Archive for July, 2012

School students, school-leavers, tertiary students and their parents will have a unique opportunity to explore local training and career opportunities at the ‘Live.Train.Work’ Expo & Careers Forum to be held at UNE’s Lazenby Hall in Armidale on Thursday August 9.

Regional Development Australia – Northern Inland (RDANI) Executive Officer Nathan Axelsson said information sessions would span a wide range of careers including: counselling, law, media, marketing and communications, early childhood services, I.T, medicine, community services, accounting and finance, nursing and aged care, science and primary industries, sport and recreation, vet and animal care, dental, optical, automotive, creative arts and design, hospitality, metals and engineering, transport and aviation,  as well as sessions on job seeking, how to write a CV, volunteering, casual work, gap year opportunities and applying for TAFE and university courses.

“Local employers, industry representatives and tertiary education providers will present across a wide range of contemporary industries and advise how attendees can find their chosen career path locally without feeling compelled to leave the region. The Northern Inland region offers diverse career opportunities,” said RDANI Executive Officer, Nathan Axelsson.

“This event will have something for everyone and is aimed at both parents and students alike. By promoting local training and career pathways, we have the opportunity to retain our youngest and brightest in the region as well as helping local organisations attract and retain the skilled staff they need to run an effective business,” Mr Axelsson said.

Regional Development Australia Northern Inland (RDANI), in conjunction with local partners including UNE, TAFE, BEST Employment,  Jobs Australia, Speedie Staff Solutions, Armidale Business Chamber, EACH Youth Connections, Armidale Dumaresq Council, Community Mutual Group and many local businesses and employees are supporting the event. Careers Network Partnership Broker Program is helping to bring together the partners for this important event to address the lack of knowledge about training, education and career pathways across many local industry sectors.

“Career Expos have been run very successfully in Armidale in the past by a dedicated team; however there has been a lapse for a few years owing to a lack of funding. It is very exciting that we now have an effective partnership working to bring about this great opportunity for students and parents. The event will combine an expo with stalls and forums and we have broadened the forums to include many more professional occupations as well as retaining traditional trades,” said Marg Baber from Careers Network Inc.

Bookings are essential and further information can be found at www.rdani.org.au/projects/livetrainwork.

A University of New England health researcher has been awarded a Churchill Fellowship for a project , aimed at improving services for ageing Australians with an intellectual disability.

The Fellowship will take Dr Stuart Wark to the United States and the UK in June and July next year to examine the best models of care for such people in those countries – “models,” he said, “that are cost-effective, and that could make a difference, particularly in rural areas”.

“In the past 100 years the life expectancy of people with an intellectual disability has risen from less than 10 years to more than 60,” Dr Wark said. “When they need the additional support associated with ageing, there’s no funding available. While the States say that this is simply an ageing issue, the Commonwealth argues that it’s still in the domain of ‘disability’. It’s difficult to access mainstream ageing support for these people in rural areas, and the disability sector is struggling to deal with this new issue.”

“The purpose of this project is to examine different models of practice in the United States and the UK, where governments and services have been addressing this issue in recent years,” Dr Wark said. “It’s a matter of seeing what models could be translated to an Australian context. For example, there’s a palliative care network for people with intellectual disabilities in the UK that could work very well in rural Australia.

“On the basis of this study, I hope to be able to recommend to government better structures of support at a local service level, taking into account the varying needs of rural and metropolitan support agencies.”

“Being based in regional Australia has given me a particular focus on the applicability of such models to rural and remote regions,” he said.

Dr Wark has been working with people with disabilities for the past 20 years. He is currently Executive Manager of a support team at The Ascent Group – an organisation that provides services for 300 people in Armidale and the wider New England region. At UNE, he is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the newly-formed Collaborative Research Network (CRN) for Mental Health and Well-being in Rural and Regional Communities. He expressed his appreciation of the support of Professors Rafat Hussain and Trevor Parmenter from UNE’s School of Rural Medicine, and Kevin Mead, CEO of The Ascent Group, who all supported his Churchill Fellowship application.

As a member of teams comprising researchers from UNE and the Universities of Sydney and Newcastle, he’s involved in a number of projects investigating the effects of ageing on people with a disability, and differences in those effects between people living in metropolitan and rural areas. “The CRN projects are not only establishing strong links between universities,” he said, “but we’re also starting to see a lot of collaboration between the academic and service sectors.

