussions were held to build an overland line from Hobart in the south to Launceston in the north of Tasmania, extending across Bass Strait to Victoria.

Guardians of health and security: Point Nepean’s twin roles in history

18 April 2025 / 4 Comments

Point Nepean, located at the tip of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, is a site of remarkable historical significance. It houses Australia’s second-oldest surviving barracks-style quarantine buildings and fortifications that once protected the colony’s coastline. As the primary quarantine station in Victoria until 1979, Point Nepean played a pivotal role in safeguarding public health.

A rain bomb hits Gympie and surrounding districts

21 February 2025 / 2 Comments

At 9.00 pm that night, it came bucketing down nonstop. It was so loud that it was hard to hear anything. By 11.00 pm, I thought it was pointless to go to bed and looked outside to check this downpour, with thunder rumbling and lightning flashing around us.

A resident describing conditions in Gympie on Friday night, 25 February 2022.

Australia’s Engineering Marvel

17 January 2025 / 4 Comments

After the Snowy, she was a nation.

Nelson Lemmon

Thank God we had visionary leaders and the world’s best engineers in Australia 75 years ago. Without their efforts, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric scheme – one of the seven engineering wonders of the world – might never have come to fruition.

This monumental project blended innovative thinking, engineering brilliance, and the dedication of a diverse workforce.

Tragedy on the Derwent: Remembering the 1975 Tasman Bridge Disaster, 50 Years Later

3 January 2025 / 2 Comments

Between 1967-75, Hobart endured a series of catastrophic events. It all started with the Black Tuesday fires in February 1967 that claimed 62 lives. Several other tragedies followed that to Hobartians, seemed like they would never end. August 1969 saw the disappearance of Lucille Butterworth, October 1973 the Blythe Star was wrecked off southern Tasmanian waters with three men drowning and seven survivors spending eight days adrift in a lifeboat, and the Mt St Canice boiler explosion in September 1974 that took eight lives.

The year Santa never made it to Darwin

20 December 2024 / 1 Comment

It began as a deep distant rumbling, like the stirring of some gargantuan subterranean beast.

It was unsettling at first, ominous, something you felt in your guts more than you heard with your ears, an eerie subsonic vibration that seemed to rise from the bowels of Hades.

As the she-devil crept closer, the wailing began.

50 years of hydroelectric power

15 November 2024 / 4 Comments

To generate hydropower you needs lots of water and steep hills – both things Tasmania has in abundance.

In the heart of Tasmania’s rugged southwest, a region once almost uninhabited since settlement and defined by its natural lakes, impenetrable forests, and fierce winds, a remarkable story of human ingenuity unfolded. This remote area, receiving four meters of rainfall annually, seemed an unlikely place for grand engineering feats.

More than a mountain of concrete – building Warragamba Dam

18 October 2024 / 3 Comments

Sydney’s early water woes

Since European settlement, Sydney has faced frequent water crises due to unreliable water supplies.

The first water supply for Sydney was Tank Stream, named for the “tanks” or reservoirs cut into its sides to save water. The stream, which wound through the early settlement, eventually degenerated into an open sewer and was abandoned in 1826.

The debt of burden was the skeleton in all their closets – the failure of the Beerburrum Soldiers Settlement Scheme

20 September 2024 / 5 Comments

A Grand Vision

The Queensland government funded Beerburrum Soldier Settlement Scheme was a disaster. The aim was to provide repatriated servicemen from World War I with farms where “swords could be transformed into ploughshares” for a tranquil existence in a rural climate.

The high enlistment numbers and enormous physical and mental casualties from the war, forced Australian authorities to develop a repatriation policy.