Stoop

Published The Age and Sydney Morning Herald here.

Nobody knows for how many thousand years the Dunggula story has been told to children.

The Bangerang people in northern Victoria believe it has been told since the land was created. But this will be the ﬁrst year that the story, about the creation of the Murray River, is communicated as an animated, digital touch book.

Dunggula is the story of the journey of Gunyuk, a wise old Bangerang woman, who approached the creator god, Baiami, in the mountains to ask for water for her starving people in the lowlands. The creator sent the rainbow serpent to forge a great riverbed and later delivered the rains that ﬁlled Dunggula (the Murray River). This gave people plants and food, coloured the land and united the people.

Reproducing the story in a digital format helped unite Indigenous and non-Indigenous children with community elders and brought clans together to compare stories. The process helped revive a struggling language and a story that has been told for millennia by elders to children was retold by children for elders.

Dunggula, a story from Bangerang Nation was produced with the help of the SharingStories Foundation, an organisation that works with more than a dozen Aboriginal communities across Australia to help children and elders record ancient creation stories in a variety of new digital formats for community use and, when deemed acceptable by custodians, shared as education resources. The foundation helps communities produce animated and bilingual digital touch books, interactive cultural maps, short ﬁlms, augmented reality-guided tours of country and language apps.

In November last year, the foundation in partnership with the Nyikina community won best education app or e-book at the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) awards, for Woonyoomboo the Night Heron, an 85-page animation of a creation story co-produced over 10 years with the Nyikina people in the Kimberley. In September the same work was a ﬁnalist for best non-ﬁction e-book in the 2019 World Digital Media awards. Bangerang and non-Indigenous pupils at St Georges Road Primary School in Shepparton animating one of the drawings for the Dunggula digital touch book. 

Bangerang community member and Koori engagement support worker Anne Atkinson oversaw the SharingStories programs at St Georges Road Primary School in Shepparton. She said one beneﬁt of the process was “getting kids to turn up to school excited”.

In 2016, 12 Indigenous year 5 and 6 children chose 12 non-Indigenous kids to partner with on the project. The 24 children were taken to key sites around the Murray River and discussed the story with elders. SharingStories then organised a team of sound, ﬁlm and visual artists and producers to work with the children under the guidance of elders. The kids were taught the digital skills to make the content and a year later SharingStories artist facilitators returned to help them edit and ﬁnish production.

Atkinson said what moved her most was “seeing the kids being proud of what they were doing and their culture and not being shy or ashamed but proud to talk together with our community elders”.

Anne Atkinson with her father at the Murray River (Dunggula) near Cummeragunja Mission, where many Bangerang people lived.

“The elders were very happy that the story was continuing in our area for our people and with the Bangerang language that was being lost. Now with this story it has come alive again,” she said. Daen Sansbury-Smith, Victorian program manager for SharingStories, said Aboriginal communities have always adapted their cultural expressions to the times. “Back in the '70s, elders were saying we need to paint on canvas to save and protect our songlines and our stories. Back then painting with acrylic on a square canvas was modern. Now the elders are saying this is the way forward.”

The process also beneﬁts the schools. SharingStories founder and CEO Dr Liz Thompson said: “We help teachers understand how to get custodians into the classroom and how to get children out on country. The community sees the school valuing culture. It’s a place that respects their culture. That builds trust between schools and the communities that they serve.”

The foundation works with communities as far-ﬂung as Warburton in Western Australia, the Kimberley and Arnhem Land as well as eight communities in Victoria, with two more - the Yuin and Bidwell communities in south-east NSW - to commence programs this year.

Since it was founded in 2011, the foundation has co-produced 15 bilingual touch books, including the Wurundjeri creation story of Birrarung (the Yarra River), and seven new digital touch books will be launched in 2020, including the Dunggula story.

Aboriginal culture is rooted in story and stories have always been enacted in many art forms - song, dance, pattern and ceremony. The multimedia touch books combine old and new arts and media - song, dance, claymation, shadow screen performance, Photoshop and Garage Band, for example - to add layers to stories that have always been multidimensional.

Sometimes elders and adults help children illustrate the stories. The story of the Giant Green Sea Turtle, from the Liya Dhalinymirr people in East Arnhem Land, was illustrated by a senior man using traditional cross-hatching paintings. Now they are being animated.

Digital content often integrates drone footage, photographs, traditional imagery and songs relating to important sites. Apps use augmented reality to show users elements of traditional story and key sites as they walk through country.

Liya Dhalinymirr community members in East Arnhem Land dancing the Hermit Crab dance for a SharingStories touch book about Mukarr, the Giant Green Sea Turtle.

One remarkable animation, Wati Kutjarra and Tjintjintji at Nyirrnyirrpungu (Two Men and the Bat People at Nyirrnyirrpungu), superimposes silhouetted dancers moving across a traditional dot painting.

“All culture is ﬂuid,” said Tim Goodwin, co-chair of SharingStories, barrister and member of the Yuin community in south-east NSW. “There’s no sense that Aboriginality or our cultural expression is a concept that is frozen in time.

“And [our digital formats] still incorporate all those ancient traditions of painting and art, dance and language that are the bases of storytelling.”

