• Dairying currently faces major economic, social and environmental challenges worldwide.
• Corporate dairy farming is placing undue strain on small-scale farmers, rural communities and the environment.
• The dairy sector faces greater competition from plant-based and artificial milk alternatives.
• Governments can help the ‘just transition’ of smaller-scale farmers and communities into opportunities provided by these challenges.

Contented cows quietly grazing lush green pastures to produce wholesome fresh milk could become a relic of the past if global trends highlighted by Macquarie researchers continue into the 21^st century.

This bucolic ideal is already being replaced by huge, industrialised farms where herds are fed in mechanised sheds and milked by robotic machines as worldwide, large corporations replace traditional family-run farms.

Writing for the leading international journal Agriculture and Human Values, PhD candidate Milena Bojovic and Associate Professor Andrew McGregor from the Department of Geography and Planning in the Faculty of Arts believe the global dairy industry faces increasingly complex social, environmental and economic challenges from global, national and local sources. These include:

• growth of milk markets and consumer demand in the Global South, particularly Asia, while milk consumption in the Global North has flattened or even decreased as more consumers demand plant-based alternatives such as soy and almond
• intensified use of capital, land and animals to meet increasing production demands, whereby smaller scale farms are purchased by larger corporations
• growing awareness of the ecological impacts of dairying, particularly on local soils, water quality and the global climate
• rapid development of plant-based and ‘artificial’ milk in laboratories to replace products from dairy cows.

The authors contend that these challenges have important socio-ecological implications for farmers, communities and local environments, and highlight the complex interactions between these challenges. Larger corporations are better able to address the ‘cost-price squeeze’ faced by small-scale farms, forcing small farms to sell to corporations. In turn, farming populations diminish and services in local, dependent rural communities enter a downward spiral in populations and services.

Increased corporatisation also degrades the local environment and increases methane production from cows, contributing to anthropogenic climate change. Capital-intensive technologies, such as automated milking and feeding systems, reduce human-animal interactions to become rationalised, mechanistic and transactional, rather than the traditionally caring relations between farmers and their herds. Finally, the rapid development of dairy alternatives such as plant-based milk and synthetic milk, coupled with consumer awareness of the negative environmental impacts from industrialised dairy production, are decreasing demand for dairy milk in the global north and placing further social and economic pressures on local communities.

In response to these complex challenges, the authors highlight the important roles governments can play in moderating and providing leadership to support the transition of dairy-farming families and their impacted communities. This should be directed towards the opportunities offered by:

• de-intensification to protect smaller, pasture-based milk producers from corporate takeover to encourage dairy milk production for niche milk markets
• diversification to assist family farmers into alternative industries
• upscaling the production of dairy alternatives and supporting farmers and their communities to transition into new food production systems.

Such government involvement would result in a more just transition for farmers and families to alternative industries that could maintain or even grow rural communities and their populations while improving environmental conditions in rural areas.

The initiative was led by PVC (Research Performance and Development), Professor Amanda Barnier and Deputy Deans Research and Innovation. The Themed workshops and Open-Door workshops gave researchers an opportunity to explore research strengths and consilience, and to forge new collaborations aimed at bringing a range of disciplinary perspectives to research problems.

Professor Greg Downey, Interim Dean, Macquarie School of Social Sciences participated in the Brain Capital workshop.

“Everyone worries about academic silos which can keep us isolated in our own groups, talking to the same people over again. Macquarie is a special place where you can get new connections to happen. I am excited to pursue new leads and find fresh collaborators,” he says.

Themed workshops were co-hosted by Professor Barnier, and Deputy Deans Research and Innovation and Open-Door workshops were hosted by Research Centre directors. Workshop themes included Ageing Well, Ageing Together and Living Pasts, Resilient Futures. There were also workshops on Sustainable Cities and Brain Capital.

“The workshops revealed new ways in which our researchers and research teams might collaborate, coordinate, and converge efforts to become more than the sum of our parts. They highlighted Macquarie’s many research strengths and culture of collegiality as well as enormous potential for new and distinctive approaches to solving the big problems of the future,” says Professor Barnier.

