The Best Australian Science Writing 2019

By Lisa Harvey-Smith

Good science writing makes us feel. It makes us delight in the discovery of a black hole munching on a star, laugh at the image of aliens puzzling over golf balls on the Moon, wonder at the mystery of the Spanish influenza's deadly rampage, grieve for baby shearwater chicks dying with plastic-filled stomachs, rage at the loss of the Great Barrier Reef and cheer for the clitoris' long-overdue scientific debut. This ninth edition of The Best Australian Science Writing showcases the most powerful, insightful and brilliant essays and poetry from Australian writers and scientists. It roams the length and breadth of science, revealing how a ceramic artist is helping to save the handfish, what is so dangerous about the hype around artificial intelligence and whether too much exercise is bad for the heart. It makes us think, feel and hopefully act.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Feb 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781742244723

Book preview

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Introduction: Delight and the darkness

Bianca Nogrady

The practice of taking caged canaries into coal mines to alert miners about pockets of dangerous gas conjures an evocative image: a vivacious flash of bright yellow in the hot, oppressive darkness, dancing in its tiny enclosure and chirping its longing for the sunlight.

When that dancing stilled and the singing fell silent, the miners knew their lives were at risk.

Scientists – and by extension, science writers – are that canary. But they’re far from silent. As the climate threat looms, they sing louder and louder, more and more passionately, as if their life depended on their song being heard.

The Best Australian Science Writing anthology is more than a collection of the best science writing Australia has to offer. Science writers have their fingers on the pulse of the scientific community: what’s hot, what’s controversial, what’s dominating the conversation. As such, their choice of what stories to write is an indicator of what’s really going on in the scientific world.

This year, an overwhelming majority of entries for The Best Australian Science Writing anthology were stories about the impact of climate change – not just on humans, but on the flora and fauna we share this world with, and whose fates are inextricably entwined with ours. What happens to them will impact us – and vice versa – and it’s rarely for the better.

Helen Sullivan’s portrait of the dying Great Barrier Reef around Heron Island offers a glimpse of what we stand to lose – and have already lost – through inaction on climate change. Nick Kilvert imagines the life of an Australian girl born today, navigating a not-too-distant future world where average temperatures are 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer. Dyani Lewis tells the story of two native turtle species – both facing unprecedented threats from disease, habitat loss and a changing climate – and the terrible dilemma facing scientists trying to save them.

Science used to be portrayed as a dispassionate, objective, almost detached process: measure Substance A, weigh Animal B, add Chemical C, mix and observe results. Those who work in the sciences, or who write about scientists, know nothing could be further from the truth. I challenge you to read climate scientist Lesley Hughes’s cry from the heart, or Cameron Muir’s gut-wrenching salute to the scientists mourning dead shearwaters with plastic-filled stomachs on Lord Howe Island, and not feel your throat tighten. These scientists are no longer singing: they’re screaming.

The best science writing is about making you feel. Whether it’s hope that CRISPR gene editing can put an end to the shocking obliteration of billions of male baby chickens – as revealed by Jackson Ryan – or Tegan Taylor’s terrifying piece, raising the prospect that the spectre of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic could return, good science writing grabs both your heart and your mind, and it changes you.

Sometimes, it makes you angry. There’s palpable frustration and anger in Dana McCauley’s forensic dissection of political intransigence and inaction on Australia’s obesity problem, but at the same time, Jane McCredie’s piece explores the confusion and frustration that so many feel when trying to navigate the barrage of conflicting and hysterical warnings about potential carcinogens in food. Simone Fox Koob analyses the simmering tensions between farmers and conservationists over the fate of Australia’s iconic wedge-tailed eagles. Anger also rings clear in Annabel Stafford’s exploration of the devastating return of tuberculosis – this time, armed with antibiotic resistance – to plague the poor, the margin-alised, and the ‘invisible’.

But sometimes – often – good science writing makes you smile. Delight is a particular speciality of science writing. Just as those coal miners’ spirits were no doubt lightened by the presence of their twittering, colourful companions – and often whistled to them – science writing can bring a smile or a laugh even in gloomier times. Mark O’Flynn’s whimsical poem imagines aliens encountering the golf balls hit on the Moon’s surface by astronaut Alan Shepard in 1971, while Andrew Tink’s nail-biting piece takes us backstage at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station outside Canberra, which relayed the video feed of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface to audiences around the world.

