Recent research media coverage

• Link to story on UoW's webpage: http://media.uow.edu.au/news/UOW060276.html

• Story in Your Times

• Story in the Illawarra Mercury (and no, those headlines were not my idea!)

Women, work and phones...

Having had several conversations the last couple of days about the pros and cons of various mobile phones, it was with great amusement I read an article in the Guardian Weekly last night about a televised debate in India on the merits of paid employment for women outside the home. According to the reporter, the most articulate man on the against-paid-work team won the debate with this gem of a comparison: Working women are like mobile phones; modern and glamorous, with exciting features. But they are easy to lose. You don’t always know where they are, and there is a danger someone else could lay their hands on them. Stay-at-home wives are like landlines. You know where they are, they are easier to maintain, they don’t need recharging and even old models work fine. I wonder how this fine gentleman would explain the ‘technical fault’ that currently is making not just my landline but also my internet completely useless at home? Last night I appreciated the modernisms, glamour, exciting features and reliability of my Sony Ericsson mobile phone even more than usual. I even considered looking up new models to equip myself with the latest model that goes with all of my modernisms and unpredictability. That is, I would have if the internet/landline was working!

Spring at last!

The spring fairy passed by NSW on Saturday and just like that the winter chill disappeared and the gentle warmth of spring arrived. It is still wet and windy but it thankfully is no longer cold. In preparation for the warmth of the coming months, the spring flowers have been nudging their way upwards and outwards to grace their surroundings. With the warmth the ants and spiders have also multiplied almost overnight, whilst the cat now shelters in the semi-shade of the garden bushes rather than exposing herself completely to the midday sun. The spring flowers were also out on-mass in South Australia when I managed to squeeze in a couple of bushwalks and tours of the vineyards of the McClaren Vale and the Barrosa Valley during a recent trip to a Adelaide for a bushfire conference. It was an excellent conference. Lots of interesting talks and people – those ‘fiery’ folks sure know how to throw a good party! As nature is busy shedding its winter coat, I am busy getting ready for interviews with landholders in my study areas. There are several hoops to jump through before these interviews can take place – receiving approval from the University’s ethics committee is always a bit of a rigmarole and lining up landholders for convenient interview times is almost like herding cats. But I’ll get there. In the mean time I took the opportune moment to catch-up with a few of the wonderful landholders in my Windellama study area, by taking a group of students down to work with the local LandCare group on a riverbank erosion project. There’s nothing like getting your hands dirty, whilst talking about everything under the moon with likeminded people.

Tasmania

I have come to the conclusion that conferences are one of my favourite parts of my work/PhD. Not only do you get to hear about fascinating research projects, expand your network by meeting these researchers, get inspired and motivated about your own work but you also get to travel to wonderful places. This time round it was the annual conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers that gave me a much appreciated excuse to board a flight to Hobart and the magical island that lies between Australia and Antarctica - Tasmania. The 5 day conference was superb and I came away with lots of food for thought, positive feedback about my own research and good ideas about how to move my research on to the next level. Excited and exhausted my wonderful fellow PhD'er Pat and I hired a car after the conference and drove south-east from Hobart down to Port Arthur - Britain's most feared convict settlement in its day. From there we followed the east coast of Tasmania for the next 3 days, along rugged coastline, through magical forests, hiked over the Hazards at beautiful Freycinet National Park before turning inland at St Helens to the stunning Pyengana Valley in the north-east of Tassie. Here we enjoyed a hearty home cooked meal at the Holy Cow Cafe - a part of the completely self sustained Pyengana Cheese Factory - before exploring the wonderful fern forest that surrounds the base of St Columba Falls. I fell in love with Tasmania despite the cold short winter days. I can't wait to go back in summer with a tent to hike through the wilderness for days at a time...

Fire Fighting Training

I am now well into the fieldwork/data collection part of my PhD. It's going really well although I still suffer from occasional panic attacks from the enormity of the task ahead and the uncertainty of having people as your object of study! Trees or rocks seem so exceptionally simple in comparison - especially when it comes to the organisational side of things! But whenever I am out in the field interviewing people or doing participant observation I am reminded why I am a social geographer. People are fascinating creatures!