By 29 August, over 20 Expressions of Interest had been received. From these, selected collectives will be invited to pitch their MQRC bid to a panel of internal and external experts in late September.

Workshop participant Associate Professor Dr Lisa Spagnolo, of Macquarie Law School says, “at the end of the workshops there were some tentative ideas for potential future collaborations. Of course, it is up to individuals to follow through, something that isn’t easy when we are all time poor. But that was the beauty of the workshops – they were an impetus to do that. A great starting point to spark connections and interest!”

Information about the 2023 MQRC Scheme and Workshops can be found on the Research Centres Scheme webpage.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Sakkie Pretorius, says it’s particularly pleasing to see four humanities projects funded.

“Through each of our future-shaping research priorities, but particularly Resilient societies, we strive to better understand ourselves and the cultures around us, so we can help build ethical, just and inclusive communities,” he says. “I congratulate all the successful recipients in the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Science and Engineering and look forward to seeing the positive impact of these projects.”

Congratulations to our DECRA recipients

Dr Regina Fabry  (Faculty of Arts)
$328,092 for ‘Living to tell, telling to live: Experience, narrative, and the self’

A robust sense of self is crucial for our mental wellbeing and in this project Dr Fabry will analyse the biological underpinnings of the human mind and define the core features of self-narratives, leading to a novel theory about the sense of self and enhancing our understanding of the power of self-narratives. 

Dr Ana Tanasoca (Faculty of Arts)
$374,686 for ‘The Common Heritage of Mankind: A Cosmopolitan Preservationist Ethic’

This project aims to provide the first systematic, unified moral framework for understanding the ‘common heritage of mankind’ principle of international law, which postulates that some assets are valuable for all mankind and hence should be preserved for perpetuity.  It will provide an important contribution to philosophical debates on intergenerational justice, cosmopolitanism, climate change, and humanitarian intervention and provide practical guidance to policymakers and stakeholders in reshaping global governance around this principle.

Dr Pierrick Bourrat (Faculty of Arts)
$441,200 for ‘Inheritance and the Emergence of Individuals: From Concepts to Practice’

This project aims to solve a fundamental problem in biology:  how entities at one level biological organisation (e.g. single cells) transition or evolve into entities at a higher level (e.g. multicellular organisms). The project will demonstrate that conceptual research by philosophers of biology can make an impactful contribution in biology and answer fundamental questions in this field.

Dr Monika Zalnieriute (Faculty of Arts)
$426,530 for Artificial Intelligence Decision-Making, Privacy and Discrimination Laws

Monika’s project aims to expand knowledge of the effectiveness of Australia’s discrimination and data privacy laws by drawing on empirical mixed methods and comparative US and EU experiences.  Monika was successful in securing her DECRA grant through her previous role at the University of New South Wales but recently joined the Macquarie Law School (welcome Monika!).

Dr Xuyun Zhang (Faculty of Science and Engineering)
$387,141 for ‘Scalable and Deep Anomaly Detection from Big Data with Similarity Hashing’

Anomaly detection – aiming to identify anomalous but insightful patterns in data mining –  is an important big data analytics technique, but existing detection methods suffer from either high computational cost or low detection performance. This project aims to develop a detection framework to advance detection performance and efficiency, bringing huge benefits to applications such as real-time predictive maintenance in smart manufacturing, and intrusion detection in cybersecurity.

So, when a piece of research comes along that fits in with expectations, connects missing evidence and supports current research, it is welcomed and applauded like a long-lost friend.

This is the enviable position that a Macquarie researcher has found herself in and she couldn’t be more excited. Dr Kira Westaway from the Department of Environmental Sciences recently discovered the missing evidence that connects the human dispersal timeline from Africa round to Australia and supports an early arrival of modern humans into Australia.

Her lead-authored research recently published in Nature provides evidence for a human presence in Southeast Asia between 73,000-63,000 years ago – almost 20,000 years earlier than previously thought.