There’s delight in Brenda Saunders’s gentle poem, walking alongside a group of women as they harvest native tobacco and sit within its comforting fragrance and space; in Linden Ashcroft’s ode to a familiar and stoic Melbourne weather station; and in Phil Dooley’s delightfully visceral description of the cosmic spectacle as a black hole guzzles the innards of a star. Angus Dalton’s portrait of Sydney’s urban water dragon population has one of the most delightful first sentences I’ve ever read, and Tricia Dearborn’s poem celebrating the element sodium takes you to unexpected and delightful places in the mind. Stephen Nicol’s homage to the humble krill – even going so far as to have the image of one tattooed on his forearm – shows just how much scientists can fall in love with their subjects. And perhaps the most delightful is Melissa Fyfe’s paean to the clitoris, in all its formerly hidden glory and complexity, and to the Australian scientist who has almost single-handedly brought the clitoris out of the closet.

Like so many pieces of good storytelling, good science writing also has an element of mystery. After all, what is science but a quest to solve mysteries? Natalie Parletta outlines a mystery that has been plaguing horse owners in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales – an unknown substance causing large numbers of pregnant mares to spontaneously abort – while Konrad Marshall asks whether there is such a thing as too much exercise, and is it causing heart attacks in the mega-fit? Even the concept of ‘disease’ is a mystery, as Felicity Nelson outlines; but attempts to pin down what makes a particular condition a disease have major implications for human wellbeing and welfare.

There’s a common misperception that science writers and journalists – not always interchangeable terms – are champions of science; that all the stories they write will be in celebration or study of science’s achievements. In fact one of their most important roles is to put science under the spotlight, without fear or favour, and show its flaws as well as its finer moments. Jon Brock’s interview with scientist C Glenn Begley shines a light on the reproducibility crisis at the heart of medical research, while Ellen Broad’s look behind the hype around artificial intelligence reveals growing calls for caution and measure in a field that offers so much potential but also poses great risk. Ceridwen Dovey highlights the downsides of a testosterone-fuelled culture of space exploration, and Lauren Fuge suggests that to truly change how we see our planet, and how we care for it, we need to send artists into space.

Science writing is not just about the present and future – it also explores our past and helps us to understand how the present came to be. John Pickrell walks in the fossilised footsteps of the dinosaurs that once roamed the area around what is now Broome in Western Australia, and reveals how those footsteps are entwined with the history and culture of the local Goolarabooloo people. Ivy Shih writes about how the long-extinct Tasmanian tiger lives on, in remains preserved in museums and laboratories that still have the capacity to surprise. Genelle Weule takes the reader to a humid, dusty excavation site in Borneo, where archaeologists are studying the ancient remains of modern humans to understand their journey and how they might have survived a cataclysmic eruption that wiped out much of humanity. And Meredi Ortega’s poem reveals the human stories in the detritus and minutiae we collect.

Much has been written in recent times about our collective grief for the world we are steadily destroying, for the many precious living things and places we are losing or have lost, and for our regret that more was not done sooner. It’s fair to say that we are suffering the consequences of the Pandora’s box that was opened with the Industrial Revolution.

That piece of ancient Greek mythology has two endings. In one of them, Hope remains locked away in Pandora’s box, to punish humanity. But there’s another ending, in which the spirit of Hope is released, so that even in the darkest times, humanity can find a glimmer of brightness – their own little mine canary. There’s a glimpse of hope in Carl Smith’s story of attempts to eradicate the introduced rats plaguing a tropical Pacific island, and in the mind of the ceramic artist crafting bespoke pottery egg-laying sites for the endangered handfish, as Nicole Gill reports. It’s there in Jo Chandler’s quest to see the stunning Queen Alexandra’s birdwing butterfly in the wilds of Papua New Guinea, and in John Read’s exploration of efforts to tackle the scourge of feral cats and protect the vulnerable species they prey on, including the almost mythical night parrot.

I hope this anthology makes you feel. I and the writers in here want you to be transported, enlightened, delighted and hopeful – but we also need you to be angry. Because anger can inspire action, and right now that’s what we need most of all.

The dragons are changing

Angus Dalton

To catch a dragon, you need a canoe, a head-torch, and the cover of darkness. Steel-reinforced gloves also help. James Baxter-Gilbert, a PhD student at Macquarie University, won’t tell me how many times his fingers have almost been crushed in the field because he’s nervous of provoking the disapproval of his Workplace Health and Safety supervisors. But when the creature you’re stalking can have a bite force equivalent to that of a wolf, it’s safe to assume that not every covert voyager in James’s dragon-catching team returns to the shore unscathed.

The eyes of an eastern water dragon are too sharp by day to allow any sort of ambush.

‘They see you coming, and they’re big, and they’re fast,’ James says. ‘As soon as you get close and they realise you’re not behaving normally, they bolt.’