“To think that one Aboriginal person holds everything is wrong,” said Sansbury-Smith. “Because there are storytellers, there are song people and visual artists ... everyone has their role. When we go to communities we always ask who can guide the students best in relation to the multiple art forms that are explored.”

Every program is driven by the community and choices of content, story and images are guided by elders.

Annie Nayina Milgin, senior Nyikina cultural custodian, directing a drone in the Kimberley as part of research into the story of Woonyoomboo the Night Heron. 

“Stories have grown, from 12 to 85-page digital touch books, because each time there’s a journey on country and groups of elders together, they recall fragments of stories that are pieced together,” said Thompson, who has helped Indigenous people publish their stories for over 30 years. “That term used now about ‘awakening sleeping languages’ is accurate about stories, because they are also laying there. “That’s why it’s so important to facilitate those experiences and journeys because ... if [the story] is not catalysed and recalled and recorded, if the sites aren’t located while custodians are able to, then a lot of that knowledge could be lost.”

"Gunyuk yama wuta yenbena yakapna malnha damanmy, gona yurratha ganya Baiami ngarrnhang."

Gunyuk asked for all the tribes to sing and dance to the sky, hoping Baiami would hear.

Children and elders go digital to tell ancient Indigenous stories

June is a popular month to make love. So are the months of October, November, December and January, according to birth statistics collated for The Age.

The myth that summer loving leads to more babies in spring is only partly true. We also conceive more in October and November and, as the nights get longer and the doonas get warmer, in June and July. 

Historical birth data collated by the Offices of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Victoria and NSW show around ten per cent more births in July, August, September and October and increasingly higher numbers around February and March.

The figures challenge modern preconceptions about conception and point to  a more traditional mating season that begins in spring.  Adjusted monthly birth rates also challenge astrologers who presume there are equal numbers of people born under each star sign.

“More Victorian babies are born under the star signs of Cancer, Leo, Virgo and Libra,” said the Registrar of the Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages,  Ms Helen Trihas. She said the data also had implications for workplaces and medical services.

Maternity wards are often busier in Spring. Pam Tytler, associate charge nurse at the Birthing Suite of the Northern Hospital said they often had to hire more staff in September and October.  Last year the unit delivered 183 babies in October compared to 141 in December.

Overall data was collated for the Age from total births in 1958, 1983 and 2008 in Victoria and NSW. Dr Christine Read, medical director of Family Planning NSW said the figures were intriguing and raised questions about whether birth times were planned or  followed more instinctive or seasonal patterns.

Could nature be telling us when to nurture?

Recent studies in Victoria and NSW concluded that more than 50% of pregnancies, especially first pregnancies, were unplanned. Director of the Centre for Women's Studies & Gender Research at Monash University,Dr Jane-Maree Maher, said, “We have a fantasy that we are very careful or organized but our research showed that a lot of conceptions are still not planned.”

Couples that do plan often try to avoid giving birth during busy work seasons. Dr Read said there were other reasons for people to give birth before December. “Hospital and medical services are less accessible in December and January and people might not want to give their children birthdays around Christmas,” she said.

There were around 70,000 births in Victoria last year and up to 600 more births in busier months. The differences and the pattern of births in both states were more pronounced fifty years ago.

Professor Bob Birrell, coordinator of Population and Urban Research at Monash University, said access to  heating and air conditioning means “there is no longer any reason to give birth at certain times of the year.”  

We don’t need to act like animals and give birth in late winter or spring to maximise sunshine, warmth and food for our offspring but according to these statistics, that may be what we still do. 

If births are not planned then sexual chemistry plays a bigger part. Dr Maher said holiday conceptions were not just about alcohol and warm nights (or lapses in contraception) but about having more time and more relaxed time together.

If holidays lead to increased fertility the federal government may not need to extend the $5000 baby bonus but just gazette more public holidays. 

The increase in conceptions in October and November, before summer,  coincides with traditional fertility seasons and fertility festivals like Beltane and the Maypole dance, that were held around the middle of Spring.  Jane Hardwick-Collings, midwife and birth workshop coordinator, said “mid spring is the most fertile time of the year so humans are re-enacting what is happening in nature. We go on heat in the spring time."

Published The Age, general news, p3, Saturday, June 13 2009, "Spring is in the Air in June"


The astrology of lovemaking

It is a timeless, primal scene but I’m not entirely convinced humans should be here.

The active peak on Reunion Island, La Piton de la Fournaise (The Peak of the Furnace), rises above one of the earth’s “hotspots” and is one of the world’s most active volcanoes.  The last lava flow occurred early last month and there are small eruptions almost every year.  

I am only slightly bemused to find locals revere their volcano like a national symbol. Images of the last big eruption in 2007 are proudly displayed all over the island. 

From the air, Reunion looks like a giant turtle floating in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. The oval-shaped island, just 65 kilometres long, is backed by 3000-metre, volcanic peaks that shoulder the sky.

On the first day we are driven straight to the active volcano and our guide almost persuades us it is safe.  We are told observatories monitor the volcano’s every mood and eruptions only cause flows in the uninhabited south of the island. But it is a few days later, when we visit the site of the 2007 flow, that my insecurities change to reverence.  

