Lumen Winter 2023

Can we save planet Earth? Our experts’ report card

Methane-busting seaweed

Best wines for a changing world

Life on campus

Reviews, events, new writing

And more…

How things have changed. The University of Adelaide will proudly celebrate its 150th birthday next year. This aerial photo was taken to celebrate the centenary, 50 years ago. We want you to come to our events next year… more details to come!

The University wishes to acknowledge the Kaurna people, the original custodians of the Adelaide Plains and the land on which the University of Adelaide’s campuses at North Terrace, Waite and Roseworthy are built.

About Lumen

Lumen is the University of Adelaide’s peak magazine – for and about the University. It is published bi-annually and distributed via a print edition and email to about 100,000 recipients.

Our thanks to our many contributors this issue – faculty, staff and alumni. This issue’s cover Alumna Tiahni Adamson is hoping this humble seaweed – the Australian red seaweed Asparagopsis – may help improve the world by reducing methane emissions from ruminants which consume it.

By Dr Jessica Gallagher, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (External Engagement)

Hello, and welcome to the first Lumen for 2023.

Lumen has a long and proud history as a publication for, by and about the alumni of the University of Adelaide – and this issue celebrates its 50th anniversary.

Each issue reaches about 100,000 members of our community across South Australia, interstate and around the world via print and digital editions.

Over its life, Lumen has taken different forms and its content has flexed and changed. This ongoing evolution is essential for any publication of such longevity and note.

It is our goal to continue to evolve Lumen to meet the current needs of our diverse community, and to add new ways of talking to each other to make it a more dynamic conversation.

As part of that process, we would like to know more about what you think about the publication – what you like now, and would like in the future. Issues that are important. Content which would be helpful. New ways for us to connect with each other and the life of the University.

From this issue onwards, we would like to invite you to be part of the life of this publication by sharing your thoughts through correspondence and memories, and your lives through updates on your career and where you are now to help you keep in touch.

More details on how to do this are inside. We’d like to create, with your help, a publication which is consistently interesting, and sometimes surprising and provocative, both in print and online. Our message in some ways is simple. Here at the University of Adelaide we are actively engaged in the most pressing matters of our time. Our faculty, staff and alumni Make History. These are stories we need to tell.

Some changes to the format of Lumen we can make immediately - this issue has a broader range of content and the theme of sustainability. Nothing less than the fate of our planet is at stake as we strive to find answers. Our faculty and alumni are playing their part.

Future issues will have other themes –suggestions are welcome – and next year our University’s 150th birthday will need its own special celebrations.

We hope you enjoy this issue, as we take our first steps down this new path.

We look forward to talking with you, and listening to you.

Editorial team

Deputy Vice-Chancellor

(External Engagement):

Dr Jessica Gallagher

Director, Media & Communications:

Elisa Black

Manager, Corporate Communications:

Keryn Lapidge

Lumen Editor: Mark Douglas (Lumen@adelaide.edu.au)

Photographic coordinator:

Isaac Freeman

Contact us

If you have feedback about the magazine, or would like to send a letter to the editor, you can contact us in these ways:

By email: Lumen@adelaide.edu.au

Online: www.adelaide.edu.au/alumni/lumen

By post: Lumen, The University of Adelaide, SA 5005

We’d love to hear from you.

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Sustainability statements

Lumen is printed on paper from recycled and sustainably grown sources. The plastic cover is fully compostable.

“A publication of this kind, with its audience of educated, intelligent and interesting people, created by a top 100 global university, has the potential to be something smart, engaging and thoughtful. That is our goal.”

The (sustainable) future of the planet

Sustainability – of our planet, and all life on it – is the subject of intense global conversation and research.

At the University of Adelaide a broad range of research is underway. Its goal: accelerating solutions that deliver sustainability, equity and prosperity for the planet and its people.

One of our leaders in this field is Professor Mike Goodsite, the recently appointed ProVice Chancellor (Energy Futures) – a man who wears many hats including Director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Resources – ISER.

In this interview for our special Lumen sustainability issue, Mike gives valuable insight into the current issues we face, and the solutions we are seeking.

to live, work and develop in ways that respect and fairly balance the needs of our ecosystems and intergenerational communities.

Taking a global view, how are we as a species, and the Earth as a planet, faring?

Well, when considering the UN definition, we are, in general, not acting sustainably as a species. Modern humans, in our approximate 200,000 years on this 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, have become the single most influential species on the planet. Our human development has led to emissions and other human activities that contribute to significant global warming and other changes to land, environment, water, organisms and the atmosphere.

So, how are we, and the planet Earth faring? I think it is documented that since the dawn of humankind, the planet, where it can be impacted by humans, has never been in such a dire state as it is today. The Stockholm Resilience Centre has documented that many of the so-called planetary boundaries are outside of their limits

The good news is, that just as humans must own the negative impact, we have the capacity to recognise it and develop the tools to understand what is going on. We can mitigate impacts and adapt to changes that we can predict will come. It is a complicated system, but I am very proud to be part of a University where finding the solutions to the greatest challenges of the day is prioritised. Looking closer to home, how is Australia performing as a nation in terms of the many elements of sustainability?

The word sustainability is bandied about a lot these days. Can you give us a definition of just what it means?

In 1987, the United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Organisations generally adjust this to best match what it means for them. For example, in Here for Good, the University’s sustainability strategy, developed under the leadership of Professor Melissa NurseyBray, the definition of sustainability is:

We as a species are growing, a few of us in a more economically prosperous manner than others. Indeed, the human species is impacting the geologic record in such a way, that if we were to examine it, since the industrial age, the impact of humans, rather than natural processes, would dominate this record – especially during what is called the ‘great acceleration’ of the last 60 years. It is why scientists refer to the present time as a geologic epoch where human influence dominates: a new geological era called the Anthropocene – or age of humans, a notion which was proposed first in 2000 by Nobel

I think Australia is improving, but there are lots of continued opportunities for improvement across each of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Australia is starting to look at the abundance of renewable energy, and driving modern energy systems in an ambitious way. Getting to a green energy system that is equitable for all Australians is difficult, but one that present day Australia is doing a great deal to lean into.

And in South Australia? What are some of the big challenges we are facing here?

Ross Garnaut, in his 2020 report: South Australia’s Climate Change Challenge and Opportunity, detailed many of these, including the need to adapt to unprecedented warming and the consequences of this. Since the impact of COVID, we now face additional challenges that are not unique to us, but are perhaps exacerbated by our distance and relative

Prize winning atmospheric scientist Paul J Crutzen and limnologist Eugene F Stoermer.

“We are, in general, not acting sustainably as a species.”

Michael Goodsite

population: the challenge of attracting and maintaining talent in our State. Humans cause anthropogenic impact, and we are also ultimately key to its solution. We must build the knowledge base to turn challenge into opportunity. This requires the talent to do so.

I think we should also point out what we are very good at in our State. We have a globally leading position in variable renewable energy as well as the circular economy. The University of Adelaide is the most hydrogen intensive research university, and the State is building the largest green hydrogen electrolyser in the world.

One of the challenges for any jurisdiction or organisation is the impact of their supply chain, and at the University we are creating knowledge through our own operations and also research to positively address this.

Can you please explain the role of ISER – the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Resources?

Sustainability is a value and an ethos that the University of Adelaide embeds into our daily actions, our choices on campus, and in our research. Sustainability guides the decisions we make, the way we interact, and what we stand for.

We have three institutes directly addressing sustainability issues: ISER, the Environment Institute and the Waite Research Institute.

ISER is the brand champion of University of Adelaide-wide initiatives and key portal of research capabilities within sustainability, energy and resources. We coordinate the University’s Sustainability Research Strategy and lead large-scale collaborative research efforts across our academic ecosystem.

ISER leads globally transformative research that overcomes complexity, drives change, and creates value for a more sustainable future. We want to accelerate solutions that deliver sustainability, equity and prosperity for the planet and its people, underpinned by breakthrough research.

ISER has 110 affiliate researchers across the University as of January 2023: 28 in the Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics; 12 in the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences; and 70 in the Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Technology. Obviously there are many areas of research need. How is the University deciding which areas to prioritise?

The Sustainability FAME Research Strategy and the University sustainability strategy 2030 – Here for Good, build upon the

University’s Strategic Plan, Future Making

The University consults with internal and external stakeholders to align areas of research excellence, relevance and societal impact with our capacity and capability to deliver on these together.

If you had to pick just two really big problems, some big research the University is working on to help the planet, what would you say they are?

Future Energies such as green hydrogen: production from seawater and from photovoltaic cells, storage at near ambient temperature and pressure and scaling its utilisation.

The work we are doing with the primary sectors: sustainable agriculture and land and seascape management together with carbon and biodiversity markets as well as more sustainable mining.

“The planet, where it can be impacted by humans, has never been in such a dire state.”

“Changing the world” no joke

On a challenging day, Kristin Raman and her colleagues sometimes joke that it’s tough changing the world.

While that is said entirely in jest, in her own “small way”, as she describes it, she is proud to be playing a part.

“I didn’t set out with the goal of working in sustainability, but I guess it has always been a part of my psyche.

“As a family, my parents were involved in that world and it was just part of life for us to be active and thoughtful about the environment.

“I’ve worked in the energy industry ever since I graduated from the University of Adelaide, so it perhaps makes sense that my two sides have come together.”

Kristin – known as Krissy – is Head of Strategy and Sustainability at Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (AGIG).

One of her key projects was the development of Hydrogen Park South Australia (HyP SA) in the Tonsley Innovation Centre – the first facility in Australia to deliver a renewable hydrogen blended gas to customers on the existing gas network.

“The hydrogen comes from water split into its two components using sustainablysourced electricity,” she explains.

The “green” hydrogen is then blended with existing gas supply and initially supplied 700 gas customers in Mitchell Park. That is expanding to a further 3,000 gas connections – including businesses –this year.

The gas is also being pumped into tube trailers (long storage tubes on the back of semi-trailers) and transported for use by industry and, in the future, the transport sector.

The goal, of course, is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and find sustainable energy sources other than fossil fuels.

“We have other facilities around the country that are in various stages of development, and we are also working to connect biomethane facilities,” Krissy said. “It’s all part of the industry’s overall efforts to help to green up Australia’s energy mix.

“These are small steps in the right direction which AGIG likes to share with the wider community. Many people don’t know that

renewable and carbon-neutral gases exist, or that our existing gas distribution networks can deliver them, so it is important to engage with the community and think about what more we can do to deliver the energy transition in a responsible way.”

Since operations began, about 3,000 people, from students to Ambassadors, have toured HyP SA.

“We know there is a long way to go for Australia, and the world, to meet emissions targets, but we are pleased that we have the opportunity to be working on something that can help us get there.”

Krissy Raman graduated from the University of Adelaide in 2006 with an Honours degree in Chemical Engineering and a Bachelor’s degree in Finance. She continues to have links to the University through her role on the Industry Advisory Board for the Centre for Energy Technology, and her role on the Research Advisory Committee for the Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre.

Kristin Raman - Courtesy of Matt Turner/Newspix

Making a difference

By Eleanor Danenberg

Tiahni Adamson, a Torres Strait Islander woman descended from the Kaurareg Nation of Thursday Island, is a passionate wildlife conservation biologist who graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Wildlife Conservation Biology) from the University of Adelaide in the class of 2020.

Tiahni is now focused on sustainable aquaculture production as the Lead Community Engagement Officer at CH4Global.

Tiahni also lectures at the University of South Australia, is the State Coordinator of Seed Mob, Australia’s only First Nationsled youth climate justice group, and is a youth dialogue member for the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

In her career so far, Tiahni has worked on programs for the CSIRO, including the Aboriginal Summer School for Excellence in Technology and Sciences. She has also worked for the Department of Primary Industries and Regions as a Sea Ranger and a Fisheries Compliance Support Officer, where she fostered relationships between First Nations communities and government.

In 2019, Tiahni trained as a Climate Reality Leader under Al Gore.

These experiences have taken Tiahni from sea to land, surrounded by natural wildlife in regional and remote communities both within Australia and internationally to

understand, learn and develop projects that nurture marginalised nations.

Finding and progressing technologies, ideologies and solutions that can positively impact climate change, and learning alongside Elders on Country, have been highlights for Tiahni.

“Impacting climate change at scale and having the best outcomes for First Nations communities to be uplifted and nurtured along the journey; whatever it takes to do this, is my career goal,” Tiahni says.

“Currently I am achieving this through my work with CH4 Global, with the growth and use of the Australian red seaweed Asparagopsis to reduce methane emissions in livestock ruminants.

“Sustainability is living in harmony and coexistence with the land, sea and other beings, in manners that can continue to support all forms of life, generation after generation. Sustainability must tie in with the deep desires of Western culture to accelerate human progress, which requires an unlearning, and then relearning of regenerative practices.”

A prominent role model and next generation leader, Tiahni advocates for the participation of First Nations people and women in STEM careers. She regularly speaks at festivals and conferences and to businesses to communicate climate science and First Nations justice.

In 2022, Tiahni received the Dr Kay Price AM Award for demonstrated excellence in, and ambassadorship for, STEM and she was named a Superstar of STEM by Science and Technology Australia. She was one of two students to be awarded the inaugural Indigenous Time at Sea Scholarship from CSIRO’s Marine National Facility. She also received the Tirkapena Indigenous Award, a distinguished alumni award from the University of Adelaide.

In February 2023, Tiahni was nominated for the Rising Star Award in The Advertiser, Sunday Mail and SkyCity’s Woman of the Year Awards.

“As First Nations people, we have a really deeply ingrained wisdom, knowledge and understanding of the Earth and its systems,” Tiahni said when interviewed by the University’s alumni team after her Tirkapena Indigenous Award win.

“We’ve cared for this country since time immemorial, and it’s only over the last 230 or so years that we’ve had such detrimental damage.

“I think my proudest moments in these spaces are when I come across young people who have heard me speak at events about what we’re doing in the climate space, and then seeing them grow.