By night, the dragons sleep on branches overhanging creeks and lakes. If they’re attacked, they drop into the water below, and can stay submerged for over 45 minutes. But James hijacks this survival technique, manoeuvring a canoe below the dragon and snatching it from its perch with a noose and a net ready to catch the plummeting, metre-long lizard.

‘Effectively at that point you’re like the boogeyman of dragons,’ says James, bright-eyed above a bushy beard and a hoodie emblazoned with the Jurassic Park logo and the words URBAN DRAGON RESEARCH TEAM. ‘You sneak up on them at night, come up from under their bed and grab ’em. There’ve been jokes in the lab that we’re more like the CIA, black-bagging dissident dragons. Then we bring them to the lab and they go through the UFO experience – "there was a bright light, I was in a laboratory, I woke up and they had stolen my babies!"’

We’re in the Lizard Lab, a large hut in the corner of Macquarie University’s campus, sitting on an iguana-green couch next to a tank filled with leaf litter and the light of a heat lamp.

‘Is there a water dragon in there?’ I ask, eyeing the sticky note pinned to the corner that reads, ‘Hibernating! Do NOT Disturb!’

‘Nah, it’s a pygmy bearded dragon called Chris Pratt,’ says James, sipping tea from a mug shaped like a chameleon’s head. ‘That’s what happens when you name a lizard via Twitter poll – we narrowly missed Lizard McLizardface.’

James is studying the burgeoning differences between eastern water dragons – Intellagama lesueurii – that are born in a wild setting and those that hatch in urban spaces. He only hunts for pregnant females, who are brought back to the lab and injected with a chemical that induces them to lay eggs. The eggs – around the size of a thumbnail – are incubated and hatched, and half of the hatchlings are returned immediately to their mother’s place of capture. The other half stays to be observed by researchers.

James has 12 capture sites around Sydney, and sites are assigned a value that numerically describes how urban or wild the area is. The amount of trees, rocks, fresh and salt water, people, concrete and other unnatural hard surfaces are all taken into account. A hectare of full-blown bush in the Blue Mountains near Kanimbla warrants a perfect score of 100 – nary a Snickers wrapper in sight. But the rest of the sites fall somewhere in between there and zero.

‘The Darling Harbour population is 0.3 on the scale,’ says James. ‘That’s definitely our most urban site. The dragons are right downtown in the Chinese Garden. There’s this tiny pocket of green, but if you’re looking at the kilometre around them, it’s multi-storey high rises. So you’re working at the site and you’re staring at a bush trying to get a dragon out, but if you look up it’s like, concrete all around you.’

Creatures that thrive in the city are usually clad in concrete grey or cloaked in shades of brown to match the bricks-and-mortar hues of suburbia. Pigeons and rats exemplify the small, fast- moving traits of efficacious city slickers. But the water dragon defies everything we expect of an animal thriving in high-density urban spaces.

‘They’re just this metre-long, really charismatic-looking, prehistoric-dinosaur-Godzillas,’ James says. ‘The last animal you’d expect to find right in Darling Harbour.’

* * * * *

The entrance to the Chinese Garden of Friendship is near a huge sign that sends traffic barrelling towards the Harbour Bridge. The first cosmopolitan Chinese garden-dwelling dragon I spot is a large male – I can tell by the width of his head and his blood-red chest – and he’s perched on top of a boulder in the middle of a lake.

A guide with square glasses and freckles tells tourists that the Ming Dynasty–style gardens were built in 1988 – the year of the dragon – to celebrate the relationship between Sydney and our Chinese sister city, Guangzhou. She’s standing in front of a huge ceramic mural of a golden dragon emerging from the sky, representing China, meeting with a blue dragon rising up from the sea, representing New South Wales.

‘There are dragons hidden throughout these gardens,’ she says with a coy grin. I tag along on what’s supposed to be a seasonal tour based on the mid-autumnal changes, but the guide is a little thrown off by the erratic behaviour of the botanical residents. Gardenias, a summer flower, are blossoming in the late afternoon. A maple is only just starting to turn yellow and the lotus flowers have been blooming for four and a half months instead of their usual two.

When I admit that I’m really only here for the dragons, the guide looks relieved. ‘Come this way,’ she says. She leads us to a wooden balcony carved with ornate botanical designs and points out the water dragon in the middle of the lake, a dark streak on the pale rock. He’s bobbing his head up and down, neck outstretched.

The tourists gasp. ‘Yes, there are living dragons in these gardens too,’ the guide delivers with flourish. Of course, the boulder he’s lying on is called Dragon Rock.