The 2007 eruption cut a black swathe through rainforest and disgorged new earth into a smouldering sea. It’s there I realise volcanoes don’t destroy earth – they create earth. Lava eventually becomes soil.  Walking across the top of the lava is like walking on pottery baked with the first patterns on earth.  We are amazed to see young green plants already growing on these ceramic fields.

Reunion is a young island created by recent eruptions two million years ago and its rich soils and flora are studied as present examples of the geological past of many countries on earth.

Not far from the 2007 lava flow, Le Jardin des Parfums et Des Epices is a testament to this fertility.  The garden of perfumes and spices is a botanical rainforest garden green with every species of flower and tree, both ornamental and agricultural, grown on the island.

There are elephant trees with wrinkled trunks and flowering heliconia and orchids throughout.  Our passionate host and plant farmer, Patrick Fontaine, teaches us to respect the intelligence of flora. He points out medicinal plants and shows us indigenous plants that only grow in these six square kilometres on earth.

Plant oils such as geranium used in French perfumes and vanilla are still important exports. The magical orchid, vanilla, perfumes the whole island and came to scent the world after a Reunionnais slave discovered how to manage its pollination.

Slavery is often linked to drugs and exotic substances. Reunion was also farmed to grow sugar cane for rum and the drug which now ironically enslaves western civilisation - coffee.

The French East India company settled the uninhabited island in 1665 but generations of slaves and indentured labourers from Africa, India and China now enrich the blood and culture of the people.

Réunion has remained a remote “departement”, or state, of France. Though 12 hours flight from the mother country, the island is also very French and in true French fashion, very proud of it.  A local trucking company vaunts the logo “La Passion du Transport”. The Reunionnais commonly enjoy Bordeaux with long lunches on vine-shaded patios overlooking the Indian ocean.

Reunion has been kept a French secret for centuries and 80 per cent of visitors still come from France. Only 700 Australians travelled there last year but that number is rising quickly after the launch in April of Air Austral operations in Australia and the first direct flights from Sydney to Reunion and onto France.

The Reunionnais love good wine, barbecues, picnics, seafood, beaches and sports so Australians should fit right in. Restaurants serve Creole and French cuisine. Vanilla duck curries, samosas and rice share menus with delicately herbed swordfish, salad vinaigrettes, French cheeses and wines.  Guava, lemon, goyavier, coconut, pineapple, banana, lychee, and vanilla rum punches festoon restaurant tables and bars even at lunchtime.

In France, life is an aperitif for eating. In Reunion, rum is an aperitif for life.

And just as the rum is infused with tropical spices and fruit, French culture in Reunion is infused with Creole joie de vivre and tropical languor. 

Roses and bougainvilleas flower over white paling faces around cottages painted in bright tropical  pastels. French signs in traditional blue cursive fonts hang over streets alive with Creole children. Strawberry, tomato and garlic roadside stalls are as common as tropical fruit stalls. In cemeteries, the deceased rest beneath Catholic crosses and frangipani copses.

I am charmed and intrigued by the Creole blend of cultures. The Reunionnais live in a tacit racial harmony that is a model for a  racially mixed-up world. The people just accept others to have different racial backgrounds.

There are 24 towns named after Catholic saints, including the capital, St Denis, but the Reunionnais also observe the practices of a range of religions: Muslim, Hindu, African and Catholic. Our guide, Sully Chaffre,  himself part French Brittany, Tamil Nadu, Cantonese and African, says he tries to “inspire [himself] with the positive aspects of each religion and many of the new generation are doing the same thing”.

Like the rainforest on Reunion, syncretism and Creole culture may also be an example of the future of the world. The population of Reunion is also quite literally young with half the 800,000 residents under the age of 25.

Living on the sides of an active volcano also gives the locals a good sense of humour. Michael Asprey, alias Mickey Rat, is a resident Australian surfboard shaper and the official warden for Australian travellers.  “Creole people get together and they just laugh,’’ he says outside his surf shop in St Leu, ‘‘All day they crack jokes. It’s one of the things I really enjoy here.”

The coast is frequented by giant leatherback and loggerhead turtles but the national animal seems to be the gecko. Images of the lizard with a cheeky, youthful spirit appear everywhere: on houses, cars, clothes and jewellery.

This youthful spirit expresses itself in thriving bars and nightclubs and a wide range of sports on offer. With a summer sea temperature around 30 degrees, travellers and locals keep busy big game fishing, diving, paragliding and surfing.  

From a paraglider above St Leu on the west coast, surfers look like coloured reef fish on a dappled coral sea bed.  Soaring at 800 metres, I feel like birds feel and see like birds see. The entire coast. The entire ocean. The entire sky.

From the shore, every view of Reunion is backed by the peaks of three collapsed calderas, or “cirques”, that form the volcanic high country. Still relatively uneroded, the sides of the cirques are unnaturally and spectacularly vertical. Villages and roads cling impossibly to razorback ridges.

Published Traveller, The Age and SMH.

Bow down at the peak - Reunion Island

When the architect of the Australia pavilion at the Venice Biennale dropped by Richard Bell’s Aboriginal tent embassy in a park near an entrance to the exhibition, people thought there might have been tension.

Bell had wrapped a large model of John Denton’s award-winning, $6 million Australia pavilion building in chains, craned it onto a barge, and motored it up and down along the Biennale’s Giardini foreshore - to protest the white bias of art world hierarchies: or “white art in black boxes” as Bell put it. But Denton loved the humour and congratulated Bell.

