The Australian Bite

Wildlife, dongas & the first ever map of Australia

3 February 2011

Listen and download: MP3

This week on the Australian Bite, we hear of a new campaign to to bring home an important part of Australia’s cultural heritage – the first map to use the name Australia. We get an insight into a different kind of life when resources worker Trent Hope shows us around his donga – or portable cabin – in the remote pilbara region of Western Australia. And city kids come face to face with nature at the Wangat wildlife refuge.

Historians want map brought “Down Under”

A new campaign has been launched to bring home an important part of Australia’s cultural heritage. It’s a map drawn in 1804 by Mathew Flinders – the first known person to circumnavigate the Australian mainland. Dubbed the country’s Birth Certificate, the Flinders map was the first to use the name Australia. But for more than 200 years, the document has been in British hands, hidden from view in the UK Hydrographic Office. Associate Professor Don Garden is the President of the Federation of Australian Historical Societies.  He told Alison Carabine that the map should be brought Down Under – and placed on public display for all to see.

Kids come close to nature at Wangat Wildlife Refuge

There’s a whole generation of children growing up whose contact with wilderness is limited to city parks, gardens and the occasional David Attenborough wildlife documentary. To help turn that around, the CSIRO’s kids science club “Doublehelix” held a family camp at Wangat, a wildlife refuge three hours north of Sydney in the foothills of the Barrington Tops. Wangat is an indigenous word meaning ‘place of whispers’, but whispering they were not, when a group of kids from an urban environment were released into the bush. Leone Knight reports.

More photos at the ABC Rural website

Living in a donga

Along with red dust and high visibility gear, dongas are an iconic part of life in the north of Western Australia. The average rent for a house in Karratha is already over $1,500 a week, with prices slated to increase by a further seven per cent this year. So it’s no surprise thousands of workers choose to live in dongas – essentially a shipping container converted into a bedroom with ensuite.  Trent Hope is from Melbourne, and works in the resources industry in Karratha on a fly-in, fly-out basis. He shows Lucy Martin around his humble abode.

Music: (not in podcast)

We hear the Sydney singer songwriter Andy Bull with a track from his Phantom Pains EP,  featuring guest vocals from the Hungry Kids of Hungary.

Artist: Andy Bull (with Hungry Kids of Hungary)

Track: Last Waltz

Album: Phantom Pains EP (2010)