The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 (2 page)

IAN GIBBINS is a neuroscientist and Professor of Anatomy at Flinders University. He has over 100 scientific publications on the microscopic structure and function of nerves communicating between the spinal cord and the internal organs. Ian's poetry has been widely published, including in
The Best Australian Poems 2008
and has been shortlisted in national poetry competitions. His first full collection
Urban Biology
was published in 2012 with an accompanying CD of his electronic music.

CLIVE HAMILTON is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. For 14 years, until 2008, he was executive director of the Australia Institute, a think tank he founded. He has held various visiting academic positions, including at Yale University and the University of Oxford. His books include
Growth Fetish, The Freedom Paradox: Towards a post-secular ethics
,
Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change
and, most recently,
Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate
.

NICHOLAS HASLAM is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. A social psychologist, Nick has written widely on relationships, group processes and psychiatric classification. His books include
Psychology in the Bathroom
and
Introduction to Personality and Intelligence
. His current fascination is the psychology of the nose.

GARETH ROI JONES is a member of Friendly Street Poets in Adelaide. In 2012 he was selected as one of three emerging poets as
part of
New Poets 17
. He loves both science and poetry, so combining them is a great joy. A highlight was having the poem that appears in this anthology chosen for RiAus'
Poem of the Month
and being displayed on the LED thread which wraps around the Royal Institution of Australia's Adelaide headquarters.

KARL KRUSZELNICKI has 27 years of education (primary school to university). His degrees in physics and mathematics, biomedical engineering, medicine and surgery provide a solid scientific basis to understanding what is contained in the thousands of pieces of scientific literature that he reads each year. He currently works as an author, a fellow at the University of Sydney, and science reporter at the ABC (ten radio shows, one TV spot, and the weekly
Great Moments in Science
segment). He has spent two years travelling through 15 of the 17 Australian deserts.

PAUL LIVINGSTON is the author of six books, nine radio plays, and was a cowriter on
Happy Feet Two
. He has received four AWGIE awards for television comedy writing. His comic alter ego Flacco has toured extensively in Australia and internationally and his television credits include
The Big Gig
,
DAAS Kapital
,
Good News Week
and
The Sideshow
. Paul was the joint winner of the 1996 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for outstanding achievement in the performing arts in Australia.

MICHAEL LUCY is the deputy editor of
The Monthly
. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne.

TIM MINCHIN is an Australian comedian, composer-lyricist, pianist, vocalist, actor and writer. ‘Audacious', ‘jaw-dropping', ‘a genius', ‘a devil', ‘an angel', ‘a rock-star' and ‘unashamedly polysyllabic' are just some of the words used to describe his sell-out shows worldwide. We have no idea how to explain his ridicu-lously
exciting career in just 75 words. So: <
www.timminchin.com
>

GINA PERRY trained first as a psychologist, later as a professional writer. She is the author of
Behind the Shock Machine: the untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments.
Her feature articles, columns, essays and short fiction have been published in newspapers and literary magazines around Australia. Her co-production of the ABC Radio National documentary about the obedience experiments,
Beyond the Shock Machine,
won the Silver World Medal for a history documentary in the 2009 New York Festivals for radio. <
www.gina-perry.com
>

NICKY PHILLIPS is the science reporter at the
Sydney Morning Herald
. As a specialist science journalist she reports on everything from climate change and conservation to evolution and astronomy. She writes the weekly
True, False or Utterly Absurd
column for the
Herald
's health and science liftout. Nicky is a former reporter/producer with ABC Radio National's
Science Show
and
Health Report
. She has also produced packages for the BBC World Service. Nicky has a bachelor of science.

FRANCESCA RENDLE-SHORT is a novelist and essayist. Her most recent book
Bite Your Tongue
was shortlisted for the 2012 Colin Roderick Literary Award. She is the author of
Imago
and
Big Sister
, and has also published short fictions, photo-essays, exhibition text, poetry, and scholarly work. She is the recipient of the 2013 International Writers' Fellowship to Iowa, has a doctorate in creative arts, and is an associate professor at RMIT University. <
www.francescarendleshort.com
>

RACHEL ROBERTSON is the author of
Reaching One Thousand: A story of love, motherhood and autism
and a lecturer in professional writing and publishing at Curtin University. Her work has been published in anthologies and journals such as
The Best Australian Essays
,
Griffith Review
,
Westerly
,
Island
and the
Australian Book Review
. <
www.rachelrobertson.net.au
>

KELLEE SLATER is a general surgeon specialising in surgery for diseases of the liver, bile ducts and pancreas. She is a member of the liver transplant team at Princess Alexandra Hospital and has a private practice at Greenslopes Private Hospital. Kellee did her general surgery training in Queensland, then travelled to Denver in the United States to learn liver transplantation. She is the author of
How to Do a Liver Transplant: Stories from my surgical life
. Kellee is a married to Andrew and is the proud mother of four.

MARK TREDINNICK is a poet, nature writer, and essayist. He is the author of
Australia's Wild Weather, The Blue Plateau, Fire Diary
and nine other books. He was the winner of the 2011 Montreal Poetry Prize and the 2012 Cardiff Poetry Prize. Mark is a member of the Kangaloon Group of Concerned Artists and Scholars.

CHRIS TURNEY is an Australian and British earth scientist. He is Professor of Climate Change and an ARC Laureate Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Chris is the author of
1912: The year the world discovered Antarctica
;
Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from climates past
and
Bones, Rocks and Stars: The science of when things happened
, as well as numerous scientific papers and magazine articles. In 2007 he was awarded the Sir Nicholas Shackleton Medal for outstanding young Quaternary scientist, and in 2009 he received the Geological Society of London's Bigsby Medal for services to geology. <
www.christurney.com
>

ÅSA WAHLQUIST has been a rural journalist since 1984. She has worked in ABC Radio and ABC TV, at the
Sydney Morning Herald
and
The Australian
. She is currently a freelance journalist. She has won a dozen awards, including a Walkley in 1996, the Australian Government Peter Hunt Eureka Prize for Environmental Journalism in 2005, and the European Community Journalist Award in 1993. Åsa is the author of
Thirsty Country
, a book about Australia's water crisis.

