The Conversation Yearbook 2019: 50 Standout articles from Australia’s top thinkers

By John Watson

A little bit of authority goes a long way in an opinionated world. Here Australia’s most erudite thinkers share expert views on the issues that shaped the nation in 2019. The Conversation Yearbook has become an annual bestselling collection that navigates fake news and shouty views and offers a fresh perspective on the fundamental issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780522876079

John Watson

John Watson is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Optical Engineering at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.

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Introduction

The articles collected in this volume have been chosen from among several thousand published on The Conversation Australia website throughout 2019. All were published at a particular moment in the news cycle, and many bear traces of the fleeting preoccupations of those moments. Each one has earned inclusion here because it contributes something of ongoing significance and is an exemplar of the clear writing based on evidence that is at the heart of The Conversation’s mission.

Founded in 2011, The Conversation has been a big success. Today, it is produced in four languages and ten countries. Over 38 million people read it every month. The idea behind it is simple: articles are written by academic experts, commissioned and edited by professional journalists, and distributed for free online. Articles are free to republish by any media outlet that credits The Conversation.

Australia’s universities support The Conversation because it helps them meet their community engagement objectives—we give them rich analytics and metrics. Academics like The Conversation because it gives them a large and diverse audience. Our articles appear in print and online publications across the country.

Teachers value The Conversation as a free and easily accessible educational resource. It provides accurate, informative and concise articles written in everyday language that their students can easily understand.

By helping academics share their knowledge and expertise when it is most relevant, The Conversation makes the best thinking and research available to the public, as well as political decision-makers and those who advise them.

We frequently hear from authors about calls from senior politicians wanting to know more about articles they read in The Conversation. Political staffers have been spied with printouts of Conversation articles, briefing ministers as they sweep through the corridors of parliament. Our articles have been quoted in federal and state parliaments and have formed the basis of dozens of submissions to government inquiries.

This type of reliable and high-quality information is as important for the proper functioning of democracy as clean water is to health. Our readership is growing rapidly because our work is useful, trustworthy, informative and engaging.

In a time of increasing division, our focus is on collaboration. The Conversation serves and is supported by a range of stakeholders—including universities and individual scholars, foundations, governments and individual donors, and the talented journalists and technologists who come to work every day determined to see facts inform public discourse.

I hope you find our work informative and learn as much from reading this collection as I did from working on it. Thanks to this book’s editor, John Watson, our terrific academic authors and to all my colleagues whose hard work has made The Conversation a global success.

Misha Ketchell

Editor, The Conversation

CHAPTER ONE

From the Perspective of Time

An incredible journey: The first people to arrive in Australia came in large numbers, and on purpose

Corey J.A. Bradshaw

Professor, Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University

Laura S. Weyrich

ARC Future Fellow, Metagenomic Cluster Lead at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, UoA Node Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of Adelaide

Michael Bird

ARC Laureate Fellow, JCU Distinguished Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, James Cook University

Sean Ulm

Distinguished Professor and Deputy Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, James Cook University

The size of the first population of people needed to arrive, survive and thrive in what is now Australia is revealed in two studies published today.

It took more than 1,000 people to form a viable population. But this was no accidental migration, as our work shows the first arrivals must have been planned.

Our data suggest the ancestors of the Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Melanesian peoples first made it to Australia as part of an organised, technologically advanced migration to start a new life.

Changing coastlines

The continent of Australia that the first arrivals encountered wasn’t what we know as Australia today. Instead, New Guinea, mainland Australia and Tasmania were joined and formed a mega-continent referred to as Sahul.

This mega-continent existed from before the time the first people arrived right up to about 8,000–10,000 years ago. (Try the interactive online tool at http://sahultime.monash.edu.au/explore.html to view the changes of Sahul’s coastline over the past 100,000 years.)

When we talk about how and in what ways people first arrived in Australia, we really mean in Sahul.

We know people have been in Australia for a very long time—at least for the past 50,000 years and possibly substantially longer than that.

We also know people ultimately came to Australia through the islands to the northwest. Many Aboriginal communities across northern Australia have strong oral histories of ancestral beings arriving from the north.

But how can we possibly infer what happened when people first arrived tens of millennia ago?