Someone guesses that the gyrating dragon is trying to swallow something, but it’s actually a territorial display. The males’ scarlet chests are used for intimidating other males (there are twelve throughout the gardens) and attracting mates – in the confines of the gardens, competition for space, food and females is fierce. As we climb to the gardens at the top of the waterfall, the guide explains that each section of the garden was designed around yin (the quiet force residing in the shaded, tucked-away corners) or yang (the loud, bright spaces filled with the sound of plunging water). The dragons are the perfect resident for a place embodying these two opposing forces; they are either rock-still or explosions of wheeling limbs charging across the paths of shrieking visitors, their muscular tails thrashing through manicured hedges.

When the tour is over the guide leaves us to explore. I find a small female sitting on a rock next to a discarded map. Spines run from the base of her head right down the length of her tail. Her banded markings are the colour of earth and sand. A black streak runs across her cheek like mascara dragged by a tear. Her orange dinosaur eyes stare me down. I back off.

Walking out of the gardens, I spot a large male – perhaps the one displaying on Dragon Rock – snaking out of the water. He drags himself onto the polished pebble shore. Behind him, a Novotel, unmarked skyscrapers and skeletal cranes rise into the sky. Thick black scars mar his shoulders.

* * * * *

There’s an increasingly obsolete notion that nature is something far away from cities; something you travel for or ‘go out’ into. Attached to that notion is the idea that as urbanity sprawls, nature shrivels or is eaten away at. To a degree this is true – human activity has had enough drastic ramifications to justify a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene – but the narrative that every population of native species is declining isn’t accurate.

The most robust populations of brushtail possums, redback spiders and bluetongue lizards exist in cities. The green and golden bell frog was once so abundant it was the go-to species to go under the knife in high-school dissection classes, until habitat loss drove it to the edge of extinction. But two thriving populations of the frog were discovered in development sites in Homebush – the frogs have a high tolerance for heavy metals and salt, and are doing fine in the contaminated soils of industrial areas. Hanley’s river snail was also feared extinct recently until it was rediscovered living exclusively in underwater irrigation pipelines. In his book The New Nature, Tim Low writes, ‘Native animals don’t have any concept of unnatural, so they don’t necessarily recoil from humanised landscapes.’

James is discovering that the dragons, too, aren’t just failing to recoil from urban spaces, they’re actually adapting to better suit city life. The babies hatched in the lab are measured every two months; everything from forearm and toe length to skull width. The more urbanised a dragon is, the bigger the head – perhaps a crammed city setting warrants a stronger bite – and the longer the limbs.

James leads the way to a large structure that resembles a fenced-in tennis court. Inside a chicken-wire gate there are six square spaces around 3 metres square, divided by waist-high wooden barriers. Half the spaces are filled with grass and piles of sticks and logs. The other half are covered in concrete patio tiles, other synthetic surfaces, and a plastic stool. All of the areas have a pond of water in the middle made out of a blue clam-shaped kids’ pool – the type that everyone had in their front yard in the ’90s.

This experimental set-up is designed to establish whether the differences in dragon morphology, or body shape, are due to the environment they’re exposed to as they grow up, or if it’s embedded in their genes. To find out, they’re raising urban-bred dragons in natural settings and wild dragons are growing on simulated urban patios.

‘Right there’s a little cheeky one,’ says James. He points out a yearling dragon around the length of my hand lying on the small square of tarp that shades the clam pool. Other tiny dragons are skittering around the sun-drenched corners of the enclosure, soaking up warmth before the afternoon turns cold. Their dark little bodies look like assemblages of twigs. Their skinny back legs and toes look gawky, and their tails seem disproportionately long, making up over two-thirds of the dragons’ length. James explains that the laterally compressed tails are used for swimming, and are the reason early colonisers reported seeing crocodiles in the waterways of Sydney.

At this size, essentially everything that’s larger than the dragons will try to eat them: birds, snakes, even larger predatory insects. There are hastily patched-up patches of net where enterprising birds of prey have tried to tear through, and the fence around the dragons has been reinforced at the base to stop rats from tunnelling through and devouring the baby dragons’ brains. When a plane goes overhead, the dragons scatter into hidey-holes.

‘Survival rates are super low for young dragons,’ says James. ‘A mother will put out two clutches of ten eggs per year for 30 years, and that’s just to replace herself in the population. We’re talking a 90 per cent failure rate at least.’

The findings are suggesting the changes are not due to the upbringing of a dragon, but rather what’s embedded in their genes.

