The Royal Society of Tasmania 2023 Christmas Dinner and Lecture
Thursday 7 December, 5.30 pm for 6 pm, Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, Marieville Esplanade, Sandy Bay.
Members and guests are invited to join us for the annual Christmas Dinner ($70 per person) and Lecture. Please fill in and return the acceptance form to admin@rst.org.au before 15 November. Download the acceptance form using this link.
The lecture to be given by Dr Annaliese Jacobs-Claydon is entitled:
“Shearwater Stories: Histories of Tasmania and the Arctic, c.1800-1860”
Sometime between 1850 and 1860, a Chukchi umialik (a whaling captain), drew a map of the Bering Strait on sealskin. The map was a rich depiction of an animate and changing world, and it included several whaling ships gathered to hunt Aġviq, the bowhead whale. Like the short-tailed shearwater, one of them might have made the long journey from Tasmania.
We are used to thinking of Hobart as an Antarctic gateway, but this talk will turn things around, and examine some of Tasmania’s Arctic histories. How did islanders impact the Arctic regions, and how have this island’s histories have been shaped by Arctic environments, animals, and people?
Following the tracks of migrating animals and the people who pursued them in (roughly) the first half of the nineteenth century, we will look at how Tasmanians were entangled in the shifting politics of dynamic Arctic worlds, and how those threads were woven in turn into the fabric of Tasmanian history. We will also stop with Tasmanians in the places they called home and look at how they used Arctic stories to make sense of their pasts and imagine their futures. Indigenous people and Indigenous networks of trade and information are central to these stories, connecting the Bering and Bass Straits in surprising and important ways. These polar perspectives might help us reckon with the living legacies of Tasmania’s colonial history, a history that includes the changing polar regions that many will never see.
Annaliese Jacobs-Claydon was born and brought up on Dena’ina land in Southcentral Alaska. She began her career as a historian and archaeologist with the U.S. National Park Service in two Indigenous-owned Affiliated Areas, the Iñupiat Heritage Center (Utqiagvik) and the Aleutian World War II National Historic Area (Unalaska/Dutch Harbor). She earned her PhD in British and Imperial History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015, after which she worked for the State Library and Archives Service at Libraries Tasmania as an Archivist until 2022.
She is now an Adjunct Researcher in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania. Her first book, Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in early 2024.
Behind-the-Scenes Tour of the RST Library Collection
Wednesday 1 November, 10 – 11am
Level 5, Morris Miller Library, UTAS
Visit the home of our RST Library Collection and hear about what makes it important and how it is used by researchers, students, and the broader community. Historical Collections Coordinator, Katrina Ross, will delve into the collections and share the stories of the popular, the old, and the quirky items that make this collection nationally significant.
Places are strictly limited to 15 participants.
To register, send an email to office@rst.org.au to reach our office assistant before 27 October 2023. Details of the event will be in the email of confirmation.
View a recording of the lecture by Jon Addison – July 2023
Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery holds in its collection one of the most important flags in Australian flag history: The Australasian League flag of 1851. Although this flag represents one short period of political agitation, Mr Addison will show how it can be considered the design origin of Australia’s current national flag, chosen by a competition in 1901.
Jon Addison is the Senior Curator of Public History at QVMAG, Launceston. Before taking up his current post in 2008, he worked at several museums in Australia and the UK, including the Western Australian Maritime Museum, the London Transport Museum and the Scottish Maritime Museum. His current role allows him to explore many diverse collections and interests.
International Big Picture Learning Credential: Putting the Person Back in Assessment
The Northern Branch of the Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to a public lecture by Tanya Ringuet, at 1.30pm, on Sunday 26 November 2023, in the Meeting Room, QVMAG, Inveresk, Launceston.
Admission is free for members of the Royal Society of Tasmania, and members of the Geological Society of Australia. General admission – $6. Students, QVMAG or TMAG Friends, and members of the Launceston Historical Society – $4. Full Covid vaccination and the wearing of face masks are highly desirable.
The Big Picture design for learning is centred around students learning through personal interests, with an emphasis on real-world learning with expert mentors in the community. The International Big Picture Learning Credential puts the ‘person’ back into educational assessment so that young people exiting schooling do so with a rich, customised portrait of their abilities that offers meaningful, accessible information to end-users in the wider community, while allowing students significant agency in the way they are represented.
Tanya Ringuet has over 30 year’s experience as an educator and school leader. Based in Launceston, she is currently seconded to Big Picture Learning Australia as the International Big Picture Learning Credential Coordinator and Big Picture School Coach (Tas). Her role involves overseeing credentialing processes for students within the global Big Picture Learning network. Committed to maintaining the validity and integrity of the credential, Tanya is part of a team that contributes significantly to the network’s objective of empowering students for a dynamic future.
