The Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to our annual Mid-Winter Dinner and Lecture
by Dr Shasta Henry, at 6pm, on Thursday, 8 June 2023.

The Dinner and Lecture will be held at the
Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay.

Please register using this link. Registrations close on Thursday 1st June.

Our guest speaker, Dr Shasta Henry, is the previous Royal Society of Tasmania Student Councillor, and currently science communicator for Melbourne-based think-tank Future Crunch.

Shasta will give us a future’s perspective that will explore the Adaptability Quotient, the new IQ, which is the trait that makes humans better than robots. AQ is the measure of how skilled individuals are in making intentional change in an environment that is evolving at speed. According to the Harvard Business Review, it is the new competitive advantage.

Shasta is a recent graduate from the University of Tasmania. She is an entomologist and science communicator. Her doctorate focused on the long-term impacts of fire on the invertebrates of the Wilderness World Heritage Area as well as insect taxonomy. As a communicator, Shasta has presented in a number of different forums around Australia, including talks as a Young Tassie Scientist, on ABC radio, and at the TEDx Hobart 2022 conference.

Future Crunch are a team of unlike minds, a collection of different specialists, who are united by their mission to foster intelligent optimism. Future Crunch have shared their inspiring keynote presentations to the staff and boards of global banks, universities, software developers and community organisations to name just a few. Their fact-based talks highlight how humans fit into a future of exponentially expanding technologies, and how we are uniquely adapted to carry on thriving.

Friends of TMAG have kindly invited members of the Royal Society of Tasmania to attend a talk by Ann Cripps, in conversation with Kate Warner, at 5.30pm, on Thursday 25 May 2023. The talk will be held in the Central Gallery, TMAG. RST members will be able to attend at the same admission price as Friends of TMAG members.

Admission Price: Members $20, Non-members $30. Includes refreshments.

Information on how to book for this event may be found here.

Ann will talk about the research for her recent book, Gardeners, Plant Collectors, Friends: Hobart Town and Beyond. Not only did early colonists bring European species to the colony of Van Diemen’s Land, they also sent endemic Tasmanian plants to collectors overseas. As you follow Ann’s research you will meet Quakers, botanists, doctors, horticulturalists and nurserymen who were instrumental in bringing Tasmania’s flora to the wider world.

While Ann’s research took her far afield, many of her discoveries came from detailed studies of documents in the Royal Society of Tasmania’s Special Collections, housed at UTAS, and from items in the TMAG collection.

As a special treat, you will be able to view the exquisite table cover embroidered with Tasmanian plants created by early settler Catherine Mitchell. Catherine is just one of the many creative women whose works feature in Ann’s book. Our thanks to Peter Hughes, TMAG’s Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, for a rare opportunity to see this beautiful and fragile work.

Speaker

Ann Cripps is a garden lover and historian who has lectured and written for many years on all aspects of Tasmanian garden history. As a consultant she has advised on the restoration of some of Tasmania’s significant gardens. In her research for this book, Ann visited libraries and other institutions in the United Kingdom as well as in Australia, uncovering a fascinating network of gardeners, plant collectors, their families and some of the most important botanical collections in the world.

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The Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to a lecture by Dr Keith Hayes at 3 pm on Sunday 2 April 2023. The lecture will be held at the Geology Lecture Theatre (Geo.211.LT), Earth Sciences, Geography Planning and Spatial Sciences Building, UTas, Clark Road, Sandy Bay.

Please register using this link. Eventbrite registrations close at 2 pm on Saturday 1 April. The lecture will be recorded, but not live-streamed.

Admission is free for members of the Royal Society of Tasmania. Non-members are welcome and donations are appreciated through our website or at the door. Suggested donation is $6; $4 for students and Friends of TMAG and QVMAG.

Abstract

Synthetic gene drives cause significant deviations from Mendel’s Law of Equal Segregation, enabling specific genes to increase in prevalence in populations of sexually reproducing organisms, even if these genes incur a fitness cost. In the laboratory, gene drives have suppressed caged populations of human malaria vector mosquitoes in less than 12 generations (about 3 months) raising the prospect of a powerful new genetic method for eliminating malaria from regions such as Africa where the disease kills more than half a million people each year, 80% of which are children under five. In this presentation, Dr. Keith Hayes describes the methods used by his team to assess the environmental and human health risks associated with a strategy of staged releases of genetically modified mosquitoes in Burkina Faso, designed to culminate in the first field trials of gene-drive-modified mosquitoes to eliminate malaria vector populations at a continent-wide scale.

