Latest news with #Western Australia
ABC News
3 hours ago
- Science
- ABC News
Indigenous rangers join WA's Burrup Peninsula underwater heritage survey
Caleb Pitt-Cook is drifting just above the ocean floor, running his fingers through the soft sand. The 24-year-old Ngarluma man is searching for the stone tools his ancestors used thousands of years ago. "If you told me I'd be doing this work two years ago, I would have laughed in your face," he says. "It's one of the coolest parts of our job. I'd say it's my favourite part right now." Mr Pitt-Cook is contributing to research that has already made history. "There's only ever been two submerged Aboriginal archaeological sites mapped in Australia," Flinders University maritime archaeologist John McCarthy says. "Those were found by our team here." When humans first populated the Australian continent about 65,000 years ago, the sea level was much lower. "There's a huge area of archaeological landscape that's been lost to sea level change," Dr McCarthy says. Since 2019, Dr McCarthy's team has been trying to find artefacts from that time, submerged off the coast of the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia. The region's traditional custodians call the peninsula Murujuga. "The initial discoveries made in Murujuga were stone tools. They're very common — the sort of knives and forks of their day," Dr McCarthy says. "They survive very well through sea-level change because they're made of igneous rock, which is very hard and durable." Maritime archaeology of this kind is still in its infancy in Australia. Dr McCarthy says it is almost certain there are significant sites all across the continent's perimeter, and mapping where they are is the first step to protecting them. This year's round of underwater surveys is the first time in Australia that Indigenous rangers have accompanied maritime archaeologists. It is the culmination of more than a year of training for a handful of Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation rangers. "First, you start off with pool dives and it's a big jump up to actually get out on the water," Ngarluma ranger Malik Churnside says. "Once you're out there in the water and there's actually animals … sharks swimming around, [it] can be quite a scary sight, at first." One of the submerged sites Mr Churnside surveyed was an area that thousands of years ago would have been a freshwater spring. The spring is referenced in a Ngarluma cultural song his elders still sing today. "It's just like evidence and a connection to something they've talked about and sung about for such a long time," he said. Back at camp, Yindjibarndi man and Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation director Vincent Adams pulls on a virtual reality headset. It transports him from the hot Pilbara afternoon to the silty depths of Murujuga, where he can look out at the seabed alongside the divers. The goggles connect to a live feed from a remote operated vehicle (ROV), allowing elders and knowledge holders to identify artefacts in real time. Mr Adams says the technology is a big hit among the community elders. "It's like 20 years ago when the mobile phone came out and they were all frightened of it," he laughs. Mr Adams says several of the artefacts he has helped classify trace back to ancient hunting, crafts, and ceremonies; practices that still exist in some form today. "When they bring this up from under water, we can see that this is history from here, culture from here," he said. It is also an opportunity to inform researchers of the local lore and rules behind the tools. "If it's men's stuff [that] comes up, women can't see this, kids can't see it. Only men that have been through law," Mr Adams says. "We've been practising for years on land. This culture now is under water." The ROV will allow the team to rapidly survey larger and harder-to-reach areas. Mapping these sites is a new frontier for cultural heritage protections and could prove pertinent for waters crisscrossed by bulk carriers and offshore pipelines. Murujuga intersects with the Carnarvon basin, which is home to Australia's largest gas reserves. Geoff Bailey, a world authority on submerged landscapes, says robust information is essential to ensure industry can navigate the uncharted history off the Burrup Peninsula. "If somebody puts a hole in the seabed … they're quite likely to expose something that is of relevance and interest to the environmental history of the landscape and the cultural history of that landscape," Professor Bailey says. "The key to this is good communication and understanding." Earlier this month, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape was granted World Heritage status by the United Nations in recognition of its outstanding universal value. In UNESCO's unanimous ruling, member countries lauded the underwater archaeological work as a critical part of the nomination and called for further study. Mr Vincent Adams says the research is laying important groundwork as more gas projects look to come online. "This has popped up a lot of times in conversations with elders, saying what about the pipeline?" he says. "There's no law, there's no rule for any of this. Beyond the enormity of the task at hand, Mr Pitt-Cook's time below the waves is one of reflection. "Our culture is an oral-based tradition so it's all passed down through generations of speaking, songs and teaching," he says. "A lot of people are really sceptical because we don't have anything written down on paper. "But to actually go out and explore these places where the stories originate from is really special. "It's a whole different world under the water." Watch ABC TV's Landline at 12:30pm AEST on Sunday or stream anytime on ABC iview.
