Australian Geographic

Writing this issue’s story on the Houtman Abrolhos National Park (page 82) was a gift for Carolyn Beasley. “During my previous career in marine consulting I had visited by boat and fallen in love with the islands,” she says. “For this story, my journ

My partner and I have been travelling to Australia for 30 years. One time we met lovely people in Perth who invited us to stay. In their living room I read my first Australian Geographic and was hooked. Now we have been members for 28 years and are s

JUST AS IT SEEMS THAT humans have done irreversible damage to the planet’s atmosphere and set Earth on an inexorable path to a climate-based Armageddon, there’s a sign high in the sky over Antarctica that offers hope. Kids during the last quarter of

IN SWEDEN THERE is a saying: “God made the plants and animals, Linnaeus named them.” In the 1700s, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus promoted his so-called Binomial System for assigning scientific names to species. It was adopted worldwide and remains

WHEN MOST people think of volcanoes, destruction usually comes to mind. But one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in recorded human history gave birth – to Frankenstein! When Mt Tambora exploded in Indonesia in 1815, it ejected about 100cu.km of debr

LANDSCAPES DON’T get much harsher: plains of blinding white quartz studded with stunted acacia shrubs stretching towards a horizon shimmering in a heat haze. Survival in such a place is tough. It stretches credibility that an animal could be so finel

ON 5 November 1868 a long-awaited shipment arrived at the Port of Melbourne – the Great Melbourne Telescope. While construction had begun in Ireland in 1866, a large-scale telescope to observe the Southern Hemisphere’s skies had been in planning sinc

IT’S NOT SURPRISING that Australia’s rodents receive less attention than many of our better-known marsupial mammals. For most of us, native rats and mice are often hard to distinguish from introduced pests. And yet Australia’s native rodents are uniq

IF IT WASN’T for the small community of artists, its desirability as an outback setting for movies and the seemingly never-ending tourist trade, Silverton would be little more than a ghost town on the desert’s edge. Located west of Broken Hill and cl

ASTRONOMERS love puzzles and the Universe has plenty. But few rival the mindbending mystery of a Sun-like star officially named KIC 8462852. Usually known as Tabby’s star after the lead astronomer involved in its discovery, American Tabetha Boyajian,

EARTH’S human population is expected to soar past 8 billion by 2023. So it’s no wonder the leading threat facing the vast majority of imper-dilled plants and animals on the IUCN Red List of threatened species is habitat loss. The number of people has

GAZING OUT AT SUNSET from Nettleton’s First Shaft Lookout – the site of Lightning Ridge’s first hand-dug opal mining shaft – it’s not difficult to picture the ancient wildlife that once roamed among the trees here, in north-western New South Wales. I

2020 TAS AUSTR ALIAN OF THE YEAR Dr Jess Melbourne-Thomas MARINE, ANTARCTIC AND CLIMATE SCIENTIST DR JESS MELBOURNE-THOMAS considers the moment she slipped through thin sea ice and plunged into the teeth-rattling waters of the Southern Ocean as the h

Age: 46 Lives: Canberra FOR MORE THAN 25 YEARS, Wiradjuri woman Katrina Fanning has lived and breathed rugby league. Following a successful career as a player, she was appointed manager of the Indigenous Women’s All Stars team, Chairperson of the Aus

THERE’S A MYTH that the memory of a goldfish lasts only three seconds. But that wasn’t how Professor Culum Brown saw it when he was 12. He kept fish as pets and would while away the hours staring at them instead of doing his homework. The more he sta

HUMANS AND fish evolved from a common ancestor. Early humans appeared on the planet just 6 million years ago and modern humans not until about 195,000 years ago. By contrast, the genealogy of fish goes back more than 500 million years. They’ve been e

WHEN I LOOK AT these images they remind me of when I was a kid. They were bedtime stories for me: a big fire lit up the painting on the wall and I saw it and the painting became real for me. I looked at it and my grandparents told me the story – it w

IT WAS JUST HOURS before dawn on 4 June 1629 when Captain Adriaen Jacobszoon of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, mistook breaking surf for moonlight glinting on the ocean. His ship, the Batavia, was carrying the richest cargo ever to leave the

FACT Abrolhos aquaculture includes pearling, aquarium corals, and soon, yellowtail kingfish. FACT After the Batavia shipwreck, 125 men, women and children were murdered by mutineers. 1 Take a flight. Seeing the archipelago from the air gives a great

“BIM! BIM! BIM!” calls Sarah Billis at the top of her voice as the rising sun spreads a torrent of warm light among the eucalypts and turkey bushes at Manmoyi outstation in West Arnhem Land. Home to the Bininj people, Manmoyi is a small, remote commu

THE WORD GONDWANA evokes a sense of the epic. It conjures an ancient time when Earth’s supercontinents were being rearranged; when Gondwana – the great southern landmass that eventually broke into Australia, Africa, South America, Antarctica, Arabia

And the Mackay Highlands Great Walk traverses plenty of it, passing through Eungella National Park, which encloses more than 50,000ha of rainforest. At more than 800m above sea level, it’s often swathed in mist and cloud, a respite from the Queenslan

1 This is a 56.9km hike that’s mostly graded 4, for experienced bushwalkers only, with tricky navigation and sometimes treacherous paths. Take topographic maps and a compass, and know how to use them. 2 It’s recommended you walk between April and Sep

MENTION “THE SNOWY” and most Australians will know you’re talking about one of this country’s mightiest waterways: the Snowy River. Starting high in the alpine country of New South Wales and completing its journey by spilling into Bass Strait at Marl

THERE ARE several different kayaking disciplines: river kayaking on flat water; white-water kayaking on rapids and on faster-flowing waterways; and sea kayaking on the open ocean and along the coastline. Regardless of which discipline you follow, kay

Australin Geographic Managing Director Jo Runciman travelled north on Coral Discoverer to be immersed in the enthralling Indigenous cultures of northern Australia. I WAS DELIGHTED to recently host a special Australian Geographic Coral Expeditions art

LORD HOWE ISLAND is one of Australia’s best photography destinations. It’s World Heritage-listed because of its scenic beauty, biodiversity and rare flora and fauna and offers a large variety of terrain in a small area. Walking and Photography Weeks