Blair Trewin, Australian Bureau of Meteorology; David Jones, Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Karl Braganza, Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Neil Plummer, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and Rob Smalley, Australian Bureau of Meteorology
The Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed 2013 as Australia’s hottest year since records began in 1910. Average temperatures over the continent have been 1.2C above the 1961-1990 average, breaking the previous…
You can cram a lot of knowledge into 12 months. Since this time last year we’ve learnt that bees, like people, have a “too-hard basket”; how dinosaur necks got so long; that, in theory, it’s possible to…
For the past three years it’s been an occasional pleasure and a frequent privilege to work with the academics who contribute to The Conversation’s Environment & Energy section. It’s not just the soil…
The oceans of music, much of it free, that most of us have access to continued to expand unabated in 2013. I’ve plucked the following from the seemingly endless tides because they said something to me…
I spent most of 2013 living overseas and from afar Australia’s beauty and its fault lines came into sharp focus. In my reading I found myself searching for insight, and three Australian stories stood out…
I’ve nominated these eBooks as notable publications in 2013 based on three criteria. First, I enjoyed reading them enough to finish the whole text on a digital device. Second, they use the digital format…
I love writing and reading Games Of The Year posts. It’s so nice to just once every year be given the liberty to think back on the games you played, not forward to the games you might play in the future…
From limited theatrical releases to the queer film festival circuit – and being refused classification – 2013 has seen films with LGBT content distributed to audiences by a variety of means. Box office…
What follows is not a “best-of” list and is by no means conclusive – but these are some of the Australian TV shows that stood out for me in 2013. Top of the Lake Top of the Lake is a seven-part mini-series…
Oddly enough and against trend – all those Scandinavian crime novels bobbing up in translation – I spent most of the year travelling Australia in crime fiction. From East (Peter Cotton’s Canberra in Dead…
Warning: this is not a list of the best movies of 2013. There were plenty of movies released this year that stirred up debates about cinema and who makes it. They were the ones that made me sit up and…
What makes a children’s book compelling? Is it a driving, action-centred plot that forces us to turn the page? Is it a puzzle that we solve from clues thrown down by the narrator – or is it a story that…