A trip to Narrabri

It's a little while since I made a posting, but not because of a dearth of things to say. I'm just so busy I don't know whether I am coming or going. Two weeks ago I was in Sydney. This week I, Bernice (my grant partner) and our project manager Ron Reavell headed off to Narrabri for a couple of days to attend an unusual conference. Narrabri is on the Namoi river, a major tributary of the Darling system, about 3.5 hours drive from here. That's roughly equal to 350 km and that takes you into another world. To the west, the landscape is as flat as a tack ... a world of large farms, research institutes and a very large (5 km long) array of telescopes. To the east is Mt Kaputar, a not so little pimple of 5200 feet (1600 m).

And what took us to Narrabri? It's home to the Cotton Catchment Communities Cooperative Research Centre (CCC CRC)who've just funded us to the tune of $200,000, and we were invited to a research showcase of project's they've selected. And it was my pleasure to talk about our proposal and what we've done already to profile economy and society in the 19 local government areas with a strong cotton presence. This isn't particularly strange, but our audience was. To start with, 98 out 100 projects are hard science and our attentive (?) audience consisted of plant geneticists, chemists, hydrologists (cotton is mostly an irrigated crop and plays havoc with drainage and stream flow), environmental scientists, climatologists and others. It's the first time that I've addressed such an audience, but I was able to lace the presentation with some heavy statistics that some of them might have appreciated. I gave the presentation and nothing fell over, which was good.

I dressed up for the occasion, which meant jeans and a shirt rather than shorts and t-shirt which is my normal academic gear. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised when I got there to find that I was wearing club uniform. Just about all the scientists looked like me! As an aside, I'm reminded of a strange statistic. The location in Australia with the highest per capita concentration of PhD degrees is not Sydney's eastern suburbs or north shore, nor Armidale, but Narrabri. That's because of all the agriculture research stations and the telescope!

AS