Some believe all art is political, but Bell, whose work was short-listed for the Australia pavilion, said: “Political art only makes up 4 per cent of the market. I see that as an opportunity.”

It was always paradoxical for the Venice Biennale, an exhibition founded in 1896 to present the art of nations, to adopt the quasi-political theme: May You Live in Interesting Times.

Northern Irish artist Cathy Wilkes almost rejected her invitation to represent Great Britain - because of her dislike of countries and borders. The new selection process for the Australia pavilion with an Australia Council-appointed panel selecting from proposals open to the artistic public also caused controversy.

Philanthropist and former Australian Biennale commissioner Simon Mordant AM, who donated $2 million and led the campaign to help raise remaining funds for the construction of the new Australia Pavilion, said the new process was more prone to being influenced by political correctness. "That certainly wasn’t the case [this] time. It was an excellent panel,” he said, referring to the panel chaired by artist Callum Morton which selected the pitch from artist Angelica Mesiti with curator Juliana Engberg to represent Australia. "But there is that risk in future.”

Few chosen artists created work about the politics of art but the variety of ways Biennale artists reimagined politics was nevertheless inspiring.

Christoph Buchuel placed "Barca Nostra', the mangled hull of a ship in which 700 refugees drowned off Sicily in 2015, on the wharf outside a cafe at the end of the main exhibition building - to protests from one artist, who said: “that’s not art, it’s media, it’s death, it shouldn’t be here”.

At the other end of the political art spectrum, Australia pavilion artist Angelica Mesiti’s video 'Assembly', featured a subtle, slow representation of a political forum - the Italian Senate - by musical translations, dissonance and shimmering harmonies.

A majority of works by the 79 artists in the curated exhibition, and in the 90 international pavilions, were political, even when they took an ironic approach to global issues. Two of the best were made by Chinese couple Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.

Their giant hydraulic, robotic, limbed paintbrush, housed in a clear acrylic cage, span threateningly and bent down to sweep up dark crimson liquid - oil, paint or blood - which kept spreading across the floor. Every few minutes the robotic brush paused to do a celebratory dance, proud of what it had achieved. 'Can’t Help Myself' was a comical but ominous depiction of the technology that claims to save us from disasters.

There were several haunting memorials, not to fallen soldiers, princes or queens, but to the citizens, poets, journalists, women and children “disappeared” by dictatorships.

'Discordo Ergo Sum' (I protest therefore I am) by Renate Bertlemann, in the Austrian pavilion, featured glass roses skewered on rows of metal spikes, neatly fusing the flowers of anti-war protests with a World War I cemetery.

On similar rows of metal spikes, Indian artist Shipal Gupta skewered the words of 100 poets imprisoned or killed since the 7th century. 'In your tongue, I cannot fit', a work coming to Dark Mofo next month, features microphones suspended above the spikes that broadcast their words about prison, intermittently forming a chorus of urgent whispers, hauntingly bringing the poets’ ghosts to life.

Some work was too overtly judgmental and approached propaganda or essay, albeit for a good cause. 'The White Album', a film by Arthur Jafa which won the Golden Lion for Best Participant prize, began with a wonderfully challenging collation of found footage of people being racist, criticising racists or occupying threatening racial archetypes (a Muslim with an automatic rifle, for example). But then the voiceover descended into slogan and polemic.

The value of this Biennale’s survey of political art was demonstrated when two artists addressed the same subject or trope - an aeroplane for example.

Poland pavilion artist Roman Stanczak’s 'Flight', turned a luxury jet inside out, with its wiring and engine organs on the outside, in a succinct inversion of the winged symbol of western progress, a symbol imploded this century by terrorism and the tangled futures of technology and wealth. In the main exhibition, Yin Xiuzhen’s 'Trojan' let viewers walk inside a six-metre tall doll-like sculpture of a passenger in crash position, head praying between her knees.

The main exhibition featured as many female artists as male (and a few non-gendered) for the first time in the Biennale’s 123-year history. Several women photographers produced powerful self-portraits that challenged the viewer’s gaze, in a genre popularised by Frida Kahlo.

For 'Body En Thrall', New York artist Martine Gutierrez posed naked in the arms of a male dummy bridegroom, her expression both acquiescent and defiant. South African artist Zanele Muholi portrays herself as a defiant black queen wearing accessories that yet refer to bondage. Japanese artist Mari Katayama made disturbing and beautiful self-portraits by adorning her amputated and prosthetic limbs with the materials of doll making.

There were few works requiring words to frame their ideas in this Biennale, and there were several signs that the conceptual modern era is giving way to more kinetic or accessible engagements with mainstream news media. Artworks that challenged political biases of news media formed some of the most striking works.

US artist Christian Marclay’s '48 War Movies' is a nauseating tiling of 48 complete films about the horrors of war that creates a media vortex. 'BLKNWS' by experience music video clip director Kahlil Joseph is a two-channel music video that samples black political figures and footage of persecution and survival, high and pop art, sublimely and powerfully edited to match the different rhythms of the soundtrack.

