Cynthia in Australia Part III

Cynthia in Australia part III
OK, so I’m clearly not a shining example of daily journaling. But I get to it eventually! I am now home, but want to fill you all in on the last third of the trip…so imagine these are daily entries. Have fun!October 25-26: Canberra
Arrived in Canberra late Tuesday night. It was a spectacular sunset over the western flatlands as we headed south. I had an excellent meeting with Judy at her office in Canberra Wednesday morning where we brainstormed some new options for students in Alice Springs (aboriginal art studies!) and she gathered some contacts for me to connect with CSIRO – the premier national science research organization in Australia. Getting something set up with them would essentially open up the entire continent for our students who are interested in research oriented internships. We’ll see how that goes. I was also able to connect with the national press reviewer about potential journalism internships (I was in the National Press Club building, after all!). Hopefully we can get some journalism going if the papers are open to the idea. She is going to make some first contacts on our behalf. After an energizing meeting, we connected back with Ben and then we were off to see the city.

Judy genuinely loves Canberra and it shows. First stop was one of the best meat pie and sausage roll shops in the city. Mmm. Meat pies. We had a spectacular tour that culminated in hanging out with a bunch of wild kangaroos smack in the middle of the city. Canberra is called the “Bush Capital” (as in wilderness, not G. W.) and after visiting, it’s clear why. The city isn’t all that large and it is surrounded by forests and rolling hills. Getting into the bush is only a few minutes drive or bike ride away. The next morning we snuck in a quick tour of the parliament building before heading out into the farmlands toward Charles Sturt Uni.October 26-27: Wagga Wagga – Charles Sturt Uni and Green Grove Organics
This was an action packed couple days. We met up Thursday night with Nuala Grundy and Barbara Slade, both international programs coordinators at Charles Sturt campuses, and Chris Turner, a former Aussie exchange student to OSU, for dinner at a local pub. Chris has literally just returned from being one of 5 representatives of Australian students at an international conference in Thailand to build international exchange awareness around the world. He and the others are sure he was selected because of his previous exchange to OSU. Our dinner was a great start to an outstanding visit.

For Friday, Nuala had arranged for me to have several individual meetings with teaching faculty throughout the day. I was able to meet with Art, Writing, Business, Education and Environmental Sciences. All of them were quite enthusiastic about sending their students to OSU-Corvallis and Cascades. I was also able to meet with a food science student who has applied to come to Corvallis next year and share a bit about Corvallis. We concluded with a nice lunch with Barbara and Roz, the international programs advisor who works with inbound students (our students)…an incredibly kind and knowledgeable person.

The Wagga Wagga campus is built on a hill and it’s quite bush-like. Lots of eucalyptus trees and a pleasant atmosphere. The buildings are a sort of stucco like architecture with red tile roofing. It would be a great place to go to school. Wagga Wagga is a nice town as well. It felt a lot like Corvallis with a river running through it as well. I took a run along the running trail they have that follows the river…the entire circuit is about 30 km. I ran about 15 km of it over the course of my two days there. Between the uni and the town is a nice nature reserve…full of crows. Hence the name Wagga Wagga – land of many crows. As I went running through there, I began having flashes of Hitchcock’s movie and wondered if I would get out of there alive…no worries, mate!

Friday afternoon, I was able to connect with Green Grove Organics and Junee Licorice and Chocolate Factory for a new internship site. It’s a family run business who has been quite successful in selling their organic licorice all over the country. The place has such a great atmosphere…it’s like you’ve met up with old friends as soon as you have arrived. I was immediately greeted with an organic coke (back to actually using real cocoa beans!) and a sampler of their chocolate covered licorice and raisins. Good stuff. They are enthusiastic about hosting our interns and are almost overflowing with project ideas…including developing the first organic raspberry licorice recipe. Any food science students out there ready for the challenge?? They have been creative in their marketing approach, choosing to go with more of a guerilla marketing strategy that has been working really well so far. They were also the first organic farm in Australia and helped to develop the organic farming standards. Students interested in marketing, food science, organic farming and public relations would be perfect for this site. They are in the process of setting up a new relationship with a major food retailer in the US and are interested in having our interns manage that project as well. I think this will be a really unique internship site that will be lots of fun. Housing and food will be provided…probably in a host family environment given the nature of the business.October 28-29: Melbourne
Now for the long drive to Melbourne. Australia is in it’s 6th year of a draught and it shows throughout the farmlands between Wagga and Melbourne. The sheep and cattle are eating nothing but nubbins of brown grass and the wheat fields are all of one foot tall. It was a sobering thing to see…especially after having recently watched an Inconvenient Truth. The conditions that currently exist now, in October, are as dry as things usually are by the end of summer in February. It’s going to be a long summer if the rains don’t show up soon.
The weekend in Melbourne was a time to catch our breath a bit and experience some of the pre-Melbourne Cup anticipation. The Melbourne Cup is the biggest horse race of the year in Australia and takes place November 7. The state of Victoria has declared that Monday and Tuesday an official holiday, so it’s a major part of the culture. Men get dressed in their best black tie outfits and women go crazy with their hats. It was fun to bear witness to the anticipation and excitement. Melbourne is a cosmopolitan city with lots to do. It’s clean, easy to get around with their tram system and the people are quite friendly for being such a large city.October 30-31: Hobart, Tasmania
We departed Wednesday afternoon for Hobart, Tasmania – our final stop. Hobart is a great port town on the island of Tasmania, which I think is a secret little treasure island. The island has mountain peaks and ocean beaches all within 2-3 hours of each other. It’s still a relatively undeveloped island with lots of wilderness and fresh, clean air. I was able to meet with my contact for internships on Tuesday and he is ready to work with us. He is a consultant who works with the parks agencies and University of Tasmania, so he has connections for virtually any sort of natural resources, tourism and recreation, forestry, environmental science, or life sciences students. There is a lot of potential with this internship…most of them would be customized based on student interests and qualifications. We are also looking into pairing our students with PhD students needing to complete internship projects in Tassie so the two of them can work together. This provides an avenue for our students to connect with peers as well. Examples of some projects include a variety of animal or plant research projects or state parks user surveys to park fee impacts on visitor accessibility. Again, an exciting option for our students!

November 1-2: Exploring Tassie
Our last two days in Tassie were vacation for the two of us. Ben hooked himself up with a wetsuit and surfboard and we headed to the cold coastal waters of Tasmania for some surfing. That’s another little secret about this place – some of the best surfing in the world if you can take the cold. We spent the next day prepping our bags for departure (easier said than done with the US restrictions) and then went hiking up in to the mountains for the afternoon. We saw some spectacular waterfalls and walked through a forest of the tallest hardwood trees in the world. The Redwoods in the US are the tallest softwoods and the Eucalypts in Tasmania are the tallest hardwoods. It was certainly humbling to be wandering among such huge trees.

November 3: Flying home
Not much to report, fortunately. It’s a long flight home from Hobart – 18.5 hours total of air time including internal flights and 36 hours of travel time. Yet we arrived just a few short hours after we left!Overall this was quite a successful trip. It was great for me to visit our existing sites and establish the personal connections with our host site coordinators. And doubling the number of internship sites in Australia was a bonus as well. Now for the getting all those new sites posted on the web and catching up at home… can I go back?!?