The Best Australian Science Writing 2014

By Ashley Hay and Ian Lowe

Now in its fourth year, this popular and acclaimed anthology steps inside the Australia's finest scientific and literary minds to present a collection that celebrates the nation's finest science writing of the year. Featuring prominent authors—such as Tim Flannery, Jo Chandler, Frank Bowden and Iain McCalman, as well as many new voices—this annual anthology covers topics as diverse and wondrous as our "lumpy" universe, the creation of dragons, why are Sydney's golden orb weaver spiders getting fatter and fitter, and the frontiers of climate science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Mar 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781742241883

Ian Lowe

Ian Lowe is an emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University and was a reviewer for the United Nations-sponsored 2005 Millennium Assessment Report and the 2004 report of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program. He is the president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and is the author or co-author of sixteen other books, including Living in the Hothouse (2005) and A Big Fix (2008). He lives on the Sunshine Coast.

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Introduction: Stories, definitions and the art of asking questions

Ashley Hay

At the end of 2013, in Springfield, MA, the Merriam-Webster dictionary company announced its words of the year. Based on around 100 million consultations per month, these track the words that have piqued most people’s interest, and the 2013 list featured ‘metaphor’ and ‘integrity’, ‘cognitive’ and ‘niche’. But at the top of the list, enjoying its status as the word with the most increased ‘look-up’ rate, was one that, the Merriam-Webster folk suspected, might ‘surprise many people’.

The word was ‘science’.

The dictionary gives first a general definition (‘knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation’), a series of ‘full definitions’, and then a separate definition for children (‘an area of knowledge that is an object of study’).

As Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large, explained, science is a word ‘that is connected to broad cultural dichotomies: observation and intuition, evidence and tradition’. He noted the ‘wide variety of discussions’ that had centred on science in 2013 – ‘from climate change to educational policy’. And he noted the ‘heated debate’ about ‘phony science’ and whether science might ever give us ‘all the answers’. Underneath all this, he suggested, science simply fascinates us ‘enough so that it saw a 176 per cent increase in look-ups this year over last, and stayed a top look-up throughout the year’.

Science is certainly about all those things and part of all those discussions and debates. It is also intrinsically fascinating. As someone who hangs out mainly on the humanities side of the fence, I’ve always wished I understood this earlier in life – it was one of the pleasures of becoming a jobbing journalist to realise that this great and unknown (to me) pool of work and ideas and projects, from astronomy and biology to zoology with everything else in between, was such a fertile source of fascinating stories. All you had to do was ask the ‘who, what, where, why and how’ of Journalism 101. I wrote my first scientific profile on the lifework of Australia’s pre-eminent weevil expert more than 20 years ago, and kept going from there.

This is a book of science writing, the fourth in a series of annual anthologies. It is drawn from a variety of sources – from books and blogs, from magazines for school children and more specialist journals – and its voices reflect these diverse origins. It holds stories about the results of scientific research, about the people who undertake it, about the inspirations behind it, about its history and its future. It holds stories about plants and animals and people and places. It holds stories inspired by science – including short fiction and poetry – and stories that speak to the necessary connection between science and imagination.

All these are parts of its whole. I work mainly as a novelist these days, and I know that the ideas of metaphor and translation often resound for me in science writing: the way a body of expert knowledge, with its particular methodologies and terminologies, can be unravelled and laid bare to make sense and to engage exquisitely. In this way, I hope some of the stories here scan purely for clarity, interest and those moments that kindle a reader’s curiosity. Others require a longer step into more complex language or more complex attempts to decode more complex processes.

In 2013 Japanese researchers built a machine that could visualise people’s dreams with 50 per cent accuracy. Voyager 1 became our first vessel to enter interstellar space. Science magazine nominated cancer immunotherapies as its annual scientific breakthrough; New Scientist nominated the first movies made by physicists of ‘what travelling to the past really looks like’. Three new species of that feisty marsupial, the antechinus, were discovered around Brisbane; an expedition walked into Cape Melville in Far North Queensland and found two new lizards and a frog. And science snuck into pop culture via Nick Cave’s ‘Higgs boson blues’. (British physicist Brian Cox observed that Cave couldn’t have written the song without the particle – because without the particle he wouldn’t exist: ‘he’d just be a load of fragments travelling through the universe at the speed of light.’)