There was a parallel growth in the number and sophistication of collaborations - works made by teams of accomplished artists and artisans, with principal artist as director, and curator as producer - a growth led by an impressive collection of video works. Many works also more seamlessly combined genres of art - music, theatre, poetry, puppetry or dance.

Lithuania won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion for an opera - theatre, music and poetry - set on a rectangular beach observed from above as if it was a painting, with performers dramatising climate change.

Ironically, in this context it was almost a political act to depict positive visions of the future. The latest work by Japanese screen artist Ryoji Ikeda, 'data-verse', is a dangerously beautiful vision of a universe depicted by movements of data. Ikeda’s monumental mathematical and musical composition contrasted with the tenderly crafted mathematics of underwater organisms explored in the fine crochet coral and toxic reefs curated and created by Australians Christine and Margaret Wertheim.

In a Collateral event outside the Biennale grounds, South Australian artists created a 30-metre installation and film depicting the passage of three billion years in 'Living Rocks'. The visualisation was scientifically researched yet almost too photographic to believe. But the time-lapsed landscape, and score, to volcanoes rising, erupting and eroding, for example, succeeded in making one feel like a dot at the end of time - as insignificant as responsible for the future of the earth.

But the last word about politics and art might go to the director of an organisation that abstract painter Mark Bradford has helped fund since his US representation at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Bradford has sponsored Process Collettivo, an organisation that helps prisoners in Venice recover their self-esteem, before and after release. Process Collettivo director Liri Longo described their shared political mission: “We try to help people discover better parts of themselves.”

Published The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, May 2019, along with two features on artists.

Review of the 2019 Venice Biennale

When George de Mestral went for a hunting trip with his dog in the Swiss Alps in 1941, a multimillion dollar idea stuck to his sock.

The Swiss engineer studied the burrs attached to his clothes and his dog’s fur and used the design of the tiny hooks, that the plant had evolved to disperse its seed, to design Velcro.   

The field of biomimicry - the study of natural forms and systems in design and engineering - has come a long way since Leonardo da Vinci studied birds to design flying machines, parachutes and hang gliders over 500 years ago.

In 2011, researchers at German bionics company Festo demonstrated a lightweight, carbon-fibre robot that quite literally flew like a bird, and one of da Vinci’s drawings, around a TED talk auditorium, before a standing ovation and five million YouTube hits. 

Examples of biomimicry are now everywhere if you know where to look.

The silent nose of Japan’s Shinkansen train was not designed after a bullet but a kingfisher’s beak.  During the last decade, gecko paws have been studied to develop chemical-free adhesive and self-cleaning medical bandages. Less painful syringe needles - yes, that is possible - have been designed with serrated edges that mimic the irregular edge of mosquito proboscises, a reason we don’t feel their sting until it’s too late.

Lotus flowers are a symbol of purity partly because of the dirt-repellent qualities of their leaf surfaces, a microscopic structure used by German biomimicry firm Lotusan to develop more durable and grime-resistant paints.  The rough pattern of denticles on shark skin, one of the oldest and fastest fish in the sea, has been used to develop a drag-resistant paint for aircraft and ships.

The “bee’s knees” is a metaphor for a good product that CSIRO took seriously. Researchers took resilin, a protein found in the joints of bees and other insects - the substance that enables fleas to jump so far - and by studying its physical and chemical structure are developing a new generation of super-elastic materials.     

CSIRO senior principal researcher Chris Elvin says biomimicry is a key part of the third revolution in biology - after genetic engineering and genomic sequencing - that involves the convergence of biology, chemistry, physics and engineering. “They are going to merge and as they do we will be using nearly four billion years of biology to develop systems, receptors, machines and materials that are remarkable.”

Former fisheries and wildlife officer Jay Harman saw the universe not in a grain of sand but in a seashell in the palm of his hand. Like many biomimicry entrepreneurs, Harman had a breakthrough moment when he understood something about an element of nature - in his case, the secret to better fluid dynamics.

Harman, entrepreneur and author of The Shark’s Paintbrush, a survey of global biomimicry enterprises, is one of a growing number of business people who believe biomimicry can bring about the next industrial revolution.  “There are at least three million species on earth and all of those species are made up of hundreds and thousands of solutions to all of the problems that are facing humanity. There is really nothing that we face as a species that hasn’t already been addressed by nature in countless ways,” he says.  “Every living thing can teach us how to do everything that we do better.”

Harman’s company began studying seashells and then studied frozen whirlpools to develop world-leading designs for fans, impellers and water mixers that look more like lilies than traditional propellers. His company PAX Scientific went commercial in 2008 and now maintains 250 patents worldwide and has four subsidiaries with multi-million dollar turnovers. Nature’s algorithms are so perfect, a single 15-centimetre PAX Water impeller can mix a water storage reservoir the size of a football field 12 metres deep.

Harman, now based in California, is in Australia to launch Materian - a national network of engineers, manufacturers, scientists and designers - that aims to identify and help commercialise advanced materials. The network will be launched by Colourways, Australia’s national trend forecasting body on 28-29 July. Materian coordinator Kim Chadwick says, “Biomimicry is an important trend.  If researchers, manufacturers and designers follow biomimetic thinking and work collaboratively, the commercialisation of new and advanced materials will accelerate.”