“This wider impact, that’s greater than myself, is what makes me feel really proud because it’s not an objective that I ever had in mind. Seeing the potential for inspiring other people to create positive change is probably my favourite thing.

“Success comes down to impact and positive change and the longevity of that change as well.

“So often we try to implement projects in society that are short lived and not long lasting. For me success is about real, transactional and tangible changes that affect big systems.”

Eleanor Danenberg is Marketing and Communications Coordinator for the University’s Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics.

“Sustainability is living in harmony and coexistence with the land, sea and other beings.”

Meeting the challenge

By Anton Middelberg

Climate change presents one of the most significant global challenges facing society, necessitating a collective and comprehensive response. As part of the global community, universities have a critical role in helping the world through leadership in research, teaching and engagement with the community.

As a research-intensive institution, the University of Adelaide and its innovative researchers continue to use our skills, knowledge, and expertise to explore and develop possible answers to pressing questions on how to ensure a sustainable future.

As part of this approach, we have recently finalised a new research plan - the FAME Sustainability Strategy - which is aimed at accelerating solutions to deliver sustainability, equity and prosperity for the planet and its people, underpinned by breakthrough research.

FAME stands for ‘Foci and Magnets for Excellence’ and comprises a series of strategies which prioritise our research at scale and to deliver positive and lasting impacts for our State, nation and beyond through research excellence and its translation.

As the global population has grown, our demands on natural systems have multiplied. Our natural ecosystems are under great pressure and the world is experiencing a rapid loss of biodiversity, global land degradation, increased waste and pollution, and food and water insecurity, all exacerbated by a rapidly changing climate. This in turn has obvious effects on our human systems, exacerbating poverty and inequality, and fuelling disruption to global peace and justice.

Deep and lasting transformation of our social, ecological, industrial, and cultural systems is required to address these challenges and improve the sustainability of life on Earth. This is an enormous challenge that requires changes in practices, values, education and governance across communities, industries and government.

In this context, the University of Adelaide is a champion of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, as a call

for action. Our new FAME Sustainability Strategy links to these important goals, and prioritises our world-class research across many disciplines, from public policy to improving food production to creating new renewable energy sources to influencing behavioural change.

Discovery and development of breakthrough sustainability solutions are core to the University’s strategy –as is educating the next generation of research and industry leaders with the skills to navigate the complex decisions and governance challenges to deliver true sustainability.

We believe that our research across the University’s faculties and research institutes has the capability to drive this agenda. The FAME Sustainability Strategy outlines five research missions focussing on urgent and important cross-cutting thematic areas:

Research Mission 1: Resilient, healthy and equitable communities

Seeks to reduce global inequality and cultivate an inclusive transformation to a sustainable future. This includes exploring human rights-based approaches, improving access to justice, promoting inclusivity and participation, championing indigenous voice and traditional knowledge, resilient infrastructure and planning, disaster risk reduction, and enhancing the wellbeing of vulnerable populations through improved health systems.

Research Mission 2: Responsible resource production and consumption

Explores innovative systems and solutions required to improve production and consumption – from the extraction of critical minerals through to the systems required to optimise food production and water use. Investigates how we can do more with less to ensure the sustainable and efficient use of a natural resource.

Research Mission 3: Planetary health and biodiversity restoration

Focuses on planetary health, including the restoration and resilience of biodiversity and ecosystems. This includes pioneering new knowledge into planetary health, biodiversity restoration solutions, nature-

based climate adaptation, and the true valuation of ecosystem services. It will also champion indigenous and traditional knowledge to strengthen ecological research.

Research Mission 4: Accelerated access to clean and green technologies

Accelerates the technology, innovation and skills required to transform to a sustainable economy. This includes developing future fuels (including hydrogen) and low emissions technology, as well as reducing inequality through transferable, affordable and accessible technology.

“This is an enormous challenge that requires changes in practices, values, education and governance across communities, industries and government.”

Research Mission 5: Effective sustainability governance and decision-making

Encourages and enables sustainable governance. This includes research into reimagining governance structures, responsive policy and regulatory design, mobilising green and climate finance, capacity development and behavioural change, and enhanced decision-making tools. It will also examine the co-benefits, trade-offs and tough choices required to navigate sustainability issues.

By adopting this wide-ranging, multidisciplinary approach to transformative research outcomes, the University seeks to engage with the community in this global endeavour.

Professor Anton Middelberg is the University of Adelaide’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Research).

Further information on ISER, and our guide to sustainability experts at the University of Adelaide, available via this QR code.

Environment report card – failing our planet

Professor Andy Lowe, Interim Director, Environment Institute, gives his sobering overview of the state of the planet.

With the recent waves of climate extremes and disasters – floods, drought and fires – it is clear that we are now living beyond the boundaries of many of Earth’s life support systems, and we are impacting the health and wellbeing of people and our planet.

But this isn’t the first time we’ve faced serious environmental issues.

During the height of industrial revolution in Europe, mills pumped out coal dust causing pollution and smog on a massive scale, shortening the lives of workers and broader communities.

More recently, aerial nitrous and sulphurous pollution from power stations and carbofluoro compounds from industrial processes have produced acid rain and ozone hole depletion, driving forest loss and elevated cancer rates.

But the challenges of today are on a truly global and multinational scale. So, let’s suck the lemon and take a cold hard look at the key issues we are facing and what we can potentially do about them.

The challenge ahead

A number of intergovernmental organisations have documented, in detail, the problems we are facing, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. But the scale of these issues has perhaps been best captured by the planetary boundaries concept developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

In a simple graphical way, major environmental challenges have been examined and then considered as to whether we are within Earth’s coping mechanisms (i.e. within planetary boundaries) or are currently operating outside our planetary coping boundary. The assessment, first undertaken in 2009 by Johan Rockström who led a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists, has been updated a number of times to examine key environmental threats, including:

Climate change

Perhaps the largest challenge of our generation. The uncontrolled release of greenhouse gases is leading to runaway climate change that is driving increased climatic extremes such as droughts, floods, ocean inundation and bushfires.

While international agreements to decarbonise energy, transport, industry and agricultural processes are being developed for 2050, we will need to reach many of these targets by 2030 to stay within a safe temperature rise of 1.5oC, but this target is looking increasingly challenging.

Ocean acidification

Around a quarter of the CO2 we emit goes into the ocean. Here it forms carbonic acid, acidifying the surface water, locking up carbonate and making it difficult for shell forming marine life (coral and shellfish) to grow. Losses of these marine ecosystems through ocean acidification could potentially lead to drastic reductions in fish stocks. Reining in greenhouse gas emissions will stop both climate change and ocean acidification.

Biodiversity loss and extinctions

Changes to natural ecosystems from human activities have been more rapid in the past 50 years than at any other time in human history. The main drivers of change are our demand for food, water, and natural resources.

The current high rates of species extinction (the most rapid in the history of life on Earth) can be slowed by efforts to protect the biosphere, enhance habitat extent and quality, and improve connectivity between ecosystems.

Land system change

Forests, grasslands, wetlands and other vegetation are being converted into agricultural and urban land uses all over the planet. This change is one of the main driving forces behind biodiversity loss, and the cycling of water, carbon, nitrogen and other elements.

Globally, including in Australia, a target of 30% natural landcover is being promoted to help restore balance between natural and managed systems.

Freshwater and hydrological cycles

On a monumental and global scale, we have modified river flows and changed water vapour dynamics. These shifts in the hydrological cycles have been abrupt, and water is becoming increasingly scarce, leading to water stress and conflict.

A system of consumptive freshwater use, including allocations for environmental and cultural flows, is required to maintain the overall resilience of Earth systems and to avoid the risk of ‘cascading’ local and regional thresholds.

Nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans

The biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus have been radically changed largely due to the industrial-scale production and application of agricultural fertiliser. However, rather than promoting crop growth, nitrogen and phosphorous released into our atmosphere pollutes waterways, coastal zones and terrestrial biospheres, leading to oxygen starvation and ‘dead zones’.

Reduced and targeted fertiliser applications are being developed through agtech and nano science developments.

Chemical pollution and the release of novel entities

We are still releasing large quantities of toxic and long-lived substances into our environment, including plastics, heavy metal compounds and radioactive materials. Even when the uptake of these pollutants is at sub-lethal levels for organisms, they can reduce fertility and cause permanent genetic damage. For plastic pollution alone, eight million tonnes enter our ocean from rivers each year, and we are all ingesting microplastics through sea salt, tap water, and shellfish.

Whilst we are currently unable to set a single chemical pollution boundary, it is clear we need to quantify and reduce this risk.

Atmospheric aerosol loading

A recently proposed planetary boundary, the impact of atmospheric aerosols are still being understood. Aerosols play a critical role in the hydrological cycle affecting cloud formation and monsoon systems. Aerosols can also have an adverse effect on many living organisms. Inhaling highly polluted air causes roughly 800,000 people to die prematurely each year. While many relationships between aerosols, climate and ecosystems are well established, many causal links are yet to be determined.

Stratospheric ozone depletion

The ozone layer filters out ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun. A thinner layer allows more UV radiation to reach the earth causing skin cancer in humans and damage to terrestrial and marine biological systems. Fortunately, because of the actions taken as a result of the Montreal Protocol, we are on a path to repair the Antarctic ozone hole to allow us to stay within this boundary.

Andy Lowe - Photo by Cath Leo

Bird surveys Kangaroo Island - Tom Hunt

Rising to the challenge

Andy Lowe gives a brief snapshot of the vital environmental research – and actions –underway at our University.

The problems we face as a planetary species are daunting in scale and volume – but can be solved through a combination of research (to identify the problem and innovate new products or practises that solve the problem) and socio-economic-political frameworks required to drive change in systems.

The Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide is developing a broad range of research-based solutions for the planetary boundaries we face, including:

• Restor ing our terrestrial and marine ecosystems;

• Prepar ing for and developing resilient ecosystem plans in the face of fires and floods;

• Developing more efficient water use systems and policies;

• Protecting our biodiversity from deforestation, illegal logging, illegal wildlife trade and over exploitation;

• Examining biodiversity extinction dynamics and developing conservation plans;

• Designing production and urban landscapes that bring back nature, biodiversity and nature’s benefits to people.

Developing solutions that solve multiple issues while harnessing multiple benefits are more likely to be adopted and successfully implemented.

Research to tackle the biodiversity crisis

The loss of biodiversity is perhaps one of the greatest environmental challenges we face. Extinction is forever, and the loss of biodiversity also means the loss of important ecosystem services – also known as nature’s benefits to people – that biodiversity and natural habitats bring, including clean air and water, soil integrity, carbon sequestration and nutrient recycling, pollination and a range of human physical and mental wellbeing benefits from being in and around nature.

My research group (www.growelab.com) is passionate about developing applied research to address some of these most pressing environmental challenges.

We work mainly on plant and forest ecosystems to create holistic solutions for ecosystems worldwide.

We work in three main areas: discovering and protecting biodiversity; managing and conserving biodiversity; and valuing and restoring biodiversity.

Discover and protect

It’s amazing to think that we still don’t know how many species there are on Earth. Best estimates are around 10 million but we have only put names to around 15% of these. The rest, mainly insects, we refer to as the dark taxa – we know they’re out there but we don’t really know what they are or where they are.

Recently DNA methods to help identify species – DNA barcoding – have made the task of identifying species quicker and easier and building an ID reference library can help with hard to identify species.

Case study: We’ve applied these methods to help control the trade in illegally logged timber products. Our group has been part of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime working group to develop scientific methods to identify timber in supply chains, and we have also been working with a Singapore based company, DoubleHelix Tracking Technologies, to apply these methods to global supply chains. Manage and conserve

Biological diversity, including genetic diversity is an important asset to maintain. Natural ecosystems, agriculture and forestry, and other natural resource value chains all depend on the management and conservation of plant diversity. For natural systems, genetic diversity can help maintain resilient populations in the face of environmental pressures, such as climate change.

For managed and exploited species, this variation is the important basis for selection of new crop plants and varieties that have unique features and adaptations. We collaborate with international partners to develop and raise awareness of tools and best practices for the management of biological resources.

Case study: Indigenous plants of Australasia are becoming increasingly valuable crop and forest assets worldwide. But harnessing their genetic potential will require effective and socially responsible management of their seeds, strains, and digital sequences.

As a co-lead of the DivSeek International Network’s Regional Hub for Australasia, our lab coordinates a team of crop scientists and policy experts to understand the gaps and opportunities in the way we utilise plant genetic resources in our region.

Value and restore

In the coming century, we will need to restore world ecosystems and adapt to a changing climate.

Our group develops the restoration practices required to recover lost ecosystems and build communities resilient to future challenges.

The value of services provided by intact ecosystems is still poorly studied. Our work quantifies the value of a range of ecosystem services (such as pollination, microbial function, and carbon sequestration) to help motivate restoration programs.

Native oyster reef renewal

Case study: Many of our food crops depend on feral honey bees and Australian native bees for pollination. But these crucial pollinators are at risk. Agricultural landscapes tend to offer little food for them when crops are not in flower. What’s more, Varroa mite incursions could wipe out feral honey bees altogether.

To safeguard pollination services, our group led the Secure Pollination through Revegetation project. We created a DNA barcode library to identify pollen collected by bees, worked with industry partners to design and implement revegetation strategies for agricultural landscapes, and explored the link between plant diversity and pollinator diversity.

People power –how you can help

A critical role of the University is to help convene the societal debate, and develop solutions to the problems we are facing. It’s no use researchers spending time and effort if they are developing irrelevant solutions or develop potentially useful solutions that then sit on the laboratory shelf and are not adopted.

Regional groups have the capacity to develop locally applied solutions that can ultimately overcome global challenges. Using this ethos, the Environment Institute works with local communities and partners to develop solutions and has helped support a new mode of community engagement over the past year through the Dynamic State initiative (dynamicstate.com.au).

By bringing together a diverse range of scientists, artists and entrepreneurs, as well as community and local government leaders, we have developed a framework to tackle global issues.

Members of the Environment Institute are passionate, bold and interdisciplinary.