In the week submissions for this year’s anthology closed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published Climate Change 2014, and I followed its release from a hospital ward where my son was being stuffed full of antibiotics to counter a staph infection. These two instances seemed to speak to our different intersections with ‘science’. On the one hand was the noise that questioned the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. (As Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb later noted, people would hardly take a broken-down car to a fishmonger for advice on how to fix it – or for actual repairs: so why do we have a problem trusting experts when it comes to climate science?) On the other I was in a place that embodied our certainty that science, in the guise of modern medicine, could fix or ameliorate just about any human ailment – in this case, a mountainously swollen knee.

As the editing process concluded six weeks later, Australia’s latest federal budget was announced: Suzanne Cory, president of the Australian Academy of Science, reviewed it for The Conversation in the context of Tony Abbott’s election promise to ‘provide the long term, stable policies and vision that our nation’s scientists and researchers need to excel in their work’. Judge us, he had asked while removing a ministry of science from his cabinet, on ‘performance, not titles’. On judgment day, wrote Suzanne Cory, ‘the results – on the whole – are not good’. She outlined the $450 million cut from Australia’s premier research institutions, the end of bulk-billing, the dismantling of the preventative health agency, and ‘serious cuts for programs vital for adapting to climate change’.

Yet as Ian Lowe writes in his foreword for this miscellany, the role of science is critical not only to our understanding the problems we face, but also to solving them: ‘even accepting the limitations of scientific knowledge and the human failings of individual scientists, science still gives us our best chance of a desirable future – just as it has given us a much more desirable present.’

* * * * *

There was a huge response to the call for submissions this year, and more entries for the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing than ever. This means only a fraction of the pieces could end up in these pages, which made for some torturously subjective decisions. In the end, this particular suite of stories connected with and spoke to each other, creating a kind of narrative through their different parts. From different genres, and written for very different audiences, a lot of those parts are about process: about the time research takes, about the tiny particularity of its questions and its methods. There are epiphanies and unexpected intersections; there are careful reassessments of some areas of knowledge and thorough reiterations of others.

There’s the tenacious attention with which Ludwig Leichhardt walked through the landscape of Sydney in 1842, cataloguing what he saw and marking out – with such certainty – specific species that had not yet been scooped into taxonomy. There’s the narrative slide from his walk to those made in the same landscape by the scientists Nicky Phillips follows in ‘Survival in the city’, watching species adapt and evolve in a newly urban space. There’s the moment of coincidence in Leah Kaminsky’s ‘Massimo’s genes’ when a random conversation makes an almost providential connection to unravel a rare genetic disorder in a three-year-old boy in Melbourne. There’s the careful way Frank Bowden unpacks the usefulness – and risks – of screening for prostate cancer, and the growing and fruitful intersections James Mitchell Crow finds between the advocates of organic farming techniques and the operations of conventional agriculture.

There are water-cooler hooks: how women have influenced the evolution of penis size (and Rob Brooks’s insistence that this story represents ‘a study in how science should proceed in sober and restrained steps’) and the discovery of a giant carnivorous platypus that sounds like it belongs in a B-grade Hollywood film (albeit 5–15 million years ago). There are researchers separating exquisitely thin layers of graphene using sticky tape (you’d need three million sheets to make a stack 1 millimetre high) and the UQ physics professor who took care of the world’s longest-running experiment, the pitch drop, for decades, only to die a few months before its latest drop fell. There’s the image of researchers literally walking through their subjects’ brains in the virtual environments – or ‘CAVEs’ – that Dyani Lewis describes, and the minutiae of zebrafish embryos that grew in Michael Lardelli’s lab and changed the questions he might ask about Alzheimer’s. There’s Rebecca Giggs plumbing everything from marine biology and colour theory to the cyanophilic accumulations of bowerbirds to investigate her reaction to reports of a lone eyeball, washed up on a far shore.

