a muse and love story from 1992 in Melbourne

Taken from just 10 recent headshot photos of Tania …

By Tania Peitzker — The topics addressed in this article are covered in depth in my Kindle etextbook available on Amazon Books, as well as my iversity online course on the subject of #metaverses #xr & #immersive tech. You can sign up here for Springer’s iversity MOOC by me — On Demand - including a certificate, exercises, challenges and a forum for the community of participants. Let me begin with Kathleen Booth, the British computer scientist and inventor of the assembly language, who has just died aged 100. And the exciting news from successful Spanish climate change activists who campaigned to get the University of Barcelona to make a Climate Emergency course mandatory for staff and…

There are now many studies and a lot of data on the carbon footprint of our phones. A recent paper from a researcher at the German multinational Siemens explained in 2022 that the manufacturing of our smartphones accounts for 77% of the carbon footprint of our individual device, while 22% is the environmental damage from daily posting and the use of the internet. Only 1% is the actual electricity required.

I’m heading back to Europe now after my last in a series of sabbaticals here in Cairns. End of life care for my mother has been a journey — they say we should talk more about death and dying. And people are uncomfortable with The Topic. I find it more disturbing that people don’t discuss the situation with aged care, the services and the actual Old People’s Homes as we used to call them. — The system in Australia is quite different to that in the UK, the DACH region, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Italy and France. I have visited, lived in or contemplated moving to these countries. Aged care standards and the social services were deciding factors in settling down, staying or leaving them.

Growing up in Cairns and visiting the region, you were always confronted with land rights. Or not. There were many local First Nations people who used to sit in our town parks, congregating, commiserating, celebrating. They are less visible now. We don’t see them in large groups sitting placidly, almost meditating, in Martin Munro Park. — Or down in the squares behind the marina, the shady pockets of blade grass and comforting giant figs raining down roots around Fogarty Park and the patch left by the casino to commemorate Dr Koch, Cairns’ malaria pioneer and first notable medic, scientist and hospital administrator. There isn’t much left…

My totem has long been the snake, although I think it may have recently become the long finned black eel now. Many of Australia’s freshwater fish are diadromous. They travel instinctively from fresh to saltwater to complete their lifecycles. FNQ species that are diadromous include “barramundi, mangrove jack, jungle perch, tarpon, snakehead gudgeo and the long-finned eel”. (quoted from “Restoring Fish Passages in the Wet Tropics” by Terrain NRM, page 7. Ecotone quarterly magayine. CAFNEC Cairns and Far North Environment Centre. Vol 43, Number 1, March 2023).

I strolled through the Palm Cove Markets, watching a surf lifesaving carnival of Nippers. They were doing runs on the beach and seemed to have replaced the game of Flags with an army-type crawl under some rope netting. Further along the beach, their older counterparts were clothed from neck to feet in “stinger suits”. These nylon jumper suits are meant to save you from what could be deadly stings from Box and Bluebottle jellfish. The two deadliest kind we learned about when I was being trained as a beach Lifeguard at the Palm Cove Surf Lifesaving Club.

Whilst back in Cairns on sabbatical and helping to look after my ageing, elderly parents, I visited my usual haunts. The incredibly beautiful Cairns Northern Beaches and then up to the now glamorous Port Douglas and beyond. “Beyond” as the locals realise, means magical, old FNQ locations like Newell and Wonga Beaches or the globally appreciated, Daintree Rainforest. Heritage protected and part of the UNESCO World Heritage Wet Tropics region stretching from Townsville to Cooktown.