I had a fantastic opportunity to take my fieldwork to the next level a couple of weekends ago in Windellama - the southern most region of my three study areas in the Southern Tablelands. The local Rural Fire Service brigade captain had invited me to attend their Basic Fire Fighting training course, which they run for new voluntary brigade members. It was a great opportunity for local landholders to put a face to my name, as they all received a copy of my postal survey a couple of months ago. For me it was an equally great opportunity to learn more about fires, whilst covertly eyeing up potential interview 'victims'.

Winter is truly over us down under and the beautiful crisp winter air in the Southern Tableland reminded me of Europe. Watching the steam from my breath and scraping ice of my car windows in the mornings was a first for me since moving to Oz. It was most enjoyable writing up my field notes from the day in front of a burning fire each evening.

Gone bush

Yesterday provided another opportunity to explore the wonderful Australian bush. This time I headed down into the Shoalhaven Gorge (4 hours south of Sydney) with a group of friends. The ultimate aim was to scout for good camping spots for a weekend long bushwalk next spring. Given that it pretty much hasn’t stopped raining for the past 3+ weeks, it was with sighs of relief as well as happy spirits that we watched the sky turn orange with the first of the days’ beautiful sunshine just before 6am. It was a spectacular 7 hour walk – we descended down steep cliff sides, bolder jumped through a dry riverbed (photo), walked in the shade of casuarina trees along the banks of the Shoalhaven river (photo) and ate lunch on a sandbank where the Bungonia river joins the Shoalhaven river. What a wonderful day in the bush.

A Bondi Sunday

The rain seems relentless in the eastern parts of NSW at the moment. This, however, does allow for some delicious comfy sofa reading time and less distractions from work. And thankfully the rain is interspersed by sun. I've had a relaxing Sunday in Bondi today - something that I love both because of the relaxation but also because Bondi is such a wonderful place to exist. I woke up early, put my running shoes on and ran down to the beach where I found a spot sheltered from the wind where I could indulge in my tai chi training. A homeless person snuggled up in his rug a little further along the cliffs on a cliff shelf sheltered from both the wind and rain, whilst the surfers skilfully rode the waves. In similar vein my day ended by the water where waiting for the Rose Bay ferry to arrive, I watch a pelican stand on the wooden pier watching a little boy fishing whilst the last rays of the sun painted the sky and the clouds orange.

How time flies!

Going by the philosophy of better late than never, here's a very belated Happy New Year!

I find it hard to believe that it is March already. Time really does fly! Apologies for not posting any updates to my blog for quite a while. I tend to rely on photos to relay many of my experiences but I find that this particular website is an absolute pain when it comes to uploading photos. It crashes repeatedly and with too many other things to see to, the system eventually got to me and put me off 'blogging'. Well, I'm back with renewed effort but with a somewhat different strategy. I will keep the photos on this blog to the bare minimum and I have instead created a photo album online that I will update at the end of each month. Do drop me an e-mail if you would like the link to this album.

I have had a very busy start to the new year with both my PhD and the two other research project that I am working on entering into their next and more intense stages of fieldwork.

It is so exciting to see my PhD data starting to trickle in - returns of a year's worth of hard work. My friend and fellow PhD student Pat and I were out letterbox dropping my survey to just short of 2400 households in my three study areas last week. After 6 long days, 1600 odd kms and several episodes where we were saved by our 4W drive when we thought we were helplessly bogged down in the absolutely middle of nowhere, it was really exciting to arrive back and find my pigeon hole at UoW filled with completed surveys - Yay!

Having properly initiated my fieldwork, the NSW Rural Fire Service has embraced my project to the full and I am receiving wonderful support both from their HQ and their local brigade staff. I am pencilled in to complete my basic fire fighting training in May. Should be interesting and fun.