SBS Australia
6 hours ago
- Business
- SBS Australia
Australia's ancient export brings new jobs to WA
Shark Bay or Gathaagudu is on Australia's most westerly point. A world heritage area where the bronzed earth meets turquoise waters abundant with marine life. Here you'll find turtles, dugongs, whale, dolphins and scattered across the sea floor a coveted delicacy containing centuries of seafaring history. The sea cucumber is Australia's first ever export. From the early 1700s, Makassan fisherman, from the island of Sulawesi - now Indonesia - sailed the trade winds south to Arnhem Land to trade with Aboriginal people. "From what the records show, they used to swap sea cucumbers for iron for their spears. So I thought it was incredible that there was a trade before colonisation and you can actually record it. So why not try and recreate it?" That's Malgana Traditional Owner Michael Wear. He heads an Indigenous-owned business which is reviving the ancient industry. Tidal Moon draws on traditional knowledge to harvest sea cucumbers sustainably. Hand-picked, one by one, the marine animal will soon be dried and processed at a brand-new export facility in the West Australian town of Denham. And then they're sent to a Singaporean partner for export across South East Asia. Tidal Moon also has its sights set on Western markets, with emerging research highlighting the potential health benefits of the marine animals. The hope is that as the business scales up, so too will employment opportunities in the region. "The lack of indigenous people in the commercial fishing industry is so, so unfortunate. If you can create a business that's sustainable, that's culturally directed, you can create jobs and a middle class within small coastal towns." Since 2017, the company has trained around a dozen Indigenous divers, including 28 year old Malgana and Amangu man Alex Dodd - the company's lead diver "Tidal Moon, what it's actually doing is making that middle class ground so people can move back home and have jobs and then buy a house, settle down with their family and kids up here and move back home. A lot of the time you get young fellas that grow up here and then they're moving away going to the mines or going to Perth or something like that because it's not sustainable for them to work here." Conservation is also at the heart of the business Gathaagudu is home to the planet's largest reserve of seagrass both a food source for marine life and a carbon storage powerhouse But more than a quarter was razed in a marine heatwave in 2011, and it's still recovering while also grappling with a new heatwave. In February, the waters were four degrees warmer than usual. Tidal Moon is leading one of the world's largest seagrass restoration projects. While scouring the seafloor for sea cucumbers, the divers also replant seagrass reserves. "One of the key things that we're trying to do is keep the carbon captured in the sea floor. So without seagrass restoration, you have these carbon bombs that go off and there's about 40 million tons of CO2 that are at risk in Shark Bay." The team have also catalogued over 4000 hours of footage – a 'living library' of marine observations noticing a symbiotic relationship between the seagrass and sea cucumbers. Jennifer Verduin, a marine scientist at Perth's Murdoch University, agrees that the relationship might be 'mutually beneficial,' saying sea cucumbers are 'the worms of the ocean.' "The function of sea cucumbers overturning the soil and redistributing nutrients. It's very good to get those nutrients in within the sediment. So it's good for the seagrasses and they grow better. But seagrasses, in turn, also then protect the sea cucumbers." She says Tidal Moon's divers, have a 'careful' and 'circular' way of approaching marine conservation. "We have lost the art of observation as western scientists, very often. And that's why I think Tidal Moon is really important to getting that back up to a better understanding of a circular ecosystem, if you like."
