The Australian Bite

Pine trees, polling and sleep-deprived teens

19 August 2010

Listen and download: MP3

This week on the Australian Bite, Australian teenagers – are they getting enough sleep, and if not, why?   We travel to the remote Northern Territory community of Gunbalanya, as a mobile polling booth comes to visit.  And we’ll meet a Tasmanian botanist who has been travelling the world collecting the seeds of endangered conifers.

Tired teens need sleep

Australian adolescent sleeping patterns have been revealed for the first time in a large study by researchers at the University of South Australia. Their finding, according to Dr. Sarah Blunden, a research fellow at the University of South Australia’s Centre for Sleep Research is that teenagers are not sleeping nearly enough. So what’s going on? Can we put it down to physical or psychological factors? Or is it more due to the fact that one in five young Australians have a television or computer in their bedroom, and one in ten having a games console? Richard Aedy spoke with Sarah Blunden to find out.

This interview was originally broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program

Election 2010: remote area polling

Imagine this: in ten days you have to cover over one million square kilometres, set-up mobile voting stations at designated times and collect votes from over 250 communities in one of the largest electorates in the country – the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari. That was the job of the Australian Electoral Commission for the ten days until the 21st of August. Lingiari is a unique electorate because of its size, its remoteness and the fact that the seat has the highest indigenous population in the country at around 43.5%, nearly three times the proportion of the next highest electorate. ABC reporter Brooke Bannister flew to the remote indigenous community of Gunbalanya, east of Kakadu National Park, to see how it all works in practice.

More on this story at the ABC Darwin website

Creating an “ark” for conifers

In Australia’s southern island state of Tasmania, a local researcher has been on a conifer rescue mission, travelling the world collecting their seeds and bringing them back for replanting in a land where they once thrived (and if you’re not sure what a conifer is, it’s any of the mostly evergreen trees and shrubs whose seeds are usually found on cones – like pine trees for example.) Tim Brodribb is from the School of Plant Sciences at the University of Tasmania and he tells reporter David Reilly about the project and some of the rare conifer seeds he has collected in countries including Fiji and Vanuatu.

You can read a transcript of this interview at the Radio National Science Show website

Music (not in podcast)

Tjupi – or Honey Ant in English – play energetic and emotive desert reggae. Singing in Luritja as well as in English, they are incredibly popular and well respected across Central Australia. Listen to this and you’ll understand why.

Artist: Tjupi Band

Track: Wati Kutjungku