A large part of January went with preparing for and then looking after 9 American students who came out to take a 3 week intensive undergraduate subject on environment and society in Australia. We took them on a 9 day fieldtrip where we walked up several mountains, spent some facinating time with Aboriginal people, saw God only knows how many kangaroos and where the students generally went through a huge personal growth curve having been pushed way out of their usual comfort zones. It was exhausting work but very satisfying too.

Work has very much dominated my new year but there has thankfully also been time to relax in fantastic settings with wonderful friends. A few adventures that spring to mind is playing in the waves down the south coast of NSW over new year, touring the vineyards of the Hunter Valley with a good friend visiting from the US, going on a 5 hour bush walk on Mt. Royal where we walked through enchanted woodland covered by moss and many other types of vegetation, whilst enjoying the wonderful views and the magical light of the late afternoon sun.

I Love a Sunburnt Country

The wall calendar behind my office desk is currently displaying a poem by the Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig. Besides from being incredibly apt for my PhD project, it makes me smile whenever I look at it...

I LOVE A SUNBURNT COUNTRY

(by Leunig)

I love a sunburnt country

A land of sunburnt plains.

Of sunburnt mountain ranges

Of droughts and sunburnt rains.

I love sunburnt horizons

I love her sunburnt sea

Her sunburn and her sunburn

This sunburnt land for me.

Almost Christmas!

I can't believe it is almost Christmas! 2007 has flown by! The last few months have been really really busy with both my PhD and the two other project I am working on having moved on to the next level. I am currently developing a postal survey that is due out in January. But even bigger parts of January will be taken up with helping to run a 3-week intensive undergraduate subject, which involves 10 days in the field. I am really looking forward to this experience - being paid to look after students in Kosciuszko National Park is my idea of a dream.

The really good news of the month is that the Bushfire Corporate Research Centre has taken me under their wing. This relationship was initiated with me attending a 3 day meeting near Melbourne earlier this week. It was great to get up to date on what's happening in my field across Australia and to share stories and experiences.

I made the most of having to make the trip down to Melbourne and caught a flight a day early, jumped in a rental car and drove down the Great Ocean Road. Wow! The coast is just stunning here and when I wasn't marveling over the coastal views, I was enjoying the wonderful old growth forest that still grows in patches along the coast of Victoria, and quiet moments with birds and wallabies. I think the photos speak for themselves...

To remind myself that I moved to Oz to slow down (my pace lately has been worryingly similar to my London lifestyle!), I made the 3ish hour drive up north to the Hunter to visit my friend Julian's biodynamic farm. I will once again let the photos speak for themselves bar from saying that the view from Julian's front porch is near on to die for (and should you be interested in wwoofing or alternative farming do check out the Imago Forest website: http://imagoforest.googlepages.com/home).

The other side...

After too many weeks of long, long days in front of the computer massaging the millions of thoughts in my head into greater clarity, I have finally made it to the other (and much sunnier) side of my first year PhD review. It has been an interesting exercise that has been painful and frustrating at times but also very rewarding in as much as I am now much clearer about the details of my project, and I have received some really constructive feedback during, and especially at the end of, the process. From now on you can look forward to much more exciting updates on my PhD with photos from my study sites and the adventures that my fieldwork may entail.

One thing in particular has kept me sane during the review period - a fabulous routine that I have picked up, which involves 3+ trips a week to Bondi beach where a run on the beach is followed by a swim in the sea and concluded with a large coffee and a newspaper in my favourite little café.

Not bad eh? Sydney's climate and geographical location really does have its advantages. With summer well and truly on its way, Sydney has upped its already fantastically eclectic selection of weekly events - the photos above are but a small selection of some of the many things I have been able to indulge in lately...

To recover from my review, I set off for the Budawangs in Morton National Park very early Saturday morning for a 3 day treat of bush walking and sleeping in caves. The views were to die for and I felt like a new person from the overdose of fresh air and eucalyptus scents when I returned to Sydney last night. The trip was a timely reminder of why I decided to embark on my PhD in Oz - this country really is stunningly beautiful : )

What is the role of bushfires in the Australian landscape?