FRED WATSON has been Astronomer in Charge of the Australian Astronomical Observatory since 1995, but is best known for his radio and TV broadcasts, books, and other outreach programs. He is also a musician, with a science-themed CD and an award-winning symphony libretto to his name. Fred was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2010. He has an asteroid named after him (5691 Fredwatson), but says that if it hits the Earth it won't be his fault.

DAMON YOUNG is a philosopher and writer. Damon is the author of
Philosophy in the Garden
and
Distraction
, both published locally and abroad. He has written for
The Age
, the
Sydney Morning Herald
,
The Australian
, the ABC and the BBC, and is a regular radio guest. Damon has also published poetry and short fiction. He is an honorary fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

EMMA YOUNG is an award-winning health and science journalist. She is a contributing editor at
COSMOS
magazine, and a regular contributor to
New Scientist
, and the author of the STORM series of science-based children's action/adventure novels.

Foreword:
Not a Nobel laureate

Tim Minchin

The previous two collections in this excellent series have contained forewords written by Nobel laureates, so in pursuit of balance – I assume – this year's foreword is being written by someone who is quite spectacularly not one. Therefore, rather than say something knowledgeable or insightful, I'll begin with the dental health of the people of Oregon, USA.

I've only been to Portland once, but geez it's a great city – its population a paragon of liberalism and artiness, sporting more tattoos than you could point a regretful laser at, and boasting perhaps a higher collective dye-to-hair ratio than anywhere on earth. Great music, great art, wonderful coffee … It's my kind of town. Except, the residents recently voted – for the fourth time since the 1950s – against adding fluoride to the water supply. It's as if a mermaid on one's lower back is an impediment to sensible interpretation of data, or perhaps unkempt pink hair acts as a sort of dream-catcher for conspiracy theories.

This apparent inverse correlation between artistic interest and scientific literacy seems to play out all over the world. Go to Byron Bay in New South Wales, and you'll find more painters and musos per capita than anywhere in the country, and
– inevitably – a parallel glut of aura-readers, homeopaths and anti-vaccination campaigners. There's clearly no such thing as a free lunch: you wanna listen to good blues, you have to have your palm read (and maybe get measles in the process).

As an artist who gets aroused by statistics (among other things), I find this deeply troubling. But I reckon (and yes, I only reckon: one of many advantages of being a not-Nobel-laureate is that I may hypothesise with relative impunity) that the apparent relationship between artiness and anti-science is a result of people acting out cultural expectations and subscribing to popular myths, rather than a genuine division of personality type or intellect. I wonder if artists identify themselves as spiritual (whatever that means) and reject materialism for the same reason that they might wear a beret or take up smoking: it's just adherence to a perceived stereotype, rather than some fundamental feature of the creative brain.

Science is a masculine trait and art a feminine trait; people are either ‘right-brained' or ‘left-brained' thinkers; a materialist worldview is an impediment to the imagination; you need to believe in magic to write magically – all these tropes are familiar to us, and all of them myths. Or if they're not
entirely
myths, they are nevertheless dull and unproductive categorisations.

At the heart of some artists' anti-scientific worldview is the suspicion that science is unromantic. The beauty of the human form is best revealed with charcoal, not with a scalpel. Love should be expressed in a sonnet, not measured with an fMRI. A sunset may be photographed or painted or reflected in song, but getting excited by its rate of fusion or the fact that it represents pretty much all the mass in the solar system is seen as somehow … unpoetic.

And further into it: the fruit of the tree of knowledge will rob you of paradise. Facts are the opposite of inspiration. Scientists are cold, boring, and amoral. If you reject the spiritual you will
never access the sublime.

Of course, I'm building a straw-man only to burn the bastard.

Science is not a bunch of facts. Scientists are not people who are trying to be prescriptive or authoritative. Science is simply the word we use to describe a method of organising our insatiable curiosity. It's just easier, at a dinner party, to say ‘science' than to say ‘the incremental acquisition of understanding through observation, humbled by an acute awareness of our tendency toward bias'.

Douglas Adams said, ‘I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.'

Science is not the opposite of art (nor the opposite of spirituality – whatever that is), and you don't have to deny scientific knowledge in order to make beautiful things. On the contrary.

Great science writing is the art of communicating that ‘awe of understanding', so that we readers can revel in the beauty of a deeper knowledge of our world.

This volume is a small, exciting, and illuminating reminder that art and science feed off each other, need each other, are each other. There is no conflict between art and science: there is only the wide-eyed pursuit of cool ideas.

Introduction:
An intimate dissection

Natasha Mitchell and Jane McCredie

‘How about chooks, ciggies, then farts?'

‘Yes, that works!'

If you'd been a fly
^*
on the wall during the many sessions we spent compiling this anthology, you might have mistaken it for a comedy script in the making. Happily, there was plenty of hilarity alongside all the hard head work.

The curious thing about choosing the best science writing is that the process itself is fairly unscientific. There are no formulas you can apply, no clearly defined exclusion criteria, no
p
values or confidence intervals.

In the end it comes down to gut feeling (though, as one of the pieces in this book explains, it seems we have a second brain in our gut, so maybe that's not as random as it sounds).

We suspected early on that we could, if we weren't careful, end up with a collection that read like a vaudevillian freak show. A cast of oddball animals, kooky sex (often involving oddball animals), and gee-whiz stories about scientific pursuit and discovery.