Pictures and Story by JAMES WOODFORD

Additional pictures at Stuart Cohen’s Flickr site and at Rick Stevens’ Flickr site

It is the mystery of the Montague Island “mouse” that shouldn’t be there.
The eighty-hectare nature reserve, nine kilometres off the NSW South Coast town of Narooma has suffered a feral mouse plague that has lasted for nearly 130 years, since the lighthouse station was established.
Goats, rabbits and an impenetrable infestation of introduced kikuyu grass have also cursed the island’s ecology.
The last goat was shot in the late 1980s and for the past decade scientists and park managers have been determined to declare the island feral free.
Two years ago a massive baiting program using helicopter distributed poison-laced cereals was undertaken that simultaneously wiped out the entire rabbit and exotic mouse population.

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A good friend of mine has been threatening for months to write the definitive distillation of the global economic crisis in less than 200 words.
The other day I was on King Street in Newtown when I saw this advertisement in the window of a quick cash outlet.
I passed it by and, at first, it only registered in my sub-conscious. After ten steps I came to a stop and retraced my route back to the poster and stood there with the same ghoulish fascination that might be reserved for a car crash. [Read more →]

In 1997 I attended the Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne at which Aboriginal delegates famously turned their backs on Prime Miniature, John Howard. It was a potent insult that, at the time, seemed unprecedented. But it’s not – the most common perpetrators are town planners and developers. [Read more →]

Dr Alistair Paterson is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Western Australia and in 2009 is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of Copenhagen….Over the next few months as the world counts down to a crtical international climate change conference Real Dirt is hoping to run occasional news from Alistair.

The latest conference on Climate Change ended last week in Copenhagen, Denmark, with one message: act now. The meeting aimed to survey the
latest information about the realities and challenges of climate change.
The 57 sessions and 2500 participants combined researchers from the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities. This conference was
part of the countdown to COP15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009. In December the UN Climate Change Panel
will be in part responding to the 2007 climate change report and many countries will make their national carbon emission committments known. [Read more →]

Last century I wrote a story about the rabbit calicivirus escaping its island quarantine in South Australia. A few weeks after visiting the area in the Spring of 1995 the calicivirus jumped containment yet again and spread throughout the continent, killing hundreds of millions of rabbits. Myself and photographer, Peter Rae, were accused of being the culprits. The ABC has been seeking anecdotes about rabbits so I decided to tell my side of the calicivirus story….

Picture by RICK STEVENS

Story by JAMES WOODFORD.

In late October 1995 I was at my desk at the Sydney Morning Herald when news broke the rabbit calicivirus had escaped its quarantine on Wardang Island off South Australia and had started killing rabbits on the mainland.

As environment writer I suggested to an editor that myself and a photographer travel to Adelaide and drive to the site of the infection - an event which had momentous implications for the national environment.

We contacted the CSIRO, who were monitoring the outbreak of the disease, and informed them of our intentions.

It was a grey, hot, still day and I still remember vividly arriving at the location of the disease breakout, meeting up with CSIRO researcher Brian Cooke and being taken to see a number of dead rabbits. [Read more →]

Professor Poongschtock’s piece published last week has spurred another senior expert into print on the issue of the reality of fire management in Australia. Apart from the choice of another crazy pseudonym, Dr Berris Fueller, is well worth a read before we lynch any more so-called greenies. Picture by Rick Stevens.

In south-eastern mainland Australia most vegetation communities have evolved in landscapes subject to periodic and often intense wildfire. For example, since European human settlement, major wildfires have been recorded in the State of Victoria on average roughly once every 7 years or so. In chronological sequence, these occurred in 1851 (”Black Thursday”), 1898 (”Red Tuesday”), 1905, 1906, 1912, 1914, 1919, 1926, 1932, 1939 (”Black Friday”), 1942, 1943, 1944, 1952, 1962, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1972, 1977, 1981, 1983 (”Ash Wednesday”), 1985, 1997, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2005-6 and, most recently 2009. Between 1926 and 1978, a total of 260 human lives were lost, including 71 deaths in the “Black Friday” fires of 1939 alone.

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The Bushfires in Victoria were a paradigm-shifting event - gripping, terrifying and devastating for dozens of communities and hundreds of families…The news was shocking in its magnitude and the disaster will have enormous consequences for land management and housing development across the nation. Professor Poongschtok is an alias for one of Real Dirt’s most informed readers. He knows what he is talking about so his piece may be long but every word is worth reading. It is the other side of the story.

It was inevitable. The search for someone to blame, for someone to be made responsible. Strangely, unlike all other natural disasters, this only seems to occur after bushfires – not cyclones, or tsunamis or earthquakes, just bushfires. Unfortunately, the arguments criticising the perceived lack of hazard reduction burning have all the credibility, substantiation and science of a lynch mob swinging a noose. And that’s because the arguments are entirely political not logical…. [Read more →]

By JAMES WOODFORD
Phil Watson says 9.50 am on January 12 will be a preview of the state’s sea level future.

Watson is the Team Leader of the Department of Environment and Climate Change’s Coastal Unit and for the first time has launched a program to document the flooding impacts of the highest tide visible during daylight hours.
“It will allow everybody to get a glimpse into the future when mean sea level will be higher than today,” Watson says.
King tides happen twice a year – at night in winter and during the day in summer.
The upcoming king tide is predicted to peak at just over 2 metres. Based on analysis of ocean water levels from Fort Denison dating back to 1914, Watson says that this tide level is only exceeded on average for around 9 hours every year. [Read more →]

It’s been a crazy year here at Real Dirt HQ - that is my laptop and office on the south coast of NSW…But I have been a little quiet the last few weeks as I have been travelling for my next book.

After a short break until mid-January I hope to get things cranking up again. I have been giving the website a lot of thought and I am keen to see it become more comprehensive in 2009.

One of the things I am most keen to see is more interaction with visitors to this site…When I set up Real Dirt I wanted it to be a place for other people’s stories, pictures, anecdotes and news. So let me know your feedback - either send me an e-mail or post a comment. The best thing about the site for me has been the comments - so keep ‘em coming!!

Happy New Year!

Having just returned from Townsville I know it is a long way away and I certainly couldn’t imagine getting there on my own steam. That’s why I was surprised to see a note from the Australian Museum that some of the White Ibis researchers have colour banded in Sydney have turned up in far north Queensland cities.
The note was also proof that every creature -  even those apparently charmless ones like an Ibis neck-deep in trash - is loved by someone. This Sunday all Australians are being asked to keep an eye out for Ibis and report any sightings of the shameless thieves to the Australian Museum’s John Martin - john.martin@austmus.gov.au.

NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service Wildlife Management Officer, Geoff Ross, said: [Read more →]