This is a guest post from my mate Peter Shaw, who for his sins now lives on the Gold Coast of Queensland.

“The plentiful stocks of fish encouraged the development of a fishing industry in the region [Tweed Heads/Coolangatta] in the early 1900s and it was soon booming. Perhaps the most famous and successful fishermen in the Tweed were the Boyds. The six Boyd brothers, Jack, Herb, Fred, Charlie, Bob and George grew up in Tweed Heads and became legendary beach net fishermen. They fished for sea mullet, tailor, king fish, [white bait/pichards] and jewfish and some of their hauls were enormous. In the 1930s a single haul from Kirra Beach filled over one thousand 18lb cases of sea mullet.”

This is a guest post by Martin Hardie (Deakin University), Dr Kathryn Henne (Australian National University) and Jason Mazanov (University of NSW). It was originally published by Deakin Research Communications.

The Minister for Sport Kate Lundy has recently said that up to 40% of athletes who ASADA seeks to interrogate refuse to answer questions. This has obviously been a source of frustration for ASADA in the wake of the USADA Armstrong investigation.

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I like a good hat so being in Tucson in southern Arizona for a few days I thought I’d catch up with the folks at Arizona Hatters to see if they had anything that caught my eye and suited my head.

I was last in Tucson about six years ago and bought a Stetson Open Road at Arizona Hatters and was looking to replace that hat, which is now sweat-stained inside and out with the red dirt of the centralian deserts and well-battered from being snaffled by dogs, thrown around in all manner of vehicles and being stuck on my sweaty head for too many hours over too many years.

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I’ve known Lillie Claire for most of her life.

Of all the images I have of her the most vivid is of a three year old, naked, covered in dirt and scratches emerging from the dust cloud after her father rolled his truck on a lonely dirt road outside the small Northern Territory township of Beswick in the mid-eighties.

She was thrown clear from the truck and landed – intact and somewhat bemused – while all around her was wreckage. The truck was a write off.

Then – as now – I knew that Lillie Claire was tough. Tougher than that Toyota Hi-Lux at least.

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In my bible of western American birds* the Burrowing Owl Athene cunicularia is described as “uncommon and local” and found usually in open grasslands or on agricultural lands.

Well, David Allen Sibley got it bang on the money for me.

Sometimes you are blessed by accidents of geography or circumstance.

Me? I think I’m blessed by a bit of both.

Sometimes you have to go a long way to see very ordinary birds.

Sometimes very special birds come to you.

The dawn chorus at my house can be a deafening cacophony, particularly when the Fig tree just outside my upstairs balcony is in fruit.

About three times a year the eponymous Figbird Spechotheres viridis takes charge and at the height of the fruiting season – when the fruit is “cooked” as locals say – flocks of Figbirds descend on the Fig tree outside my bedroom to gorge themselves on its beautiful golden fruit.

This is a guest post by David Ross, the Director of the Central Land Council based in Alice Springs. He delivered this talk at the Aboriginal Governance Summit, held at Tennant Creek on 18 and 19 April 2013.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners, the Waramungu people, and thank them for their welcome this morning.

I would also like to say how heartening it is to see so many of our leaders here today for this important gathering.

This Summit is not a conference.

This is a place for Aboriginal people from right across the NT to have an honest, open – and hopefully inspiring – conversation about where we want to go, and what work we need to do to get you there.

I caught up with Nate Rice in his small office on the top floor of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, a squat building tucked away in a corner of Logan Square in downtown Philadelphia.

Nate’s office – not much bigger than a broom cupboard – is a mess. He sits at his desk surrounded by books, papers, the detritus of his latest field trip and his dirty laundry and tells me about his life and work with birds.

Nate is in the office but, like all field biologists, is looking forward to his next field trip “I became a biologist because I like to be in the field – not because I like to sit behind a desk. If I don’t get into the field for a couple of months every year, if I don’t get to places where there is no light pollution and no humans … I go batshit crazy.”

This is a guest post by the Keep River Kite.

One would have thought that the nadir of NT Government efforts to rid public spaces of people overindulging in warm wine or bitter beer was the mid-1990’s when Chief Minister Shane Stone thought it time to “monster and stomp” on those people deemed to be making poor use of said spaces.

Stone was not shy in providing resources for police to take huge numbers of people into “protective custody”, a spell of six hours in the “drunk tank” at the nearest station, for persons intoxicated but not having broken any laws.

He enacted the infamous mandatory gaol terms for property offences, including minor receiving charges, so those drunks dabbling in a spot of crime often had protracted stays in prison.
However the mainstay of the monster stomp was being swept up out of a park and, via the cage on the back of the police ute, being deposited next to the stainless steel dunny in the cop shop drunk’s cell to sleep it off.

This is a guest post by Deakin University legal academic Martin Hardie.

At the moment it is as if the whole country, or at least the footballing part of the country is sitting, waiting for ASADA to say or do something, even, if possible, make a decision as to what happened and when.

In recent days the media has published stories to the effect that both the Australian Sports Anti-doping Authority (ASADA) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) were consulted and approved the use of the various substances in issue in footygate.

If this is correct is raises serious concerns about the ability of ASADA to provide good and reliable advice to athletes as to what they can or cannot use. In an article I co-authored recently we raised some of the issues at play when an athlete or support person might have in consulting ASADA.