Why not get in touch with a research idea, collaboration or if you’d like to help us by volunteering your time and skills. We value creativity and a healthy attitude toward balancing life and work. We strive for diversity and aim to create a positive work environment that fosters the personal and professional development of our team.

Please contact us at: environment@adelaide.edu.au

Bushfire Impact Kangaroo Island - Tom Hunt

Here for good

By Melissa Nursey-Bray

The University is committed to a sustainable future, and has ambitions to lead and deliver positive and sustainable change for good. Solving known and evolving problems of today, and preparing our emerging leaders for tomorrow, is our strength.

The previous Campus Sustainability Plan (2016-2020) outlined the University’s first coordinated suite of strategies to reduce carbon emissions and engage the campus community in sustainable action. Tangible outcomes from this include 30% of waste diverted from landfill, 2MW of solar energy generation on-campus, and we have reduced our on-campus building energy use by 18% since 2014.

We derive renewable energy from our rooftops and solar farm at our Roseworthy campus to augment the world-leading supply of renewable energy from South Australia’s impressive and increasingly decarbonised grid.

This work has been recognised at a State and national level and has provided the University with a foundation for delivering low-carbon campus operations.

But like most – we must do much more. The University has created our new Sustainability Strategy to help accelerate sustainable transitions and contribute to global solutions for health, peace and prosperity of the planet.

Called Here for Good, our strategy provides a framework not only for how the University of Adelaide can lead sustainability transitions on campus, but also for how we can become a university of choice for sustainability education and breakthrough research translated for environmental benefit.

The objective of the strategy is to embed sustainability across the institution in all decision-making, and to arm our graduates, communities and government leaders with the knowledge and innovations to adapt well and prosper across generations. As a signatory of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) since 2016, the University is well placed to help businesses, industries, governments and future generations in progressing sustainable transitions locally and globally.

Our world-class researchers and teachers are already building sustainable pathways to address the issues of climate change, food security, water security, biodiversity, health and housing. Here for Good builds on this to ensure we respond to the SDGs through our research, teaching, community outreach and campus operations. Central themes throughout the strategy are how the University will achieve global impact, lead by example, encourage transdisciplinary research and teaching, and unite to achieve not only our own community but broader societal sustainability goals.

The University of Adelaide supports sustainable transitions through generating new ideas, researching solutions and preparing graduates with capabilities to solve complex problems. Global environmental change challenges every aspect of our lives and can only be effectively addressed by collaboration across a multitude of disciplines. We are continuing to build a comprehensive and integrated portfolio of research that addresses our most pressing local, regional and global environmental challenges to achieve transformational change for good.

Aerial view of the Roseworthy solar farm

The development of our strategy has been guided by advice and feedback from staff, students, the Sustainability Strategy Steering Committee, and our broader community. It serves as a signal that we wish to partner with our community, with industry and the wider South Australian society to turn our ambitions into reality.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived in this country for over 60,000 years and in Caring for Country, are experts in sustainability. Across every element of our Sustainability Strategy, we seek to learn from cultural knowledge and make positive change with an ethos of Caring for Country and culture in our heads and our hearts.

The decision to act and put the University on a more sustainable path is not a hard one to make. In fact, it is not really a choice at all but an imperative. Every fraction of a degree of global warming we avoid lessens the impact on future generations. In 2017, the world had already warmed by one degree from pre-industrial levels. We must act with speed and scale. The University of Adelaide is up for the challenge, and in a position to help our communities and partners with their aspirational sustainability transitions.

We have set a target to accelerate decarbonisation efforts within our campus footprint by achieving net zero by 2025 and carbon neutrality by 2030. Our commitment to responsible investment includes a transition plan to divest from all direct fossil fuel investments by the end of 2024. We have targets addressing responsible procurement and reduction of waste, sustainable transition and decarbonisation efforts within our campus operations, and revegetation and biodiversity on our campuses.

Our cumulatively greatest contribution to society accrues through our educational activities and the lifetime contributions alumni make to society. We have a critical role to play in supporting the learning and development of the next generation of world leaders. Moving forward, all graduates will be exposed to sustainability considerations in their degree, and we will embed sustainability in our graduate attributes and in relevant education programs across the University.

Here for Good outlines the University’s commitments and vision for a sustainable future that is embedded across our Institution. You can find the strategy and more about how you can join us to make transformational change for good on our website.

Professor Melissa Nursey-Bray is the Chair of the University’s Sustainability Strategy Steering Committee. She is Head of Department in Geography, Environment and Population.

“The decision to act and put the University on a more sustainable path is not a hard one to make.

In fact, it is not really a choice at all but an imperative.”

Peter Garrett performing at the Here for Good concert, March

Fast (future) food

By Lee Gaskin

When it comes to the problem of feeding a growing population, the world is facing many challenges.

A 2017 United Nations report predicted 9.8 billion people would inhabit the planet by the year 2050 – a substantial increase from the current estimated figure of more than eight billion.

That’s an extra 1.8 billion mouths to feed, at a time when a changing climate is leading to drier and more arid conditions for farming. Growing food in a sustainable way is the key. This includes less reliance on water and finding alternatives to products that contribute to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Researchers play a pivotal role in assisting primary producer profitability.

“It is through the research, development and extension cycle that many primary producers learn, evolve and adapt to ensure that their production system is as efficient as it can be.”

The University’s Waite campus is home to one of the largest concentrations of agriculture and wine research and teaching expertise in the Southern Hemisphere.

Named in honour of Peter Waite, the Waite Agricultural Research Institute was established on the site in 1924 following the bequest of Urrbrae House and surrounding acres from Peter Waite to the University of Adelaide.

The campus is located on 184 hectares in the Adelaide foothills at Urrbrae, seven kilometres south-east of the Adelaide CBD.

“The School of Agriculture, Food and Wine aims to foster excellence in science education and research,” Jason says.

“We connect scientific excellence with the relevant industry bodies.

“This philosophy guides and inspires our research and teaching programs.

“It takes many years to produce even a millimetre of new soil, yet it can be lost very rapidly through poor management.

“Dirt is a dirty word to those who study soil - the soil should be considered as the Earth’s living skin, and should be treated as a precious resource.”

Tim leads the Soil Ecology Group which is working on a number of projects, including:

• Vineyard soil ecology – funded by Wine Australia, this project is investigating the impacts of under-vine cover crops on vine performance, soil health, soil carbon stocks and vineyard resilience.

• The microbiome project – capitalising on an archive of more than 10,000 soil DNA samples collected from cropping paddocks across the nation, over more than 20 years, and through glasshouse and field trials, this Department of Ag riculture, Fisheries and Forestryfunded project seeks to identify fundamental changes in soil biolog ical communities due to changes in farming systems over the past two decades. This is in collaboration with the South Australian Research and Development Institute.

Australia isn’t immune to these issues with our country’s dry climate and increasing pressure on farmers to produce more with less. This is why researchers from the University of Adelaide are tackling this complex and multi-faceted situation from a multitude of directions.

Professor Jason Able, Head of the University’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, based at the Waite campus, says the impacts of climate change will have a significant impact on food production in Australia.

“Climate change is real and will alter the landscape as we know it in the years ahead,” he says.

“But all this comes at a cost, and such challenges require primary producers to alter their practices continually to ensure they are ahead of the curve and are winning in as many of those years in a typical boom and bust cycle.

“Our extensive international network of academic and commercial collaborators provide a stimulating and unique environment for student training.”

Nothing is more important in agriculture than soil. It’s the basis of all plant life and is essential for developing reliable crops.

Tim Cavagnaro is a Professor in Soil Ecology at the University of Adelaide’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, and the Associate Dean (Research Partnerships) for the Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Technology.

“Healthy soil is the backbone of productive agricultural, and indeed natural, ecosystems,” he says.

“The soil, and the diverse communities of organisms that it is home to provide essential ecosystem services that our very existence depends upon.

• Urban agriculture – a key strategy and impor tant area of investigation for global food secur ity. Urban agriculture, the practice of cultivating and producing food in towns and cities, has the potential to build community resilience in the face of climate change.

As well as research into the health of soil, another important project has discovered a new gene in barley and wheat that controls the angle of root growth in soil.

This research opens the door to new cereal varieties with deeper roots that are less susceptible to drought and nutrient stress.

“The angle at which barley roots grow into the soil enables them to capture water and nutrients from different soil layers,” said Dr Haoyu (Mia) Lou, joint first author on a study that was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Dirt is a dirty word to those who study soil - the soil should be considered as the Earth’s living skin, and should be treated as a precious resource.”

“Shallow roots enable plants to capture phosphate and surface water, while deeper, straighter roots can stabilise yield by accessing deeper water and nitrate. They can also bury carbon deeper in the soil.”

Dr Lou undertook the research as part of a joint PhD program with the University of Nottingham.

Other projects that champion a sustainable future include:

• Professor Rachel Bur ton is leading research into the properties of industrial hemp and its many end uses, from providing food and building materials, to cosmetics, clothing and medicine.

• Professor Matthew Gilliham, Director of the new Centre for Excellence in Plants for Space, is leading a research centre funded by the Australian Research Council and led by the University of Adelaide that will investigate how to grow plants in space. This research will also have important implications for sustainable agriculture in harsh environments here on Earth.

• Dr Jenny Mortimer, Associate Professor of Plant Synthetic Biology, is leading research into the properties of duckweed – a high protein, nutrientr ich plant species that could be used as a protein substitute for meat products for astronauts

So, whether it’s on Earth, or up in space, researchers from the University of Adelaide are playing their part in helping to uncover solutions on how to keep food on the table for generations to come.

Lee Gaskin is Media Coordinator for the University of Adelaide.

“Climate change is real and will alter the landscape as we know it in the years ahead.”

Jason Able at the Plant Accelarator, Waite campus

Edible insects - for our plate and our planet

Would you consider adding crunchy crickets into your weeknight meals?

How about grinding some mealworms into a stock to add a bit of umami to your favourite soup, while also making a small step towards reducing your environmental impact?

The question of how the human race feeds an ever-growing population in the future is what led food scientist Ishka Bless, a joint PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide and the University of Nottingham, to investigate what makes people so squeamish when the idea of eating insects is raised.

“We’re at quite a pivotal stage in terms of our food systems and how we approach them,” she says.

“There is a growing research focus on a protein transition, which would see us reduce our reliance on traditional animalbased food products, and increase our consumption of existing and new protein alternatives, such as insects.

“That’s not to say that everyone needs to stop eating meat, but perhaps explore incorporating alternatives in our everyday diet.”

The first stage of the project, conducted early last year, aimed to establish a sensory lexicon for edible insects commercially available in Australia.

“Introducing any new food into our diet can be hard, but insects present some additional challenges.”

Smashed avo bagel with mealworm furikake

As an open resource, this provides standardised language for describing the flavour and texture of edible insects, as well as a useful tool for industry and research.

“We recruited people to be trained in tasting and describing edible insects such as crickets (Acheta domesticus) and mealworms (Tenebrio molitor),” Ishka says.

“Initially the participants were asked to find words to describe the aroma, flavour and texture of different samples.

“We then combined and refined those words to generate a lexicon, which was used to develop sensory profiles for different insect species and their common preservation and cooking methods.”

The next step is compositional analysis. This will provide a greater understanding of the relationship between insect diet and preparation with nutritional and aroma profiles.

This will be done in collaboration with the CSIRO’s Food Innovation Centre at Werribee, Victoria.

“Aroma compounds have an impact on end flavour,” Ishka says.

“We’re currently conducting studies to understand the impact of what insects eat and how we prepare them on their taste and nutritional benefits.”

Once sensory profiles and chemical analysis are complete, the final step is identifying what is impacting adoption.

This involves understanding what insects and preparation methods consumers would prefer and how they would eat them. Providing solutions to encourage people to add insects to their everyday diet will follow.

“One of the biggest issues we have is that in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, insects have negative connotations,” Ishka says.

“That’s why people have an aversion to eating insects, even if they are farm-raised specifically for human consumption and are completely safe for us to eat.

“To overcome this, we need to try and present insects in the context of food.

“Rather than showing someone just a cricket, we are exploring ways to make people more familiar with insects as an ingredient. For example, providing

information about the flavour and texture of crickets, and how they can be used – such as in stir-fry or as a powder in soup stock so that you can’t see it.”

The researchers will use face-reading technology to analyse the emotional response people have when presented with insects in food.

Ishka expects to have the study completed by mid-2025, but she knows changing longheld perceptions will take much longer.

“Introducing any new food into our diet can be hard, but insects present some additional challenges that we are working to overcome,” she says.

Cricket okonomiyaki

“One of the biggest issues we have is that in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, insects have negative connotations,”

Goodbye to Grenache? So long Shiraz?

New wines a hot topic

By Simon Behenna

Growing up, Sue Bastian (Associate Professor in Oenology and Sensory Studies at the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine) remembers her parents being teetotallers … except for when the Vicar came around, which was often, and then they’d wheel out the drinks trolley and pour glasses of sherry from the crystal decanter. Sometimes Sue’s father would allow her a tiny sip after a Saturday lunch, but it wasn’t until later in life that she realised there was much more to wine than cream sherry.

In just a few short decades, our nation’s familial fondness for sherry all but died out. Mid-century migration sparked a cultural change in the palates of Australians, and the wine industry today is a significant contributor to the Australian economy and culture. Our taste for wine, though, still seems relatively predictable. According to 2021-22 data from Wine Australia, the top-selling still wine varieties are Sauvignon Blanc (18%), Shiraz (18%), Chardonnay (10%), Cabernet Sauvignon (9%) and Pinot Noir (6%).

Dr Richard Muhlack, Senior Lecturer, who teaches students at the Waite campus about the growing need for sustainable production, argues that these varieties may not be sustainable for a hotter, drier future.

“The challenge in Australia is that we’ve got significant production located in regions which are already hot and dry and which are going to become hotter and drier,” he says.

