Michael Green

Writer and producer

Police have no leads in delayed investigation

In Social justice on

THE State Coroner has heard that the police have no leads into the death of a man who was found in the Maribyrnong River in July 2011.

Michael Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on 26 June 2011. His body was retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale eleven days later, on 7 July.

In February, the Coroner suspended the inquest into his death and directed the police to reinvestigate with a different detective in charge.

In a hearing yesterday, Acting Senior Sergeant Peter Tatter-Rendlemann, from the Hobsons Bay crime investigation unit, told the Coroner’s court that there were no witnesses or evidence about what happened during the period Atakelt was missing. “I have nothing so far that can shed any light as to what may have occurred,” he said.

Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum said he now believed the inquest would not provide any answers about how his son died. “From now, my hope to find the truth is diminishing,” he said.

The police initially claimed that Atakelt had entered the river near the Smithfield bridge in Footscray, several kilometres downstream from where the body was found. But at the inquest in February, Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, said it was not possible for a body to float such a distance upstream.  

The case has been controversial, especially among the Ethiopian and other African-Australian communities, ever since Atakelt’s body was found nearly two years ago.

In December 2011, the assistant commissioner responsible for the north-west metro region, Stephen Fontana, assured a public meeting in North Melbourne that the original brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation”. He said it had been overseen by both the homicide squad and the ethical standards department, and that he had “total confidence” in the Footscray police officer responsible, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher.

However, the Coroner heard today that CCTV footage from various locations near where Atakelt went missing was no longer available. It was not accessed during the original investigation.

Last month, the police made a new appeal for any witnesses to provide information through Crime Stoppers and displayed posters around Flemington and Ascot Vale. But Acting Senior Sergeant Tatter-Rendlemann said no new witnesses had come forward.

The inquest has been scheduled to re-commence on 26 August.

For background, read the other articles I’ve written about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’, ‘Watching a hearing’, ‘Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death’ and ‘Changing a whole system : racialised policing in Melbourne‘.

The right kind of urban growth

In Greener Homes on

Green roofs and streetscapes make a cool change for the city

FROM his own patch of turf in Coburg, Emilio Fuscaldo can see south all the way to the skyscrapers. The grass is on his roof.

It’s one of only a few residential green roofs in Melbourne.

Mr Fuscaldo is the founder of Nest Architects; his motives were both private and public. “It’s incumbent on architects to practice what we preach. I wanted to show that you can devote a large percentage of your budget to sustainability,” he says. “You can compromise on other things, such as kitchens, cupboards and tiles, and still achieve a beautiful result.”

Before the soil was installed, Mr Fuscaldo and his partner lived in their home for a summer and most of winter. The difference was immediately clear: with the slab of earth overhead, their heating bill halved. In the summer, the temperature is now always tolerable without air conditioning.

“You cool and heat when you hit the extremes and we’re not hitting the extremes,” he says.


Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Mr Fuscaldo estimates that the green roof added between $20,000 and $30,000 to the cost of the home (the biggest expense is waterproofing). “This wasn’t an exercise in affordability. It’s about assigning your budget the right way,” he says.

The couple bought the back of someone else’s block, and designed an elegant, two-bedroom house to fit the space. But although the backyard has gone, the living roof means the bugs and birds sill have a place to be.

The rainwater in their tank gets filtered through the vegetation and the roof also reduces stormwater runoff during heavy rain. Most of their plants are ornamental, but this autumn, their rooftop plot delivered a zucchini as large as their infant son.

There’s another, less tangible, benefit too. “It feels amazing to be in the house and know that between you and the world is this amount of land,” Mr Fuscaldo says. “It’s like being in a cave. It really adds to your experience of dwelling.”

If you’d like to follow suit, there’s a heavy catch. Existing roofs aren’t strong enough to bear the load without expensive retrofitting.

With that snag in mind, Melbourne resident Shelley Meagher founded ‘Do It On The Roof’, a campaign to put green roofs on the places that can already cope best: commercial buildings.

Together with several other volunteers, Dr Meagher is calling for a public green roof in Melbourne’s CBD.