“You know that your research has been accepted when everyone collectively sighs in relief,” said Kira.

“We can now say with some confidence that modern humans had reached the island of Sumatra before 65ka (kilo annum) – when evidence suggests they had already made the crossing to Australia. This evidence has been greatly anticipated but has been a long time coming.”

The site, Lida Ajer, was a ‘lost cave’ excavated over 120 years ago by the ‘Java Man’ discoverer and Dutch palaeoanthropologist, Eugen Dubois. His findings were not lost, now housed in the Lieden museum in the Netherlands, but the exact location of the cave had been lost to scientific and even local knowledge.

Armed with a copy of a 120-year-old map and plan of the cave, Kira searched endlessly to rediscover this lost archive of evidence that was crucial to the human dispersal story.

“I sometimes feel like my life is like an Indiana Jones movie – finding lost caves in tropical jungles using a weathered old map, recovering fossil treasure to bring back to the museums,” she said.

Why was Lida Ajer so worth finding?

Nestled in amongst the dense array of orangutan teeth, Dubois also found two human teeth that were thought to be of great antiquity. Kira and her colleagues rediscovered the site with the intention of establishing a firm chronology for the evidence and testing the modern human attribution of the teeth.

“The hardest part was trying to find the site again.

“We only had a sketch of the cave and a rough map from a copy of Dubois’s original field notebook. We stumbled across the cave almost by accident. But, the minute I saw a large calcite column in the entrance I knew we had found the cave dug by Dubois over 120 years earlier.”

The Lida Ajer human teeth were identified as modern human 70 years ago by Hooijer, a Dutch palaeontologist studying orangutan fossils, and while the study was convincing, it lacked comparative studies of contemporaneous human fossils.

The teeth were reanalysed using state-of-the-art imaging techniques, allowing insight into enamel thicknesses and junctions between the enamel and dentine, critical for distinguishing human from other primate teeth. The analyses confirmed that the teeth are anatomically modern human, indicating that they were present on the Sumatran landscape at that time.

A barrage of dating techniques were applied to the sediment around the fossils, to overlying and underlying rock deposits in the cave and to associated mammal teeth, indicating that the deposit and fossils were laid down between 73-63 thousand years ago.

“Along with the location of the cave the importance and significance of these teeth had been lost due to an inability to confidently identify and date them. We finished off what Dubois had started all that time ago – but we had modern dating techniques and state-of-the-art scanning techniques on our side.

“I see this research as a triumph of modern scientific techniques applied to a long-standing problem.”

Despite fitting in with the recent human dispersal evidence from Morocco and northern Australia and providing the missing 20,000 years in Southeast Asian evidence, the research was not without its surprises.

“No one could have expected that the oldest evidence of modern humans would be found to the west of the expected dispersal route, so far inland, and up in the mountains within a dense rainforest environment – that was a surprise!”

It is generally accepted that modern humans dispersed via coastal routes due to ease of movement and plentiful resources. Rainforests are considered difficult environments to live in ­– they require technological innovations and sophisticated hunting techniques. Finding a modern human presence in a rainforest location at 73-63 thousand years ago suggests that these skills were in place by this time. This research supports a short chronology of human dispersal across the globe – meaning that they dispersed much quicker than originally anticipated.

“The capability of early modern humans is constantly surprising us – finding their presence in Lida Ajer at this time means that they dispersed much quicker and over a wider area, were more resourceful, and had more skills than we have ever acknowledged. I have a new-found respect for these early members of our species.”

Demonstrating its global appeal, this research has reached all corners of the globe with Kira being interviewed by news channels in Australia, Spain, Brazil, China, Russia and UK.

“Everyone has been really supportive and the general feeling is that at last Southeast Asia evidence can take its rightful place on the timeline of modern human dispersal from Africa to Australia.”

