Academic Update
Dry Semester 2009 in Australia has started and the Wet Tropics are dry indeed! I’ve lived here for over ten years and can’t recall when the forest looked so parched. Distant fires have been burning and make the early evening sky a painted landscape of colors.

Students have arrived and are enthralled with the beauty that surrounds them here in the tropical rainforest of Northern Australia. We were visited by a cassowary on-site which served as a welcome introduction to attending the First Annual Cassowary Summit in Cairns a day after arrival. When one student realized that the mighty flightless bird looked as though it evolved from the days of dinosaurs, he noted: “Wow, I feel like I’ve travelled back in time.”

Welcome to the oldest rainforest on earth mate; welcome to the land of “roos”, pythons, and the Great Barrier Reef; to the lands of the Aboriginals once part of Godwana. The land of “Oz”, home of Tim Tams and Vegemite and a whole new set of friends in the World Heritage listed Wet Tropics. This is your home amongst the trees for the next three months.

In the first two weeks we are already starting to feel like family. Classes have started and first assignments already due. The community liaison manager for the Wet Tropics Management Authority shared Stories From the Heart of the forest around a campfire last week and introduced students to the magnificence of this place. We started our weekly community service partnerships last Friday with TREAT (Trees for the Evelyn-Atherton Tablelands), LandCare and on-site works. Immersion into “interpreting the rainforest” with local artists will begin this week and culminate in a school public exhibition at the annual Yungaburra Folk Festival in October. We’ll be sure to post our works here for further viewing!

Welcome to Australia. Follow our journey over this dry season. We’re looking forward to sharing.
-Moni Carlisle, Centre Director

Student Reflections
Things have been going well here at the Centre for Rainforest Studies in Australia. After a mere two weeks in the rainforest, I can already feel myself settling in to a routine and I’m relishing that feeling. Parts of this magnificent forest are shedding their formidable exteriors: I walk home each night now excited to spot cute, nocturnal animals (like the pademelon) instead of terrified of each and every sound around me.

I wake up each morning with the birds - a natural alarm clock is the best kind of alarm clock (though you won’t get me to agree to this at 6:15 a.m.). After a wholesome breakfast of eggs, cereals, and toasts, we typically have a few lecture blocks each morning. These aren’t your typical college lectures though - these are lectures that directly engage us with our surrounding environs, both scientifically and culturally, and that is an incredible way to learn. Our afternoons are often spent off-site doing various field labs and activities. I’ve explored the Atherton Tablelands from a variety of frameworks already: socio-economically, geologically, and ecologically. We’ve also had the chance to visit places like Cairns on a couple occasions. I even attended my first Australian rugby game (Atherton vs. Cairns) this past Sunday! Though I barely knew what was happening, I still quite enjoyed the game. I’ve been here just two weeks and I already feel myself coming to know this place better than I know my own hometown.
-Caitlin Adams, Swathmore College

My stay in the rainforest has been quite a delight thus far. I feel as if I have already been a part of a list of activities that would last over a course of one month! The second day of our stay, we traveled down the Gillies Highway to Cairns for the Cassowary Awareness Convention. The discussion panel was enlightening about the rare and endangered bird’s habitat issues and their various conservatory efforts. A bonus of the convention was getting to touch/see a salt-water crocodile and a water python. Within the next few days, our socio-economics teacher, David, split all of us into different groups in order to investigate social and economic issues throughout the major towns in the Atherton Tablelands. My group traveled to Malanda for the day where we met some intriguing characters that provided us with insight about local town life and environmental issues. Tom English, owner of the Malanda Hotel, shared very interesting stories about the town and his hotel. For example, King Charles visited Malanda for a business trip and he stopped to meet and greet most of the crowd. He also talked about how the town was founded on the logging industry, but later resorted to today’s dairy business. Pete Reynolds, former farmer, informed us about the trouble Tableland farmers are having with the Queensland government about runoff. The contaminated runoff eventually ends up in the Barrier Reef, but Reynolds was furious that farmers were being isolated/cornered for major environmental issues. It was a delight interacting with Aussie locals.
-Phil LaTourette, Davidson College

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