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Nicole McMahon

The rock pool at the top of Gunlom Falls looking out over Kakadu under a blue sky with white clouds
Explore

Gunlom's pools are open again, on Jawoyn terms

Gunlom is the waterfall everyone knows, an 85 metre drop with a natural pool at the top looking out over Kakadu. It closed in 2019 and stayed closed for almost six years. On 1 July it opened again, and the reason it took that long is the best part of the story.

17 October 2026 · 2 min read
Kangaroos resting in a grassy bush enclosure with a small timber shelter
Conservation

Twice a week, a grocer's leftovers go up the hill to Dural's wildlife

On 35 acres of bush at Dural, against Berowra Valley National Park, a sanctuary founded in 1977 has cared for Sydney's injured and orphaned wildlife on volunteer hours and donated food. Twice a week the boxes come up the hill from the Harris Farm store, and now there is a cool room to keep them.

17 October 2026 · 2 min read

Earth to Sea News, Issue No. 28

Giant waterlily pads, the Amazon cousins of the new species, near Iquitos on the Peruvian Amazon. Photo: Unsplash. Good morning. This week

14 October 2026 · 3 min read
Giant green lily pads with upturned red rims floating among tall grass on calm water
Global Good News

Hiding in an Instagram photo: a giant waterlily nobody had named

In 2021 a Colorado nursery owner posted a photo of himself beside some very large lily pads on a river in eastern Colombia. At Kew, Carlos Magdalena knew no giant waterlily had ever been recorded there. A satellite search and one night boat ride later, Victoria colombiana has a name.

13 October 2026 · 3 min read
Giant painted letters spelling Woytopia in orange, yellow, blue and pink under a black marquee on a school field
Sustainable Living

A Sunday at Woytopia, and the plates that came back

We caught the train up the coast on a spring Sunday for Woytopia, the free sustainable living festival the Peninsula Environment Group has run with volunteers since 2008. Here is the day as we lived it, from the first plate to the last tree.

13 October 2026 · 7 min read
Orange limestone cliffs of an ancient reef above a still pool and sandy bank under blue sky
Nature

Three kilometres under the sheep country, a drill found a coral reef

About 63 kilometres south east of Blackall, Geoscience Australia drilled three kilometres down looking for rock salt. What came up instead was nearly a kilometre of core packed with fossil corals, sponges, trilobites and ammonites from a reef more than 325 million years old.

13 October 2026 · 4 min read
A tall grey and brown bustard striding through dry golden grass
Wildlife

Two bustards walk out into the Thar Desert, and a ten year wait is over

On a Sunday morning in Rajasthan's Thar Desert, two young male Great Indian Bustards, hatched and raised by people, walked out of a soft release pen in Desert National Park and into the wild. Ten years of patient work came down to those first free steps, with 97 more birds growing up behind them.

13 October 2026 · 3 min read
Bright green strands of algae floating in dark pond water
Innovations

How a speck of pond life became a switch for the brain

Peter Hegemann simply wanted to know how a single celled pond alga finds the light. Thirty years on, the protein he and Georg Nagel found, and that Karl Deisseroth slipped into nerve cells, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In Basel, eye doctors are already giving a little sight back.

13 October 2026 · 4 min read