The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 Read online

  THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2014

  ASHLEY HAY is the author of four books of narrative non-fiction (including Gum: The story of eucalypts and their champions) and two novels. Her 2013 novel The Railwayman’s Wife was shortlisted in the fiction category of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, in which it won the People’s Choice Award. She was literary editor of The Bulletin and her science writing – covering subjects from mosquitoes and robotics to historical collectors and ‘hobbits’ – has appeared in many publications, including The Monthly, Australian Geographic and Griffith REVIEW. Her work was awarded one of the inaugural Bragg Prizes for Science Writing in 2012 and shortlisted for a Eureka award.

  THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2014

  EDITED BY

  ASHLEY HAY

  For Nigel Beebe, and for Huxley Hay Beebe – A.H.

  A NewSouth book

  Published by

  NewSouth Publishing

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd

  University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  newsouthpublishing.com

  © University of New South Wales Press Ltd 2014

  First published 2014

  This book is copyright. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested in University of New South Wales Press Ltd, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the chapter authors. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Title: The Best Australian Science Writing 2014/Ashley Hay, editor.

  ISBN: 9781742234182 (paperback)

  9781742247137 (ePDF)

  9781742241883 (ePub/Kindle)

  Subjects: Technical writing – Australia.

  Communication in science – Australia.

  Science in literature.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Hay, Ashley, 1971–, editor.

  Dewey Number: 808.0665

  Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

  All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The publisher welcomes information in this regard.

  This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

  Contents

  Contributors

  Foreword: Clear and simple

  Ian Lowe

  Introduction: Stories, definitions and the art of asking questions

  Ashley Hay

  A short walk in the Australian bush

  Ludwig Leichhardt

  Survival in the city

  Nicky Phillips

  Planet of the vines

  William Laurance

  Is there room for organics?

  James Mitchell Crow

  This. Here. Now. The climate catastrophe

  John Cook

  Weather and mind games

  Tom Griffiths

  Weathering the storm

  Peter Meredith

  Firefront

  Ian Gibbins

  Antarctic ice: Going, going …

  Nerilie Abram

  They’re taking over! The jellyfish move in

  Tim Flannery

  From Alzheimer’s to zebrafish

  Michael Lardelli

  Joseph Jukes’ epiphanies

  Iain McCalman

  Popular mechanics: A short story

  Gareth Dickson

  The CAVE artists

  Dyani Lewis

  High-tech treasure hunt

  Sarah Kellett

  The carnivorous platypus

  John Pickrell

  The eye in the sand

  Rebecca Giggs

  The now delusion

  Michael Slezak

  Reached by committee, nineteen eighty-three

  Paul Magee

  Material of the future: Sticky tape, honey and graphene

  Lisa Clausen

  Pitch fever

  Trent Dalton

  Uniquely human

  Thomas Suddendorf

  The pet-keeping species

  Peter McAllister

  Penis size may be driven by women (Oh, and it matters …)

  Rob Brooks

  Eleven grams of trouble

  Frank Bowden

  TB and me: A medical souvenir

  Jo Chandler

  Massimo’s genes: Medicine at the genetic frontier

  Leah Kaminsky

  Life, the universe and Boolardy

  Richard Guilliatt

  Liner notes, Voyager Golden Record

  Meredi Ortega

  Beyond the ‘Morning Star’

  Alice Gorman

  The oldest known star

  Bianca Nogrady

  The quantum spinmeister: Professor Andrea Morello

  Stephen Pincock

  Here be dragons

  Vanessa Hill

  Advisory panel

  Acknowledgments

  The Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing

  Contributors

  NERILIE ABRAM is an Australian Research Council QEII Fellow at the ANU. Her research looks at how Earth’s climate has behaved in the past, and what that tells us about recent climate changes. She does this by developing past climate records from natural archives such as tropical reef corals and Antarctic ice cores.

  FRANK BOWDEN is an infectious diseases physician, professor of medicine at the Australian National University and a senior administrator with ACT Health. He teaches evidence-based medicine and infectious diseases to medical students and has a special interest in population health, junior doctor training and the music of Brian Eno. His book Gone Viral: The germs that share our lives was shortlisted for a Queensland Literary Prize in 2012.

  ROB BROOKS is director of the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre at UNSW Australia. He is an internationally recognised expert on evolutionary biology and sexual conflict, and winner of the Australian Academy of Science’s Fenner Medal. He won the 2012 Queensland Literary Award for Science Writing for his book Sex, Genes & Rock ’n’ Roll: How evolution has shaped the modern world, and the 2013 Australian Government Eureka Prize for Science Communication.

