Zipping trip from Brisbane (a conference) to Melbourne to Sydney. Brisbane was sunny and touristy, where I stayed was a redeveloped shore along the river (the Brisbane River), lots of restaurants and cafés, not much of interest. However, the first night I had dinner I encountered a rancher, sitting at the next table. He was in town as his wife was having a medical procedure, though his ranch was 750 kms from town. He had cattle on 100,000 acres, along with 45,000 goats, 2 helicopters, horses and was 80 kms from the closest regional town where they shop. I saw pictures of sunsets, a crashed helicopter, horses and goats. His closest neighbor is the largest cotton grower in the world with 93,000 hectares. How can that be?? The farm, if it can even be thought of in those terms, is on the Darling Riverine Plains. The Plains are an amalgamation of 12 floodplains with water storage dams that stretch for more than 28 kms along the Culgoa River and Murray Darling basin. The dams supply 130 square kms of irrigated cotton and other crops, including wheat. Needless to say, this is a controversial issue, and the ownership, which has included Chinese capital, is quite controversial, and First Nations people are entirely left out, including to water. In the Fraser Darling Basin, water entitlements can be traded separately to land, Canada and China have invested in water rights; all can be traded. Even the First Nations must purchase water rights. Only by 2026 will all trades or transfers be recorded for the reason for the trade and price details, but not necessarily for the environmental impacts of water extraction and use. It is said that this water basin is the most neoliberalized in the world, but Australia’s waters are all governed by the market.
The conference itself was a bit odd. It was held by the Life Course Center, a government funded center interested in why some people succeed and others not. Presentations varied from neuroscientists claiming that folks in western countries succeeded better than others because they had higher levels of concentration (!!! - ? affluence = ability to concentrate? Shown through statistics), to First Nations speakers discussing the need to recapture language and land. Hard bridges to cross among world views, juxtapositions are so stark. The main botanical garden in Brisbane, a bit out of the way, next to an active gravel pit and 2 freeways, is excellent! I got to walk in a eucalyptus forest, through a magnificent and diverse section of gravilleas – large and tall, bushy, prostrate, red, yellow, pinkish. And also all kinds of protea. Australia has showy natives compared to So Cal. That is for sure. I also saw parrots and other unfamiliar and cool birds.
Mangrove
Gravillia
I flew to Melbourne where it was drizzly and cold, stayed in a nice hotel by the University, on a street with lots of restaurants, largely student oriented I’d say, Italian, Lebanese, Thai, Chinese, and a superb bookstore that made me terribly envious. Los Angeles has several nice bookstores, but none with the depth and breadth of this one. There were quite a few people browsing. It is a bit shocking LA can’t support a truly robust bookstore. My neighborhood one, The Village Well in Culver City, is good, and it attracts a lot of people as it has a café and open tables for people to work and meet. But. . .the range of books at the one in Melbourne far surpasses any Los Angeles offerings, sadly. LA is a rather anti-intellectual city, people don’t read much here. The downtown of Melbourne was swarming with people, many Brits who had come for some extremely important football game. Many florid, large, drunk men at bars, exchanging sports lore. The downtown is like most others, high rise buildings, restaurants. . . nothing especially memorable.
In Melbourne I went to the natural history museum to see an exhibit on the Bunjilaka Aboriginal peoples. There are so many different First Peoples groups in Australia, each having had their own language and ways of living in the several regions of the country, from tropical to desert, to river plains and the coasts. In fact, there were ~ 250 languages (+ more dialects) with over 160 still actively spoken. The artifacts spoke to the deep understanding of place that existed and one of the things I found unexpected were the opossum wraps/blankets! The opossums are different than the ones here, but are nocturnal marsupials as well. Beautiful thick fur, and quite a few are necessary for a decent sized wrap or blanket. Other displayed objects were quotidian use objects, baskets, nets, spears, fishing equipment, beautifully incised myriad sof things. Life was, I suspect, at times precarious.
Melbourne was also a time of meetings with colleagues at the university, sampling Australian single malt whiskey – very nice – and a glass of wine here and there. I went to other exhibits as well, but the stay was short and my host whisked me off to visit the fascinating Latrobe Valley about 3 hrs inland. The drive went through endless suburbs, not much different than LA. Miles and miles and miles of housing developments with malls, I was a bit surprised at the extent of Melbourne’s sprawl, limitless flat land, I guess. . . .
The Latrobe Valley has been the home of significant open pit coal mining to power 4 large coal fired power plants and they supplied nearly all the electricity to the state of Victoria. They were/are, old and inefficient, burning local coal that is very wet, so not worth exporting. They are slowly being decommissioned and solar is moving in. We were toured – in a Tesla – by a retired coal plant commissioning engineer who spent his whole career there, moving up the corporate ladder. He is now a strong renewables advocate and involved in a neighborhood decarbonization project on his street. The utility has provided $1million Australian to retrofit houses to solar and thermal performance improvements, up to $25,000 per house. He is actively involved in recruiting.
