Well, I have been in Australia for 2 weeks now. 2 weeks?! I can already tell that if I blink one too many times, I’m going to be back in the States. Things are settling down, so I have a little bit of time to write a blog post of impressions and experiences so far.
For the first week of the trip, chaos was the best word to describe the experience. It took a week for my luggage to show up, and United wouldn’t deliver it to my house, which meant working my way up to the airport (about 45 minutes away) to collect my bags. I’m happy to have my bags back, but very unhappy with United. If I can avoid it, I won’t be flying with them again. The customer service was absolutely lousy. Speaking of a house, I finally have a room! That also took about a week. I was staying at the youth hostel in town which is a 30 minute bus ride away from the campus. That was okay (particularly because it was in the center of town), but I am glad to have my own room that I don’t have to share with 3 other guys. I was very stressed out the first week here (when things don’t go as I plan, I stress hard), so I tried to spend time doing things that would relax me including going to see Inside Out (highly recommended) or going to Newcastle Beach to photograph the area (largely the birds there). That helped quite a bit, but I am now glad that things have calmed down.
The house I’m in is not great, but it’s cheap and that’s what I want. I have lived in a lot worse, and I don’t have to be here long. The strong benefit is that it’s only a 10 minute walk from the office which means I don’t have to hop on a bus all the time. Buses are expensive here! It costs $3.80AUD ($2.91USD) for a 1 hour ticket. With all of the running around I’ve had to do, I reckon (there’s an Australian term for you) that I’ve spent nearly $50 on buses. They have a card you can get and charge that will have slightly cheaper fares ($2.50-$3.10AUD depending on distance), but still, it ain’t cheap! So, I’ve been walking a lot. It’s good exercise and it will help prep me for laying transects in a week or two.
This last week, I went to Sydney on Monday as a brief stop before going to Canberra. While I was in Sydney, I stopped at the Taronga Zoo, which is an impressive zoo. It’s not necessarily the largest, but it has a lot of exhibits. The one thing I really liked about it was that it is forested. So rather than being on a manicured estate like a number of U.S. zoos, it actually feels like you’re out in nature observing the animals. I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, but I did get to stop by the reptile house with the express purpose of seeing the Corroboree Frog breeding facility there and talking with the head keeper. Southern Corroboree Frogs are critically endangered. You can count the number of calling males in the wild on one hand. The Taronga Zoo is one of four institutions working with Corroboree Frogs and they’re being quite successful. Fortunately, the frogs breed well in captivity. Unfortunately, they’re easily susceptible to chytrid, a deadly fungus wiping out frogs all over. While there are reintroduction efforts, it is currently unclear as to how successful they are, in part because it takes the frogs 5 years to reach maturity (pretty long time for a frog). The head keeper there gave me the opportunity to photograph some of the frogs. I had asked and was expecting to be turned down due to the status of the amphibians, so when he said it was no problem, I was so very excited! I think it’s now a bucket list item to see one in the wild. That may be a tall order.
With my remaining time, I looked around the zoo but was sure to watch the bird show, which I was told was excellent. The reviews didn’t lie. It was probably the best bird show I’ve seen. Pretty seamless transitions between species (with the one exception of a rat going off script and trying to escape), and lots of good information. It was very interactive and immersive as well. They had a large variety of birds from cockatoos to a buzzard who cracked open a fake emu egg to an Andean Condor! If I get back to the zoo, I’ll have to go again. It was a fascinating show.
The following day, I hopped on a bus to Canberra for the official orientation for the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Fellowship at the Australian Academy of Science. There were 30 recipients of the award this year for Australia, and all showed up to officially kick off the “summer.” It was a very nice experience because I got to know the fellows better than when I went up to Washington, DC in April. It is somewhat intimidating hearing everyone’s projects and when I get to mine, I basically say that I’m making clay models. But I’m answering big questions with them, so there’s that. But it is hard to compete with a project aiming to get humans and robots to work together better or one to better capture energy from waves for alternative energy. I hope, at least, that the other 29 people felt the same as I did. It was really neat to see the wide variety of projects, as well as fellows.
The first day was rather light in terms of activities because it was generally assumed that most of the fellows would have arrived in country a day or two earlier and would be dealing with jet lag. After the first day, we went to the Australian War Memorial which is dedicated to all of the service men and women who served in all of the wars that Australia was involved in. It was nice to see the dedication, and it was a quite nice museum that had a pretty complete history of Australian wars. And as a random fact, since World War I, Australia has aided the U.S. in every war we were involved in.
Following the War Memorial, we went to Parliament to learn about how Australia is governed. The whole Constitutional Monarchy confuses me a little. They’re their own independent country, but still have ties to the UK, and in particular, the royal family (Queen Elizabeth is on all of the currency). They have a government similar to ours in that they have a house of representatives and a senate, but it operates in a parliamentary fashion. After touring Parliament, we got to sit in on Question Time.