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Yahoo
Surprising item balancing on Aussie driver's roof baffles police: 'Unbelievable'
A police officer was forced to do a double take while on patrol in a coastal city last month after he spotted a baffling item precariously balanced on the roof of a driver's car. Bodycam footage of the stop shows the puzzled officer greet the motorist one afternoon in Albany, Western Australia, before pointing out the glaring red flag sitting just centimetres above his head. Video of the random breath test has gone viral after it was released by the WA Police Force on Friday, and while authorities have made their feelings about the incident clear, thousands of viewers couldn't resist cracking a joke. 'Some people leave their phone on the roof. This guy? His beer bottle,' the force captioned the clip. 'Nothing says 'pull me over' quite like mobile happy hour. '42,599.73 hours spent patrolling the roads. 707 traffic charges. One beer bottle found on roof,' officers added. 'Let's keep the drinks in the fridge, not on the freeway.' 🚘 L-plater's surprise response after copping $1,689 fine and losing licence 📸 Driver's photo sparks $400 warning over little-known road rule 🛞 Aussie drivers stunned after car feature goes viral: 'Hilarious' Aussie driver blows more than seven times the legal BAC Police spotted the vehicle with the beer bottle on the roof at around 5pm on June 9, a spokesperson for WA Police told Yahoo News. In the footage, the officer asks the driver if he had consumed any alcohol that day. 'Not this morning, no,' the man responds, prompting the cop to point out the glass hitchhiker. 'Oh,' the driver says before blowing 0.367 — more than seven times the legal blood alcohol content (BAC) limit. The motorist, who said the bottle had been on his car roof since the prior night, was arrested and charged with driving a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol, the police spokesperson told Yahoo. He appeared before the Perth Magistrates Court on July 6, where he was issued a $4,000 fine and had his licence disqualified for three years. Many Aussies have praised the police officer online for doing a 'good job', while others wondered how the beer bottle had stayed upright. 'This is the new 'waiting for a mate',' one woman commented. 'How is he still upright?' someone else said. 'Unbelievable,' a third person wrote. Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@ You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.
ABC News
3 days ago
- General
- ABC News
Redmond locals call for 'horrible' train crossing's safety upgrades after death of 29yo woman
Residents of a small town in Western Australia's south have called for improvements to rail safety at level crossings in the country after a woman was killed in a collision with a freight train. The 29-year-old woman was a passenger in a car that collided with a CBH grain train yesterday in the county town of Redmond, 400 kilometres south of Perth. A 39-year-old male driver and three children travelling in the vehicle suffered minor injuries. Resident Carly Pateman-Baker, who lives 50 metres from the train line, said the level crossing in Redmond was notorious for dangerous driving. "It's quiet out here, but there's quite a bit of traffic and nobody ever stops. [They do] a quick slowdown to look both ways and then keep going." Ms Pateman-Baker, who moved to Redmond about a year ago, said train drivers often sounded their horns when passing through the town to warn drivers off the crossing. "There are others that will sound it a few times before they hit the [crossing], and then they'll hit it again as they're leaving." Ms Pateman-Baker, who can feel the vibrations of trains before they reach the town centre, said there was a disparity in infrastructure across regional and built-up areas. "Normal train lines either have warning lights when the train's coming or the barrier that comes down moments before a train is even close to the [crossing]," she said. "[We need] something like that, especially for myself and my sister. We have three kids each so we always have cars full of kids." Aurizon, which operates CBH Group's grain haulage in WA, said none of their train crew were physically injured but were "very shaken" by the incident. A spokesperson for the company extended their condolences to the family and friends of the deceased. "This incident will be felt deeply by the local community, including our train drivers and employees who live and work locally," the statement read. Independent transport researcher Brett Hughes said about 80 per cent of rail crossings in Australia did not include lights or gates. Dr Hughes said while drivers had a responsibility to drive safely, self-managed or "passive crossing" presented a complex problem. "People underestimate the distance to a train and … underestimate the speed. "Most of us make mistakes from time to time and unfortunately it's just awful if that's a deadly mistake." Dr Hughes said a greater focus on rail safety was needed in regional areas. "We need to make sure that all the signage is the best possible and we need to make sure that people understand the hazards at level crossings." Ms Pateman-Baker said there had been an outpouring of sadness in the community for the family affected by the collision. "As a mum with kids between the ages of 12 and one I feel for the three children who were in that vehicle," she said. "That would scar them for life."
