A healthy food program at Baryulgil primary school has turned around the health of the students. Mike Bowers spent lunchtime with the pupils.
Make sure you read The Pineapple Prescription, by Gordon Weiss.
How do you get journalists to comprehend the complexities of a federal budget before they start telling everyone about it? You start by locking them up.
It's a strange beast, the budget lock-up. You give up your phone and all means of communication with the outside world. (Computers may be brought in, but no internet access is allowed; cameras and recording equipment, but no means to broadcast what's recorded.) Only then may you enter a set of rooms with the best and brightest of your colleagues ‑- and of course the budget papers.
That's what it's all about - the budget papers. A surprisingly heavy bagful of books and folders and papers, actually.
You get access to a blizzard of information, six hours before anything official is released. The cost is captivity; the reasoning is that media professionals need time to produce the news of the budget, and they have to be "locked up" so news (particularly, only briefly considered news) does not leak and affect the markets. The reports are ready to go at the very second the Treasurer's speech hits the despatch box at 7.30pm.
My best reckoning is that I have been "inside" 23 budget lock-ups. For 22 of them, I concentrated on the news of the budget; this time, on Tuesday, May 8, 2012, I turned my lens on the production and process inside this small and sometimes silly world.
With this new-found freedom, this is what I saw.
... it's best not to see them being made. That saying has been making the rounds since the 1860s, but it was true as ever in Canberra today. Still, who can help but look? TGM's Mike Bowers takes his lens to Question Time's shenanigans, fun to see but harder to stomach.
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White cemeteries stood out against the fields; the silent cities, as Kipling called them, sped by the car window as little more than a light blur framed by green. I was small for a 10-year-old and had to stretch to get a full view. Northern France and Belgium contains about 900 cemeteries from the Great War; every few kilometres another would flash past. My father was pushing our little car, a 1964 Cortina, to its limits on a brand new motorway. Anything not held down firmly would savagely flutter around the cabin and get sucked out one of the four open windows.
"Your grandfather," he shouted over the wind noise, waving his hand vaguely on the right side of the car, "he fought here during the First World War." It was 1971 and we were racing across Northern France on our way back to England, where we lived at the time.
I don't think he intended to do it but nevertheless a seed was planted that summer day, and it has germinated into what some of my friends feel is an obsession. As I grew older the question I kept asking myself was, "What motivated this man to join up soon after the declaration of war and travel across the world to risk his life before it had really begun?"
Fast forward 40 years. I am standing in the dark of a bracing autumn, pre-dawn in the NSW town of Braidwood. The dawn service was still an hour away. My mind started to wander on the journey that brought me here, from those yelled few lines about my grandfather back in 1971. I have tried to understand his experiences through research and travel to many of the places where he served. I have been drawn back to The Dardanelles 11 times and the Western Front nine.
These pictures represent my favourite images from the past few years of my travels - the long shadow of Australia's great war. So much to remember.
Uprooted by war, an ancient tribe has transplanted its members and their rituals to the banks of the Nepean River in Sydney. Gordon Weiss and Mike Bowers have been exploring the world of the the last remaining Middle Eastern gnostic religion - as they perform their ritual called poronia, which means creation. Additonal reporting Farid Farid
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Photographer Rick Stevens celebrates the silver-haired and silver-scaled veterans who’ve thrilled generations of Sydney visitors.
Photographing animals has been a lifelong passion for veteran lensman Rick Stevens, affectionately called "The Rat" by his colleagues.
Stevens first visited Sydney's Taronga Zoo as a cadet in the early 1960s. He was attracted to photographing animals because of the challenges involved in getting a frame that has impact and holds the viewer.
As he explains, "Animals don't complain about bad hair days, they're not self-conscious, but on the other hand you can't tell a group of chimps to move closer together. In many ways there are similarities between animals and humans. There is not much difference between a group of young chimps playing and a group of young children playing; they misbehave much the same and get scolded by their parents much the same way."
At zoos and wildlife parks around the world, photo calls are typically held for newly born arrivals and cute, furry imports, high in the "ooh, ahh" factor. Here, Stevens celebrates the senior citizens of Sydney's Taronga Zoo.
The life span of animals in captivity varies from species to species, but generally it is longer than their wild relatives due to easy access to food, lack of competition and expert medical care.
A small abattoir on the fringe of Australia’s outback is a window on modern rural life.
Drive west from Sydney, and you'll leave the cool fringe of the coast. Over the forested ridge of mountains known as the Great Dividing Range, you strike the blond reaches of the vast western plains food bowl. Beyond, through the postcard towns of Bathurst, Orange and Dubbo, winding roads are gradually beaten straight by the hammer of the sun and the anvil of the earth. The rich terrain and flat fields peter out. The distance between towns and villages lengthens, and the eye searches for the next settlement along the route forged through desert. The road puckers until it's the eye of a needle on the point of a shimmering horizon, and dips slightly and rises through scrub and blankets of ruddy earth on either side. Each corrugation proves how easy it is for the spill of floodwaters that occasionally crosshatches this country to cut off towns for weeks at a time.