Question Time sounds like something out of Sesame Street, but it is anything but. Imagine that you have a group of five year olds who naturally separate themselves into boys and girls. One group stole something from the other group because it felt it had the right to it, which led to a debate on who should be able to have that object. When one group questions the opposite, it’s questions dripping with distain and seeking to undercut the other group. When individuals question each other within their group, there are softball questions meant to build up the confidence of that group (i.e., “boys are better than girls because boys play sports and girls don’t”). Now, because we’re dealing with five year olds, such arguments are not civil. Insults are thrown left and right, and whenever someone makes a particularly good point, his or her group guffaws in approval. Occasionally, when these arguments occur, a parent may butt in to scold particularly boisterous individuals, and if those individuals are particularly bad, they’ll get a time-out. I’m sure all of you can relate to this scenario.
Now, what does that have to do with Question Time you may ask? Well, take that scenario and rather than have the individuals be five years old, have them be thirty to eighty. And that’s it. Just the difference in age. No maturity that comes with age, just the difference in age. And there, you have a pretty good approximation of Question Time. Members of the two leading parties (the Liberal Party – equivalent to US Republicans – and the Australian Labor Party – equivalent to US Democrats) question the other of topics of the day and try to undermine the other party while bolstering their own. It’s not civil, not really anyway. The Speaker will warn or throw out particularly boisterous members, but otherwise pretty much anything goes including yelling, laughing, sneering, etc. When the opposition party (the Labor Party) asked question of the Prime Minister (Tony Abbott of the Liberal Party), they were about a letter sent to the Attorney General from the hostage taker in Sydney last year (basically, the guy sent a letter to the AG two months before that happened asking if it was okay for him to talk to the leaders of ISIS). The AG didn’t do anything about the letter, which the Labor Party hammered on. The Liberal Party just asked fluff questions of the Prime Minister or his other ministers (i.e., what are you doing to better education in Australia, how are you helping farmers in Australia, etc.). It was basically like watching a bunch of 5 year olds argue. Except that it was grown men and women. And they are in charge of an entire country. It was interesting to witness, to say the least.
The following day, we started off with breakfast with the U.S. Ambassador to Australia, John Berry. Seeing the entourage along (security detail, photographers, aides, etc.) was intimidating. Fortunately, the Ambassador was quite jovial. He was enthusiastic about hearing what we planned to do while in Australia and, here and there, had anecdotes that related to our research. I was impressed with how knowledgeable he was (for instance, he actually knew what chytrid was and why it was a concern). He was a busy man, so we didn’t get much time to spend with him, but it was a pleasure to spend the hour or so with him. After that, we headed to Tinbinbilla Nature Reserve which was about an hour outside of Canberra. There, we got to meet an indigenous ranger who told us a little bit about Aboriginal culture, tool use, and history of the Reserve. Then we got to walk around the reserve and enjoy the bush. This habitat is completely foreign to me, and it was so interesting. The Eucalypt forests are pretty open (almost reminds me of tropical dry forest). The leaf litter layer isn’t really deep and the ground is pretty covered in herbaceous vegetation (often grasses). It was quite unusual, but I can see how brush fires are such a problem (most of the larger trees had charring from a fire in 2003). The bird life there was pretty good, and I did hear a number of frogs calling (all Crinia signifera). I didn’t get a chance to dig for them since we were on a tight schedule. But we did finally see a ton of kangaroos and even an emu (which was very aptly described as being out of a Dr. Seuss book). While there were wild koalas in the area, I only saw some captive ones (two fellows managed to find a wild one). And after all of that, we headed back to Canberra to head our separate ways and start our research. I took the bus back to Sydney and then the train to Newcastle Friday morning.
Today, I finally started getting into making models. It took a while getting all of the stuff I needed to make them, but now I should be set to get into it. I think I can get around 2000 models this week, which means I may be able to start placing them next week! Until next time!
First blog post from Australia! This certainly has been an interesting beginning to a trip. I’ve had some trips (research and otherwise) where the flights have been awful for one reason or another, but never quite such a pain as what I have experienced for this trip. To begin with, my flights actually were pretty smooth. I had plenty of time between flights and didn’t have any delays, which is unusual. I guess that should have been foreshadowing. I flew on a Dreamliner from Los Angeles to Melbourne, and that was a pretty nice plane. Each seat actually had plenty of leg space (for someone my stature, anyway). Each seat also had an individual touchscreen monitor to play games or watch movies (with a pretty large movie collection). I think the thing that impressed me most were the windows. They didn’t have shades to pull down when you wanted to darken your area, but rather were electronic. You could dial them up or down for clarity and they would shade more or less. It was pretty cool, but given that I flew at night, I couldn’t actually tell the full effect.