The City of Melbourne’s open space plan, released last year, showed that in the heart of the city – around Elizabeth and Bourke Streets – there’s no public open space within a walkable distance.

“Thermal imaging studies of Melbourne show that the hottest part of the city is around Hardware Lane,” Dr Meagher says. “Having buildings surrounded by concrete leads to increases in temperatures – that’s the urban heat island effect, and green roofs help reduce it.”

Climate scientist and adaptation expert Professor Roger Jones, from Victoria University, says it’s crucial we build cool, reflective or permeable streetscapes, as well as green roofs. They’ll not only help us cope with a hotter climate, but also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

“The difference between an urban forest and an adjoining suburb can be as much as 5 degrees,” he says. “We need cool spots for people on hot days, so we’re not all indoors by an air conditioner. We have to design places people want to be.”

Read this article at The Age online

Regenerating after the bushfire

In Greener Homes on

Kinglake residents came out of the fire and into a plan – it just wasn’t theirs.

LAST Sunday, over seventy people gathered in the renovated, rebuilt hall at Kinglake Central. David Engwicht, a placemaking expert, told the audience that the fire was an opportunity “to burn the triviality” from their lives. They could create community, relationships and “systemic resilience”, however they wanted.

It was the first week of a free, two-part event called Regenerating, sponsored by RMIT University, Australian National University and CSIRO.

The speakers – under the themes of people, place, prosperity and preparedness – covered an extraordinary range of disciplines, from firestorm physics and vulnerable ecosystems, to regional economies and social media.

The event was organised by Daryl Taylor, from the Kinglake Ranges Community Resilience Committee. He says a common thread emerged: the need for communities to take back control of decision-making. And that’s a lesson relevant for citizens elsewhere, with many towns and suburbs facing uncertain futures.

The latest report by the Climate Commission, The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather, stated that climate change is already increasing the intensity and frequency of heatwaves, droughts, storms and sea-level rise. “The southeast of Australia, including many of our largest population centres, stands out as being at increased risk,” it said.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In Kinglake, Mr Engwicht said no one could be sure which challenges will come first. Planning only for specific threats can, counter-intuitively, make you more vulnerable to unexpected ones.

The second day of the event will be held on Sunday May 5. The speakers include historian Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, and psychiatrist Paul Valent, author of From Survival to Fulfillment.

Mr Taylor says that, in organising the event, the committee members were motivated by their experiences since the fires – especially the contradiction between locals’ willingness and capacity to act, and the stifling nature of the assistance they received.

“A disaster is a tragedy, but also an opportunity to regenerate, to rethink and redesign. We lost unique opportunities because state government, corporations and NGOs had pre-determined agendas and one-size-fits-all strategies,” he says. “‘Engagement’ was too often about engaging with someone else’s prefigured plan.

“Our communities were incredibly creative after the fires. We self-organised to meet our fundamental human and social needs – often without external help, and by flying under the radar. But as we became exhausted, it became difficult to act outside the government matrix.

“People don’t really need welfare and command-and-control directives. They need empowerment. They don’t really need donated undies and toothbrushes. They need to be supported to collaborate and make critical decisions about their communities’ futures.

If he could, he’d bypass the idea of “recovery” altogether. “Recovery can be a dog-whistle for counselling, welfare agencies and dependency. It’s backward looking and doesn’t address what makes communities truly flourish,” he says.

This year, Mr Taylor and his family are renting in Eltham. They’d been living in temporary housing until a few months ago. His daughter can now walk to high school, but it’s been a difficult transition in other ways.

“I’m really feeling the anonymity of the suburbs,” he says. “In Kinglake, when I came home, it was nothing to see several cars at our property and people everywhere. We got through the last four years on the strength of our social relationships – we did everything together.

“The experience has been extraordinary. While you wouldn’t wish it on anyone, it’s been rich with learning.”

Read this article at The Age online

The living fossil

In Environment on

It’s as old as the dinosaurs, grows in a top-secret location and – until the early ’90s – was only known through 150 million year old remains. This is the story of the Wollemi Pine.

