Unless you call the Coorong region of South Australia home – or have visited Lake Albert, one of its biggest waterways, in the past decade – then you probably haven’t heard of him. Born John Francis Peggotty in Ireland in 1864, the bearded felon apparently earned his moniker due to his preferred mode of transport…on the back of an ostrich. Perched beside Lake Albert at Meningie in the heart of the Coorong is an information panel that looms almost as large as the life-sized saddled-up statue of the ostrich.  Apparently, after sailing to Australia in 1890, the pistol-packing shirtless outla ..read more

Both stages exploded – the first at an altitude of 90km, the second at 150km. This was seen by some as proof that Earth is flat, because the rocket supposedly crashed into the “firmament” above our flat Earth, rather than exploded.  Typical flat-Earth explanations on TikTok were, “There’s no breaking through the energy dome. You cannot go to space physically. We have never been to the Moon.” Firmament believers are a subset of the wider flat-Earth community and tend to be fundamentalist Christians. They believe God placed a physical barrier – the so-called firmament – exactly 200km above ..read more

Both stages exploded – the first at an altitude of 90km, the second at 150km. This was seen by some as proof that Earth is flat, because the rocket supposedly crashed into the “firmament” above our flat Earth, rather than exploded.  Typical flat-Earth explanations on TikTok were, “There’s no breaking through the energy dome. You cannot go to space physically. We have never been to the Moon.” Firmament believers are a subset of the wider flat-Earth community and tend to be fundamentalist Christians. They believe God placed a physical barrier – the so-called firmament – exactly 200km above ..read more

Victorian Tom Tregellas fulfilled that dream – only he had to wait until he was an adult. What’s more, his magical creatures were real. An iron founder and labourer by trade, Tom was a self-taught naturalist. He spent every weekend he could exploring the bush surrounding Melbourne, especially in the Dandenong Ranges. In 1918, while birdwatching in Sherbrooke Forest, near Kallista, Tom stumbled upon a giant cylindrical hollow log, 5 x 2.5m, which he wasted no time turning into the ultimate live-in bird hide. According to Esther Hardware in her biography, Tom Tregellas: Pioneer Naturalist, “With ..read more

It’s tiny, about the size of a sesame seed, and it feeds on a bee’s fatty tissues. An infected bee would be similar to a human carrying a parasite sized between a bagel and a frisbee. A Varroa-infested bee has a reduced ability to fly, pollinate crops and carry food. When enough of its bees are infested, a hive dies. The first Varroa mites of consequence in Australia (previous minor infestations were eradicated) were found in New South Wales, near Newcastle, in June 2022. They have since been detected south near the Victorian border, and north around Coffs Harbour. The official policy has chan ..read more

I’ll never forget my Year 7 camp to Bungonia Caves (now Bungonia National Park) – a wild gorge pockmarked with more than 190 limestone caves near Goulburn in southern New South Wales. Despite my teachers insisting, “You should face your phobias head on!”, it didn’t work. I still have nightmares of being stuck in a squeeze half-filled with water, gasping for air. I also remember from that trip the guide being miffed that Odyssey Cave, one of Bungonia’s, had recently lost its title of ‘deepest cave in mainland Australia’. Explorers of a South Australian cave had dug out a few metres of theirs “s ..read more

In 1929, an ‘avalanche’ shifted more than twice the volume of Mt Everest – but nobody saw it! Why? Because it was entirely underwater. When there’s no snow involved, scientists call such an event a “turbidity current flow”.  Back in 1929, an earthquake triggered one of these massive underwater flows at the Grand Banks, in Newfoundland in eastern Canada. The bottom of the ocean there was quite flat and hardly sloped at all – just one-quarter of a degree. Even so, this slope was enough to allow the sediment already sitting on the ocean floor to slide downhill at nearly 70km/h.  By the ..read more

On a recent family trip to the fabled Hanging Rock in Newham, Victoria, the Yowie clan took an unplanned detour to Woodend. Emily, my 11-year-old daughter, found “something on the internet” about a nearby “gravity-defying” section of road “where things roll uphill”. Yes, you read correctly: roll uphill. “If you put the car in neutral and take the handbrake off, the car rolls uphill,” she exclaimed, reading from the website. And so began an hour-long search for the offending (and not signposted) stretch of road along Straws Lane. We only realised we were at the right spot when we noticed a car ..read more

Given this column has previously delved into the spurious world of flying saucers and so‑called flying rabbits, why not a flying pieman? But Australia’s “flying pieman” didn’t mysteriously fly through the sky, he walked fast, very fast…while carrying hot pies on a pole. William Francis King began his adult life as a failure – in his parents’ eyes, at least. Born in London in 1807, William was the eldest son of a British Treasury paymaster. Mum and Dad hoped he’d become a man of the church, but young William showed little interest in theology. As punishment, his father promptly banished him, ag ..read more

Superbugs are bacteria nasty enough to kill people. Worse, they are almost totally resistant to most antibiotics. In 2019 superbugs killed at least 1.3 million people – that’s more than 2 per cent of the 55 million people who died from all causes in that year. Unfortunately, most of today’s antibiotics were developed decades ago, so bacteria have had lots of time to develop resistance to them. But what about Neanderthals? About 500,000 years ago, our evolutionary pathway split – one leading to modern humans, and the other leading to the Neanderthals.  Neanderthals were about the same heig ..read more