When I got to Melbourne, that’s when things started going awry. I waited at the baggage carousel to grab my bags and escort them through customs, but they never showed. I had flights from Memphis to Houston to LA to Melbourne, so I guess it didn’t surprise me that they didn’t show. There was plenty of opportunity to get lost, despite plenty of layover time. I went through customs without my bags, which made it pretty smooth, and then got in line for my fourth flight of the day from Melbourne to Newcastle. I learned that for that flight, you’re allowed two carry-ons provided that they are less than 7kg. My 18kg camera bag was going to have to be checked. At the best of times, I’m nervous about anyone touching my camera bag, and this was right after an airline lost two of my bags. But I had no choice. I’m glad they didn’t weigh my laptop bag as it was well over the 7kg limit (full of books, mostly).
I got to Newcastle and was picked up by a friend who I met in Ecuador (I know, small world). She dropped me off at a hostel where I almost immediately passed out from jet lag. The next couple days were a blur of frustration and stress. For two days, the airline had no idea where my luggage was. It wasn’t until the 17th that I got word that it was sighted in LA and should be delivered here on the 18th. In the intervening time, I had been working on setting up a bank account here as well as trying to find a place to live. Securing a room/apartment/house is not easy from 8000 miles away. I ended up finding a small room for $120AUD per week, which is well under budget for me. It’s not much, but I’m not going to be there for a good chunk of the summer (winter), and it’s basically just a place to crash. I’m not going to be complaining, particularly because it’s only a 10 minute walk from where I’ll be working on campus.
My impressions of United Airlines aren’t great, but the reception I’ve received from Australians here has been wonderful. There must be something in the water that makes them all cheery, jocular, and smiling all the time. It’s quite wonderful (and I must say, I love the Australian accent). I met the lab that I’ll be working with over the last couple days, and despite them either, not knowing that I was coming or just finding out within a couple days of my arrival, they have been quite welcoming and curious about my research. They seem like a pretty interesting group of people, and I definitely look forward to learning more about their interests and research. It seems like I’m the odd duck in that I’m doing color evolution research. The rest of the lab seems to be working on some aspect of chytrid in the Green and Golden Bell Frog. It’s interesting, even now, seeing the differences between the Australian and US education systems (i.e., a 2-3 Masters in the US is equivalent to a 1 year Honors thesis in Oz; and PhDs are only 3 years in Oz whereas they’re 5-6 years on average in the US). The differences largely seem to be due to coursework and teaching requirements in the US.
Things are slowly starting to settle down, which I very much welcome. For a while, I was very worried that my luggage wouldn’t arrive in a timely manner, which would basically mean my completely revamping my experiment since all of my equipment was in my luggage. But things seem to be working out, and now I think I’ll be able to get into making models, and hopefully get into the field in a week and a half or so. We’ll see!
Aside from that, I need to plan a trip to Canberra for an orientation for this fellowship, and I think I am going to stop in Sydney to visit a future collaborator as well as stop at the Taronga Zoo to see the Corroboree Frog breeding facility there. I’m still working out the details and a little nervous about driving on the other side of the road in a major city, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.
That’s all for now!
Time is growing closer and closer to heading off to Australia. I will leave on June 13! And there is still much to do before heading out to the Land Down Under.
I have been purchasing gear for the past week for this trip. Much of it has been photo gear because, as I've said before, I want to be able to document this trip, not just for my adoring fans, but also because scientists generally have a difficult time conveying their work to the general public. By having a variety of different camera equipment as well as the constant documentation, I can show all of you what it is like to be on the ground floor of conducting scientific research including all of the triumphs and headaches.
I have had the pleasant fortune to meet an Australian researcher who is doing some clay model work on Pseudophryne. Originally, this worried me because I didn't know if she was doing all that I proposed or what. But after talking with her a bit, it looks like we're going to collaborate on working with Pseudophryne which is a huge relief. Sometimes researchers can be territorial about their research subjects, but I am pleased that this researcher is not like that. That is how it should be! Science for science's sake, not for ego.
With this new researcher willing to help me out, it relieves some of the pressure I was having to work get all of my ducks in a row before heading to Oz. And that is fantastic because I am trying to figure out some experiments here in Mississippi before I go to Australia. I am going to be presenting at a Behavior conference in Cairns, Australia in August which will be my clay model experiments on Dendrobates tinctorius as well as some chicken experiments that I am hoping to complete before I leave for Australia. I did these experiments a few months ago and got some interesting preliminary results, but I wanted to try them again so that I'm confident in my interpretations of the behavior. Essentially, I'm looking at how chickens learn colors of frogs. Really neat results on that from the first go, but I don't want to spoil the surprise just yet!