“In the wake of recent terror-related events, there are increased calls for greater resilience against terror. There are media celebrations of the resilience of the public as well as heartening stories of individual valour in the face of both terrorism and disasters of other kinds – from bushfire to chemical spill to civil unrest. However, there is not often much consensus on what being resilient actually means, of what it looks like, or of how it can best be achieved.

Simply being more ‘resilient’ is not a solution to the problem of terror, nor is it a new form of security. People can be resilient in many different ways and it can be both active and passive – from being willing to give to charity or help a neighbour to knowing local evacuation routes or having the right insurance for the prevailing risks specific to your locale. A city can be resilient – in its streets, spaces, infrastructure, and design; from bomb proof glass in bus shelters to system redundancies in the power grid. An organisation or an economy can be resilient in its capacity to respond and flex under the pressures of global competition. Systems can be as complex as an individual person can, but both can be or become more and less resilient.

Resilience is perhaps best thought of as a way of living enmeshed in collaborative networks and acted out by everyone, from the people on the street to the heads of state. It is designed to allow all involved to get not just ‘back to normal’ but become better off than they were before being exposed to danger.

At its heart, resilience is a strategy of flexibility. It evokes the elastic, the bouncing back, but more than that resilience is a way of becoming more than we were before, of learning from experience, adapting and even transforming to better fit the new context into which we emerge.

Resilience is not to be thought of as a political gambit. It is not a one-shot-cure nor ‘old wine in new skin’. It represents a legitimate means for creating more participatory forms of government for the future.

What remains to be seen is if we as individuals, communities, and nations can rise to the challenge of doing things differently in the years to come, for if we are to become more resilient one thing is certain: we must change.”

 ‘No one is an island, entire to themselves,’ John Donne.

What happens health-wise in any corner of the world can have serious ramifications for all other countries. Increasingly, health challenges are having global impacts and we must find global solutions – the recent Ebola virus and Zika virus crises being the most recent illustrations of this reality.

“Preparation of the second edition has particularly emphasised the dynamism of global health,” Professor McCracken says.

“Who, at the publication of the first edition in 2012, would have picked that five years later much of the geopolitical environment affecting global health would have been effectively tossed in the air with the election of Donald Trump as US President and the UK ‘Brexit’ vote to leave the European Union?

“Those five years have similarly seen the serious and unexpected Ebola and Zika epidemics, but also witnessed astounding medical technological advances, such as dengue vaccine developments, direct acting anti-viral drugs for treating hepatitis C, gene editing, stem cell therapy and immunotherapy.”

Professor McCracken explains that global life expectancy has improved impressively, but the gains have not been equally shared around.

“Horrifically, armed conflict in Syria and other areas has seen an enormous loss of life, while the threat of famine has emerged in East Africa, but been largely ignored by the wealthy developed world.”

A central theme running through the book is the difficult ethical issues arising in global health. For example, do rich, advanced nations have a moral responsibility to help poorer countries improve their population health? In the interests of overall population health, how much subjugation of individual rights and civil liberties should be allowed? In high mortality-risk epidemics, should priority in health care be given to particular sections of the population? In light of the enormous burden of mosquito-borne diseases, would it be ethically justifiable to use genetic engineering to eliminate the mosquito species?

What lies ahead for global health?

Kevin argues that, in the absence of catastrophic global pandemic, nuclear war or environmental change, significant increases in global life expectancy can be confidently anticipated. However, will this longer life be with better or worse health?

___________________________________________________________________________

Building on the successful 2012 first edition, new or expanded issues covered in this edition include:

• Emerging and re-emerging infectious disease threats
• Increasing awareness of and interest in antimicrobial resistance and superbugs
• Terrorism, global conflict, and health
• UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
• The drive for Universal Health Coverage
• Information technology in global health
• Substance abuse
• Elder abuse
• The health of LGBTI people
• Palliative and end-of-life care
• Ethical issues in global health

Kevin’s profile provides further information on his research and publications.

Dr Tanya Evans from the Department of Modern History is an acclaimed author and was recently awarded the NSW Premiers’ History Prize in Community and Regional History. We sat down with her to learn more about her role as a public historian examining the history of family, motherhood and sexuality.