  JO CHANDLER is an award-winning journalist and writer. After a long career in daily newspapers, she is now freelance, focusing on science and medicine, climate change, human rights, women’s issues and development. An extract from her book Feeling the Heat – dispatches from the climate ‘frontline’ – earned her the inaugural Bragg UNSW Press Prize for science writing in 2012. She has also won a Walkley, a Quill, and a Eureka Prize. This is her third appearance in BASW.

  LISA CLAUSEN is a Melbourne-based writer. She was a journalist on newspapers in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne before joining the South Pacific edition of Time, where she covered stories in Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Vanuatu and across Australia for more than a decade as a senior writer. She now writes about Australian history, science and the environment for leading publications such as the Monthly and Fairfax’s Good Weekend magazine.

  JOHN COOK is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. He created the website , which won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge. John is the co-author of Climate Change Science: A modern synthesis and Climate Change Denial: Heads in the sand and has written a number of peer-reviewed papers on c
limate change and the psychology of misinformation.

  TRENT DALTON writes for The Weekend Australian Magazine. A Walkley Award winner, he has been the national News Awards Feature Journalist of the Year three times and was Queensland Journalist of the Year in 2011. His journalism has twice been nominated for a United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award. His writing also includes several award-winning screenplays, including Glenn Owen Dodds, which won the prestigious International Prix Canal award at The Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France and saw Dalton named Best Writer at Aspen Shortsfest 2010.

  GARETH DICKSON was born in Melbourne and graduated with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland in 2009. He is currently undertaking a PhD, also in Creative Writing, at the University of Queensland. He has published stories and poems in numerous journals and magazines, both in Australia and abroad, including the White Review, which shortlisted ‘Popular Mechanics’ for their annual short story prize in 2013. He currently divides his time between Brisbane and London.

  TIM FLANNERY has written 32 books including the award-winning The Future Eaters and The Weather Makers, now available in over 20 languages. The author of more than 130 peer-reviewed papers, he has also made numerous documentaries and regularly reviews for the New York Review of Books. In 2007 he was named Australian of the Year. A founding member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, he became Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner in 2011, and in 2013 he founded the Australian Climate Council, which he now heads.

  IAN GIBBINS, an internationally recognised neuroscientist, has recently retired as professor of anatomy at Flinders University. His poems have been widely published in print and online, and he often performs his work accompanied by his own electronic music. His first full poetry collection Urban Biology was published in 2012 with an accompanying CD. Ian’s work spans the art–science domain and includes numerous collaborations with artists in diverse fields. For more information, see .

  REBECCA GIGGS writes about ecology and environmental imagination, animals, landscape, politics and memory. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Aeon, Overland, Meanjin, Going Down Swinging and the Guardian, while her stories have been widely published and anthologised in collections including Best Australian Short Stories 2011 and The Best of the Lifted Brow. Her first non-fiction book will be published by Scribe in 2015. She teaches in the English Department at Macquarie University.

  ALICE GORMAN is an archaeologist who specialises in the material culture of space exploration, with a focus on orbital debris or space junk. She is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at Flinders University, and a member of the Space Industry Association of Australia. Alice has worked extensively in indigenous heritage management across Australia, providing heritage advice for industry, government and Aboriginal groups. She tweets as @drspacejunk.

  TOM GRIFFITHS is the WK Hancock Professor of History at the Australian National University, chair of the editorial board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography and director of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU. His prize-winning books include Hunters and Collectors, Forests of Ash and Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. His latest book, written with Christine Hansen, is Living with Fire. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

  RICHARD GUILLIATT is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in many Australian and overseas publications. He is the author of two books, Talk of the Devil and The Wolf: How one German raider terrorised Australia and the southern oceans in the First World War, co-authored with Peter Hohnen. He is a staff writer at The Weekend Australian Magazine.

  VANESSA HILL is a science communicator and media producer based in New York City. Vanessa is the creator, writer and host of BrainCraft, a PBS series exploring psychology, neuroscience and behaviour. She previously worked for the CSIRO, where she managed their social media and edited the CSIRO news blog, and also acted as a CSIRO spokesperson and science reporter to Australian broadcast media.

  LEAH KAMINSKY, an award-winning physician and writer, is poetry and fiction editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her forthcoming books include Cracking the Code with the Damiani family (2015), a literary non-fiction book about cultural attitudes to death (2015), and a novel, The Waiting Room (2016). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

  SARAH KELLETT travelled around Australia with the Shell Questacon Science Circus in 2010 and has earned a graduate diploma in science communication. After freelance writing and world travel, she now works at the CSIRO in Canberra as a science writer and content development editor for Scientriffic and The Helix, two magazines for kids and teens. Sarah also regularly writes the CSIRO’s Science by Email, edits Maths and Stats by Email and she is halfway through writing a novel.