“So if inland regions like the Riverland, Sunraysia, and the Riverina, which produce about two-thirds of Australia’s wine, get hotter and receive less rainfall, and if there’s less water accessible through irrigation from the Murray and other river systems, then that’s going to be a pretty big hit.”

Enter what, for now at least, are referred to as ‘alternative’ varieties of vines which are more suited to our harsher, drier conditions and poorer soils.

“If we want those regions to continue to grow grapes, then we need to look at alternative varieties,” says Richard. “We’ve historically grown varieties that were popular in France, but the growing conditions in France aren’t the same as they are in, say, Berri. We need to be looking at varieties that come from warmer locales, like in Spain or Greece, where they’re better adapted to warmer growing conditions.”

climate change. Kerry Wilkinson (Professor of Oenology) is particularly interested in how vineyards and wineries can manage one of the catastrophes that comes with warmer and drier climates: bushfires.

“Bushfires are a really wicked problem that’s going to keep occurring as a consequence of climate change,” says Kerry. “In recent years, it’s not just an issue for Australian grape growers and winemakers; we’ve seen fires in the US, South Africa, Canada, some parts of Europe and Chile. We are going to experience more bushfires, we just don’t

With many alternative varieties already commercially available, the onus now is upon the producers to create awareness, and consumers to try a broader range of wines. “We need wines to match our very outdoorsy, Mediterranean climate,” says Sue. “There are many alternative varieties that can be produced into a refined wine with good structure, but are perhaps also lighter and fruity and approachable. On a 36oC day, for example, who wouldn’t prefer a slightly chilled, medium-bodied red over a big, heavy one? We’ve done consumer research and every wine that we’ve shown – purely Australian wines made from these alternative varieties – has been loved.”

With a healthy international interest in our innovations, another challenge is to drive the research and innovation to meet global challenges, principally those associated with

If, for example, you always select Syrah, you’ll probably find Montepulciano moreish; if you covet Cabernet, it’s comparable to Touriga Nacional; if you get into Grenache, you’ll probably like Nero D’avola.

know when or where they’re going to occur. “For vineyards that survive fires in close proximity, smoke taint becomes a significant issue.

“Through our research, we’re trying to give industry tools with which they can better assess the level of smoke taint and more quickly make decisions about whether they should harvest the grapes, or what kind of remediation strategies might need to be used to reduce the intensity of any perceivable smoke characters in the finished wine.

Kerry Wilkinson, Professor of Oenology

Coombe Vineyard,Waite campus

“Over the years we’ve been evaluating just about anything we can think of to mitigate the impact of smoke exposure, whether that be protective coverings or sprays in the vineyard, through to remediation strategies that try to remove smoke taint either during the fermentation process or from a finished wine.

“We use our expertise in chemistry and sensory science to evaluate those techniques to give industry confidence in strategies that are going to work, and to support them to make decisions before a bushfire event happens so that they know that if smoke exposure occurs they are prepared to evaluate and manage the impact.”

Staff and students at the Waite campus know all too well how changes in culture, climate and consumer choice sway their industry’s direction. The challenge is to stay ahead of the changes, and for education and research to focus on how practices in the vineyard, and in the winery, impact the composition of wine and the sensory properties.

“When I worked in industry,” says Richard, “I interacted with winemakers and viticulturists who, when confronted with technical or sustainability challenges, were often not really sure who they should speak to or how they might go about addressing them.

‘What appealed to me about applying for my job here at Waite, moving from industry to the University, was the opportunity to teach and impact students before they embarked on their careers.

“I see the work we do here at the Waite campus as a fulfilling opportunity to help put our students in a good place and to really set them up so they’ll at least have a leg up on the generation before, and be better equipped to tackle the sustainability challenges of the future.”

“The challenge in Australia is that we’ve got significant production located in regions which are already hot and dry and which are going to become hotter and drier.”

Dr Simon Behenna is the University’s Internal Communications Coordinator.

A wine by many other names…

By Briony Hoare

After graduating, I began working in the Southcorp Wines graduate program at Lindeman’s Karadoc winery in Victoria. One of the benefits of working in Mildura in the late 1990s as a young, single professional with a disposable income was the regular joy of dining at Stefano’s restaurant.

Stefano had a cellar (really just a hole) at the back of his restaurant, full of random wines with really weird names that I couldn’t pronounce and strange Italian varieties that I’d never heard of … and I fell in love with them. What I found so compelling was the texture and the subtlety and the way they worked so beautifully with food.

After the millennium clicked over and the world didn’t end, I travelled to Italy to work and learnt about Nebbiolo, Dolcetto, Moscato and Barbera in the north, and Cortese in central Italy. When I returned to Australia, and again worked with Southcorp, any time there was a new variety coming up on the production forecast I was there pestering the group winemaker to have a chance to work with them. I made Sangiovese at Langhorne Creek, and Tempranillo and Nebbiolo in Mudgee – it was really exciting to work with those varieties.

When I left Southcorp to start my family, I was consulting to some growers in Langhorne Creek and spotted some odd looking vines and asked what they were. It turns out they’d been to southern Italy in the late 1990s to explore varieties that would better suit their sunny region which often experienced early dews, and acid challenges in their fruit. So they planted Pinot Grigio, Fiano, Greco and Aglianico but seemed a bit unsure about what to do with them. So I said, “I know what to do with them!” and that was the beginning of Beach Road Wines for me.

We made Aglianico and Pinot Grigio in 2006, Fiano in 2008, Greco in 2009 and we’ve been going ever since really. Fiano, Nero, Vermentino, Aglianico, Montepulciano, Prosecco … all of those varieties tick so many boxes in terms of natural acids, low disease problems, low water requirements, heat tolerance and higher yield. Vermentino in particular is just fabulous. The grapes have got a strong skin so you get fewer disease issues, they’re big chunky bunches, it has a huge yield compared to say Chardonnay, and it makes a cracking glass of wine. As a wine, Vermentino should be pushing every bottle of Sav Blanc off the shelf because it’s such a good drink!

When we opened our cellar door in McLaren Vale in 2014, a lot of people hadn’t heard of the varieties we were working with, but they’re definitely a lot more accepted now, and the words don’t seem quite so foreign. This is part of the beauty of our culture: we’re always changing and adapting. Briony Hoare is winemaker at Beach Road Wines. She graduated with a Bachelor of Agricultural Sciences (Oenology) in 1997.

Briony Hoare and Spritz - Beach Road Wines

Living and breathing sustainability

Sustaining

Aboriginal culture at the University of Adelaide

By Eleanor Danenberg

What do you think when you hear the words ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘sustainability’ together? Do you think of plants, or maybe animals?

The perception that Aboriginal peoples’ knowledge is limited to flora and fauna is a hangover from a settled, colonised world, says Professor Steve Larkin, Pro ViceChancellor Indigenous Engagement at the University of Adelaide.

“To inadvertently limit Indigenous knowledge to things like folklore because they’re meant to be this hunting gathering class of people: they are rather outdated notions of what people think Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people know. There’s an element of power in this: the power of who decides who knows more, or what people are deemed to know.”

Every day, across every faculty, experts from the University of Adelaide are pushing the boundaries of traditional notions of sustainability. The following are just a few examples of members of our community working to sustain Aboriginal music, language, and health, all of which will in turn sustain Aboriginal culture.

Music

Researchers have received a $1 million grant from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Indigenous scheme for a project that will strengthen knowledge, understanding and application of the intricate tuning systems that underpin traditional Indigenous musical practices. Members of the research team from the University include Dr Luke Dollman from the Elder Conservatorium of Music, Mr Grayson Rotumah from the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music, and Ms Eleanor McCall from the Mobile Language Team.

Language

University of Adelaide researchers have contributed to a new website, a comprehensive one-stop-shop for everything about the Kaurna language, the original language of the Adelaide Plains. The Kaurna Warra website (www.kaurnawarra. org.au) is the new project of Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi (KWP) which has been hosted by the University since 2004, and its sister organisation Kaurna Warra Karrpanthi (KWK). The KWP team, Associate Professor Rob Amery, and PhD candidates Susie Greenwood and Jasmin Morley, also worked on the first ever English to Kaurna dictionary, Kaurna Warrapiipa, which was published in 2022.

As Uncle Rodney (Rod) O’Brien, respected Kaurna Elder and Cultural Advisor at the University of Adelaide says: “The Kaurna language revival is vital to the survival of the Kaurna culture in the future. Without our language we lose our essential ingredient, I believe… it defines us and distinguishes us from others.”

Health

Director of the University’s Indigenous Oral Health Unit and Yamatji woman Ms Joanne Hedges is the chief investigator on a study about human papilloma virus (HPV) throat cancers among Indigenous Australians. The initial results found throat cancers caused by HPV are 15 times more prevalent in

Indigenous Australians than young nonIndigenous Australians. The National Health and Medical Research Council has provided $3.1 million in funding so the worldleading study can continue for the next five years, with the research’s ultimate goal being the early detection of HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer before it becomes fatal.

Health through education

Mr Kym Thomas, a Nukunu Elder, is a researcher with the Adelaide Rural Clinical School which coordinates training

“Sustainability is much broader than just key things to do to sustain a healthy physical environment in society. We need to sustain a social, political, moral commitment to achieving equity as a priority; it’s something that the University breathes, it’s got to live its values.”

Right: Cedric Varcoe, Narungga/Ramindjeri/ Ngarrindjeri people, born 1984, Kaurna Wirltu Tidna , 2021, acrylic on canvas (University of Adelaide Library Special Collections, A.VA.2022.1037.1)

placements for medical students across rural, regional and remote South Australia. Currently the Chair of the Nukunu Thura Corporation, and previous Chair of Pika Wiya Health Service Aboriginal Corporation, Kym believes the placements are invaluable for the next generation of doctors to better understand Aboriginal patients and work with them toward healthier futures.

“When I used to take the medical students on cultural immersion trips to the APY Lands, one student said to me, ‘I’ve learned more in this week than I have in a lifetime, when it comes to knowing Aboriginal lifestyles and cultures’. If you don’t understand your topic, if you don’t understand the community, you’ve got no way of being a doctor that’s going to fit in and provide the right treatments, the right referrals, the right advocacy.”

Dr Dylan Coleman, a Kokatha/Greek woman from the far west coast of South Australia, works as a Lecturer in the Yaitya Purruna Indigenous Health Unit, which sits within the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences.

“Aboriginal peoples’ health and wellbeing, with protection of Country at the centre, should be a priority within university systems, but that’s not always the case,” she says.

“Yaitya Purruna has developed an Aboriginal Governance Model that includes all of the schools in the faculty. The Executive Dean has approved this model, and the faculty is supporting its further development by Indigenous staff at the University through a process of community consultation.”

“The improvement and maintenance of Aboriginal health necessarily requires people to be able to make decisions about their own lives and that of their children and grandchildren, to protect Country for the future generations.”

Culture

The University of Adelaide prioritises sustaining Indigenous cultures.

In 2022 as part of National Reconciliation

Week, a new portrait of Uncle Rod O’Brien was unveiled in the Barr Smith Library.

The University has long collected portraits of its leaders and great thinkers, and this was the first portrait of an Indigenous leader to join the University’s Visual Art Collection. The portrait was created by Thomas Readett, an artist and Ngarrindjeri/Arrernte man who was born and raised on Kaurna Country. Uncle Rod’s portrait acknowledges his leadership in the University community on its journey to reconciliation.

“I hope my portrait shows Aboriginal people that I’m valued by the University, and I hope to inspire other Aboriginal people at the University, whether they be students, academics, or professional staff, to reach for the stars and achieve excellence. Maybe one day there will be an Aboriginal Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor,” Uncle Rod reflected at the time.

Also in 2022, a mural was commissioned as a permanent fixture of the University of Adelaide’s North Terrace campus. The mural, Kaurna Wirltu Tidna, was created by

Cedric Varcoe, a Ramindjerri yuraldi man of the Ngarendjerri nation, and Narunga artist.

“The University of Adelaide strives to increase Indigenous cultural affirmation by raising the status and visibility of Indigenous cultures. We also prioritise collaboration with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. By commissioning Cedric’s artwork for the Hub, the heart of our University, we are putting these principles in motion,” Professor Steve Larkin says.

Uncle Rod believes the mural is important for connecting people to Country when they are on campus.

“If you connect to our Country, we believe that you’ll care for our Country, and if you care for our Country, the Country will care for you.”

Professor Larkin believes sustainability is twofold: sustaining the right things, while leaving the wrong things behind.

“It requires robust interrogation –sustaining what we value, want to retain, maintain, build and grow while rendering unsustainable those structures that actually oppress, limit, and perpetuate inequality and disadvantage. This requires us to be quite introspective as an institution; for Indigenous Australians it’s sustainability of organisational commitment,” he said.

“Sustainability is much broader than just key things to do to sustain a healthy physical environment in society.

“We need to sustain the investment of both material resources and of commitment to closing the gap. We’ve got to sustain a material investment that’s commensurate to need, we need to sustain a social, political, moral commitment to achieving equity as a priority; it’s something that the University breathes, it’s got to live its values.”

Eleanor Danenberg is Marketing and Communications Coordinator, Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics.

This 2021 painting of Uncle Rodney O’Brien, Kaurna Elder, now hangs in the University of Adelaide Library. Painting by Thomas Readett, Ngarrindjeri/Arrernte people. (A.VA.2022.1031.jpg)

Re-engaging with the world

By Jess Gallagher

Now that COVID has subsided, and the world is once again open for business, the University of Adelaide has been able to resume its strong engagement around the world.

This work continued virtually and online throughout the pandemic. Now, happily, our students, staff, alumni, and University partners are once again able to re-enter the world and meet each other in person.

The links we share as a University span every continent. The University of Adelaide, as a top 100 university, is a true global citizen with students and staff drawn from around the world – and partnerships in dozens of countries.

These partnerships include linkages with business, governments, researchers and universities with whom we share our expertise, and from whom we learn. Of course, we also have our family of thousands of alumni scattered around the world as our ambassadors.