Published in Smith Journal, Volume 6

ON a cool, clear day, in early spring 1994, David Noble rested for lunch deep in a canyon in Wollemi National Park, 130 kilometres north-west of Sydney. The meal was nothing special; he’d brought standard bushwalking fare – sandwiches, muesli bars, nuts and sultanas. But the location was extraordinary. One-in-150 million, or thereabouts. He just didn’t know that yet.

Noble was 29, fit and wiry, and renowned among local bushwalkers and canyoners for exploring uncharted, inaccessible territory.

Earlier that morning, high above the gorge, he’d slung his rope around a thin sapling that clung to the rock face, tested his weight against it, then whizzed over the ledge. It was just another weekend adventure, together with his regular exploring buddies Tony Zimmerman and Michael Casteleyn.

The three men travelled light: they wore footy shorts and t-shirts and carried no camping gear, just their ropes and harnesses. They’d scrambled down the cliff, pushed their way through bushes and ferns along a rocky creek, and abseiled again, trying to stay out of the icy water.

They stopped at the end of the canyon, and while they ate, Noble looked around. It was a dark, narrow rainforest, moist from the water dripping down the cliff walls and flowing in the nearby creek. There was no direct sunlight; even the air seemed tinged with green.

Noble peered at the trees above him, but didn’t recognise the species. He’d taken botany courses in his environmental science degree, so he knew a thing or two about plants. They were conifers, shaped like a storybook Christmas tree, but the mature trunks had a strange, bubbly bark, which looked like Coco Pops. The tallest among them stood nearly 40 metres. Noble snapped off a small branch, put it in his backpack, and promptly forgot about it.

Within months, the trio’s lunch-spot hit newspapers all over the world. It became the most sought-after and jealously guarded view in the whole country. Nearly two decades later, its location remains secret. Only dozens of people have ever been there. If all goes according to plan, few more ever will.

***

It’s a misty, prehistoric kind of morning, early in summer, and Noble is picking his way along the neatly manicured paths of the Blue Mountains Botanic Gardens. He’s leading me towards a single Wollemi Pine – Wollemia nobilis – planted on a grassy hill.

The species is named for him, and for the national park in which he found it. Nearby, inside the information centre, there’s a large display about the tree, including a 150-million-year-old fossil that matches the pattern of its needles.

The Wollemi Pines are living fossils. Noble’s discovery was like a twitcher spotting a pterodactyl.

He strides ahead, arms and pack straps swinging in time with his springy, splayfooted gait. But just as I’m admiring his nimbleness, he stops abruptly. He’d gotten us lost, momentarily. “I’ll bring the map next time,” he says, with a wry smile.

Truth is, he’s much happier without paths at all. And certainly without journalists and photographers hanging around. In front of the camera, those free-swinging hands lose their rhythm and clasp one another awkwardly in front of his waist instead.

Noble is now 47, and a long-time park ranger. He’s a walker, not a talker. And nobody understands this landscape like he does. In the late 1970s at Katoomba High School in the Blue Mountains, while other kids were playing school cricket, he chose bushwalking. As the years went by, he kept exploring new corners of bushland in anyway he could: caving, canyoning, kayaking and hiking.

By the early ’90s he was working with National Parks, building walking tracks near Blackheath, the town where he grew up. On weekends he ventured into the Wollemi wilderness. A huge expanse of bush, the park traverses some of the most rugged terrain in New South Wales. No one knows for sure, but the best estimate is that there are about 500 canyons within its boundaries.

On expeditions with his friends Noble has named over 200 places previously unnamed and unexplored.

“I like to go somewhere and get to know it well,” he explains. “Most people travel the highways, but when you go off the track and have to use maps, compasses and a GPS, it’s a little bit harder. You need technical equipment to do it, so you get to go places even the Aboriginal people wouldn’t have seen.”

***

It wasn’t unusual for Noble to take a cutting of a plant he didn’t recognise. His father was a keen amateur botanist, and the two would often nut out the identification together.