Should you be wondering a) what the ongoing conflict over the role of bushfires in the Australian landscape is about, and b) what a key part of my PhD is investigating, then read this wonderful quote from Stephen Pyne's book 'The Still-Burning Bush' (2006:9):

‘…Australia’s bushfire [debates are] inextricably bound up with questions of identity. What is nominally about flame very quickly…becomes a discussion about something else. The practices of Australian fire quickly morphs into the politics of identity; geographic, professional, national. The fissures are many and cross one another, like veins in granite. City v. country; greenies v. farmers, graziers, and loggers; ecologists v. foresters; those who live off the land v. those who visit it; those who believe bushfire is ultimately an expression of a nature beyond human contrivance, and those who believe humanity can, for good or ill, profoundly alter fire’s regimes. All perceive the contemporary fire scene as inappropriate; all demand that they be heard; and all recognise that bushfire forces society to choose, thought what that choice means, or implies, is often as fluid and intangible as flame itself. Nowhere is this truer than when discussion touches upon ‘hazard-reduction burning’, which can escalate into synecdoche not only for the political debate about fire policy but for the whole trajectory of Australia’s environmental history.’

From the green hills of Surrey in England to Surrey Hills down under...

Spring has well and truly arrived to the east coast of Australia, which makes a wonderful transition from a fantastic summer month in Europe. I so enjoyed being back in the 'civilised' part of the world and it was fabulous to spend some time with family and friends. I just wish that time hadn't been so short, so I could have caught up with more of you... Everyone in both Denmark and the UK were complaining that the summer had been miserable so far but the sun hardly left the sky whilst I was there. I just love the long summer evenings in the northern hemisphere - it's is so wonderful stilling having day light at 10pm. It's like having two days in one and your energy levels just sky rockets (or mine do anyway!). I started off in Denmark with the wedding of one of my dearest and 'oldest' girlfriends - Tilde, who to my great approval married a truly 'gaev jyde'. It was such a lovely day and Copenhagen was at its absolute best with a jazz festival going on in the small old cobbled lanes and squares, as well as time to relax with some pizza and Tour de France on the telly. From there it was on to my parent's farm where you could virtually hear the grass grow, everything was so lush and green. There is nothing like the green of northern Europe in summer - so different from the Australian green. The farm was blessed with a new little member - Nuf, a gorgeous Labrador puppy, which seemed to take up the vast majority of my time. You couldn't turn your head for many seconds before it was up to new tricks. Everything was fun, even fetching an old shoe in the lake again and again and again! The last weekend before I headed across the North Sea for the big smoke was filled with excitement, as the naming day for my cousin's toddler turned in to a surprise wedding and lots of time for catching up on lost time. Walking in through my old front door in Wimbledon was like coming home - such a good feeling. I spent a week in London and the south east of England catching up with friends morning, afternoon and evening. So much fun, although it was showing on my waist line by the end of the holiday! After a week in the UK, Ed and I decided to fulfil one of the dreams that we've been talking about for ages - that is taking Ed's motorbike on a proper road trip. We headed down south to the coast and caught the ferry to Brittany where we spent a few days just touring the small countryside roads, soaking up the wonderful French atmosphere in cafés surrounded by medieval buildings and eating some rather bizarre food that wasn't always agreeable with my taste buds. So from the sunny hills of Surrey, I jumped on the plane and immediately started looking for accommodation in Sydney when I touched down. My heart was already set on Surrey Hills - a really charming neighbourhood of Sydney. I absolutely love Sydney - it has so much more to offer than Wollongong. So I now commute down to the university three odd days a week and work from home the rest of the week. That my initial housing arrangement in Surrey Hills has turned out to be a tad stressful is an understatement! So I am moving on to what promises to be a much better house/home in Surrey Hills next week. So by the time I next update this site, I will hopefully be comfortably settled...

You've got to love a country that includes surfing conditions in the national news every evening...

Some of my favorite moments from the past month...

< My favorite place in Wollongong... > Watching footsteps form and wash away on the beach...

Kayaking on Tallowa Dam in the Kangaroo Valley...

Leaning over the edge to catch a glimpse of the sun creating rainbows in the water of Fitzroy Fall...