It turns out there are several ways we can look indirectly at:

•where people most likely entered Sahul from the island chains we now call Indonesia and Timor-Leste

•how many people were needed to enter Sahul to survive the rigours of their new environment.

First landfall

Our two new studies—published in Scientific Reports and Nature Ecology and Evolution—addressed these questions.

To do this, we developed demographic models (mathematical simulations) to see which island-hopping route these ancient people most likely took.

It turns out the northern route connecting the current-day islands of Mangoli, Buru and Seram into Bird’s Head (West Papua) would probably have been easier to navigate than the southern route from Alor and Timor to the now-drowned Sahul Shelf off the modern-day Kimberley.

While the southern route via the Sahul Shelf is less likely, it would still have been possible.

Modelled routes for making landfall in Sahul. Sea levels are shown at -75m and -85m. Potential northern and southern routes indicated by black lines. Arrows indicate the directions of modelled crossings.

Source: Michael Bird

Next, we extended these demographic models to work out how many people would have had to arrive to survive in a new island continent, and to estimate the number of people the landscape could support.

We applied a unique combination of:

1. fertility, longevity and survival data from hunter-gatherer societies around the globe

2. ‘hindcasts’ of past climatic conditions from general circulation models (very much like what we use to forecast future climate changes)

3. well-established principles of population ecology.

Our simulations indicate at least 1,300 people likely arrived in Sahul in a single migration event, regardless of the route taken. Any fewer than that and they probably would not have survived—for the same reasons that it is unlikely that an endangered species can recover from only a few remaining individuals.

Alternatively, the probability of survival was also large if people arrived in smaller, successive waves, averaging at least 130 people every 70 or so years over the course of about 700 years.

A planned arrival

Our data suggest the peopling of Sahul could not have been an accident or random event. It was very much a planned and well-organised maritime migration.

Our results are similar to findings from several studies that also suggest this number of people is required to populate a new environment successfully, especially as people spread out of Africa and arrived in new regions around the world.

The overall implications of these results are fascinating. They verify that the first ancestors of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Melanesian people to arrive in Sahul possessed sophisticated technological knowledge to build watercraft, and they were able to plan, navigate and make complicated, open-ocean voyages to transport large numbers of people toward targeted destinations.

Our results also suggest they did so by making many directed voyages, potentially over centuries, providing the beginnings of the complex, interconnected Indigenous societies that we see across the continent today.

These findings are a testament to the remarkable sophistication and adaptation of the first maritime arrivals in Sahul tens of thousands of years ago.

Article first published June 18, 2019.

Earthrise, a photo that changed the world

Simon Torok

Honorary Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Colleen Boyle

Senior Advisor, Learning and Teaching, School of Design, RMIT University

Jenny Gray

Chief Executive Officer, Zoos Victoria, University of Melbourne

Julie Arblaster

Associate Professor, School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University

Lynette Bettio

Senior Climatologist, Bureau of Meteorology

Rachel Webster

Professor of Astrophysics, University of Melbourne

Ruth Morgan

Senior Research Fellow in History, Monash University

Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders. NASA/Public Domain

December 24, 2018, is the 50th anniversary of Earthrise, arguably one of the most profound images in the history of human culture. When astronaut William Anders photographed a fragile blue sphere set in dark space peeking over the Moon, it changed our perception of our place in space and fuelled environmental awareness around the world.

The photo let us see our planet from a great distance for the first time. The living Earth, surrounded by the darkness of space, appears fragile and vulnerable, with finite resources.

Viewing a small blue Earth against the black backdrop of space, with the barren moonscape in the foreground, evokes feelings of vastness: we are a small planet, orbiting an ordinary star, in an unremarkable galaxy among the billions we can observe. The image prompts emotions of insignificance—Earth is only special because it’s the planet we live on.

As astronaut Jim Lovell said during the live broadcast from Apollo 8:

The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realise just what you have back there on Earth.

Earthrise is a testament to the extraordinary capacity of human perception. Although, in 1968, the photograph seemed revelatory and unexpected, it belongs to an extraordinary history of representing the Earth from above. Anders may have produced an image that radically shifted our view of ourselves, but we were ready to see it.