If they couldn’t figure it out, he showed the plant to his friend Wyn Jones, senior naturalist with National Parks. “Usually he rattles them off pretty quick,” Noble recalls. “This time he said, ‘Leave it with me’. I thought there was something suspicious about that. And away we went: the longer it took them to identify it, the more likely it was something different.”

Jones, together with botanist Jan Allen, set about listing the characteristics of the tree. They cross-checked their findings with other species in the Araucariaceae family, including Kauri pines from New Zealand and Monkey Puzzle trees from Chile. They didn’t match. It was something new.

And something very old. The first conifers evolved more than 300 million years ago, a time when Australia was part of the ancient super-continent, Gondwana, along with Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.

The Wollemi is thought to date from between 90 and 200 million years ago, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The pine, and its close ancestors, once blanketed the landscapes of the southern hemisphere, while the Earth was hotter, wetter and steamier.

As the climate grew cooler and drier, those great conifer forests fell back, bested by flowering plants – the newer, more versatile kids on the botanical block. Epochs passed, day-by-day, and the Wollemi retreated to its one hidden crevasse.

Noble wasn’t privy to all the probing over the plant’s classification. But as snippets of the findings reached his ears, his excitement grew and grew. The buzz reached a peak with the public launch of the tree in Sydney. He was interviewed by every television station, including an “horrific” live-cross for Channel Ten news.

When the story of the tree’s existence was announced, enthusiasts around the world clamoured to know where it grew. But the authorities held fast – they would only reveal the location to scientists on genuine research projects. Even Noble hasn’t been back since 1995.

The mystery makes for an enthralling anomaly. In the era of Google maps, smart phones and satellite tracking, its location remains an otherworldly secret.

***

Why go to so much trouble? Is the tree really anything more than a curiosity?

It’s unlikely that many other critters still rely on the pines for their survival, because there have been so few of them for so long. But Noble says it’s too soon to tell. “There’s much more study to be done; these things can take years to figure out. Whether it’s a cure for cancer or a different sort of fungi that lives on the tree, we just don’t know yet.”

The extinction of an individual species has been likened to removing a rivet on an aeroplane. This one or the next might not matter, but one day, when too many have gone, the whole thing will come crashing down.

But when it comes to threatened species, there’s something beyond pragmatism at play. Scientist and author Tim Flannery argues that extinctions are a matter of morality. And, unfortunately, we feel it most keenly when the creature is cute and fluffy, or in the case of the Wollemi, towering and majestic. Other species aren’t so fortunate.

“The demise of a bat may not weight greatly in the balance of human wellbeing, but it speaks volumes about the human soul,” he wrote, in a recent Quarterly Essay. “Do we wish to be despoilers and executioners of the natural world? Or do we want our children to have the opportunity to enjoy a world as bountiful and diverse as the one our parents bequeathed to us?”

The Wollemi is listed as “critically endangered”: the second-last breath before extinction. A single bushfire could turn them to ash – but in their private rainforest, at the bottom of a wet canyon, they’ve protected themselves well.

As with so many other threatened species, the biggest threat is humanity. We’re living in the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humans have come to dramatically influence the Earth’s systems. By our hands, biodiversity is vanishing and the climate is transforming.

The Wollemi pines are particularly at risk, because they’re identical. One of the researchers’ most curious findings so far is that each one has the same DNA as the next. So the main reason the gorge remains secret is to protect them from us, or most likely, from our boots. The invasive plant pathogen Phytophthera, which hitchhikes on the soles of our shoes, could wipe out the lot in no time at all.

“It’s not Jurassic Park where you can get the genes from a mosquito, and bring them back,” Noble says. “Once they’re lost, they’re lost forever.”

But he isn’t so worried about the tree’s survival. After all, it has proven astonishingly resilient; it was here before us, and there’s a good chance it’ll be here after we’re gone. It waited patiently in its canyon, and now, it has taken advantage of an unusual opportunity to spread again. There are official Wollemi Pine distributors in 16 different countries. In Australia, a seedling will set you back $50.