In the last decade, more than 3000 companies have formed around success in biomimicry, a term that was only coined in the 1990s, Harman says. Most developed countries, though not yet Australia, have established biomimicry or “bioinspiration” research centres at major universities, several of them attached to zoos.  

 A 2013 economic study commissioned by San Diego Zoo’s Center for Bioinspiration revealed greater than fivefold increases in bio-inspired academic activity and patents since 2000. The Fermanian institute study forecast bio-inspired materials would generate $US420 million nationally and $1.6 trillion globally in annual GDP by 2030.     

Relying on mixtures of government and private funding, inspiration and perspiration, several businesses in Australia have pioneered the products of biomimicry.

Dyesol develops third-generation photovoltaic technology that imitates the natural process of photosynthesis and captures solar energy like leaves do, in chemical dyes. The company is working with manufacturing partners to enable windows, building envelopes, rooves and even car chassis’ to become energy generators.  Managing director Richard Caldwell said, “The inventive work has already been done for you when you start with biomimicry. This means as a business you can focus on replication rather than discovery so it’s an important methodology.”

Monash University is conducting world-leading research on applications for graphene - derived from graphite - a new atom-thin material that is expected to transform several industries. Professor Dan Li at Monash University’s Department of Materials Engineering says biomimetics will be critical to discovering ways to build new materials using graphene.

By studying the elegant efficiency of tail-fin propulsion in sharks and tuna, and the way seaweed bends before waves, Sydney company BioPower Systems has developed machines that harness the energy of the ocean. CEO Tim Finnigan, a former marine engineer, says, “Our technology has merged biological inspiration with serious industrial-scale engineering.”  The first 600-tonne, 25-metre tall, 250kw bioWAVE power generator will be installed near Port Fairy in Victoria in 2015.

[if cut] Dogs are known to have the best snouts in the animal kingdom, but Cybernose is scent detection technology developed by CSIRO that drew on the DNA sequence of a nematode worm’s olfactory organs to develop a sniffing machine already being tested by the Australian defence force for inbound security. It also has applications in the food industry, including, in Australian style, as an aid to beer brewing.  

Dr Stephen Trowell, acting group leader of innovative bioproducts for CSIRO , says sequencing offers “a cornucopia of different sensing proteins” for scientists and engineers to draw ideas from. “Things you could only imagine before become feasible. The information you need is so much more available now,” he said. [end if cut]

Janine Benyus, author and founder of the Biomimicry Institute and global biomimicry network, asknature.org, says, “Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. Biological knowledge is doubling every five years... For the first time in history, we have the instruments - the scopes and satellites - to feel the shiver of a neuron in thought or watch in colour as a star is born.

“When we combine this intensified gaze with the sheer amount of scientific knowledge coming into focus, we suddenly have the capacity to mimic nature like never before.”

The two great ironies of biomimicry are that humans have been busy destroying species that could carry essential clues to our progress. And that one of our most forward looking technology trends relies on designs that have been living under our not-so-cyber noses, for a very long time.

But by valuing nature in design and manufacturing, for the ways it can teach us to do things with less waste and less energy, biomimicry could  change our relationship with nature. 

Benyus says, “Instead of seeing nature as a source of raw materials, we would see nature as a source of ideas, as a mentor. This would change everything, ushering in a new era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from nature.”

Published  Australian Financial Review, Weekend 

Naturally Brilliant - biomimicry in design

The centrality of song in Aboriginal culture has been largely ignored by western audiences hung up on Aboriginal painting.

In traditional Aboriginal culture, story is enacted by song and the song precedes the painting and dancing. The custodians of traditional song are accordingly perplexed by the popularity of painting. 

Patrick McCloskey, manager of a new indigenous recording project in Tennant Creek, said song people were the most important custodians of culture in most Aboriginal communities.    "The singers often say the painting and the patterns don't exist without us, they don't exist without the songs. The song is the thing that binds it all together," he said.

McCloskey is manager of the Song Peoples Sessions, a visionary project that has brought two leading indigenous singer-songwriters home to the countries of their grandparents to compose music with traditional song people.   

Country musician, Warren H Williams, worked with the Warumungu song men of the Barkly region and Black Arm Band singer, Shellie Morris, worked with the song women of Borroloola and Macarthur River. The first two albums, a collaborative album written by Williams and an album of 19 traditional songs by Warumungu songmen, will be launched on 2 September during the Desert Harmony festival in Tennant Creek (26 Aug - 4 Sep).

Other Australian musicians, including Paul Grabowsky, have worked with traditional singers but this is the first project to help contemporary indigenous musicians learn traditional language and record music with song people from their own families. The songs on the two collaborative albums are powerful, accessible blends of traditional and contemporary indigenous music sung in two rarely heard but beautiful indigenous languages.  It is call and response music that spans thousands of years.

For Shellie Morris, a circle is now unbroken.  Morris' grandmother was a child of the stolen generation and Morris was adopted by a white family in Sydney. She learned opera singing before she began recording folk and rock ballads. Now she has recorded an album in the language of her grandmother backed by the traditional singing of Borroloola women. Morris said the project "will affect my songwriting for the rest of my life."

