From steel city to eco-city
By Ian Lowe
CITIES dependent on a single industry are highly susceptible to
technological change. Newcastle, 185 kilometres north of Sydney, was a steel
town, totally reliant on the fortunes of BHP. With steelmaking in decline,
Newcastle is becoming a diverse city. It now has the largest wind turbine in
Australia and other alternative energy systems such as array of solar panels to
turn sunlight into electricity.
Whyalla in South Australia is another example. Built around a BHP steelworks,
its population peaked about twenty years ago at 35 000 when the industry
employed 6000 people. Today the works employs only 2000 people. As the steel
jobs went, so did the demand for services—everything from bread to
banks—and the city has slowly declined. Today, its population is 22 000.
And the future is bleak. BHP aim to cut the workforce still further to about
1200. More seriously, the iron ore deposit used to make the steel will last only
about another twelve years. So Whyalla could easily become a ghost town.
But the local people are fighting back. I was there last month to address a
public meeting to discuss what the future holds and how to best move forward.
About 200 residents attended the meeting, a joint initiative of the city council
and the Whyalla Economic Development Board.
Community leaders have identified environmental services as a possible growth
industry. So Whyalla has designated a 14 hectare parcel of land near the centre
of town as an "eco-city". The aim is to showcase new technologies which are
likely to provide jobs in the next century. All the buildings on the site will
embody principles of environmentally sensitive design. They will be sited to use
the climate wisely and minimise energy needs for heating and cooling. Motor
vehicles will be excluded from the site except for deliveries and emergencies.
Collection and re-use of stormwater will provide enough water to sustain plants
native to the arid zone. The climate is ideal for development and testing of
solar technologies. Just the site itself is expected to have $15-20
million of building work over the next decade.
Communities like Whyalla and Newcastle can either accept that they decline
with the old technologies or try to harness the new. It's pleasing to see the
positive way they are trying to shape their future.
SCIENCE has been called in to solve a puzzle in the Australian aquaculture
industry: why barramundi are undergoing a premature sex-change! All barramundi
are born as males. In the wild, they turn into females after about six years.
But the young males selected to be breeding stock at fish farms are changing when
they are only two years old. So the industry has called in the Cooperative
Research Centre for Aquaculture to find out what is going on.
A lot is at stake. North Queensland barramundi producer Chris Phillips says
fish farms could double their output if they had reliable breeding males. The
producers use standard selective breeding techniques. They pick out the males
which grow fastest and are most resistant to health problems. But all the effort
is lost if they don't stay male long enough to pass on those desirable
characteristics. "We choose the best males as breeders, and then they go and
turn into big girls on us," Phillips said. As a result, the fish-farmers are
being forced to use wild barramundi for breeding. Phillips says this is like
mating a prize mare with a brumby and expecting to end up with a Melbourne Cup
Barramundi farms produce about $10 million worth of fish each year. It
makes obvious sense to farm these prized fish rather than pursuing them around
rivers and estuaries. The operation isn't confined to north Queensland; other
ventures are located at Wagga in New South Wales, Robe in Western Australia and
Lake Eyre in South Australia. Phillips thinks the industry could treble in
output over the next ten years. But it will need to solve the breeding problem
first. The scientists think that the answer may lie in the good diet the fish get
in their regulated environment. Being unusually well fed may be causing the
barramundi to undergo their premature conversion to femininity. The research
team expects to pinpoint the cause within a year.
PROVIDING straightforward answers to questions about the world around us is a
popular pastime of late. The collected paperbacks of science guru Karl
Kruszelnicki provide one example. So too do the publications flowing from the
highly successful Last Word column at the back of New Scientist. Now
the Victorian branch of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the
Advancement of Science has chimed in with a book aimed directly at
schoolchildren. The book with the simple title Why? was launched in
Melbourne last Tuesday by the Victorian tertiary education minister Phil
Honeywood. The questions, answered by more than 30 scientists from around the
country, were posed by teachers and students from 13 Victorian primary schools.
The book also contains a glossary of common scientific terms. All in all, a
worthwhile effort.
I'M MYSTIFIED by the pharmaceutical industry's attitude to basic research.
Are they for it or agin it? Astra, a Swedish company, opened a new $60
million factory in Sydney last month and pointed to the benefits of a research
collaboration with my Griffith University colleagues in the Queensland
Pharmaceutical Research Institute. A study by QPRI scientists of chemicals found
in native plants has identified over 300 compounds which may yield commercial
products. In the same week, the chief executive of another pharmaceuticals
company, Faulding, said that research cooperation with universities will be
phased out, because of the lack of results for industry. Speaking at the
University of South Australia, Ed Tweddell said cooperative research
arrangements provide many more benefits to the university than to the corporation
funding them. Perhaps Tweddell should talk to Astra!