A symposium hosted by ICLL and Createc on the twin subjects of water and plant life in Western Australia.
For its end-of-year symposium, the International Centre for Landscape and Language (ICLL) at ECU’s Mount Lawley Campus is pleased to present a distinguished array of biologists, geographers, writers, artists, and other creative and scientific people.
The symposium will showcase innovative, interdisciplinary, and arts-based environmental research being done by staff, alumnae, and postgraduate researchers at ECU. Presenters include Rod Giblett, Hugo Bekle, Nandi Chinna, Mary-Louise McDermott, Holly Story, Annamaria Weldon, Perdita Phillips, Nien Schwarz, and Gregory Pryor. We are also pleased to announce two distinguished keynote speakers.
November 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Patrick Armstrong, a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, will present ‘Charles Darwin’s Other Islands: The Voyage of the Beagle, Other Than the Galapagos’. The voyage that Charles Darwin made on His Majesty’s Surveying Sloop Beagle, 1831-1836, provided the basis of much of his later scientific work. This talk will concentrate on the importance of the 40 or so islands that he visited – in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans – and his approach to the observations he made on them, in an attempt to show how they influenced his later intellectual development.
Patrick has made a special study of Darwin’s life, work and influence, using both archival methods and fieldwork at some of the sites visited by the great Victorian naturalist. His most recent books include All Things Darwin (2008) and Darwin’s Luck (2009).
Our second keynote speaker, Barbara York Main, author of Between Wodjil and Tor (1967), will present ‘Interactions of Water, Plants, and Ground-Dwelling Fauna’. Barbara grew up in the Western Australian wheatbelt. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Western Australia in 1957. She is Adjunct Professor with the School of Animal Biology at the University of Western Australia.
For a full schedule of speakers, please visit the ICLL website: http://www.landscapeandlanguagecentre.au.com/symposium_nov09.html
Students, staff, and the general public are welcome to join. The full-day symposium will be held in Building 10, Room 307 from 9.30am-5pm on Tuesday 17th November.