Call for Nominations for the RST Doctoral (PhD) Awards 2023
Nominations for the annual RST Doctoral Awards open on 1 October 2023. Two awards are offered for recent PhD graduates who have made significant advances in the course of their doctoral research.
One Doctoral Award is reserved for nominations from disciplines other than STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine). The other Award is open.
The value of each award is $1,000 (AUD). Awardees may be invited to present a lecture to the Society.
Conditions of the Doctoral Awards
The awards shall be made to nominees who are no more than three years, or three years equivalent-full-time, after their PhD graduation.
The awards are intended to recognise significant advances based on the PhD research, as shown by published or in press peer-reviewed papers in national/international journals or equivalent outputs in fields where publications are not the norm.
The research should have been largely carried out in Tasmania or under the aegis of an organization based in Tasmania.
Nominations may be made by anyone although no self-nominations will be accepted.
Nominations must be received before COB, 15 November 2023. Nomination guidelines are given at https://rst.org.au/guidelines-for-annual-doctoral-awards/.
A flyer for the 2023 Doctoral awards is available via this link.
Richard Coleman, on behalf of the RST Honours and Awards Committee.
View a recording of the lecture by Dr David Harris – June 2023
The presentation will explore opportunities and technologies to facilitate decarbonisation of industrial systems through integration of renewable energy supply, storage and utilisation in practical commercial and industrial value chains.
Dr David Harris is a Chief Research Consultant with CSIRO Energy, based in Brisbane, and led CSIRO’s national low emissions and hydrogen-based energy research programs for more than 25 years. He now leads the development of major industrial-scale programs and projects across multi-sector energy value and supply chains, focusing on supporting demonstration and deployment of practical energy technologies that enable large scale renewable energy production, storage, transport, and utilisation.
UTas PhD Candidates – “Downhill Walking: A Way Forward in Blood Glucose Management” and “Using AI to Improve Safety at Sea”
The Northern Branch of the Royal Society of Tasmania, invites you to two public lectures by PhD candidates Misha Anstari and Stan Kaine, at 1.30pm on Sunday 22 October 2023. The lecture will be held in the Meeting Room, QVMAG, Inveresk, Launceston.
Admission is free for members of the Royal Society of Tasmania. General admission – $6. Students, QVMAG or TMAG Friends, and members of the Launceston Historical Society – $4. Full Covid vaccination and the wearing of face masks are highly desirable.
Misha Anstari will discuss how regular exercise is key to preventing and managing type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) as it improves blood glucose control. However compliance to exercise is poor. Eccentric exercise, which involves the muscle lengthening under load is less metabolically demanding on the body, and may be an attractive alternative to conventional exercise. This research investigates the use of downhill walking (eccentric exercise) on the management of blood glucose control and other health-related parameters.
Misha is a professional physiotherapist who is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Tasmania. Her research is centered around the use of eccentric exercise to manage blood glucose levels in individuals with type 2 Diabetes mellitus. She earned her Bachelor’s and Post-professional Physiotherapy degrees in Pakistan, where she also worked as a clinical therapist and taught before starting her Ph.D. program at UTAS.
Stan Kaine will discuss how, in a data driven world, access to up-to-date sea state information that could affect vessel safety is paramount. Research is being undertaken to convert the six degrees of vessel accelerations into sea state to allow unsafe situations to be avoided by both the vessel capturing the data and other ships transiting the area via AIS transmissions or the internet. Machine Learning is a key component in making this information available in near real time.
Stan founded a software development company, Point Duty, in 2004 with an initial mission to help track the flow of child abuse material over the internet and assist Law Enforcement to find the perpetrators. The company now has a broader data capture and analytics function.
Stan’s degree is in Computer Science, which when coupled to a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering and a Diesel Fitting Apprenticeship gives him a unique insight into boundaries between IT and the “Real World”.
View a recording of the lecture by Professor Nick Shakel – April 2023
Recent advances in the treatment of liver disease have seen previously incurable conditions effectively treated. However, the number of cases of fatty liver disease, hepatitis and liver cancer are increasing and predicted to do so for decades. Despite recent breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment we are seeing increasingly more Australians die from liver disease especially in disadvantaged groups.
Professor Nicholas Shackel is a specialized hepatologist managing all aspects of adult liver disease. He has both a medical degree and a PhD with a track record in both basic and applied research, having trained at both the Australian National Liver Transplant Unit and Duke University in the USA. Prof Shackel has interests in the diagnosis and management of liver cancer, importance of nutrition in cirrhosis and the noninvasive assessment of liver disease severity.