‘At least preliminarily, against what other labs are seeing genetically, we’re seeing experimentally in their body shapes. Changes to the dragons are occurring in less than 200 years of human pressure. They live about 40 years, so very rapidly – we’re talking a handful of generations – they’ve had this selection for different body shapes, and it is heritable. Which is ever cooler.’

James is in the process of testing other behavioural and physiological variances between urban and wild dragons too, running experiments to test how willingly they’ll approach an empty packet of CCs and how long they can run on a specialised dragon-treadmill.

Evolution is most readily observed on islands, he explains, as we walk back from the dragon nursery. The genetic isolation and different habitats create the perfect conditions for new, specific types of animal to evolve, as with Darwin’s finches. But with the ‘human wave’, as James calls us, a new type of island has been created. Instead of being bordered by water, populations are isolated by roads and buildings and huge concrete walls. ‘In the same way that we can see new species over time arise on islands, the cities are operating like islands for the dragons,’ says James. Celine Frere, a scientist in Queensland studying the changing coils of water dragon DNA, calls cities the ‘Archipelagos of the Anthropocene’.

James is reluctant to entertain the idea just yet that what he’s observing is speciation – the rise of a new type of lizard adapted exclusively to the city. But he can confirm that a skeleton that hasn’t changed for 20 million years is shifting below the dragons’ reptilian skin to adapt to the newest environmental pressure – us.

A tale of two turtles

Lasting impressions

Maxed out

Konrad Marshall

At 7 am on 28 August 2017, just south of Surfers Paradise, a grey SUV veered off a quiet suburban street and clattered through an aluminium fence. The bingle itself was not serious, yet the driver was in serious trouble. Paramedics arrived promptly and performed CPR for an hour, but the husband and father, on his way home from a dawn training session at a local surf club, could not be revived.

The man behind the wheel was Dean Mercer, a champion triathlete and winner of everything from the World Oceanman series to the Coolangatta Gold. Still in peak physical shape, Mercer had suffered an acute cardiac arrest.

He was only 47 when he died. Shocked and disbelieving mates quickly filled the ether with tributes, lionising a competitor of ascetic devotion, one whose capacity to push his body – and live a life structured around training – was legendary. In the coming week, though, amid the confused conversation around his passing, others were less surprised.

Local cardiologist Dr Ross Sharpe was one of them. In the Gold Coast Bulletin, Sharpe described the insidious impact of elite endurance sport, speaking of rhythmic disturbances and plaque ruptures and a condition called ‘athlete’s heart’. Other medicos shared his views. Dr Ross Walker, a Sydney cardiologist, spoke with the ABC about toxins and inflammatory conditions and the chronic, recurrent damage wrought by feats of extreme exertion.

‘I probably feel one of the reasons for this – and it hasn’t been absolutely proven but it’s quite logical – is that if you push yourself too hard, you’re overstretching all the mechanisms in the body,’ Walker said. Including the heart. ‘Like anything that’s overworked, it eventually gives up.’

In Melbourne, however, Australia’s foremost expert on exercise and the heart was inside his lab, shaking his head. Dr Andre La Gerche, the leader of sports cardiology at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, tells the Good Weekend he has no idea what had happened to Mercer, or what specific factors were at play in his ‘cardiac event’. No one does.

Indeed, the Mercer family, still reeling from the abrupt passing of a son, brother, husband and dad – and in no way ready to speak about the tragedy that befell them – have no conclusive answers of their own, even now. Let alone when it happened. ‘From the newspapers and TV it was impossible to tell anything,’ La Gerche says. ‘But people were making all these wild guesses anyway.’

La Gerche is the most active researcher in his field in the country, perhaps the world, but he isn’t much of a self-promoter. He has a Twitter account but has only tweeted four times. All were on the same day – a week after Mercer’s death.

First, he linked to a story connecting endurance training with heart attacks, along with his appraisal: ‘Irresponsible and ill-informed.’ Second, a statement: ‘Cardiologists should know there is no proven link between endurance sport and sudden death. Research suggests opposite.’ Next, a complicated line graph, which he annotated: ‘Athletes live longer. Endurance athletes and gold medallists live the longest. Have faith fellow athletes.’ And finally, a summation: ‘Too sad that people are using a tragic event to push unproven agendas. Great man, sad event, no blame!’

La Gerche nods when I bring up his debut tweetstorm. Friends and colleagues had asked him to speak up, to counter the misinformation swirling all around the event. ‘There were some blissfully naive views circulating,’ he says, still incredulous. ‘To push a message that places blame or fault on endurance sport? It’s irresponsible on every level.’

* * * * *

Endurance sport has an undeniably compromised reputation. Its best individual