The Australian Bite

Sports hall punches above its weight

19 November 2009

Listen and download: MP3

This week on the Australian Bite, we meet the project manager of an innovative country sports and recreation hall, which recently won best Sports building at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona.  In the lead up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, we find out what climate change activists on a hunger strike outside Canberra’s parliament house are hoping to achieve.  And farmer, cattle station manager and writer Sheryl McCorry talks about her new memoir, Stars over Shiralee - the follow up to her successful first book, Diamonds and Dust – the story of a million-acre cattle queen.

Climate Change Fasters

An international group of protesters from Climate Justice Fast, is going without food in the lead up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Paul Connor from Melbourne is one of them. He’s fasting for “strong and urgent action on climate change” in the lead-up to Copenhagen on December 7 and he’s leading a hunger strike on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra, supported by Marcella Brassett and Michael Morphett. But with such a slow-moving issue and the Federal Government’s commitment to its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, are they starving themselves for nothing? John Barrington caught up with them on day four of their fast.

You can watch the fasters’ video blog here

Link to the official website for COP15 – The United Nations Climate Change Conference, Copenhagen, December 7-18

Read the latest developments in Climate Change issues at the ABC’s Climate Change feature website here

Rural sports hall wins international architecture prize

When you’re hired to design a sports and recreation hall there are certain goals you have to satisfy – a roofed space that can be used in a variety of ways by all types of people. The Berry Sports and Recreation Hall on the South Coast of NSW does all that, and then it goes a tiny step further, because the Berry Sports and Recreation Hall has won the award for the best sports building at the World Architecture Festival held recently in Barcelona.  Project designer Michael Heenan talks to Michael Mackenzie about his initial idea for the project, and how it came to fruition.

See more pictures of the building on the Radio National Bush Telegraph website . . . . and also at the World Buildings Directory

Where is Berry?  Find out here on google maps

Stars over Shiralee

Sheryl McCorry grew up in the outback on cattle stations in the Northern Territory and she’s had quite a life-mustering cattle, running vast cattle stations and raising a family with her late husband Bob McCorry.  In fact she was the first woman in the Kimberley to run two million acre cattle stations.  Her memoirs of those years are told in her best selling first book Diamonds and Dust, which ended with her move from the northen Kimberley Region, down to the Great Southern area of Western Australia.  It was around that time, in 1998, when her husband Bob McCorry died.   Sheryl’s life changed and she hit a rocky patch which lasted quite few years, and the story of those years are told in her new book Stars over Shiralee.   She joined me to talk about the book.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia

Music (not in podcast)

Melbourne four piece indie pop band Kinematic have just released their third album, which will be launched in Melbourne later this week. It’s called Kites and it follows on from their debut album Time & Place in 2005 and their second album, The 38th Parallel, released in May 2007.

Artist: Kinematic

Track: Already Here

Album: Kites (2009)

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