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
ASX Penny Stock Highlights For July 2025
The Australian market has remained flat over the past week but has shown a 6.9% increase over the last year, with earnings projected to grow by 11% annually in the coming years. Despite their vintage name, penny stocks represent smaller or less-established companies that can offer significant value when chosen wisely. By focusing on those with strong financial foundations and growth potential, investors may uncover opportunities for both stability and upside in this niche area of investment. Top 10 Penny Stocks In Australia Name Share Price Market Cap Financial Health Rating Alfabs Australia (ASX:AAL) A$0.375 A$107.47M ★★★★☆☆ EZZ Life Science Holdings (ASX:EZZ) A$2.21 A$104.25M ★★★★★★ GTN (ASX:GTN) A$0.59 A$112.49M ★★★★★★ IVE Group (ASX:IGL) A$3.05 A$470.25M ★★★★★☆ West African Resources (ASX:WAF) A$2.31 A$2.63B ★★★★★★ Southern Cross Electrical Engineering (ASX:SXE) A$1.77 A$468M ★★★★★★ Regal Partners (ASX:RPL) A$2.58 A$867.46M ★★★★★★ Sugar Terminals (NSX:SUG) A$0.99 A$360M ★★★★★★ Navigator Global Investments (ASX:NGI) A$1.72 A$842.94M ★★★★★☆ CTI Logistics (ASX:CLX) A$1.85 A$149.01M ★★★★☆☆ Click here to see the full list of 458 stocks from our ASX Penny Stocks screener. Let's dive into some prime choices out of the screener. Genesis Minerals Simply Wall St Financial Health Rating: ★★★★★☆ Overview: Genesis Minerals Limited focuses on the exploration, production, and development of gold deposits in Western Australia with a market cap of A$4.59 billion. Operations: The company generates revenue of A$561.40 million from its mineral production, exploration, and development activities. Market Cap: A$4.59B Genesis Minerals Limited has shown promising developments as it transitions into profitability, with earnings forecasted to grow significantly. The company maintains a strong balance sheet, with short-term assets exceeding both short and long-term liabilities. Despite a low return on equity of 11%, Genesis trades below its estimated fair value, indicating potential upside. Recent executive changes include the appointment of Jane Macey as a Non-Executive Director, bringing extensive industry experience which could enhance strategic direction. While the board's average tenure is relatively short at 2.8 years, management stability and high-quality earnings bolster investor confidence in this evolving entity. Take a closer look at Genesis Minerals' potential here in our financial health report. Explore Genesis Minerals' analyst forecasts in our growth report. IVE Group Simply Wall St Financial Health Rating: ★★★★★☆ Overview: IVE Group Limited operates in the marketing industry in Australia, with a market capitalization of A$470.25 million. Operations: The company generates revenue of A$975.43 million from its advertising segment. Market Cap: A$470.25M IVE Group Limited has demonstrated robust earnings growth, with a 179.7% increase over the past year, significantly outpacing the media industry's average. Despite a high net debt to equity ratio of 56%, its debt is well covered by operating cash flow at 76.8%. The company's seasoned management and board contribute to strategic stability, while short-term assets comfortably cover both short and long-term liabilities. Trading at nearly 70% below its estimated fair value suggests potential undervaluation. However, investors should note the unstable dividend track record and low return on equity of 19.9%. Dive into the specifics of IVE Group here with our thorough balance sheet health report. Understand IVE Group's earnings outlook by examining our growth report. Pantoro Gold Simply Wall St Financial Health Rating: ★★★★★☆ Overview: Pantoro Gold Limited, with a market cap of A$1.18 billion, is involved in gold mining, processing, and exploration activities in Western Australia. Operations: The company's revenue is primarily derived from the Norseman Gold Project, which generated A$289.11 million. Market Cap: A$1.18B Pantoro Gold Limited, with a market cap of A$1.18 billion, is focused on gold mining in Western Australia. The company has not yet reached profitability and its losses have increased by 32% annually over the past five years. Despite this, Pantoro's short-term assets of A$128.9 million exceed both its short and long-term liabilities, ensuring financial stability in the near term. Additionally, it maintains a positive free cash flow with a sufficient cash runway for over three years even if cash flow shrinks by 23.6% annually. The management team is seasoned with an average tenure of 10.8 years. Click to explore a detailed breakdown of our findings in Pantoro Gold's financial health report. Examine Pantoro Gold's earnings growth report to understand how analysts expect it to perform. Taking Advantage Embark on your investment journey to our 458 ASX Penny Stocks selection here. Ready To Venture Into Other Investment Styles? AI is about to change healthcare. These 27 stocks are working on everything from early diagnostics to drug discovery. The best part - they are all under $10b in market cap - there's still time to get in early. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Companies discussed in this article include ASX:GMD ASX:IGL and ASX:PNR. This article was originally published by Simply Wall St. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team@ Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