Melburnian, Tim Cole, ex Not Drowning Waving, engineered the recordings and the four albums produced by the project in just six months. Over 50 traditional songs were recorded in studios and in Gulf island country. Melbourne anthropologist, Professor John Bradley, a fluent Yanyuwa speaker, translated the lyrics into English so Morris could "write a new story that matched the story in the traditional song."   

Morris spent three weeks learning Yanyuwa pronunciation and studying the traditional songs. Then with guidance from the song women, she wrote ballads that celebrate Yanyuwa stories, melodies and rhythms.   Traditional singers overlay rhythms to produce hypnotic patterns not unlike those in Aboriginal painting.  

Many indigenous languages are endangered and the Song People Sessions project, supported by Barkly Regional Arts, has helped maintain and reinvigorate two languages. Children were singing the songs on the streets soon after the recording sessions. One of Williams' ballads was played at the funeral of an elder before the CDs were cut.

"Many of these song people might only be around for another 15 to 20 years," said McCloskey. "Already a lot of songs have been lost. So there is an increasing urgency among the people to record songs". There are just 5 fluent native speakers of Yanyuwa. Only 15 of the 100 or so surviving indigenous languages are strong and spoken by three generations, according to Bradley.

Williams wrote one of his ballads about hearing the last Warumungu songman sing. He wrote songs first and the Warumungu men chose traditional songs with similar storylines. Then the song men sang and recorded songs, often in perfectly matching keys first time. "I wrote a song about a lonely boy returning to Tennant Creek and they said that's like the Cockatoo song, it's about a lonely boy, let's sing that one," Williams said. They have over 500 songs from song cycles that criss-cross their land.

McCloskey said, "Indigenous music is an important part of the world's cultural heritage and Australia has some of the strongest living examples of this culture."

Williams will keep learning Warumungu and now wants to teach his children the language. "There are a lot of languages in Australia that we should all be proud of, black and white," he said. "I was humbled by my culture."

Readers can listen to three sample tracks online or at http://soundcloud.com/song-people-sessions

Edited versions on line at www.theage.com.au/entertainment/new-chapter-for-ancient-songbook-20110829-1ji6a.html 

www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/ageless-voices-find-byways-of-the-songlines-20110922-1kn4j.html

Published The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Arts pages

New outlet for Indigenous song people

Tall people knew it all along: short people were out to make them suffer.

Despite the fact that Australians have been getting steadily taller and larger,  interior house dimensions have hardly changed in 100 years.

Benches cause the most pain for tall people.  

Benches in Australian homes are a standard 900 - 915 mm high which means any body taller than 5' 8" or 173 cm, must stoop to chop food and stoop even lower to wash dishes.

Roger Hall, an ergonomics expert with the University of NSW, said, “Fixed benches that are too short for tall people cause static load and muscle strain after ten minutes.”

This provides taller men with the perfect excuse for not doing the dishes (and leaving them to short people).  But it also means that most kitchen benches are causing a lot of people back pain. That the same bench height is common in restaurant kitchens is unpardonable.

Bench heights are just one problem with the design of standard houses for taller people.  Tables, chairs, doorways, beds, showers, mirrors and stairs all cause problems and even back pain to people over 170cm.

Geoff Mortimer is 195cm tall and because of his frustration with normal houses, he designed and built a house for his vertically endowed family. His wife Nancy is 178cm tall  and his two sons grew up to be 203cm and 206cm tall.

Mortimer’s mud brick and wood house doesn’t cause any discomfort to short people, but if feels twice as comfortable and dignified to anyone over 170cm tall.

At 950mm, Mortimer’s benches are just 50 mm higher than the furniture industry standard but they make a huge difference. Mortimer says his shorter guests also enjoy the height because “they enjoy standing up straighter.”

A four metre high cathedral ceiling means that bookshelves, pantry shelves and cupboards can rise to 2.8 metres and afford around 20 per cent more storage space.

Wherever possible Mortimer built doorways that are taller and wider by four or five centimetres. It’s a subtle difference but it means that a 6 foot or 183 cm tall person - the height of this author - can stroll easily through doorways, without compressing shoulders or turning sideways. A visit to the Mortimer house made me realise why I had so often in the past bumped my shoulders on doorways.

Mortimer was tempted to raise the table but out of deference to short guests he simply halved the width of the frame under the table so his family could comfortably get their legs under it on higher chairs.

In the bathroom, Mortimer’s mirror reflects short people but rises to 211 cm. It is the first time I have seen myself in a house mirror with space above my head. I immediately felt myself lengthen. Light shades are high and windows are high enough to afford decent sky views.

Significantly, Geoff Mortimer has a slight stoop but his sons, who have grown up in the 1990 house, have very straight backs.

Geoff’s son, Nick, said, “I used to get back problems living at other houses. Washing the dishes hurts your back. Beds everywhere are too short for me. Shoes my size are rare and bath tubs are not big enough.”   Geoff Mortimer added, "Most cars are not designed for tall people." Most taller people will second these criticisms.

Public transport leg room and shower rose heights were incredibly frustrating, Nick Mortimer said. Men clean the house more often but mop handles and vacuum cleaners require anyone over 170cm to almost double over. Toilet bowls are a standard 60 cm high which is a long way away for a man over 183 cm. It's no wonder men sometimes miss the bowl!