But there are words here that nod, too, not only to the scientific endeavour that underpins or inspires them, but also to the importance of the stories that those endeavours generate. Our capacity for enquiry, for hypothesis, for imagination and the trial and error of different approaches, and for narrative: these define and connect us – to each other, to our world and to our universe, in myriad powerful ways. As Thomas Suddendorf writes in ‘Uniquely human’:

We can connect diverse scenarios into larger plots. Narratives provide us with explanations for why things are the way they are and with opportunities for predicting how they will be. We can compare alternative routes to the future and deliberately select one plan over another – giving us a sense of free will and an edge over creatures with less foresight. We can prepare for whatever may lie ahead and actively shape the future to our design.

We survive and thrive partly through the stories we generate and tell.

The last pages sport a possibly unlikely duo: the winner of one of last year’s Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science (Andrea Morello), and a seven-year-old girl (Sophie Lester) who wondered if the CSIRO could make her a dragon (they did). Both understand a simple truth: that at the root of much of what we define as ‘science’ sits imagination and curiosity. It’s something to remember what it was like to be seven, to wonder about the why and how and where and when of things – as scientists do – and to find it only natural to ask. As Francis Bacon, that pioneer of the scientific method, put it: ‘Who questions much shall learn much, and retain much.’

A short walk in the Australian bush

Ludwig Leichhardt

Note: Text in square brackets [ ] has been added by the translator.

Doubtful readings are indicated by [?] and words that are illegible in the German original are indicated by [...]. Leichhardt’s marginal notes are enclosed by curly brackets { }.

1 April 1842, Sydney

I will sit down in the shade of the tall Eucalyptus and press my cheeks against its white bark and listen to the whispering of its lance-shaped leaves, which the refreshing sea-wind ruffles, while the carefree cicada sings its shrill song among them. So long as I have God in my heart and His Nature before my eyes, I shall always be content. And He will not forsake me!

* * * * *

On Monday I made an excursion in the direction of Botany Bay. I had heard much about the bush of Botany Bay and was a little astonished to have my expectations disappointed. Sandhills, like the dunes by the sea, yet with a solid sandstone core, lie confusedly beside each other, with no particular direction, enclosing trough-shaped hollows, at the bottom of which small ponds of water are found at this time of the year. The sand is white and looks as if it might well be sandstone ground down by the activity of a former sea. Towards the western slope, up which we climbed, everything was covered with Pteris (bracken). Gradually there appeared Banksia shrubs, low Eucalyptus bushes, and thin-leaved shrubs, on which mantis of various colours were crawling about. Epeirus and a very big Linyphia? with a silky-grey abdomen and yellow stripes behind its black feet had spun really strong webs. This is particularly so with the latter. Their young appear to stay close by or at least to live there temporarily, inhabiting the irregular forewebs. This is the first example of maternal care among spiders. Several distinctive types of caterpillar were found: the green red-tubercled Bombyx caterpillar, as well as a grey yellow-saddled, eight-tubercled Bombyx, a brown caterpillar with a slight saddle at the tail end, hairy caterpillars with two blackish tufts of hair, and a chrysalis, which has now changed into a wingless lepidopteran. Two green mantis, several small Acridium, and a small cricket. I mention here that one of the phasmids had caught a fly and was on the point of consuming it. These insects do not live exclusively on vegetable matter. On a pond, around which several dragon-flies were flying, I found some very interesting little plants: a composite, an umbellifer which seems to be a Hydrocotyle, and two species of Juncus. Some hemiptera were found in the moist sand. A myrtle plant with hairy fruit was common. The violet was also found, as well as Melaleuca, but it was rare. The new plant growth from spikelets of the Festuca can also be observed here. A plant, whose red flowers grow directly from the branches. Solanum nigrum seems to have been introduced.

19 September 1842 [around Sydney]

Yesterday I paid nature a very long visit and we were both alone with each other like the time I was making excursions to Paris and Naples, and going on walking trips from Rome to Florence or through Switzerland. The day was unusually mild: the mountains enveloped by a bluish-white glimmer, which became more intensely blue upwards and whiter downwards. I have rarely seen really blue distances out here, but during the setting of the sun, often when it is half an hour above the horizon, it floods the hills with delightful soft purple light just as it always hovered around the mountains of Italy.

