Australia

In Shark Bay, off the westernmost tip of Australia, meadows of sea grass carpet the ocean floor, undulating in the current and being nibbled on by dugongs, cousins of Florida manatees. A new study revealed something unexpected about those sea grasses: Many of them are the same individual plant that has been cloning itself for about 4,500 years. The sea grass — not to be confused with seaweed, which is an algae — is Poseidon’s ribbon weed, or Posidonia australis. Jane Edgeloe, a University of Western Australia Ph.D. candidate and an author of the paper, likens its appearance to a spring onion. Ms. Edgeloe and her colleagues made their discovery as part of a genetic survey of Posidonia grasses in different areas of Shark Bay, where she SCUBA dived in the shallow waters and pulled up shoots of Posidonia from 10 different meadows. On land, the researchers analyzed and compared the grasses’ DNA. They published their results Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society … [Read more...] about The World’s Largest Plant Is a Self-Cloning Sea Grass in Australia

A 95-year-old Australian woman whom a police officer in Australia used a stun gun on last week has died in a hospital, the authorities said on Wednesday, not long after announcing charges against the officer, who used the stun gun to repel her when she approached him while holding a steak knife. The case provoked outrage around Australia as circumstances of the confrontation between the woman, Clare Nowland, and the police officer emerged. Ms. Nowland, who had dementia, used a walker and weighed 95 pounds, fell and fractured her skull after a senior constable used the stun gun on her in the care facility where she lived. The police confirmed her death in a statement on social media. “Mrs. Nowland passed away peacefully in hospital just after 7 p.m. this evening, surrounded by family and loved ones who have requested privacy during this sad and difficult time,” a spokesperson for the New South Wales police force said. A few hours before her death, the police said that Kristian … [Read more...] about 95-Year-Old in Australia Dies Days After Police Officer Used Stun Gun on Her

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week, I wrote about the conversation about race and racism in the Australian media industry that had been set off by the announcement from Stan Grant that he would step back from his television hosting duties. Mr. Grant, one of Australia’s most high-profile journalists, said that he and his family had received “relentless” racial abuse after he spoke about colonial-era violence as part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage of the coronation of King Charles III. I spoke to Narelda Jacobs, who hosts Network 10’s midday news program, about her experience as a Noongar woman who has worked in media for two decades, the extra challenges and burdens Indigenous journalists face, and how she hoped Mr. Grant’s departure would be a “watershed moment” for the industry. What she said stuck with me, so I thought I’d include some of her remarks that didn’t make … [Read more...] about ‘Different Standards’: The Struggle of Indigenous Journalists in Australia

Australia ’s most decorated living soldier murdered four unarmed prisoners when he served in the military in Afghanistan , a federal court judge found on Thursday. Ben Roberts-Smith lost his historic defamation case brought against three newspapers that had accused him of committing multiple war crimes. The civil trial in Sydney ended with Justice Anthony Besanko finding, on the balance of probabilities, that four accusations of murder made against Roberts-Smith were substantially true. They included one allegation that Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed farmer off a cliff in 2012. After the fall, which smashed out the victim’s teeth, Roberts-Smith allegedly ordered a subordinate to shoot the injured man dead. Another alleged murder in 2009 involved Roberts-Smith ordering the death of an elderly man found hiding in a tunnel. In the same operation, Roberts-Smith allegedly used a machine gun to kill a young disabled man with a prosthetic leg—the leg was later kept as a … [Read more...] about Australia’s Most Decorated Soldier Committed War Crimes, Judge Finds

MELBOURNE, Australia — Nothing prepares you for your first sight of Uluru. Amid the vastness of Australia’s arid red center, there is something wondrous about this monumental slab of sandstone rising dramatically out of a flattened landscape. It is not difficult to see why Indigenous Australians saw it as a sacred place. Uluru is not just a place of wonder and reverence. It has become, too, a political and historical battleground, a place through which Australia has tried to grapple with its relationship with Indigenous Australians. It was the Anangu, the original inhabitants of the region, who gave Uluru its name. For more than a century, though, it was known to Australians of European descent as Ayers Rock, named after a 19th-century Anglo-Australian colonial administrator. In 1985, as part of a process of reconciliation with Indigenous Australians, who had been brutally dispossessed of their lands, the government in Canberra both acknowledged the original name and returned … [Read more...] about The New Voice of Indigenous Australia

SYDNEY, Australia — When Australia’s conservative government first introduced a federal goods and services tax in 2000, the health minister at the time met with protests over a new 10 percent levy applied to tampons and other female sanitary products. Anything that did not prevent diseases, the minister, Michael Wooldridge, argued, should be taxed. “As a bloke, I’d like shaving cream exempt, but I’m not expecting it to be,” Mr. Wooldridge, a Liberal Party member, told a reporter that January . Condoms were exempt but tampons were not, because “condoms prevent illness,” he said. “I wasn’t aware that menstruation was an illness.” Tampons and pads were, at the time, considered “luxury” goods and taxed as such. It has taken years, and successive governments — both conservative and progressive — for a recognition that sanitary products were a necessary health item for women. On Wednesday, the six men and two women who hold the purse strings for their states and territories … [Read more...] about Australia Scraps Tax on Tampons, Once Considered a ‘Luxury’