In recent years, our Adelaide campuses have suffered, along with the rest of the world, from this lack of interconnectivity. Without our international students – indeed for a while without any students – our University was a very different place. Now, gladly, all of our students are back, and life is getting back to normal.

The connections we forge are at every level, each of them important, with many leading to lifelong academic and business partnerships.

A recent example of this is PhD candidate Alison Gill from our School of Agriculture, Food and Wine. Ali has recently returned home after her time at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Fulbright Scholarship recipient.

Her study is particularly pertinent for this issue of Lumen with its focus on sustainability.

Ali wrote about her “privilege” to have been able to spend nine months living and studying in the USA, describing it as “transformative, both professionally and personally”.

“My project investigated the effect of soil management and variety on the productivity of dry-farmed tomatoes,” she wrote.

“Dry farming is a method of growing crops without irrigation during a dry season, historically used by Indigenous groups and Mediterranean farmers.

“My time as a visiting researcher in the Agroecology Lab was an incredible learning experience that expanded my technical and research skills.

“I am confident that my new networks will be important as I navigate my future career.”

No doubt many readers - staff, students, faculty, alumni - will understand what she means from their own experiences, and the vital importance of these linkages.

I have little doubt Ali’s experiences and new academic relationships will continue to evolve – and her research in the field of arid farming has obvious applications to our own State as we learn how to adapt to our changing climate.

Forming face-to-face bonds like these are exactly why the Vice-Chancellor, senior leaders, faculty heads and I will undertake five missions this year – to countries including India, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, USA, UK, France and Germany. These missions are a critical way for us to continue to strengthen our relationships with our alumni as well as attract research and funding, and forge ongoing and new linkages with universities.

This ongoing relationship development has already created numerous fruitful partnerships and collaborations which are ongoing and significant.

Some snapshots include:

Vietnam – carbon removal

The University is an active partner in a project to establish a facility in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta to turn waste biomass from agricultural activities into biochar. Biochar is a durable form of permanent carbon storage which can also be used as soil conditioning, water filtration and as an animal feed that lowers emissions.

This work, led by Dr Nam Nghiep Tran, Associate Dean, International Strategic Partnerships (South East Asia), within the Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Technology, aims to create green jobs, improve livelihoods and reduce air and water pollution in the area.

Separately, the University recently took a group of students on a study tour to Vietnam, funded under the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan. They investigated sustainable water management, hosted by key partners including the Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Can Tho University and the Ho Chi Minh University of Technology.

Global collaboration - Plants for Space

Our University now has a new research centre – the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre for Excellence in Plants for Space (P4S).

P4S is a major global collaboration comprising 15 academic institutions, five space agencies, five controlledenvironment agriculture companies, six education providers and seven government and technology partners across the US, Switzerland, Germany, France the UK and Australia.

The centre, led by Professor Matthew Gilliham, will focus on channelling international expertise to find ways to provide the next generation of space explorers with nutritious foods, and ondemand materials and medicines.

The P4S mission is to re-imagine plant design and bioresource production to enable off-Earth habitation – and improve sustainability of life on Earth.

France – Artificial intelligence

Based in Adelaide, the International Research Laboratory CROSSING is focussed on human autonomous agents teaming.

This is an area of research at the interface of artificial intelligence, computer science, engineering, technology, human factors and psychology.

CROSSING is a collaboration between the University of Adelaide, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Flinders University, the University of South Australia, French technological university IMT Atlantique, and Naval Group.

The University’s Australian Institute of Machine Learning is bringing its expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning to this collaboration.

All of these linkages, all of these friendships, all of these collaborations, can only be of benefit to the University of Adelaide and our community.

In terms of sustainability, building bonds like these are critical as we deal with the common climate and sustainability problems which unite us all.

Dr Jessica Gallagher is the University’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor (External Engagement).

“The Plants4Space mission is to re-imagine plant design and bioresource production to enable off-Earth habitation – and improve sustainability of life on Earth.”

Artist’s impression of a Mars living environment. Image Bruce Moffett University of Adelaide

Alison Gill working in the field

Dr Nam Nghiep Tran at the Vietnamese Biochar plant

Phillip Fredericks, Lori Hocking, Jessica Gallagher and John Williams meeting the Phillipines delegation, March 2023

Happy 50th Lumen!

By Mark Douglas, Editor

The first issue of Lumen was published on October 27, 1972.

It was created, in part, to set up better communications in advance of the 100th birthday of the University. Now we prepare for next year’s 150th celebrations.

Described then as “The University of Adelaide Newsletter”, the very first editor was Mr Ian Leggoe, the University’s Information Officer and a former journalist with the West Australian newspaper.

He noted, as he explained the reasoning behind the creation of this new publication, that the University had grown substantially and reached the stage where it “is now one of the major employers in Adelaide”.

“Accompanying this growth in numbers has been increasing diversification and specialisation in the many areas of study throughout the University.

“Gone is the day when everyone knew each other and interesting activities were known to those outside the department involved.

“This breakdown in communication within the University is reflected in the general public’s lack of knowledge of the positive activities of the University.

“The result is that the more newsworthy –though frequently less worthy – activities are the main factors on which the public builds its opinion of the University.”

It was ever thus.

For the then looming Centenary of the University, Mr Leggoe informed his readers that it would coincide with the 50th anniversary of the University’s Waite Research Institute at Urrbrae in 1924 – now with its own centenary on the horizon. Special attention was being given to planning the celebrations, he said, “so that they would appeal to as many members of the public as possible”.

Events under consideration included visits by overseas scholars, special concerts, historical exhibitions and open days. During the past 50 years, Lumen has been hard at work, changing shape and audiences to suit the mood and needs of its creators, but the central purposes remain – to inform and to engage people in the life of the extraordinary village that is the University of Adelaide.

In the next few issues, we are planning to give Lumen a polish so it is ready for our 150th, brushing up its content and appearance, and creating new ways for it to shine digitally as it strides into its next 50 years.

I hope Mr Leggoe would have approved.

Lumen 1972 Vol 1 No 1 p 1

The next 50 years –moving Lumen forward

This issue of Lumen is the first step in a progression we hope will lead to us having better conversations with our readers – our alumni family, our staff, our faculty, our students, and our community.

New features this issue include a shift in focus towards a much broader range of content and story topics.

We are aiming in this issue, with its theme of sustainability, to showcase a broad array of activities from faculties across the University.

In future issues, we’d also like to include more input from you. This includes your feedback and thoughts on this current issue.

Letters to the Editor are most welcome. Details of where to send them are on page three.

In the future, as our online presence evolves and improves, we plan to introduce new video and audio content. We will also investigate better ways to keep you in touch with other alumni, and the University, through networking, educational and reunion activities.

New sections are also likely to include “Class Notes” (updating your life and career progression), and “In Memoriam” (an opportunity to remember colleagues and loved ones).

Our next issue, due in October (publishing gods willing), will explore the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). How recent developments – most notably through the release of new and seemingly much improved free programming called ChatGPT – will impact on our lives is yet to be seen.

The range of implications appear to be enormous. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai so eloquently said in 2016: “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire.” End of humanity, or a boon to us all? You are most welcome to share your thoughts in a letter or email.

Mark Douglas, Editor

Volunteers in the wild

The birds, bees, soil and trees

By Isaac Freeman

While volunteers may not be the first thing that come to mind when you think of the University of Adelaide, their work can be found across all facets of daily life on campus and beyond. With about 2,500 volunteers helping around the University, their contributions are vital in providing student and event support, library assistance, outreach programs and sports associations.

“Volunteers can be found in nearly every pocket of the University and we certainly couldn’t do what we do without their skills, knowledge and generous contributions, “ says Kerry James, Senior Volunteer Program Coordinator at the University.

But not all volunteers can be found engaging in the day-to-day experiences on campus - some can be found in far-flung deserts, sifting through samples, while others are aiding the creation of habitat and biodiversity in our own backyard.

At the Waite campus, we find the arboretum, a 27-hectare parcel of land which contains unique corridors that have transformed into a teeming haven for bees, butterflies and birds. A generous donation in 2019 for a memorial for a passed loved one allowed Dr Kate Delaporte, Waite Arboretum Curator, to propose the idea of creating a biodiversity garden.

Together with Erica Boyle, Waite Arboretum Officer and Volunteer Coordinator, they envisioned the creation of a space that would utilise native plants to attract more wildlife to the area and provide education for the public, local schools and University students, thus forming the BB & B (Bee, Butterfly and Bird) garden. In the five years since its inception, there has been significant change within the Arboretum.

With just a brief look at the BB & B garden, you can see bees nestling into their five-star suites at the Native Bee Hotel. Next door are the architecture school-built tripods providing a refuge for birds and butterflies using host plants to spawn the next generation of pollinators. The incredible success rate of this ‘habitat corridor’ would not be possible without regular weeding, watering, marking and maintenance of the gardens by volunteers.

One of these is Les, who graduated with a degree in engineering at the University in 1971, and has found himself back on campus volunteering at the Arboretum.

Les is one of the eight volunteers involved in the development and maintenance of the BB & B, and has been volunteering for nearly two years, joining his brother-in-law to expand the garden to its current 700 square metres.

“Sometimes in retirement, your life can just become sedentary, but this gives you an activity that helps, which is why we do it. We don’t want money or thanks, we just want to help,” says Les. In addition to their work, the volunteers have a social outlet, often trading friendly jabs, having coffee together and learning about the space they care for. With land clearance and a lack of native species in most backyards, Erica encourages people to incorporate some native species, providing through the arboretum website a list of plants that can be used. “Even if you have a garden full of exotic plants but choose the right few native plants to improve the habitat possibilities in some way - that’s really good.”

To further educate the public and students, Erica created an interactive map of the arboretum BB & B garden that provides information surrounding the species used and the animals and insects that call them home. Her efforts in creating this educational tool won her the Faculty of Sciences - Science Communication Prize and her work was presented as part of the 7th Global Botanic Garden Congress held in Melbourne in September 2022 - for which she was also awarded the 2022 Professional Staff Development Scholarship.

With a hub of volunteer activity occurring within the Arboretum and Urrbrae House gardens every Tuesday and Friday, the majority of the volunteering for the University would appear to be spoken for. But just up the road a very different type of work is being conducted involving thousands of volunteer hours out in the field spanning the entire country.

Ecosystem research

TERN (Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network) is based at the Waite campus in the School of Biological Sciences. Its primary work involves a national program of standardised ecological field surveys and the TERN Australia Soil and Herbarium Collection, which provides academics both nationally and internationally with crucial data and samples for research across a diversity of disciplines including climate change, taxonomy and medicine.

TERN can achieve in the field what many researchers lack the resources to do themselves, by freely providing them with data. However, you can’t obtain over 150,000 vegetation and soil samples without logistics, staff and of course, volunteers. With over 20,000 vegetation voucher specimens requiring digital scanning, in addition to field surveys at about 100 plots across Australia, 2023 is a busy year. And that’s only the beginning.

“Whether it’s fieldwork or helping to manage the data and samples by pressing plants, curating and processing the soil and vegetation samples - it’s all work where volunteers can get involved,” says Dr Katie Irvine, Community Partnerships Coordinator at TERN. Volunteers include current students, postgraduates, retirees, and people working within the industry. The field trips can be the most demanding and rewarding parts of volunteering for TERN, with two-week long stints, up to 12 hours a day with an average of a plot a day. There’s a lot involved in collecting soil and vegetation data and samples across the country.

TERN plots are resurveyed every 5 - 10 years to measure changes in the environment. More recently TERN received funding to undergo a post bushfire survey, revisiting sites they already had data on to compare the changes in the aftermath of the Black Summer bushfires.

The value of data and information collected by TERN’s staff and volunteers has resulted in numerous findings around the world. For example, samples provided to the NSW government were instrumental in identifying new species diversity in golden everlasting paper daisies. And scientists from Rockefeller University in New York discovered important medicines and agricultural chemicals in the biological compounds of TERN’s soil samples.

As the collection of data and samples continues, so do the opportunities for discovery and a better understanding of our environment.

BB&B Garden map and plant list: adelaide.edu.au/waite-historic/waitearboretum/bee-butterfly-and-bird-gardenbbb

Isaac Freeman is Communications Assistant for the University of Adelaide.

Volunteers needed – how you can help

The many hours of dedication and passion from our volunteers in the environmental space featured in this article shows the difference being made, and the value of what like-minded individuals can achieve together for the sake of our environment.

We welcome students, staff, alumni and the general public to participate as volunteers.

There is a wide and interesting range of opportunities available, with one likely to suit you.

If you would like to be part of the University’s vibrant and diverse volunteer community, please visit our website at adelaide.edu.au/volunteer or contact Kerry James at volunteer@adelaide.edu.au

Volunteer wall at TERN

Native bee hotel

Above: Volunteer Les at the B B & B

Left: Native Bee Lipotriches sp. Elisabeth Williamson

Best pets for the planet

Carbon paw prints

By Susan Hazel

You and your dog have just survived an apocalypse and there is nobody else alive. But you have radiation exposure and know you will die soon. What do you do?

This is the scenario for the robotic engineer Finch Weinberg (Tom Hanks) in the movie Finch. To look after Goodyear, his dog, Finch trains his helper-robot Jeff on how to care for dogs. In one of the last scenes Finch teaches Jeff how to play fetch with Goodyear.

I couldn’t imagine life without my dogs. For you it may be your cat, or turtle, or parrot, or snake, or rabbit. Losing a companion animal can result in profound grief, similar to losing a family member. Being left in a position where you can no longer look after your companion animal is unfortunately not uncommon: moving to a rental where you can’t keep an animal, having to move into residential care, losing your job so you can no longer afford to keep them. I doubt many people would think to add an apocalypse to this list.

But should we think about pets and an apocalypse? I don’t mean we should all plan to get helper robots. But perhaps we should start thinking more about how keeping companion animals contributes to using up all of Earth’s resources, or nudging climate over a cliff resulting in cataclysmic climate change.

Is it sustainable to keep dogs and cats?