I noted down for myself what I found, and I shall copy out these notes here:

Lead and sulphur in the sandstone, which is being quarried close to the jail. Round inclusions of grey clay and distinct imprints of shells … They are in a block in the sentry-box next to the jail. They are the first traces of fossils, which I have observed in the sandstone.

Grevillea dubia? The leaves are very broad compared with those of other species and the edges are not curled [?]. An Oreodicus with pieces of plants arranged parallel in a sort of spiral.

A small grey Rhynchophorus with a whitish line on each side. A yellow wasp was looking for a night cap among the dewy leaves of Banksia ericaefolia.

Lambertia is now beginning to develop young shoots; likewise Hakea and perhaps all the Proteaceae one after the other. Those just mentioned are the first two I noticed. They do not appear to have very much sap pressure throughout the winter. Isopogon anethifolium is in beautiful bloom; likewise Conospermum tenuifolium, taxifolium, and linearifolium (a variety of longifolium?), Baeckea densifolia.

It is interesting to observe the distribution of the dew on the leaves and petals of Philotheca australis (scabra): while there are large drops on each side of the petals, the leaves of the stem are quite dry already. Is this in any way connected with the distribution of the glands containing volatile oils? – I observed the plant at 9 a.m.

A small spider, apparently belonging to the Lycoseae (?), on the under side of a leaf of Angophora cordata/-ifolia, beneath some loose cobwebs.

Hakea gibbosa exudes a tasteless, yellowish-white gum.

On Casuarina stricta a black hymenopteran, covered with grey hairs and considerably larger than a bee though somewhat similar in appearance was copulating. The female was winged and very big; the male, wingless and very small, had grasped the female with its mandibles at the end of the abdomen and was carried away by her at the threat of danger. The females were very shy; I found them on only one species of Casuarina.

* * * * *

I found a small plant with four sepals and four petals (which were hat-shaped at the base), eight filaments (four longer); the anthers were at the end of a cross-beam so as to form a Latin T with the filaments (Lynd called the little plant Tomanthera). Two styles. There was an abundance of them in moist spots. The pod with six stigma [...] adhering. On Conospermum taxifolium, which is in flower and according to its veins [?] shows some differences, I found a metallic green, slender beetle, which must belong to the telephorid family. Also an elaterid with four pairs of white spots on a brown background (in the act of copulation) and finally a blackish-brown beetle, which resembled almost a carabid, but probably belongs to quite a different insect family. All these beetles seem to be in full copulation. They were shy, and the first and the last mentioned ones usually flew away very quickly, whereas the elaterid pretended to be dead when caught. I found only a very small beetle on Ricinocarpos. A grey spider with its young ones in a cell between the twigs of Petrophile pedunculata. {In addition I found a small beetle with yellow dots on the same plant, as well as Rhynchophora on some others. It seems that the flowering-season of this plant forms an entomological period. – A green-reddish bug.}

The dark round shrubs of Banksia ericifolia, with their blackish, orange-coloured, cylindrical flowerspikes, are characteristic of the country around me. Gompholobium grandiflorum is a very beautiful legume. Conospermum taxifolium, Ricinocarpos with its white flowers, Eriostemon salicifolium, Sprengelia incarnata (the latter only in very moist soil) cover the ground all over. Casuarina stricta, and Comosperma virgata also add much to the beauty. Eucalyptus is only found as a very low tree. Genetyllis diosmoides, Petrophile and Isopogon. All around I heard the broken calls of several birds; it always is as if they are going to whistle a full tune, but they stop short. I was told that Australian birds generally have no coherent song or even do not sing at all. One of the gentlemen (Mr Rennie) said that they were only diatonic, which I have probably misunderstood, however. In a hole, apparently made by the larvae of the mantis, I found a very large black Rhynchophorus.