Our speaker

Dr Keith Hayes is a senior research scientist at CSIRO Data61, and leads the Data61 Ecological and Environmental Risk Assessment team in the Hobart laboratories. The team conducts probabilistic risk assessments, and supporting studies, typically for challenging problems across large spatio-temporal scales. Recent applications include:

• Hazard analysis and risk assessments for genetic control of malaria vectors in Africa,
• Cumulative risk assessments of the impacts of new coal resource developments on water resources and water-dependent assets, and
• Risk assessments for the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

Dr Hayes recently assisted the Australian federal government to design a Monitoring Evaluation Reporting and Improvement framework for Australia’s Marine Parks and is now leading a subsequent project to implement this framework.

Magistrate Webster gives an overview of his career and discusses four high-profile cases in which he has been involved as a Lawyer and Magistrate.

Chris Webster graduated from the University of Tasmania in 1974 and then practised as a barrister and solicitor until March 2006 when he was appointed a Magistrate. He is still a Magistrate.

Whilst a solicitor in private practice he held several government appointments including Hearing Commissioner of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Senior Member of Administrative Appeals Commission, Chairman of the Parole Board, and Member of the Medical Council of Tasmania.

He was President of the Law Society of Tasmania in 1994 and is involved in Rotary, Community Based Care and the Hobart Community Legal Service. Chris was President of the Association of Australian Magistrates until 2021 and is a Life Member of the Australian Judicial Officers Association.

In 2021, in recognition of his contribution to the Law and the Community, he became a Member of the Order of Australia (AM).

The recent Royal Society of Tasmania lecture, “Truth telling and treaty as it relates to Tasmania now”, by Rodney Gibbins, is now available on the RST YouTube channel. Click here to read a full transcript.

For 60,000+ years the palawa people had sovereignty across this land lutruwita. All of this changed with the arrival of the white man. The invasion radically changed us in a very short period of time, our culture was interrupted, our language and freedoms taken from us. This has resulted in continuing contemptuous views and actions by successive governments that have rendered us almost voiceless and powerless in our own country.

We began to fight back in the early 1970s. We developed our own political movements and rallied as a people. Five years ago the Uluru statement was released. It was a forerunner for states to develop their own policies towards treaty and truth telling”.

In this lecture, Rodney Gibbins outlines the responses of successive governments to aboriginal issues and considers the needs and ambitions of the Aboriginal community in the development of a treaty and the truth telling process.

Rodney Gibbins is a palawa man born in Launceston. As a child, he experienced constant physical and racial harassment. This was the experience as well, of most, if not all, of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community and this harassment was a direct consequence of the subjugation by the broader white community towards the Aboriginal community. Rodney has been actively involved in Aboriginal politics since the early 1970s and served in both the state and Commonwealth governments as a Senior Aboriginal Program and Policy Officer for over 30 years. He is currently retired.

Volcanic eruptions are fascinating for scientists and the public alike. Visual observations of eruption on land have been central to the scientific understanding and development of various models used in hazard forecasting.

However, in a submarine setting the interaction between hot magma and seawater is hidden and therefore not well understood. Recent submarine eruptions like the Hunga Tonga eruption in 2022 are extraordinary and can be devastating. International scientific teams with innovative robotic technologies have responded to these events to characterise and further understand submarine eruptions. These well characterised events underpin step changes in our understanding of how magmas and volcanoes interact with the ocean. In this presentation, I will describe case studies of recent submarine eruptions and underwater exploration of the eruption products to highlight advances and remaining challenges in the study of underwater volcanoes.

Associate Professor Rebecca Carey is a former Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, Tasmanian Tall Poppy Scientist of the Year, and the 2020 winner of the Australian Academy of Science Dorothy Hill Medal. Rebecca won the RST MR Banks Medal for an outstanding mid-career researchers in 2021. Rebecca is interested in volcanic processes and environments, geological hazards, and indigenous cultural narratives around volcanic events. Her research focuses on understanding volcanic eruptive histories, mechanisms and drivers of volcanic eruptions, explosive eruption plumes, submarine volcanoes and eruption dynamics, and volcanic hazards.