Keeping companion animals adds to greenhouse gas emissions, mostly through the food they eat. In the USA dogs and cats consume as much energy as nearly one-fifth of the total human population. Pet foods also contain a lot of protein, with a lot of this from other animals. We farm animals for human food, but a lot goes into food for dogs and cats. Livestock production contributes around 8% of total greenhouse gas emissions globally, with ruminants like cattle producing most of this.

It’s not only the greenhouse gas emissions from the production that are bad - land is cleared for grain and livestock production. Land clearing threatens species directly through loss of habitat, as well as resulting in carbon release.

I love my dogs, but if keeping them endangers wildlife species that doesn’t seem fair. What if the only animals we saw any more were those kept as companions or used for food? No longer hearing birds on the walk to the train in the morning, or seeing kangaroos grazing at dusk in the hills. To make matters worse, it’s not only the issue with greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. There is an ethical problem feeding our non-human companions. Global food production needs to increase by around 50% by 2050 to be able to feed the world human population. Most of the food used in dog and cat food could be used as human food. If food supplies become short, should we be prioritising feeding humans over nonhuman animals?

What can we do?

Maybe in the future we’ll have a wearable device that calculates greenhouse gas emissions and total resource use from everything we buy and do. If we wanted to drive our car to Darwin or fly to the USA we would need to offset that by saving in other ways. Getting rooftop solar, running an electric car, or even not getting a car at all. There might be an absolute limit to the resources we use and greenhouse gases we produce. We would have the choice of how to use those credits, but once gone we would have to wait before consuming more. Keeping dogs would use credits, and so perhaps we would have to sell our car, or become vegetarian.

Smaller dogs might become more popular if their carbon footprint is smaller. My dogs are Rosie, a Maltese cross (rescue dog) and Ziggy, a Labrador Retriever. Ziggy is still a puppy, but as an adult will eat about a cup of dry food a day. Rosie grazes, and

eats around one third of a cup a day. Cats, or even rats, would have an even smaller carbon footprint. Will the companion animals we keep change if we limit their greenhouse gas emissions? Perhaps large and giant breeds would be a thing of the past? Great Danes would go the way of the Model T Ford.

Can changing what you feed them help?

Pet food could become part of the solution rather than the problem by the ‘upcycling’ of food waste. It’s estimated around one third of food is never eaten, left to rot in the field, unsold in supermarkets, or wasted in the household. Upcycling uses food that would otherwise wind up in compost or landfill, to be diverted for other purposes. There is not a big market for upcycled pet food yet, but there could be.

Feeding of dogs and cats can be a controversial issue. There are proponents of raw food diets, but these are more likely to use edible food that could go into human food supply. Dry food has a lower carbon footprint than wet food, and may be the most sustainable type of food for the future. It’s not just the input of what you feed your dog or cat that is important; their waste is also a problem. With over five million dogs in Australia, each month they produce as much dog poo as the weight of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Pet faeces can by disposed of in the toilet where it will be processed as for human waste, or in composting or landfill. Many local councils provide compostable dog poo bags now, but whether or not this should be put into your green bin to be collected by the council varies. Composting it yourself may be problematic unless you manage your compost to kill any organisms. I’d love to see more local data on what the best method of disposing of dog faeces is so that I could base our own disposal method on environmental impact and greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate change is already affecting our companion animals

Our changing climate is already negatively affecting our dogs and cats. With the recent spate of warmer and wetter weather, especially on the east coast, the areas your dog or cat can pick up tick-borne diseases greatly expanded. A dramatic increase in

cases of tick paralysis this summer has led to a critical shortage of anti-tick venom for dogs and cats. South Australia is not currently home to the ticks that cause tick paralysis, but with continued climate change we might be in the future.

Lastly, please don’t contribute to loss of biodiversity by keeping wildlife as pets. Loss of habitat through land clearing and feral pests is already having dire impacts on endangered species. Humans don’t need to compound this by taking wildlife from the wild for their own pleasure. Most of these species don’t survive well in human care anyway.

Keeping companion animals is one of the greatest privileges we have. But it’s not one we should ever take for granted.

To protect this privilege in the future we must be mindful of the impact of our companion animals on resource use and a sustainable natural environment.

I would love my grandchildren to know the deep pleasure of living with a much-loved dog. You might be able to tell your secrets to a robot (let’s hope they’re not recording them) and they may be easier to train, but they will never beat a dog for cuddling up with on the sofa or going for a walk together. Susan Hazel is Associate Professor at the School of Animal and Veterinary Science, Roseworthy campus.

“Keeping companion animals is one of the greatest privileges we have. But it’s not one we should ever take for granted.”

Susan, Ziggy and Rosie

Love affair with disaster movies

By Ben McCann

In her influential essay ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ (1965), the American writer and intellectual Susan Sontag argued that in the post-World War II era, modern society had become obsessed with the idea of disaster, as seen in the proliferation of science fiction and disaster films. She writes that these films are concerned with “the aesthetics of destruction” and “the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc”. For Sontag, this obsession with disaster mirrored a sense of anxiety and unease about the potential for catastrophic events in the nuclear age. The films serve as a way of processing and coming to terms with these fears.

Sontag’s ideas remind us that popular genre films continue to articulate contemporary social concerns; in other words, they “reflect” the times in which they are made. The argument goes, for instance, that 1950s American science-fiction films like The Thing from Another World (1951), Them! (1954) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) might on a surface level be telling stories of alien invasion or rampaging ants, but they are also mounting a far deeper interrogation of specific contemporaneous fears such as communism, nuclear power and technological anxiety.

Films about the end of the world have always been big business. They trade on our fears, astound us with their state-of-theart special effects and remind us not just of the fragility of our home planet, but of ourselves. We think of the post-apocalyptic Mad Max (1979), where resources are scarce and society has broken down, or The Road (2009), in which a father and son struggle to survive in a world destroyed by an unspecified disaster.

Hollywood remains fascinated by threats from above and beyond. These threats usually involve aliens (Independence Day [1996], War of the Worlds [2005), A Quiet Place [2018]), meteorites (Deep Impact, Armageddon [both 1998]), solar flares (Knowing [2009]), or the Moon falling into the Earth (Moonfall [2022]). All feature recurring tropes: spectacular scenes of planetary destruction depicted in vivid CGI,

a small group of people banding together to thwart an external threat, ruminations on humanity’s own contribution to its precipitous downfall, and so on. Often, much of our pleasure derives from predicting which cast members will survive or which globally famous monument will be the first to topple.

But more recently, in this era being referred to as The Anthropocene, Hollywood has turned to a different type of ‘end of the world’ film – films about environmental catastrophe triggered by humanity. One of these defining tales about an impending global apocalypse was a full-blown Hollywood disaster film – The Day After Tomorrow (2004) – which depicts the catastrophic effects of global warming, leading to a sudden onset of a new ice age and a series of extreme weather events that threaten the survival of humanity. It was directed by Roland Emmerich (who had already made Independence Day); Emmerich would go on to make 2012 (2009), another disaster film replete with volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and a global flood.

Like these earlier ‘alien invasion’ films, such films explore themes of survival, heroism, and the human condition in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity. While The Day After Tomorrow may at times play fast and loose with scientific accuracy –the phrase “climate tipping point” from a geological perspective means decades, but in cinematic terms, that means minutes – the film succeeded in bringing anthropogenic climate change into the mainstream. Hollywood has not looked back since. These films are representative of ‘climate fiction’, or ‘cli-fi’ - a genre of literary fiction that explores the potential impacts of climate change on a personal or a global scale. Prominent examples include Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and J. G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere (1961). These texts don’t just raise awareness about the dangers of global warming and its consequences, but also offer possible scenarios for mitigating its effects. Cinematic cli-fi has become progressively mainstream in recent years. Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) shows Earth

as a frozen wasteland brought about by bungled attempts to counter global warming with a risky geo-engineering method. Wall-E (2008) and Avatar (2009) are two popular films that sound clear warnings about what might happen if human activities continue unchecked. And isn’t Happy Feet (2006) actually a film about climate change? Take away the dancing penguins and a much darker vision emerges, of an Antarctica surrounded by calving ice shelves, overfishing and ocean pollution.

And watch Christopher Nolan’s widely admired Interstellar (2014) again - the words ‘climate change’ are never heard, but they don’t have to be: Nolan depicts Earth as a place ravaged by dust storms, failing crops, and total biosphere collapse. Little wonder that the main thrust of the story follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new habitable planet.

None of this is new, of course. Science fiction cinema has frequently intertwined its narratives of space travel, flying cars, and robots with broader environmental and ecological concerns. Silent Running (1972) saw Bruce Dern as a botanist, fleeing Earth and tending a giant rainforest inside a huge space freighter. Ridley Scott’s still colossally influential Blade Runner (1982) depicted a rainy urban world devoid of plants and animals, while in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001), rising sea-levels from global warming have devasted coastal cities. And who can forget the unnerving Soylent Green

Scene from The Day After Tomorrow

(1973)? This post-apocalyptic sciencefiction film is set in New York in 2022, at a time when 40 million people are enduring a permanent heat wave and a single corporation controls half of the world’s food supply. Soylent Green was released back in the early 1970s, when Greenpeace and the Gaia hypothesis were first entering the mainstream. Five decades later, it remains staggeringly prescient in its depiction of overpopulation and societal collapse. And, in light of recent estimates that as many as 50 million climate refugees may need to find new places to live by 2025, Soylent Green’s depiction of food shortages and riots have become increasingly relevant from an environmental justice perspective.

Sometimes, cli-fi films start out as something else entirely. The plot of Don’t Look Up (2021) revolves around two low-level astronomers who discover that a massive comet is set to collide with Earth but are met only with scepticism, denial and wilful ignorance. In fact, Don’t Look Up is not really about a comet at all. It’s about climate change. And as a film historian, I

find this sustained turn towards climate anxiety in popular cinema fascinating. Perhaps those TV series about nuclear disasters (Chernobyl) or zombie outbreaks (The Walking Dead) or global pandemics (The Last of Us) aren’t really about what they seem to be. As Mark Bould’s wonderful book The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021) reminds us, what if all the stories we tell today are actually about climate change? Documentaries have also thrived. The Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth (2008), featuring former US Vice President Al Gore, presents the science behind global warming and the environmental and political impacts it is having on the world. It played a crucial role in American culture by drawing sustained media attention to the issue of climate change and heralding a cultural shift in the way ecological concerns could be discussed. Ever since, there has been a steady flow of climate-focused documentaries - Chasing Ice (2012), which follows National Geographic photographer James Balog as he captures images of melting glaciers in the Arctic, 2040 (2019), by Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau, which explores the ways in which existing technology may allow us to transition to a more sustainable environmental future, and Thank You for the Rain (2017), which follows a Kenyan farmer who films the damages wrought by climate change to his village.

It is clear then that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, climate change has come to rival the dangers of nuclear war, alien invasion and terrorism in our

collective cultural imagination. Films about those topics are still enormously popular with audiences around the world, but contemporary cinema is increasingly concerned with climate anxiety and cli-fi preoccupations.

As I write this, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) has just become the third-most watched film of all time at the global box office: that’s a film as much to do with biosphere harmony and ecosystem respect as it is with terrorism and interplanetary pillage. What these recent clifi films – both fact and fiction – remind us is that the “imagination of disaster” remains a thrilling, often perversely enjoyable experience, but it is becoming progressively more complicated.

In the darkened cinema, we may once have vicariously taken pleasure in seeing planets destroyed or tsunamis hitting the shore. But now, post-Katrina, post-Black Summer, post-Solomon Islands, visions of climate disaster are no longer confined to visual effects companies and laptop simulations. Today’s future-based stories have shifted focus from imaginary technologies or faraway planets. Instead, the pivotal themes are at home: the backdrop is Earth, the villain is the climate, and its weapon a never-ending surge of natural disaster.

Ben McCann SFHEA is Associate Professor of French Studies – and an avid film scholar and writer.

Dr

“Climate change has come to rival the dangers of nuclear war, alien invasion and terrorism in our collective cultural imagination.”

Childhood –a survival story

A Review of Shannon Burns’ Childhood, by Jennifer Rutherford and Brian Castro

Shannon Burns’ memoir Childhood traces the bewilderment of a young boy as he comes to terms with the struggle to become himself in a world without the emotional or physical stability of any dependable other. Moving from childhood incomprehension to adult clarity, it haunts and unsettles our imagination as the reader follows the boy’s painful journey. Childhood’s literary style is rhythmic, moving effortlessly from the outside world to the inside world and back again in short sentences. Less, as they say, is more, but there is nothing “more-or-less” in Burns’ writing. It is as bare and hard as granite. Courageous and frank, it does not hide beneath the soft mantle of “storytelling”, but it is compulsive reading.

The narrator of Childhood remembers little of a childhood in which his parents have only three ways of being: “angry and stupid; stoned and stupid; or angry, stoned and stupid.” What he does remember is vague, the details uncertain. Like the boy’s acquired habit of retreat and evasion, his memories are good at hiding, and yet the memoir traces the moments of a boy becoming himself with forensic detail. In a style stripped of rhetoric or affect, the reader is held hostage to the lived experience of memory-trouble; of how crystalline detail and contextual confusion co-exist.

The boy’s survival requires living a double life, with his authentic self permanently in hiding, but who can that self be – stained as it is by the guilt of familial association?

Watching the near rape of a girl, he becomes an accomplice by association; seeing his father’s sexual predation of his sister, he is stained by kinship to that behaviour. The endless physical punishment he receives confirms his guilt, which is always what a forlorn child brings down upon himself. Alone with his parents (“one of them terrifying and half-mad, the other a pervert

who fills him with fury and disgust”), possibilities for identification fall away until he is living far removed from himself.

The painful heart of this book is its quiet and undemonstrative depiction of becoming oneself, when one has no other to imitate or a standard by which to measure oneself – thus one can only signal distress through defiant gestures, thuggish bullying, and dissociation. This could be a book about the numerous ways a child can turn into a sociopath, about a boy becoming a thug, but instead we witness the boy slowly building an ideational fortress within himself in which to mobilise an ethical self. How can we explain the complexities of character?