Almost 600 kilometres northwest of Sydney, Nyngan is poised on the edge of the true outback. The story goes that at each town, if you ask, "Is this the outback?" a local will point you westwards, handing you on to the next town, the traveller never quite reaching the outback even though it seems to swallow you, until you face the cool of the Indian Ocean at the continent's far western edge. Perhaps not reaching the Outback is what gives people hope to go on. The Outback is where the myths of two Australias meet like a head-on collision on one of these lonely straight roads: that of Aboriginal Australia - antique, mystical and alive, breathing between rock and roo, as vast as the blue sky that blots out the galaxy from edge to edge of as far as one can see, and as intimate as the dust that gathers on boot leather - and European Australia, a toughened myth scrawled and stamped on the earth by the ugly rigging of abattoir and wheat mill, rusting tin-sheet hovels (now antique themselves), the gouging of earth, the planting of cotton where once only salt-bush and scrub could grow. This is Henry Lawson country, once criss-crossed by the 'Ghan' camel trains led by Australia's first Muslim workers, where mobs of sheep moved like clouds across the red land.
Nyngan is a small town of about 2,500 people, sitting somewhere on a flat horizon, watered by the ribbon of the Bogan River. In 1990 the town was inundated by massive floods that scrubbed the topography almost clean of man-made structures. When sandbagged levees failed, townspeople mustered on the railway platform, from where they were spirited to safety by army and news helicopters. The waters rose, then fell, wiping out $50 million of property.
Floods have come again to this part of Australia, waterlogging other towns but leaving Nyngan alone this time. The henna-red country between Nyngan and Bourke, 200 kilometres further outback, is now a wetland pasture of soft grasses sitting in ponds of silver water, with flocks of waterfowl rising like confetti explosions, and kites wheeling in great numbers. The Murray-Darling river system which connects the monsoonal north of Australia with the Great Australian Bight on the southern edge, and which once fed an unbroken patchwork of inland Aboriginal tribes along thousands of kilometers, has burst its banks. It might have swept away the Nyngan-Bourke arm of the western railway, had that not been destroyed already in 1989, closing one of the last great railway routes of the great southern continent.
Elinor Wrobel is a collector — of “broken, used, beautiful things”. Many of her treasures were found in the Sydney Hospital morgue. You might be surprised to find out what's in Wrobel’s collection – and how hard she's fought to protect it. Elinor Wrobel has been showing her collection to Ella Rubeli who has produced this extraordinary photo essay.
The Lucy Osburn-Nightingale Museum at Sydney Hospital on Macquarie Street, is open to the public on Tuesdays from 10am to 3pm.
Australia hosts a celebration thousands of years old. It's known as “Feast Wednesday” or “Fire Night” and Iranians are its adherents. And fire is the theme.
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Each performance of Opera Australia’s production of The Magic Flute begins for Kanen Breen in the wig room of The Sydney Opera House.
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The new face of Australian homelessness is probably a grandmother’s. She won’t be sleeping rough but couch surfing or sleeping in her car.
If you are in housing crisis in Australia, phone Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Services in Melbourne include Victorian Women’s Housing Association (www.vwha.org.au) and WISHIN (www.wishin.org.au).
In Sydney, you can contact the City of Sydney Domestic Violence Hotline on 1800 656 463
Homeless Persons Hotline (02) 9265 9081 or 1800 234 566 for help.
University of NSW researcher Ludo McFerran's report It Could Be You is available online.
Zahra and Abdalah Ahmed are refugees from Darfur who have made a new life — and a booming business — in Australia.
Zahra's is a luminous hair and beauty salon some 25 kilometres west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. A little more than half of the residents in Merrylands, the suburb where it's located, were born outside Australia - in the Middle East, Turkey, China or Africa. Hundreds of packets of human hair for extensions hang in rows along the walls.
Zahra and Abdalah Ahmed are two among millions of people displaced by the numerous wars that have wracked modern Africa. Zahra is a 32-year-old Christian Sudanese, and her 49-year-old husband, Abdalah, is a Muslim from Darfur in eastern Sudan. His people were typically cattle pastoralists and traders. He spells out his name for me. "I used to spell it with two 'l's, but when we immigrated the people at customs spelled it with one 'l', and I just kept it that way."
The couple met in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in the arid northwest of Kenya, a vast enclosed town of thatched huts housing refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Congo and Rwanda. The camp has been described as "both prison and exile". Life is a routine of food handouts, dust storms, broiling heat and malaria, while people wait for peace in their countries, or word they have been accepted as refugees somewhere in the world. Many people have lived for well over a decade in the camp, with children born and dying without ever travelling beyond its perimeter. Abdalah and Zahra arrived in Australia in 2002.