What drew you to your research field?
I am passionate about researching ordinary people and places in the past and incorporating ordinary people in the process of my research and the construction of historical knowledge. I love teaching and producing public history and working in teams. I pitch my work at a variety of audiences because my research is targeted at disrupting people’s assumptions about the history of the family. I am committed to the democratisation of historical knowledge.

In layman’s terms, what is the wider impact of your research?
My current research is taking my focus on Australia and my background in British history to compare the different genealogical communities in Australia, England and Canada. An examination of the exponential growth and impact of family history around the world reveals the democratic possibilities of public history, the different constituencies involved with historical production and consumption, and the complex ways in which many of us make meaning of the past through our own family story.

Who has been your most significant research mentor?
My PhD supervisor Professor Sally Alexander taught me how to be the best researcher, teacher and scholarly citizen I could be. I also learned a lot from her about how to work as part of a team, among a huge international network of scholars, political activists and cultural commentators and to think carefully about the impact of my work.

If you were given one million dollars in research funding, what would be the first thing you would do?
My next book is a community funded, supported and written project involving colleagues, students and locals. I’d like to use it as a model for community history projects across NSW that bring together my research, teaching and community engagement passions and produce co-created outputs with students, community and cultural organisations targeted at different audiences. I have plans to expand existing research and PACE/MRes internship student projects in places like Bourke and Orange. I also want to establish research and community projects on family history in aged care facilities across Sydney and elsewhere.

 What has been your favourite and/or proudest research moment?
Hearing from family historians from all over the world saying how much they value my work and my interest in their passion. They are ardent fans of social history and the keenest collaborators I know. They undertake their research in a huge global network of people, knowledge and information, often using social media to communicate. We need to embrace that potential if we are serious about life-long learning.

Analysis of a key terrorist magazine has revealed insights that will provide a guide for government and authorities in limiting the influence of jihadist propaganda in the West.

The study, by Dr Julian Droogan from the Department of Security Studies and Criminology with colleague Shane Peattie and published in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, is the first comprehensive analysis of al-Qaeda’s primary English-language propaganda tool, Inspire magazine – a highly visible publication that has been implicated in a number of terrorist plots.

While most mainstream reporting on Inspire emphasises its anti-Western themes and its call to terrorism against the West, Dr Droogan found that al-Qaeda and its magazine appeared to show concern about a wide range of issues completely unrelated to the business of terrorism.

While upholding ‘Islam is at war’ as their predominant theme, Inspire did not maintain its focus on anti-Western themes, and covered topics more commonly found in a general news publication, such as climate change, media coverage of terrorist activities and financial corruption in banking.

“We found al-Qaeda and Inspire proved easily distracted by local issues and the ‘martyrdom’ of al-Qaeda leaders, which fluctuated through time in response to local events such as the Arab Spring. Their concerns were divided between religious issues, local issues and the expected terrorist ideological concerns of engaging in a war with the Western world,” said Dr Droogan.

“Understanding Inspire’s thematic landscape and its shifting character proves important in understanding and responding effectively to its jihadi discourse.”

Inspire’s influence has been apparent in a number of lone-wolf terrorist attacks since 2010, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and the 2015 San Bernadino shootings.

“We fight terrorists, but we don’t understand them as well as we could. We are trying to better understand what this group is saying in its magazine, and how and why it appeals to people in the west who then become lone-wolf terrorists,” said Dr Droogan.

“The insights we found in this study will allow governments to create more tailored responses to the propaganda of al-Qaeda, and will be useful in creating counter narratives that address and refute the concerns of terrorist groups, and hopefully prevent people for adopting their cause,” Dr Droogan finished.

The study was published in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence.

98 per cent of Australian households with children have at least one form of video game, and the content of these games is sometimes questioned.

A recent paper by Macquarie researchers challenges the concept that games are amoral spaces where actions are without ethical significance.