Unrelentingly stark, Childhood speaks in whispers and we have to listen closely. There is great character in the writing and the writing itself becomes a character, so that we know it as a quiet friend, unassumingly authentic and modest, astonishing in the rawness of its wounds, but surprisingly intact in its narratorial control. Childhood re-makes the memoir-form like Mark

Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, insider and outsider co-existing in the fight for loyalties from which the reader is not exempt.

Dr Shannon Burns was awarded his PhD in Literature from the University of Adelaide in 2011. He is an Adelaide-based author, critic and member of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University.

Adjunct Professor Jennifer Rutherford is an author, critic and former Director of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. Adjunct Professor Brian Castro is an author, scholar and founding director of the JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.

Childhood, by Shannon Burns, paperback 272pp, ISBN 9781922330789 (Text Publishing)

We have five signed copies of Shannon’s memoir to give away - contest details page 44.

Shannon Burns

Versatile, bold and beautiful “MONTE”

Sue Bastian reviews a lesser known wine variety suitable for our State now and into the cellar of the future

Name: Montepulciano (prefers to be pronounced MON-TA-PULL-CHAANO).

Place of birth: Italy (possible birth place Tuscany; but mainly found around the calf of the boot in Abruzzo and also in the Marche and Umbria).

Other abodes: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, California, Mexico.

Awards: Second in the most planted grape variety in Italy contest, behind Sangiovese

Favourite colour: Deep ruby.

Personality: Highly approachable, full bodied, rounded curves, intense and rich, dark brooding fruits of plums, blackberries, cherries, mulberry, rhubarb, plus herbs, oregano, a little bit spicy, a touch of leather, pepper, tobacco, down to earth, texturally powerful and moderately acerbic. However, it is often oaked and rich, or owing to its high colour and acid, produced into lighter style reds or rosé/rosato, with less skin contact, and displaying more red fruits, herbs, savoury and tarry/wet hot asphalt notes.

Favourite cuisine: Loves slow roasted and grilled meats including turkey and game, hamburgers, pasta, rich sauces, ragus and soups, grilled veggies, protein rich pizzas, charcuterie, cheese. Montepulciano wine is versatile and pairs well with a wide range of dishes. The wine’s tannins and intense flavours make it a good match for flavourful dishes, and its acidity helps balance the richness of the food and prevent it from becoming overwhelming.

Age ability: The tannins in Montepulciano wine are usually medium to high, giving the wine a firm structure and anti-ageing properties; whilst the wine is also known for its good balance of acidity, which helps to bring freshness and liveliness to the wine and in combination, supports good ageing potential. The wine is also known for its high alcohol content, which can range from 13-15% ABV and gives the wine a warm, satisfying finish. Ageing depends on acid and tannin levels and intensity of fruit flavours, so depending on the wine and year it was made, possibly cellar up to a decade plus.

Favourite weather: Montepulciano likes the heat and dry conditions and is known to ripen late in the season, thus it holds onto its acid while developing its flavours. It is somewhat drought tolerant, a characteristic we are investigating in vine trials, and desirable for growers with scarce water resources.

If you like Shiraz, you will like Monte. From my reading over the years, anecdotally, Montepulciano wines are considered similar to those wines made from Shiraz grapes. Despite the poor odds of working closely with people over the past couple of, what can only be referred to as, “unique years”, my wine lab group managed to carry out some human tasting and consumer research. Our trained tasting panels tasted the wines blind (no, do not think blindfolds, it just means they are not informed what the wine is other than red wine) in black glasses, under highly controlled laboratory conditions (picture individual, all white, red light and temperature controlled, computerised booths) so they are denied outside distractions and can focus on the wine in the glass. What did we find? Montepulciano wines are perceived similar to Shiraz.

Drought tolerance and sustainability: Due to its late ripening potential and supposed lower water requirement, Monte is suited to warm regions and retains acid, tannin and flavour. Adoption of innovative strategies to adapt to rising temperatures brought about by climate change will be required to sustain the Australian wine sector. Potentially one approach is the cultivation of more drought resistant emerging grape varieties with diverse flavour profiles to reduce, in part, the current reliance on less water conservative major varieties, and offer the consumer some diverse wine choices. But will consumers accept wines made from these varieties? Two consumer trials have indicated that Australian red wine consumers liked all 12 different emerging variety red wines under study. Similarity scores indicated consumers found the greatest amount of similarity between Shiraz and Montepulciano, which confirmed our wine expert and trained taster comparisons.

Our findings provide evidence supporting the consumer acceptance and perceived similarities between the sensory profile of Shiraz and Montepulciano varietal wines, highlighting the potential for producers to adopt these more drought tolerant varieties as alternatives in a warmer future.

My recommendation is, next time you are in your favourite wine store looking for a delectable red wine, grab an Australian Montepulciano and why not a Shiraz as well, gather some friends, make a heartwarming, uncomplicated meal and compare them yourselves.

Salute!

Our reviewer, Sue Bastian, is Associate Professor in Oenology and Sensory Studies, Manager WIC Sensory Laboratory and Deputy Head of School, Agriculture, Food and Wine (International).

The last polar bear

By Nicholas Duddy

On a forty-nine-degree summer day, 8,000 miles from the North Pole, the last polar bear arrives in Adelaide. She washes up on the Glenelg shoreline, carried by the incoming tide.

She lies facedown in white sand. Motionless. Through pearls of spume, her frail form looms. At first, she is overlooked.

A bum-bagged jogger mistakes her for dumped shag; a myopic cyclist swears she’s a beached bronze whaler; an amorous elderly couple confuse her skeletal spine for driftwood and recall that jetty where, many moons ago, they first made love in the dark of a starless night.

But the realisation soon follows. An angler crashes the SS Fishfinger, his rusting tinny, onto a sandbank forty feet from the bear. Mouth agape, he rubs his bloodshot eyes. He forgets about his inky bucket of squid and whiting and garfish, and jumps into knee-high water.

Walking her Beagle and her mother, an eight-year-old girl is the first to touch the polar bear. Her Beagle barks, yanking the lead, pulling her to the bear. She’s never seen anything so filthy, not even when Charlie rolls in mud. With her glittery jelly shoe, she kicks the polar bear’s paw. But the bear does not stir. Mummy! she squeals through the sleepy morning.

Within minutes, the first news team arrives. In the carpark, the reporter stands impatiently, receiving her final flick of mascara, her final swirl of rouge, her left leg quivering. The cameraman burns through four durries – even the emergency one in his sock. They both race to the beach.

REPORTER: (with iambic journalistic lilt.)

What’s YOUR name, YOUNG LADY?

YOUNG LADY: (with sonic texture of honey.) Lucy. And so, in this moment, the world’s last Ursus maritimus is named after the little girl who first found her.

By midmorning news teams surround Lucy. They outdo one another with their expert coverage. One station enlists a zoologist, who posits that Lucy circumnavigated the world, drifting through the Arctic Ocean on sea ice, down the northwest passage between Canada and Greenland, across the expanses of the Atlantic, snacking on marine delicacies off the Angolan coast, before traversing the Southern Ocean to Kangaroo Island in pursuit of little penguins and longnosed fur seals, and finally crossing the Gulf St Vincent to dock on Holdfast Bay.

Another station interviews an acclaimed psychic, who — after holding a lock of Lucy’s fur and drinking a glass of seawater — believes the bear suffered from severe postpartum depression with her firstborn, exacerbated further by her son’s death in a freak fishing accident. She never recovered. The crowd builds. They pass around SPF 100+ sunscreen and share broad-brimmed hats. They create a rota for fetching food and water, only leaving the bear for loo breaks (one couple use nappies to overcome this issue). Meanwhile, the police tape off a twelve-metre radius around Lucy.

Feet invade every patch of sand. A local church group stand on the beach and read aloud Jeremiah 30:17 and pray for this celestial bear’s wellbeing. Beside them, a group of atheists stand in silence. In the carpark, at the edge of beach and bitumen, vendors sell plastic water bottles and markedup Kmart t-shirts featuring any picture of a bear — brown, koala, Humphrey B. They sell out in twenty-five minutes. Improvising, they sell plain white tees with LUCY printed in uneven Sharpie lettering.

Before the sun crowns the sky, Lucy is a worldwide phenomenon. Every major broadcaster — ABC, BBC, CNN, NBC, WXYZ — has a reporter standing by; Facebook live videos are narrated by woeful Attenborough and Irwin and Bear Grylls impressions; tweets weave a tapestry of hashtags laden with threadbear puns.

Lucy — the little girl, not the last polar bear — and Mummy now demand thousands per interview. And with good reason: this is the

first polar bear sighted in twenty years, the last confirmed sighting being by the Chukchi people in Uelen near the Bering Sea.

But Lucy — the last polar bear, not the little girl — has not moved. She remains facedown, surrounded by twelve veterinarians in face masks cleaning her fur. They clip her jagged claws. They stroke her back, gloved hands raking the ribbed outline of brittle bones. Crab nets and beer cans and ripped cloth wash away, strewn across the shore like souvenirs. Her coat shimmers bright white.

They roll her over. Repeat the process. Like a snow angel, she lies supine in white sand. Sunlight limns her silver limbs, and the crowd weeps at the sight of Lucy, at the might of beauty.

Distinguished guests arrive at Glenelg. They take up their VIP positions at the front of the crowd. The Premier of South Australia foregoes his two o’clock kip, arriving in green-and-gold boardies and thongs. He is shown up, though, by the Prime Minister who arrives in a navy pantsuit with an Australian flag pinned to her lapel. She waves off her Chief of Staff, who whispers firmly to No. 10 and the White House and the Kremlin that the Prime Minister will have to return their calls.

The crowd is restless. Lucy still has not moved. She needs to eat, one of the experts deduces. With no blubber readily available, they try feeding her a specially formulated paste of prawns and breadcrumbs and multivitamins, with just a pinch of paprika. But she does not move. The angler has a

This image, of a polar bear on the beach at Glenelg, was generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) program DALL-E2– a companion to the much discussed ChatGPT program. Its creation took less than ten minutes –most of that user error. The actual image generation took less than a minute. AI, and its future ramifications, will form part of the next issue of Lumen.

thought. He slinks away from the crowd, sprints up the shoreline, and hauls the cockle-crusted bucket from his boat. He pushes through the crowd and hands the bucket over the yellow tape.

The experts lay out the seafood smorgasbord. A paw quivers. Lids flutter. Eight-ball eyes open, green mucus oozing down her snout, and Lucy accepts the garfish dangled above her head like a sword swallower. With every bite, her strength recovers. With every bite, the crowd’s spirit rises. But Lucy’s future is uncertain. Some argue she should remain in Adelaide; some believe she should be transported to London or Paris or New York where more people can visit her.

The Premier takes off his thongs, the Prime Minister her blazer, and they agree on keeping Lucy in Australia. Just as they prepare to front the press, they receive a phone call: an anonymous person is offering ten million dollars for Lucy. The Premier glances at the Prime Minister; the Prime Minister glances at the Premier. With diligent yet decisive diplomacy, they decide it’s in the public’s best interest for the bear to be cared for in private rather than in the public sphere; to put it simply, the world must respect Lucy and her owner’s privacy as they begin their new life together.

But then the Chief of Staff receives another message: an offer of fifty million from a Silicon Valley tech-exec. Then: one hundred from a Shanghai businessman looking for a last-minute graduation present for his daughter. Another message, another offer.

Eventually, after careful and considered deliberation, the Premier and the Prime Minister decide to hold an auction overseen by Sotheby’s. As the sky bleeds with sunset, Lucy perches on all fours, her eyes scanning the crowd, her body still as an opal statue. The crowd stares at her, their hearts beating harder, eyes big and bold, lost in the polar bear’s majesty, in her mystery, overwhelmed by this monument to Mammalia.

Lucy digs her front paws into sand and heaves her body upright. Her silhouette stretches behind, across the shore and the sea towards the dying sun. Her mouth opens and a sound echoes across the beach. Not a roar, but a whimper. Lucy shakes, limbs flailing, swaying, as if bowing to the cheering crowd, hypnotised by the thousand smiles before her, until she falls headfirst into the sand with a force felt across the earth.

First published in South Australian digital journal The Saltbush Review, Issue 2, June 2022 – a sustainability issue which examines “our tangled relationship with the land and how we exploit it, and explore its beauty, uniqueness and power, both in relation to and beyond the human”. saltbushreview.com/issue-2/

Nicholas Duddy graduated from the University of Adelaide with a BA (Hons) in 2018. He is now a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oxford.

Rebooting the Muse

Harnessing digital technologies for sustainability in the Australian performing arts

By Mark Carroll

The performing arts in Australia today face unprecedented (that word again) challenges on multiple fronts. On the one hand, the social-distancing measures needed to control the COVID-19 pandemic undermined the live performance model that is the very bedrock of the profession. That base had in any case been eroded by the national bushfire emergency that preceded the pandemic, which itself led to widespread cancellations. Last year’s catastrophic floods made a dire situation even worse. Even the sceptics among us now acknowledge that something is climatically amiss, and that we all need to do something about it.

These calamities have precipitated a wholesale shift from real-time performances to online delivery. This in turn has helped not only to lower the risk of infection for audiences, but also has led to a reduction in size of the carbon footprints generated by touring. But while effective up to a point, this response is grounded in a mindset changed little since the days of Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which also saw technology employed to capture, reformat and disseminate content intended initially to be live performances in front of physical audiences. The danger now is that performing arts organisations and venues may become unviable, caught as they are with artistic content and business models that rely on real time audience experiences and physical box office income, while plying their trade in an increasingly virtual marketplace.

A team of University of Adelaide researchers, led by the Elder Conservatorium’s Professor Anna Goldsworthy, was last year awarded an Australian Research Council-funded Linkage grant to work towards a more artistically and administratively sustainable solution to the conundrum. The team will document the impact of digital technologies on the various stakeholders in the creative equation: from creators whose artistic vision calls for a given technology or process; to performers who have to realise that vision; to audiences for whom the technology might be a help or hinderance, a source of enjoyment or irritation, and finally to administrators who have to parse the results into a sustainable business model fit for the organisation’s purpose.