In Europe we are almost certain to find various insects, particularly small staphylinids and scarabs, in dry cow pats. Here you find only ants. Just as the ant here changes its food, since originally there was no cow dung in Australia, so have various other insects relinquished their original food and chosen the introduced plants. The most striking example is an Acharista (a butterfly), which once laid its eggs on a native plant, but now badly damages the grape-vine, covering the young leaves with its echinoid-like eggs, from which little caterpillars crawl out in about 12 days and feed on the leaves of the vine during the whole summer. Mr Scott told me that Acharista still afflicts native plants as well, which, however, are related to the grape-vine (?). It would be worth the trouble to test whether the eggs can be transferred from one plant to the other.

The butterfly larvae, which live in the Banksia and Lambertia, seem to metamorphose now like the Occodicus. However, the former must certainly take the chrysalis form first like the Occodicus did a long time ago (mid-August).

The bark of the white Eucalyptus is very rich in sap and so soft that the impressions of the claws of the opossum can be seen everywhere. These impressions cause a kind of inflammation, or at least a more abundant flow of sap, and gradually small protuberances are seen to cover the smooth surface. Apart from these impressions, tracts of beetle larvae are found on nearly every trunk with smooth bark. They commence as very fine threads and become wider as the larva grows.

I found a leafless plant with four petals, eight filaments (four long and four shorter), with separate anthers. This plant and the little one, which I found earlier, probably belong together. Very beautiful Leucopogon lanceolatus and Correa speciosa were found in a very delightful gully below the orphanage. Hibbertia cinerea [?] and many other fine plants are here together.

I observed very strange excrescences on Banksia serrata; the bark of the tree is swollen, thick, and torose.

Dianella cyanea. A hairy caterpillar on Lepidosperma (I gave it to the Kirchners; I do not know whether it is new).

Let me have a little rest on one of the sandstone boulders or on a dry fallen-down eucalypt trunk. All day I have roved through low-growing bush and scrub land, and my eyes have become tired of looking at the pale-green distance and the simple undulating contours of the hills. Here a deep wooded gully descends to the sea. A small creek gives the vegetation greater freshness and vigour. Not only does the Eucalyptus rise to a considerable height in order to look, though unsuccessfully, over the walls of the gully, but also the Banksia with its thick knobbly bark rises higher. The warbling of the birds becomes more cheerful, the rustling of the leaves more animated. Below the damp rocks ferns, and particularly beautiful Osmunda barbata and Davallia dubia grow luxuriantly. The trunk of Xanthorrhoea arborea (the grass-tree) attains a height of 3–4'. Callicoma serratifolia bows its ever thirsty branches over the little creek, while the sweetleaved Smilax stretches over them. Everywhere Bauera is pushing forward to the moisture. Gleichenia flabellata. The magnificent Telopea speciosissima and a host of small plants, which did poorly in the constant heat of the sun further up, thrive vigorously down here. – And what mild air! Though our senses are not delighted by the perfume of flowers, the fresh smell of the vegetation does invigorate us. The white bulky trunks and branches of the eucalypts, and the frequent dry and leafless trunks add a wintry element to this warm but languid nature.

In a small gully, which runs into the main gully further down, I found a new Logania.

Planet of the vines

Joseph Jukes’ epiphanies

Survival in the city

Nicky Phillips

Most mornings a dozen or so sulphur-crested cockatoos flock to a large yellowwood tree outside my inner-Sydney apartment to feed. They flap and frolic in the tree’s canopy. The more adventurous ones swing themselves around overhanging wires like gymnasts on a bar. At times, their squawks are so loud they drown out the Darlinghurst traffic.

But venture back to a Sydney before white settlement and the same species would have been a rare sight. In the early 1800s the British naturalist and explorer George Caley wrote of a flock he encountered in a long meadow near the Nepean River. ‘They are shy and not easily approachable,’ he wrote. A few pairs were reported closer to the city in the National Park (now the Royal National Park) in 1945, but large numbers only began to frequent the inner suburbs to feed on open grassy areas in the 1960s. Now, ecologists at the Royal Botanic Gardens and the University of Sydney are part-way through the first study to track the bird’s movements. It appears they’re true city