Sandpit to Seed
The TNQ Drought Hub is excited to be working with James Cook University researchers to help them move their research ideas that could improve agricultural adaption, sustainability and resilience towar...
Professor Ernest Hunter, an Adjunct with The Cairns Institute, recently published a book titled Reef Madness: Digging up the dirt on an Australian myth. The book centres on how for generations, Ion Idriess was Australia’s most popular author and Lasseter’s Last Ride – the story of a failed prospecting expedition in 1930 – was his first success and was the foundation stone of a quintessentially Australian myth.
In collaboration with the Cairns Tropical Writers Festival, Ernest presented a public lecture on the 12th August at the Institute. This lecture which was attended by over 40 people discussed how authors such as Idriess portrayed Indigenous Australians using quasi-ethnographic descriptions of traditional Aboriginal ways and wiles as central plot devices. This misrepresentation was further perpetuated in other popular literature and in major motion pictures, with little or no contact with Indigenous Australians. With the country being in the depths of the depressions, these popular representations of Indigenous Australians in the decades before and following the Second World War are presented to demonstrate how Idriess – and others – commodified a primitive exotic in an era before television drew the public gaze elsewhere.
Ernest is a psychiatrist who has worked for more than three decades in remote northern Australia. Most of that time being in the Cape York region and the Torres Strait Islands. He has numerous academic publications and has also authored Aboriginal Health and History: Power and Prejudice in Remote Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Vicarious Dreaming: On Madman’s Island with Jack Idriess.
Reef Madness: Digging up the dirt on an Australian myth, is available from instore or online at Cairns Books
The TNQ Drought Hub is excited to be working with James Cook University researchers to help them move their research ideas that could improve agricultural adaption, sustainability and resilience towar...
The TNQ Drought Hub recently hosted the National Soils Advocate, the Honourable Penelope Wensley AC for a whirlwind 2-day field trip visiting numerous soils restoration and rehabilitation sites to lea...
On 1 August, The Cairns Institute hosted a small, informal symposium for HDR students working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Far North Queensland. It brought together Indigenous...
The Cairns Institute Fellow Dr Kearrin Sims coordinates the JCU Research Ethical Development Symposium, now in its second year. It will be held 27-29 September at The Cairns Institute. This year will ...
The Developing Northern Australia Conference returned to Darwin this year in 2023. In 2021, the conference converted to an online event an hour before the program was due to begin due to a sudden NT C...
The Cairns Institute will host an informal symposium for HDR students working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Far North Queensland. This symposium will explore if and how post-gr...
TNQ Drought Hub’s Professor Allan Dale, Doctor Jane Oorschot and Ms Kara Worth were invited to speak at the Science to Practice Forum and share their experience on innovative tools and practices...
Congratulations to the TNQ Drought Hub drought resilience scholarship recipients. The hub recently offered scholarship opportunities to JCU students who were interested in undertaking an Honours or Ma...
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