To that end, and thanks to the generosity and vision of the Light Cultural Fund, a South Australian philanthropic organisation dedicated to fostering community wellbeing through artistic excellence, the project has at its disposal a cutting-edge performance space, The Lab, which is situated in Light Square in the centre of Adelaide. In this controlled environment, our project partners – the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Patch Theatre, and Illuminate Adelaide – will create and perform works using the available technology. In that space we will be able to track creative processes, document participant reactions, formulate strategies and, ultimately make meaningful steps towards future-proofing an industry that enriches the lives of us all.

Mark Carroll is an Adjunct Professor at the Elder Conservatorium of Music.

Rebooting the Muse: Post-COVID-19 sustainability in the performing arts (LP200300899)

“These calamities have precipitated a wholesale shift from real-time performances to online delivery.”

Elder Hall relaunched

By Anna Goldsworthy

In April 2023, we launched a refurbished Elder Hall, thanks to the generosity of our community through the Take a Seat fundraising campaign.

To celebrate, the Elder Conservatorium of Music presents our 2023 concert series, Awakenings

Our mission at the Elder Conservatorium is to awaken the artistry of the next generation of musicians across the genres of classical, jazz, music theatre, composition, popular music, and sonic arts. But it is also to awaken future audiences and music-lovers.

Our season’s theme speaks to music’s great power to awaken us all: emotionally, spiritually, sensually, intellectually.

In a program that spans the Baroque era until today, we present much-loved classics ranging from Beethoven’s Eroica symphony to Miles Davies’ Kind of Blue

Over recent years, many of us have been waking up to the rich legacy of female composers, and we are thrilled this year

to be presenting works by Dorothy Fields, Lili Boulanger, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, Valerie Coleman, Sally Beamish, Moya Henderson, Caroline Shaw and Holly Harrison, with premieres by Brodie King and our own Anne Cawrse. Many of our performers are well-known faces to our audiences, particularly the wonderful staff and student musicians from the Elder Conservatorium. We are delighted also to welcome a number of visitors for the first time, and in April, we presented the first ever collaboration between our thriving Music Theatre program and the Elder Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra in Leonard Bernstein’s lively tribute to his beloved New York, On the Town It is a privilege to present acclaimed performers from around Australia and the world alongside the musicians of tomorrow, and we invite the broader University of Adelaide community to share this journey with us. Details on are on our website. Professor Anna Goldsworthy is Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music.

Other events

The University of Adelaide looks forward to an exciting calendar of events in the second half of 2023. Alumni receptions will be held in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, US, UK and Europe. Plans are currently underway for a ‘Back to Campus’ reunion event in spring 2023, for the graduating classes of 1973, 1983, 1993, 2003 and 2013. We are eager to connect with our global alumni community at upcoming events and in the lead up to the University’s 150th anniversary in 2024.

Make sure you update your details so you don’t miss out on future events and invitations.

www.adelaide.edu/alumni.

For a full list of upcoming events, visit www.adelaide.edu/events

Life on campus

Chancellor Catherine Branson AC KC and ViceChancellor and President Professor Peter Høj AC, flank Distinguished Professor Jennifer Graves AC FAA, who was recognised with the honorary degree of Doctor of the University (honoris causa), September 2022

2022 Distinguished Alumni Award winners - Tiahni Adamson, Professor John McNeil AO, Professor Nicola Spurrier PSM and David Reynolds PSM

Mandy Thomas (left), inaugural Yaitya Tipanthi Scholarship recipient, Talara McHugh (centre), and Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Peter Høj AC at the 2022 Scholarship Celebration

Students celebrating at September 2022 graduations

Life on campus

Class of 1972 Golden Jubilee, Bonython Hall, 26 October 2022

Sophie Umehara, Priyanka Nath, Marta Rutkiewicz and Emily Ross at the Young Alumni Network’s Spring Fling, Prohibition Liquor Co.’s Next Door Bar, 24 November 2022

Children’s University Graduation, November 2022

Students enjoying Diwali celebrations, October 2022

Welcome Back Festival meets Illuminate Adelaide, July 2022

From left to right, Lawrence Yeo (Vice President), Sam Ng (President), Tan Zhengjie (Honorary Treasurer), Rachel Tee (Honorary Secretary), Ebenezer Heng (Management Committee Member), Jeffrey Lam (Immediate Past Member and Management Committee Member) at the Adelaide University Alumni Association Singapore (AUAAS) 20th anniversary dinner, December 2022.

Australian Rover Challenge, March 2023

Dr Jessica Gallagher, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (External Engagement), together with alumni at the Singapore Alumni Reception, 22 September 20223

Students enjoying Take a break festival, October 2022

Acrobats at Take a break festival, October 2022

Scholarship spotlight

Food sustains human life, yet the trends of increasing population, increasingly extreme climate, decreasing agricultural labour, and reduced agricultural land are placing huge strains on food security globally, especially in developing countries.

Inaugural recipient of the Possingham Supplementary Scholarship in Environmental Sustainability, Thi Xuan Dieu Phan (Dieu), will be focusing her PhD research on the importance of transforming sustainable food consumption.

“Now more than ever it is necessary to transform food systems toward sustainability, ensuring food security and healthy diets for future generations,” Dieu says.

“Sustainable food consumption has become a vital subject on the international agenda. However, relevant studies on this topic are conducted in developed countries and are still quite fragmented, and most focus only on single aspects of sustainable food consumption.

“While most of the empirical studies in the literature focus only on the acquisition phase, my research will cover the three phases of food consumption – acquisition, usage and disposal.

“Ho Chi Minh City - the biggest city in Vietnam - implemented a waste sorting program in 2017, but it has not achieved feasible results because of household habits. Organic waste (waste generated from food) and other non-organic waste are unsorted

and mixed, therefore more than 70 percent of the waste in Vietnam is buried, leading to environmental pollution.”

While Dieu’s focus is on Ho Chi Minh City, her research will help contribute to the gap in literature on food consumption sustainability in developing countries.

“I am very proud to be the first student to receive the Possingham Supplementary Scholarship,” she said.

“This scholarship has great significance for my PhD and career journey. It encourages me to pursue my thesis on environmental sustainability and consolidate my research interests on sustainable agriculture and food systems sustainability topics.”

The Possingham Supplementary Scholarship in Environmental Sustainability was established in 2021 by the Possingham family, in honour of Max and Barbara, who were both graduates of the University of Adelaide. Barbara was one of the first women at the University to achieve a Doctorate in Physics (1956). This scholarship supports a postgraduate student studying in the area of environmental sustainability, whose research has the potential to deliver a positive environmental outcome. For more information about the scholarship, visit: adelaide.edu.au/ possingham-scholarship

Lumen Readers’ Prize

Lumen readers are invited to enter a competition to win one of five signed copies of Shannon Burns’ memoir, Childhood

To enter, we ask that you share with us, in 100 words or less, your fondest University of Adelaide memory.

Entries may be published in the next issue of Lumen

We need to receive your entries by June 30, 2023.

Once you’ve read and acknowledged the terms and conditions, please send your entries via the website. Alternatively, you can mail them to us, along with your written entry and the form on the right: Lumen, The University of Adelaide, SA, 5005.

Winners will be announced on the website, in the next issue of Lumen, and will also be notified in person. Good luck!

Your name:

Your address:

Phone number:

Email:

Signature:

I have read the terms and conditions:

Dr Jennifer Possingham, Dieu Phan and Graham Possingham at the 2022 Scholarship Celebration

Giving feature

Resources for a sustainable future Donor spotlight

As South Australia’s leading researchintensive institution, the University of Adelaide continues to accelerate transitions towards sustainability with investment in research that has a measurable impact.

Our goal is research that builds sustainable pathways and addresses complex challenges associated with climate change, food and water security, biodiversity, health, and housing.

Central to increasing our capacity to produce cutting-edge research is the Barr Smith Library.

A diverse and accessible collection of physical and digital resources is essential in supporting more than 21,000 learners and researchers each year, and invaluable to setting up our University and community for success.

The Barr Smith Library offers a range of high-quality resources to support academics and research students throughout the research lifecycle. Each year it raises muchneeded funds to purchase key research resources and continue to be a gateway to knowledge. This would not be possible without the help of our community.

We are currently raising $63,000 to secure a new resource from Wiley Digital Archives titled Environmental Science and History

With a focus on the critical aspects of environmental science, subjects include ecology, biodiversity, deforestation, fisheries and climate change.

Published in 2023, Environmental Science and History encompasses tracing the impacts of human activity on the natural world, and enables these impacts to be researched and analysed through documents, images, data, maps and photographs.

To invest in a sustainable future and support our students and researchers to excel, please make a tax-deductible gift today.

For Alex Bishop-Thorpe, a member of the University’s monthly giving program, supporting a charity or cause you are passionate about is your vote for the world you want.

A nature-lover and long-time supporter of the Koonamore Vegetation Reserve, Alex has seen first-hand how the land and natural environment rejuvenates once introduced species are removed and the native plants are able to flourish.

“When I was 12 my Mum (Brenda Thorpe, Roseworthy Diploma of Agriculture, 1978) and Dad, bought a property that had cattle. We removed the cattle and within three years the trees had grown back,” Alex says.

“The Koonamore Vegetation Reserve is about seeing what is already on the land, supporting what is there, and applying science to it. I like the simplicity of that. “By supporting the environmental research at Koonamore Vegetation Reserve I hope to ensure their valuable work continues well into the future, and that the important data captured can be studied and shared to benefit other projects across the country.”

Koonamore Vegetation Reserve

Koonamore Vegetation Reserve is a unique environmental research project that has been underway since 1925, with first measurements starting in 1926.

Located 400 kilometres north-east of Adelaide, records have been maintained from 1926 to the present day, making it the longest-running vegetation monitoring project of its type in Australia, and one of the longest in the world.

Set up to exclude sheep, and largely rabbit-free, University researchers, students and volunteers monitor the reserve for vegetation change and regeneration, and help to preserve the unique arid ecology of the region.

All donations to Koonamore Vegetation Reserve support this research which provides insights into arid zone ecology, problems such as vegetation responses to changing climate and changes in land use.

To support this history-making environmental research, please make a tax-deductible gift today.

Alex hanging a gate on his property in the Murray Mallee where he is regenerating the land with his partner Aurelia

Achievements

Members of our award-winning University community have been recognised for outstanding achievements, accomplishments and contributions. We are extremely proud of the following award recipients, and look forward to continuing to follow, share and celebrate their successes.

Australia Day Honours 2023

Australia Day Honours 2023

Officer of the Order of Australia (AO)

Emeritus Professor Warwick Peter Anderson AO

The late Dr Kenneth Ernest Collins AO

The Hon. Prudence (Pru) Jane Goward AO

Emeritus Professor Jack McLean AO

Emeritus Professor Anne Louise Tonkin AO

Dr Heddy Zola AO

Member of the Order of Australia (AM)

Ms Juliet Helena Brown AM

Dr Liz Ann Coates AM

Professor Debra Claire Henly AM

Dr Mark David Leedham AM

Professor Donald (Don) John Markwell AM

Dr Timothy William Proudman AM

Dr Amanda Mary Rischbieth AM

Dr Roger Allen Patrick Sexton AM

His Honour Judge Rauf Soulio AM

Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM)

Mrs Gayle Linford Cowan OAM and Mr Robert (Bob) Cowan OAM

Mr John David Hodgson OAM

Mr Jonathon Nigel Leek OAM

Dr Sharon Lorraine Mascall-Dare OAM

Ms Keryl Margaret Moir OAM

Emerita Professor Ngaire May Naffine OAM

Dr Joy Ann O’Hazy OAM

Ms Robyn Joy Pearson-Robertson OAM

Mr James Robert Porter OAM

Mr Rodney Leon Smith OAM

Public Service Medal (PSM)

Ms Andrea Marie Faulkner PSM

Australian Police Medal (APM)

Senior Sergeant Kylie-Marie England APM

Ambulance Service Medal (ASM)

Mr Robert George Tolson ASM

2022 Distinguished Alumni Award winners

Professor John McNeil AO

David Reynolds PSM

Professor Nicola Spurrier PSM

2022 Tirkapena Indigenous Award

Tiahni Adamson

2022 James McWha Rising Star Award

Dr Angela Alder-Price

Professor Phiala Shanahan

2022 Distinguished International Alumni Award

Dr Mercy Mwangangi

2023 Monash Scholars

Henry Marshall

Alex Schutz

2023 Rhodes Scholar

Bridget Smart

2022 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science

Professor Trevor John McDougall AC

South Australian Young Tall Poppy Science Awards

Dr Erinn Fagan-Jeffries

Dr Zohra Lassi

Dr Jiawen Li

Dr Tatiana Soares da Costa

Dr Qi Wu

SA Science Excellence and Innovation Awards

SA Scientist of the Year

Professor Maria Makrides

Innovator of the Year

Professor Andre Luiten

STEMM Educator of the Year

Dr Richard Lilly

SA Woman of the Year

Amelia Nolan

Dr Phiala Shanahan

The University of Adelaide is proud to have a global community of high-achieving alumni. We apologise if we have missed your achievement here. If you are a recent award-winner or nominee, we want to hear from you. Please update your details or email us with your good news:

www.adelaide.edu.au/alumni/get-involved/update-your-details

Celebrating orientation week in 1973 – we really hope you’ll let your hair down and come back to party with us in 2024 to celebrate our 150th birthday! More information will be available throughout the year.

In the next issue of Lumen… We explore the role of artificial intelligence Alumni stories and profiles

Special features News, events, achievements

Preparing for our 150th birthday

And more…

When installing a new computer required a crane and removal of large windows. 1970 - installation of CDC-3200 computer at Division of Computing Research (Adelaide), located in the Engineering annex, University of Adelaide (Gate 5, Frome Road). Photograph taken by a staff member at CSIRO. Original now held at University of Adelaide archives.