“The Churchill Fellowship ties in nicely with this research.”

The English language Centre at the University of New England is calling on members of the university’s international community to join in celebrations of its 21st birthday next week.

International staff and students alike were encouraged to get in touch with the English language Centre to see how they could get involved with the week’s festivities, said Mark Cooper, Deputy Director of studies at the ELC.

“We would like to see as many people as possible participating in this event, which marks a significant anniversary for the university and its international students,” Mr Cooper said.

The week’s activities will kick off with an official opening by the UNE vice-chancellor, Prof Jim Barber, on Monday, July 31 at 4:30 PM at Booloominbah. The English language Centre will host an open morning on Wednesday, August 1, from 9 to 11 AM, and on the evening of Thursday, August 2, the Armadale International Night will take place at the UNE Arts Theatre, featuring poetry, singing and dancing, and other performances by members of UNE’s international community.

Mr Cooper said he was particularly keen to hear from international members of staff at UNE who might be interested in sharing aspects of their UNE journey on the night.

For more than two decades, the English Language Centre (previously known as the Language Training Centre) has been preparing international students to undertake studies at UNE, as well as running short courses for high schools, government and business and university student groups from Japan, Thailand ,Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. In that time, almost 4000 students have graduated from the centre, with the vast majority going on to studies at UNE.

When the centre began in 1991, it had 28 students from eight countries. By 2011, enrolments numbered almost 200 students from 19 different countries. Today, Mr Cooper estimates that roughly half of all international students coming to UNE undertake studies at the Centre.

Among the many proud achievements the Centre can look back on is the successful tender to provide English-language training to students from East Timor in the immediate aftermath of their country gaining independence in 1999. A large cohort of East Timorese students graduated from the program, which was run in conjunction with the Australian Government. The students went on to complete their studies at UNE and on returning to East Timor occupied important positions in business and government during the rebuilding of their country.

Mr Cooper said the week’s celebrations were also an opportunity to acknowledge the important links between UNE’s international students and the local community. An important such link was the English Language Centre’s homestay program, he said. Under this program, international students have the chance to live with an Australian family for the duration of their studies. Lifelong friendships were often formed along the way, he said.

“International students bring enormous economic, cultural, and social benefits to Armidale and the University, and the English Language Centre has long played a vital role in bringing them here and preparing them for their studies,” Mr Cooper said. “We would like to put out a warm welcome to the town and all members of the UNE community to join us in celebrating this contribution.”

For more information about next week’s events, or to get involved, please contact Mark Cooper on mcooper2@une.edu.au, telephone 6773 2972.

Dr Alice Storey, an archaeologist at the University of New England, is tracing the global migration routes of domestic chickens back through thousands of years towards their origins in the jungles of South-east Asia.

In doing so, Dr Storey is pioneering the use of DNA from ancient chicken bones recovered from well-dated archaeological sites around the world. This is enabling her to add a fourth dimension – that of time – to an emerging “map” of chicken dispersal. One of the ultimate goals of such research is identifying the original Asian centres of jungle fowl domestication.

“All of our domestic chickens are descended from a few hens that I like to think of as the ‘great, great grandmothers’ of the chicken world,” Dr Storey said.

Biological, linguistic, historical and archaeological data have all contributed to an understanding that chickens accompanied human movements from their Asian homeland west through the Middle East to Europe and Africa, and east through the islands of South-east Asia and the Pacific.

Dr Storey’s analysis of ancient DNA is disentangling complications in this broad picture caused by interactions later than the original dispersal. “Only ancient DNA provides a unit of analysis with the chronological control necessary to reconstruct and disentangle the signals of initial dispersals from those of later interactions,” she said. Hers are the first published reports on the use of ancient DNA in this context.

A paper by Dr Storey and her colleagues, titled “Global dispersal of chickens in prehistory using ancient mitochondrial DNA signatures”, is published today in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.

The paper, available at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039171, provides evidence for dispersal out of Asia over 3,000 years ago involving the movement of chickens both westwards to Europe and eastwards into the Pacific.

One of the most striking results of the study was the discovery of the same DNA signature in ancient chicken bones from Europe, Thailand, the Pacific and Chile, and from Spanish colonial sites in Florida and the Dominican Republic. This means that chickens dispersed both westwards and eastwards from a single ancient domestication centre, and converged thousands of years later when the Spanish brought their chickens from Europe to the New World.