Stairs are a more serious issue. Ivan Donaldson, executive director of the Australian Building Codes Board,  admitted the board was about to review the problem of “slips, trips and falls” which cause more injuries and deaths than fires in Australian homes.

Stairs vary more than benches and doors but the most common sizes are around 290mm for the tread (or “going”) and 165mm for the height (or riser) of each step. This means anyone with a male shoe size 9 or above has to walk sideways or on tip toe to go down stairs safely. It is a sure sign of persistently poor design that most men blame themselves for slipping.

So where do standard heights come from? Are architects all short people with short person syndrome?

The Australian Building Code 1996 sets minimum and maximum heights to protect safety and health but not comfort. It does not, therefore, regulate for table and bench heights which are a product of furniture industry conventions.

Where the Building Code has set minimums, they have often become standard however. Domestic ceiling and door minimum heights are set at 2.4m and 2.04m respectively and because of cost saving these heights are standard in the building industry.

Norm Bowen, senior technical officer at the Australian Building Codes Board, said minimum and maximum heights were adopted from the Uniform Building Regulations of 1945 and in Victoria, those figures came from turn of the century City of Melbourne by laws. Before that, some heights, like commercial ceiling minimums, could be as old as tudor England when allowance was made for men on horseback to ride under second storey eaves, Bowen said.

Whatever their origin, most of these heights and conventions were set when the population was a lot shorter. But it is impossible to say how much shorter because unlike other countries, Australia has not conducted a large anthropometric survey of its people. Statistics have only been collected for military purposes and are decades out of date, much like clothes sizes in this country.

The BBC recently reported that the average Briton has got taller at the rate of 0.75 inches a generation and Health of the Nation figures showed that 30% of men under 25 In England are now over six feet tall. The article reported that “if the current trend continues the average British man's height will be 6ft within a couple of generations and the average woman will be nudging 5ft 7in”.

Robert Caulfield, manager of Archicentre, the advisory service of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, said that architects needed to review their standard measurements. "Six feet is not a tall person anymore. Not in the Caucasion population."

Geoff Mortimer said, “Architects need to be trained to come up with solutions for tall people.”

Caulfield pointed out that standard widths and heights in houses were interlinked and it was hard to change one thing without changing all.

Appliances like ovens and dishwashers were now designed to fit a 915 mm high bench top. Table dimensions (around 750mm) allowed them to be carried through minimum size doors. Chairs were set to match tables. Cupboards have to be 600mm above stove tops.  So the conspiracy of the lowest common denominator is built in to the standard Australian dream home.

But it does not take much to raise the standard.

Published The Age, Domain

The tall and short of design

 was upheld by the full bench of the Federal Court of Australia last week.

In a copyright wrangle over the use of television footage, the full court ruled, amongst other things, that satire alone did not constitute a form of criticism, review or news reportage.

Aristophanes, Juvenal, Chaucer and Moliere would be turning in their graves. Barry Humphries, Clive James and John Clarke are not likely to be impressed either.

The court's frightening conclusion issues restrictions to comedians around Australia.   But perhaps a worse outcome of the ruling is that it may force  the electronic media to take current affairs even more seriously.

The case concerned a dust up over the usage of Nine footage by Ten's satirical current affairs show, The Panel. The Panel re-broadcast a number of pieces of Nine footage and made fun of the subjects, without paying for the footage.

The copyright act allows one to use footage, or reproduce works, for the purposes of making a news story, or for the purposes of criticism or review.

Much time was spent in court debating what constituted a serious news treatment and what was merely "poking fun".

Justice Finkelstein argued in classic deadpan that John Howard singing Happy Birthday to Donald Bradman on the "Midday" show was newsworthy. "An incident where the Prime Minister of a country has behaved in a way which some might call "silly" is certainly newsworthy", Finkelstein declared.

Finkelstein's argument implies that an average person on the street acting silly would not be defensible.   

The discussion of the merits of particular Panel segments relied upon the making of a distinction between news and entertainment.  A singing Prime Minister was considered newsworthy. Silly disguises used by anonymous interviewees were ruled to be entertainment alone.

The court's assessment of other segments from "The Panel"  hinged on the notion that making fun was not fair dealing unless there was also an element of serious, and "recognisable", criticism.

In other words, the court somehow managed to rule that it is no defense to make fun of something unless you also take it seriously.

Some would argue that in the case of John Howard singing this was actually impossible.

Satire -  having a lend -  is an Australian institution. It saves us from political correctness. It saves us from being defined. It saves us from the tyranny of the establishment, which is often the tyranny of the serious. The right to razz ought to be preserved in the constitution, let alone the common law.

Michael Hirsh, co-executive producer of The Panel, said, "Just because something is funny doesn't make it less newsworthy… I would argue that you are laughing at it because you are reviewing it." And this is the point. Satire, or poking fun, is not just a form of review, but one of the oldest and finest forms of review. 

Ten's counsel should have argued that the whole problem here was that Nine couldn't take a joke.

Peter Meakin, director of news and current affairs at Channel Nine, said, "Even humour has its parameters." Meakin also said he hoped the decision wasn't discriminatory against satire.  "If they want to change the law to make provision for satire alone, that would probably suit us all."

Channel Ten would not comment while they digest the findings but are considering an appeal.