At his place, on 100 acres of bush in the Blue Mountains, Noble is growing three – one in a pot, for a Christmas tree, and two in the ground. He was given them when the pines were first released for sale: his own trees bearing his own name.

It’s one of the few things in his life that have changed since his “lucky discovery” – that and the occasional interviews with the press. With or without it, he’d be a park ranger. And with or without it, he’d still be exploring new canyons. In 2005, he was named the Australian Geographic Adventurer of the Year.

He swears he’s slowed down in recent years, since having a family – his two daughters, and the orchard and vegie patch having moved up the order of priorities – but the supporting evidence is scant. He still goes canyoning with his old explorers, Zimmerman and Casteleyn, though not so often. Now his regular partner is his wife, Jules. He estimates they’ve explored more than 300 canyons together.

“I didn’t make a million dollars, so maybe I went wrong somehow,” he laughs. “But it has allowed me to be an advocate for the pine, and for threatened species as well. And for adventure: for showing people that things can still be discovered.”

The word “Wollemi” derives from a word in the Darkinjung language, which means “stop and look around”.

“It’s a appropriate, because that’s what I did: stop and notice what was near me, rather than just barging on through.”

Local investing

In Greener Homes on

Living local includes shifting your shares too.

IT’S Friday evening, and four residents are sitting around a broad wooden table in Thornbury, talking money. They’re at the regular monthly meeting – bring a plate – of the “community economics” group from Transition Darebin.

The organisation is part of the worldwide Transition Network, in which local volunteers begin to “adapt to diminishing resources and a rapidly changing global climate”.

The March meeting was held at Serenity Hill and Kirsten Larsen’s house. They’ve already retrofitted their home – solar panels angle down the north-facing roof and veggies grow in their front yard – so Ms Hill reported on their latest sustainability scheme: self-managed superannuation.

“We’ve done all these other things – our lifestyle and even our work – everything is about trying to change the world,” she says. “It doesn’t feel right for our money to be locked up doing stuff we don’t control. Between us, we have $100,000 and we can now decide where it goes.”

They began investigating self-managed super after the global financial crisis. “We worried that it could easily vanish. We wanted to get it out of that system and also, to invest it in concrete things in the community.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Self-managed superannuation doesn’t get much press, but it comprises nearly a third of all super assets. Until now, it’s been the province of the wealthy – the rule of thumb is that it’s too expensive to be worthwhile unless you have more than $200,000 stashed away. (In June 2010, the average self-managed super fund was worth nearly $900,000.)

Ms Hill found a way around the high costs. They use an online business called Esuperfund, which provides streamlined documents for $700 per year. There can be up to four members in a self-managed fund, so they can split the fee between them.

The couple haven’t decided how they’ll invest all their money, but they’re considering options: a community solar energy project, a small share in a dairy farm in the Goulburn Valley, and taking a commercial lease to house a local food hub.

“On the Australian Tax Office website there’s a long list of things you can and can’t invest in,” Ms Hill says. “You need to have a well thought out, audited investment plan. If you’re going to do it, you need to take responsibility to do it properly.”

Their plan is just what US economist Michael Shuman is promoting. Last month, the author of Local Dollars, Local Sense spoke in Melbourne and Ballarat about finance and local prosperity, sponsored by the two councils.

In Australia, he says, small businesses provide two-thirds of all jobs, but receive precious little investment. Most rely on debt for funding, which adds to their costs.

“Your whole system of superannuation is a massive subsidy for capitalising global companies to the disadvantage of local business – even though we know local businesses are more common and more likely to produce jobs. It’s a terrible skew in the system.”

Local businesses are better options for green-minded investors, he argues: they tend to buy inputs and sell locally, so their products have a smaller footprint; and they’re less likely to flee at the prospect of strict environmental standards.

Mr Shuman’s book details the growing trend of local investment in the US, including peer-to-peer investing, crowdfunding, pre-sales and local stockmarkets and investment clubs. “Most of these tools can be used in Australia too,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online

Read a related article about superannuation’s carbon footprint