Active Open Pit Mine
Active Coal Fired Power plant
There are so many interesting issues to write about. For example, if the mines are not filled with either dirt or water, there will be significant land subsidence in the area, including the local town – up to 8 meters, I think, though that seems unbelievable. So in a water scarce region, they have to decide between subsidence or allocating water to create lakes in these huge craters, as the millions of cubic yards of dirt are simply not available – the disappeared dirt was coal laden, burned up. I forgot to ask about the ash though. These plants were behemoths, offering skilled and long-term employment, energy stability and quantity. Yet, the air pollution was notorious (the day we went the skies were limpid and the valley was beautiful), there are now enormous dangerous craters in the ground, and all the ash was not even a topic of discussion. The roof top solar and thermal efficiency program is tiny and hard to implement – people are skeptical of free – and thus it takes laborious effort to build trust and convince folks. It reminds me that talk of an energy transition is loose and detached from the real reality that exists on the ground, everywhere, it is arduous if the transition relies on a voluntary parcel by parcel strategy, where there is – like in CA, some minute amount of funding for the shift. In addition to needing to overcoming reluctance, fear and doubt, over time, with distributed energy resources like roof top solar and better insulated houses, the utility sells less electricity and loses revenue. That is an issue few want to address head on. In California what we have seen is growing utility resistance to purchasing the energy generated by each household, and fighting to build far off generation and more transmission. These are the only pathways for the utilities to continue as viable economic enterprises (and in CA, they are private utilities that are guaranteed 10% return).
The next morning after a great stay in a funny motel oriented toward work crews, my host and I gave talks to a non-profit volunteer organization pushing renewables. It was held in a nice new building in Latrobe, lots of breakfast pastries, coffee and conviviality. We got some quite informed questions, I talked about my Center’s work on decommissioning and electrification. Back to the motel though! It was organized by sections of about 8 big rooms on either side of a common wide corridor. Each room was also large, with king sized beds, and the possibility of making coffee/tea. The central corridor has a little kitchen area with stocked breakfast foods, coffee for the machine, a microwave, toaster, dishes, milk, yoghurt, all kinds of breakfast foods. It all felt very generous and welcoming, if not unusual for an academic who does not go to places where there are work crews! Requests to leave work boots off and the like!
On the way to Latrobe, we stopped at the newish Cranborne botanical garden. It was a joy, including natural brushlands with 450 indigenous plant species and a re-creation of Australia’s red sands desert with the gray vegetation that lives in that part of the country. Again, there were eucalyptus of many types, sizes and leaf shapes, grevillea, ironbark, and one of my favorites, bottle trees! The Gondwana garden showed ferns, cycads, conifer and rainforest plants, plants that have ancient origins (180 million years), when the Gondwana continent connected Australia with Antarctica, Africa, South America, New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian peninsula (a bit mind boggling). It is so tempting to garden with Australian natives, they are well adapted to So Cal, and are so colorful. But it is true that our natives are diverse and beautiful, if they seem more subdued. But I was in Australia in the winter rainy season, so I did not see them in the summer dryness.
Red Desert
Bottle Tree
After this whirlwind visit, we returned to Melbourne and flew directly to Sidney, where it was even more cold and rainy. Coldest day in July in record, and buckets of rain. Downtown Sidney was like downtown Melbourne, high rises, restaurants, offices. Of course there is the renowned harbor, which I could catch a glimpse of from my Youth Hostel hotel room (great place to stay, simple, clean, friendly and with my own shower – a single is possible), and the lovely lit up concert hall, but that was at night, through the rain and fog. Mornings the concert hall was obscured by gigantic tour ships. We took the train to Wollengong on the coast, through a big natural reserve eucalyptus forest. The coast deserves its reputation, it is beautiful, with great beach areas. Wollengong is the home of an important steel manufacturing center, powered by metallurgical coal. These coal mines are underground and the coal is of premium quality. Over time, employment in the mines and steel plant has declined dramatically, and the question is what about the future, and future employment. There has been steadfast opposition to wind generation, even though the potential of that area is very high, and the proposed wind farms would be quite far off-shore. We met to talk about the energy transition, its specific opposition, its general difficulty, the house-to-house approach, and the near impossibility of getting there under a neoliberal regime, which characterizes Australia, and the U.S.
The final day in my trip, I spent the morning at the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see an exceptional exhibition, organized by Yirrikala First Nations people. It was nearly unassimilable. So many extraordinary artifacts. Apparently, the pieces – carved, painted wood, statues, painting, bark paintings – express political analysis, arguments and positions. They are also about daily life and gods, animal spirits and no doubt a great deal more that entirely eluded me. I was somewhat overwhelmed and surely not capable of comprehending what was being expressed, but at the same time, I was moved and intrigued. It would take years of immersion to have even limited insight into these pieces that communicated complex issues. What a last experience in Australia, as I exited to an enormous downpour, leaving me wet, wet, wet.