  MICHAEL LARDELLI teaches genetics and uses zebrafish to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying Alzheimer’s disease at the University of Adelaide. He received a BSc (Hons) from the University of Sydney in 1984 and a PhD in 1991 from the Council for National Academic Awards in the UK. He returned to Australia in 1997 after a further six years of postdoctoral work at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and at Uppsala University in Sweden.

  WILLIAM LAURANCE is a distinguished professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland. His research focuses on human impacts on tropical forests and biodiversity, and conservation policy. He works in the Amazon, Africa, south-east Asia and tropical Australia and has published eight books and more than 400 scientific and popular articles. He has received many scientific honors including the prestigious Heineken Prize for Environment Sciences and BBVA Foundation Frontiers in Ecology and Conservation Biology Award.

  LUDWIG LEICHHARDT, naturalist and explorer, was born in Prussia in 1813 and undertook studies including philosophy, languages and natural sciences. He arrived in Sydney in February 1842 keen to explore Australia, and undertook the first overland expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington in 1844–45. In 1848, he made a second attempt to cross Australia from east to west, leaving the last outpost of settlement in central Queensland in early April. He was never seen again.

  DYANI LEWIS is a freelance science writer. Her writing has appeared in Science, Nature Medicine and Cosmos and on the ABC online and other websites. When not writing about science, she is a producer and host for Up Close, the University of Melbourne’s podcast, and is a regular co-host on Triple R’s Einstein-a-Go-Go radio show. She has a PhD in plant genetics, but much prefers writing about other people’s work to being in the lab herself.

  IAN LOWE is emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University. He directed Australia’s Commission for the Future in 1988, chaired the first State of the Environment advisory council in 1996 and has held many other advisory roles at all levels of government. A Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2001 for services to science and technology.

  PETER MCALLISTER is an archaeologist and anthropologist from Griffith University’s Gold Coast Campus. His major research interests are human evolution and the physical anthropology of ancient hominins, and he writes funny, informative books about the anthropology of the human condition. Outside his science writing, McAllister has worked as a journalist, a graphic artist, an advertising salesman for a country music radio station, and once (almost) a Chinese-speaking rugby league commentator.

  IAIN MCCALMAN was born in Nyasaland (Malawi), schooled in Zimbabwe and undertook his higher education at ANU and Monash. He is a professor in history at the University of Sydney, co-director of the Sydney Environment Institute, and in 2007 was awarded an AO for services to history and the humanities. His current book, The Reef: A passionate history, was published in Australia in late 2013 and in the USA in 2014.

  PAUL MAGEE studied classical languages and Russian and since 2004 has taught poetry compositi
on and criticism at the University of Canberra, where he is an associate professor. He is the author of two books of poems, Stone Postcard and Cube Root of Book, and has also published a prose ethnography, From Here to Tierra del Fuego (2000).

  PETER MEREDITH’s fascination with science was sparked by a high-school science teacher who brought an unexploded German incendiary bomb into class and, with the help of his pupils, dismantled it, analysed the main incendiary chemical and set some of it off. A science writer, journalist, author and editor, he has worked in the UK, southern Africa and Australia, and his articles have appeared in more than 20 publications. He has written seven books and edited and/or co-authored a further eight.

  JAMES MITCHELL CROW is deputy editor of Cosmos magazine. A chemist by training, he began his science writing career with Chemistry World magazine, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK, before joining New Scientist, where he worked in London as a features editor. In 2010 he left the UK to move to Australia, where he began writing freelance for various publications, including Nature.

  BIANCA NOGRADY is a freelance science journalist and author who is yet to meet a piece of scientific research she doesn’t find fascinating. She has covered the length and breadth of science and medicine, and also explored sustainable innovation and death (separately) in her two non-fiction books, The Sixth Wave and The End.

  MEREDI ORTEGA was born in Albany, WA, and grew up in the mining town of Tom Price. Her poems have appeared in Australian Love Poems, Cordite, the Science Made Marvellous chapbooks, The Disappearing, Westerly, and indigo. She won Australian Poetry’s Science Poetry Prize in 2013.

  NICKY PHILLIPS is science editor at the Sydney Morning Herald. She was previously a radio reporter and producer with ABC Radio National and a science writer for ABC Online. Nicky has a bachelor of science and post-graduate qualifications in journalism. Her story on scientists’ attempts to resurrect an extinct species of frog was featured in last year’s Best Australian Science Writing. She also mentors science journalists for the World Federation of Science Journalists.