>Former attorney general Gareth Evans outlines the factors that created an unparalleled reformist momentum – and the crucial role Paul Keating played
>War in the Middle East has put a spotlight on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow sea passage through which 20% of global oil supply is shipped. But far less attention has been paid to another essential product derived from oil and gas, on which the world also relies: fertiliser.
In one of the most remote and unforgiving landscapes on Earth, a completely accidental discovery has forced scientists to rethink the timeline of human history in Australia.
What began as a routine survey in the rugged Flinders Ranges turned into something far more extraordinary. A simple detour into a dry creek bed led to the discovery of a rock shelter—one that would reveal evidence of human life dating back nearly 49,000 years.
Inside, archaeologists uncovered thousands of artefacts: stone tools, pigments, plant remains, and even the bones of extinct megafauna like Diprotodon. But it wasn’t just what they found—it was how deep it went. Layer after layer pushed the timeline further back, challenging long-held beliefs about how and when humans spread across the Australian continent.
For decades, scientists believed that while early humans arrived on Australia’s coasts tens of thousands of years ago, the harsh interior took much longer to settle. This discovery tells a very different story.
It suggests that humans were already thriving deep inland almost as soon as they arrived—adapting rapidly to one of the most extreme environments on the planet.
And perhaps even more astonishing… this site may rival, or even surpass, the age of Australia’s oldest known archaeological site.
But there’s a deeper truth behind all of this.
Archaeology only reveals what survives. And in a landscape shaped by time, erosion, and chance, how much of our past has already been lost?
This discovery raises a profound question:
How much of human history is still out there… waiting to be found?
Further information:
>With eye-watering prices at the petrol bowser hurting wallets, more Australians than ever are looking at buying an electric vehicle.
>A generation ago, studying in Australia opened doors. Today, rising costs and falling satisfaction are making international students think twice, and locals feel sidelined.
>The Integrity Gap Report has described pervasive climate misinformation, warping and dulling our perceptions of what is an existential threat. How does Big Carbon pull it off? Andrew Gardiner reports.
>Australia risks falling behind in global science, advanced manufacturing and innovation following the Government’s decision not to pursue membership of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a step backwards at a critical moment for the nation’s productivity ambitions.
One of the funnier stories of the past few years involved the arrest of an Extinction Rebellion protester who abseiled off a bridge and dangled in front of traffic causing chaos at a petroleum conference in Adelaide.
By David Penberthy
5 min. read
View original
Extinction Rebellion are of course those largely elderly earth-loving folks who express their hatred of fossil fuels by gluing their bums to the road outside companies such as Santos and Exxon and BP.
It turned out that when this protester lady wasn’t busy saving the planet she was also a part-time actor who had appeared in a television advertisement promoting petrol for Ampol.
Asked ahead of her trial about the obvious double standard, she replied: “We’ve all got to get from A to B somehow”.
Indeed we do. And hasn’t the last four weeks proved the point.
Extinction Rebellion protester's near morphett Street Bridge this morning, with one hanging from the bridge on a rope. Picture: Facebook
The War in Iran has given us a sneak preview of what the world would look like if the Greens were in charge.
To borrow a line from a suitably hippy-friendly singer in Joni Mitchell, when it comes to petrol, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, because the cost and supply issues caused by the war have been nothing short of nightmarish on our hip pockets.
If anything good can come of this war – other than hopefully ridding the world of a mad theocracy and denying it nuclear weapons – it should be genuine pushback against the green orthodoxies which have made Australia less affordable and less secure than it should be.
The war and the subsequent chaos with our fuel and fertiliser supplies should be an all-bets-are-off moment when it comes to discussing our energy security.
Australia should be one of the most energy secure countries in the world. We are a vast nation with diverse energy reserves on land and at sea, but we tie our hands with pathetic short-term thinking, partisan politics and localised politics.
Neither side of politics is without guilt in this although historically the political left in Australia has been the worst offender.
