Blogs from Atherton Tablelands, Queensland, Australia, Oceania - page 7

Sorry it has been a while! Been pretty busy lately. Last week we finished up classes and had our exams so as of friday, no more class! Which is really crazy. As of monay, our directed research projects started!! I got into Jess's DR, which is the one I wanted! i was really really excited. there are 10 of us in Jess's DR, working with bats. 9 people are in socio-econ and 6 are in the plant one. My closest friends are in socio-econ so i hardly ever see them, but i like all of the people in my group so it is all good. I am loving every minute of it. We are basically catching bats and then either processing them, or putting transmitters on them. We currently have two bats with transmitters on them ... read more

We flew from Sydney to Cairns and spent a day or so sorting out most of the rest of our trip. We also joined a program called WWOOF (willing workers on organic farms). Basically, you exchange a few hours work in return for accomodation and food, and hopefully the chance to see what it is really like to work and live in Australia, albeit in a rural setting. Our first host fell through as it wouldv'e cost us too much to get there but a lovely German couple living in Butchers Creek (not Wolfs Creek!) could collect us from Cairns. We were given a beautiful room in a converted shipping container with great views over the countryside. We had great weather and went on quite a few trips to the surrounding hotspots - waterfalls, rivers, coffee ... read more

Heylo! So this past week not much occured. just lots of studying and taking of exams, which i survived. lol. this weekend was really really great though. On thursday night a bunch of us watched The Holiday and then later on watched Beauty and the Beast. It was a good night. =) Then friday night we had craft night.. and we each did our own aboriginal style dot painting which was fun. After that watched Rabbit Proof Fence which is a movie about a true story of one of the Stolen Generation. It was good. Sad. Crazy. Yesterday we did another tree planting with TREAT. It had been raining so much all week that most of the pre-dug holes were full of water which was really annoying. I hope the trees live that we planted. I ... read more

Hey everyone, well today was rather eventful...i went on this trip called "on the wallaby" it was a pretty much hippie inspired day in the rainforest (not quite as extreme as the nimbin trip though)....anyways it was a really great day! we went to see some spectacular trees and lakes...the trees are HUGE about 60-80 meters in height...about 13m in diameter..jusst absolutely astounding....we also visited some beautiful rain water lakes as well as some waterfalls to swim under.... did you know that if a waterfall goes straight down its a boy and if it has rocks and breaks and "dances" down its a girl?! true story...thats what the aborigines reckon...anwyays we got to go in this one boy waterfall and swim behind it and all it was awesome..it was actually used in amusic video circa 1996 ... read more

Hey all! Sorry it has been a while. We've been busy with classes and field work and stuff and I've been trying to do my paper. Which I finished sunday night and then checked over last night and handed it in. Which was a relief. So, let's see. During the week I think we were just mainly having Forest Management Class and field work. Our field excerise for that class involved picking samples from many different trees, shrubs, vines, and weeds. Then we took different measurements such as flammability, leaf area, specific leaf area, wet mass, dry weight and some other stuff. Thursday we went on a little trip with Jess, the Ecology prof. We went around to different fragments of Mabi 5b forest and talked about stuff that we had learned previously in lessons. This ... read more