A history of flight

People have always dreamed of flying. As we grew from hot-air balloons to space shuttles, the camera has been there for much of the ride.

After the second world war, the US military used captured V-2 rockets to launch motion-picture cameras out of the atmosphere, producing the first images of Earth from space.

Russia’s Sputnik spurred the United States to launch a series of satellites—watching the enemy and the weather—and then NASA turned its attention to the Moon, launching a series of exploratory probes. One (Lunar Orbiter I, 1966) turned its camera across a sliver of the Moon’s surface and found the Earth, rising above it.

Despite not being the ‘first’ image of the Earth from our Moon, Earthrise is special. It was directly witnessed by the astronauts as well as being captured by the camera. It elegantly illustrates how human perception is something that is constantly evolving, often hand in hand with technology.

Earthrise showed us that Earth is a connected system, and any changes made to this system potentially affect the whole of the planet. Although the Apollo missions sought to reveal the Moon, they also powerfully revealed the limits of our own planet. The idea of a Spaceship Earth, with its interdependent ecologies and finite resources, became an icon of a growing environmental movement concerned with the ecological impacts of industrialisation and population growth.

From space, we observe the thin shield provided by our atmosphere, allowing life to flourish on the surface of our planet. Life forms created Earth’s atmosphere by removing carbon dioxide and generating free oxygen. They created an unusual mix of gases compared to other planets—an atmosphere with a protective ozone layer and a mix of gases that trap heat and moderate extremes of temperature. Over millions of years, this special mix has allowed a huge diversity of life forms to evolve, including (relatively recently on this time scale) Homo sapiens.

The field of meteorology has benefited enormously from the technology foreshadowed by the Earthrise photo. Our knowledge is no longer limited to Earth-based weather-observing stations.

Satellites can now bring us an Earthrise-type image every ten minutes, allowing us to observe extremes such as tropical cyclones as they form over the ocean, potentially affecting life and land. Importantly, we now possess a long enough record of satellite information so that in many instances we can begin to examine long-term changes of such events.

The human population has doubled in the 50 years since the Earthrise image, resulting in habitat destruction, the spread of pest species and wildfires spurred by climate warming. Every year, our actions endanger more species.

Earth’s climate has undergone enormous changes in the five decades since the Earthrise photo was taken. Much of the increase in Australian and global temperatures has happened in the past 50 years. This warming is affecting us now, with an increase in the frequency of extreme events such as heatwaves, and vast changes across the oceans and polar caps.

With further warming projected, it is important that we take this chance to look back at the Earthrise photo of our little planet, so starkly presented against the vastness of space. The perspective that it offers us can help us choose the path for our planet for the next 50 years.

It reminds us of the wonders of the Earth system, its beauty and its fragility. It encourages us to continue to seek understanding of its weather systems, blue ocean and ice caps through scientific endeavour and sustained monitoring.

The beauty of our planet as seen from afar—and up close—can inspire us to make changes to secure the amazing and diverse animals that share our Earth.

Zoos become conservation organisations, holding, breeding and releasing critically endangered animals. Scientists teach us about the capacities of animals and the threats to their survival.

Communities rise to the challenge and people in their thousands take actions to help wildlife, from buying toilet paper made from recycled paper to not releasing balloons outdoors. If we stand together we can secure a future for all nature on this remarkable planet.

But is a 50-year-old photo enough to re-ignite the environmental awareness and action required to tackle today’s threats to nature? What will be this generation’s Earthrise moment?

The authors would like to acknowledge the significant contribution of Alicia Sometimes to this article.

Article first published December 21, 2018.

History, not harm, dictates why some drugs are legal and others aren’t

Nicole Lee

Adjunct Professor, National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University

Jarryd Bartle

Sessional Lecturer in Criminal Law, RMIT University

Drug-related offences take up a lot of the resources within Australia’s criminal justice system. In 2016–17 law enforcement made 113,533 illicit drug seizures and 154,650 drug-related arrests.

Harm-reduction advocates are calling for the legalisation of some drugs and the removal of criminal penalties on others. And there’s public support for both.

But how did some drugs become illegal in the first place? And what drives our current drug laws?

Legal status isn’t based on risk or harm

Most people assume drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. But the reasons aren’t related to their relative risk or harm.

In