Dr Paul Formosa from the Department of Philosophy explains that artists across every medium engage audiences with challenging moral questions concerning topics of war, crime corruption, fidelity and the abuse of power. However, Formosa argues relatively few video games invite us to engage deeply with the morality of the worlds they depict or the behaviours they encourage us to adopt.

“Somewhere along the way, the idea that ‘it’s just a game’ has been used as a way of saying that ‘my behaviour here doesn’t matter because the purpose of gameplay is nothing more than winning or losing’,” Formosa says.

Co-author and senior lecturer in Game Design and Development, Dr Malcolm Ryan, says it is easy for players to adopt a pragmatic approach to optimising their gameplay outcomes and ignore the moral significance of their behaviour.

“What is interesting is when the designer encourages the player to make choices morally in spite of the inherent systems of the game,” Ryan notes.

“To take an example from the Grand Theft Auto series, we want to prompt the player to think ‘well I actually feel bad about running over the sex worker and taking her money and perhaps this is not something I should be doing.”

“To be clear, we aren’t advocating against these games, we are simply interested in expanding the scope of games to allow deeper, morally complex works – not to replace one with the other.”

Dr Formosa explains there has always been discussion and debate about whether playing violent video games can make you more violent which leads to the question: can playing violent video games make you a ‘worse’ person?

“Our research is more interested in looking at the inverse question: can playing morally engaging video games make you a ‘better’ person?”

Do you or your family members play video games regularly? What are your thoughts on this research?

What drew you to your research field?
Thomas King said that the truth about story is, that’s all we are. I think a love of stories drew me to my field. I’m interested in the world’s oldest written narratives, epics and myths. My research explores what these stories say about humanity, divinity, animality and civilisation. In my new role, I’m teaching the history of Ancient Israel and Ancient Hebrew. Teaching these units together provides a wonderful opportunity to consider how the biblical authors constructed their texts, both in terms of narrative techniques and the language of the Bible itself.

What would be an ‘elevator pitch’ of your research area?
My research is focused on exploring the literature of the Ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamian myths and epics. I’m currently writing a book on Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of love. I also work on the comparative study of ancient religions – from Ancient Israel, to Mesopotamia, as well as Greece and Rome. The way that different civilisations use literature to express cultural values, and to address the ‘big questions,’ is most interesting.

In layman’s terms, what is the wider impact of your research?
My research aims to bring Ancient Near Eastern literature and culture to a broader modern audience. The modern day cultural impact of the Classical world is difficult to overstate, but it’s important to consider that the Classical traditions didn’t develop in isolation, but in a kind of cultural dialogue with the traditions of the Ancient Near East. The Hebrew Bible developed as part of the cultural landscape of the Ancient Near East, and again, has an impact on Western thought that is difficult to adequately quantify – yet it in considering the Bible in terms of the historical and cultural Ancient Near Eastern context, we gain greater insights into both the biblical text and the surrounding ancient civilisations. So, hopefully my research can add to this developing understanding.

Who has been your most significant research mentor?
I’m so appreciative of the support of Dr Noel Weeks and Professor Ian Young – my ‘dream team’ of PhD supervisors. My friend and colleague Professor Julia Kindt has given me so much support and encouragement, but also provides an amazing model of a young scholar at the top of her field, which is so inspiring.

If you were given one million dollars in research funding, what would be the first thing you would do?
The continued political and social upheaval in the Middle East presents a very real threat to preserving the irreplaceable cultural legacy of some of the world’s most ancient civilisations. I’d love to develop a program strengthening communications and connections between institutions that work to raise awareness of the importance of studying the various civilisations of the Ancient Near East. I’d also love to develop greater opportunities for community outreach locally. I would hope that a greater emphasis on teaching the history of Ancient Israel and the Ancient Near East in schools would help to improve the accessibility to these fields.

What has been your favourite and/or proudest research moment?
I’ve been fortunate to have many wonderful students in my teaching career, and seeing them develop as scholars makes me very proud! The publication of my first book, Scorpion, a few weeks ago was also a very exciting moment.