The absurdity of Labor’s old three mines policy when it came to uranium was long a case in point.
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It was the ultimate half-pregnant compromise where to achieve factional harmony it was decreed that uranium mining was OK at three locations but anathema anywhere else.
At the same time we have seen regional Liberal and National MPs fire up against things like fracking saying they won’t support gas exploration on farmland.
This is often a rural form of Nimbyism, or perhaps Nimfism, Not In My Farm, which has resulted in strange alliances between conservative rural pastoralists and Greens-voting tree changers, conspiring to lock up land which could produce energy.
Other issues such as possible drilling in the Great Australian Bight have become performative flashpoints for people across politics where even the mere idea of doing something is seen as offensive in its own right.
Is there a chance that it could actually be done safely? Surely that’s a discussion worth having, without any street theatre and bumper stickers?
And then there’s the demonisation of gas where the energy source that is necessary to stabilise the grid through the uptake of renewables has come to be regarded as the enemy itself.
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Not just by the usual suspects in the Australian Greens but also by Victorian Labor where even the kitchen stove was deemed to be an enemy of the planet.
The Victorian gas position was so demented that it forced federal Labor to issue a position paper defending the use of gas, and reassure the energy sector that it wasn’t out to get it.
There is a difference between military self-reliance and energy self-reliance.
You can understand why a country like ours with an historically small population and vast land mass has needed to defend itself military through alliances.
It might be an alliance which is being tested by the erratic nature of Donald Trump, who looks increasingly isolated with his unpredictability, but it’s an alliance all the same.
Trump’s Plan A might have been noble in going after a murderous regime that was close to developing nukes, but his lack of a Plan B and his preparedness to lash out at his allies is just making him look unreliable and mad.
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday. Picture: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
But setting aside our military dependence on our bigger allies, our energy dependence on others is a self-generated disgrace.
There seems to have been a consensus in this country that things like oil refineries and petroleum exploration were wholly undesirable as the green consensus took hold.
We are at a point where renewables are still not reliable enough, and energy cannot be adequately stored and shared, meaning that power is vastly more expensive than it has ever been.
Now, our cost of living is being battered further by a war not of our own making through the crisis of fuel supply in the Middle East. We can only get petrol through Asia by selling off our gas.
The ability of this country to have a fact-based energy conversation is deplorable, mainly because the stakes are so high. The last election was a case in point.
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When Peter Dutton took the crazy-brave decision to embrace nuclear energy as an upfront election commitment, Labor’s undergraduate response was to flood X with tweeted images of three-eyed fish. Depressingly, it worked.
Based on the feedback I get from working from talkback radio, and reading the commentary online from readers on columns such as these, I think the past month has changed the dynamics in this country.
Turn brown coal into oil. Explore for more gas. Drill baby, drill.
People are fed up with paying so much, fed up with the humiliation of an energy-rich country being so vulnerable and exposed, almost to the point where if you could make fuel by burning mounds of car tyres at your local playground you’d be tempted to give it the green light.
After all, as that abseiling female pensioner from Extinction Rebellion said so well, we’ve all got to get from A to B somehow.
Editor’s note: Protester Meme Thorne was convicted in 2024 and ordered to complete 15 hours of community service within four months and ordered to pay $750 in compensation.
The War in Iran has given us a sneak preview of what the world would look like if people like Extinction Rebellion got their wish, writes David Penberthy.
Meme Thorne speaks exclusively to The Advertiser after her Extinction Rebellion Morphett St Bridge traffic stunt and why she once appeared in an Ampol advertisement.
One of the funnier stories of the past few years involved the arrest of an Extinction Rebellion protester who abseiled off a bridge and dangled in front of traffic causing chaos at a petroleum conference in Adelaide.
>At Taronga Western Plains Zoo, the drama of a safari gives way to something quieter and more urgent, a national effort to return the greater bilby to landscapes it once shaped, and a race to stay ahead of the forces that drove it out.
>Australia’s obsequiousness to Trump’s America has gone way beyond the national interest