“While unambiguous data does not yet exist to trace any of the detected mitochondrial DNA signatures back to specific domestication centres, the analysis of ancient DNA sequences presented here is an important first step towards it,” the paper concludes.

Media contact: Dr Alice Storey on (02) 6773 3085 or Leon Braun (UNE PR) on (02) 6773 3771.

The 16^th Australian Agronomy Conference, to be held at the University of New England in October, will include presentations by the President of the National Farmers’ federation, Jock Laurie, and a former Chief of CSIRO’s Division of Tropical Crops and Pastures, Dr Bob Clements.

There will also be a presentation by the Chair of the Agricultural Committee of the International Fertiliser Association (IFA) in France, Patrick Heffer. Mr Heffer’s role in IFA includes the international coordination of all issues relating to fertiliser use, innovation and research. He will speak at the conference on the future supply of fertiliser raw materials and finished products to Australia.

More than 250 delegates from around Australia – and from New Zealand, South-east Asia and Africa – will attend the Australian Society of Agronomy’s biennial conference, which will include field tours to a wide range of innovative agricultural enterprises and research stations in the New England region.

The conference, scheduled for October 14 – 18, 2012, is titled Capturing Opportunities and Overcoming Obstacles in Australian Agronomy. “Opportunities” and “obstacles” in plant breeding, nutrient supply and management, weed management, precision agriculture, and chemical-free agriculture are among the topics for discussion.

The President of the Australian Society of Agronomy, UNE’s Professor Graeme Blair, said the theme of the conference reflected “the challenge for Australia to increase food and fibre production in a sustainable manner in the face of increasing barriers to the adoption of new technologies”. “These barriers are being raised by a burgeoning urban population that is remote from the realities of agriculture but wants cheap and safe food,” he said.

Dr Clements, a UNE graduate whose research at CSIRO helped to boost the viability of livestock industries in northern Australia, will speak about the contribution of Australian agronomy to world food security over the past 20 years, and look at what lies ahead. In his role as Director of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, he helped to open doors for Australian agricultural scientists in many Asian countries.

The Australian Society of Agronomy is the professional body for agronomists in Australia and New Zealand. Its members are drawn from government, universities, research organisations and the private sector. A highlight of the Society’s biennial conference is the presentation of the Donald Medal to an eminent agriculturalist. The medal honours the memory of Colin Donald, who was Professor of Agronomy at the University of Adelaide from 1954 to 1973.

Fellowships of the Society will be presented for the first time to agronomists who have made significant contributions to Australian agronomy.

Another event at the conference will be the presentation of the Young Agronomist Award, worth $1,000, to an outstanding agronomist under the age of 35.

Professor Blair said that the Society was encouraging farmers to attend the conference “to learn about the latest in agronomic advances”. Details of the event can be found at www.agronomy.org.au or by contacting Professor Blair at gblair@une.edu.au.

The University of New England and the New England Institute of TAFE are collaborating to provide online degree programs with embedded vocational qualifications.

The programs will allow students to graduate with a UNE degree and, along the way, acquire a succession of VET (vocational education and training) qualifications through TAFE. They will also allow students to exit from – and re-enter – the degree program at various points along the way after acquiring the VET qualifications.

“Employers are, increasingly, seeking people who are work-ready as well as having a university degree,” said Eve Woodberry, UNE’s Pro Vice-Chancellor Students and Social Inclusion. “These new programs will enable students to work towards vocational and university qualifications concurrently, and graduate with two or more qualifications.”

Ms Woodberry explained that UNE already had “vertical articulation” arrangements with TAFE, under which students with VET qualifications could enrol in a UNE degree program at an advanced level. One example of such arrangements is in the field of early childhood education. “The programs under development, however, will follow a ‘concurrent articulation’ model,” she said. “It’s a model that is still quite rare in Australia – allowing students to enrol at two institutions in the one process without having to navigate their way through independent pathways. And it encourages people to enter a university degree program earlier than they might otherwise have done, while giving them access to multiple exit and re-entry points corresponding to the vocational qualifications they have earned along the way.”

Pat Walls, Acting Director of Educational Development at the New England Institute of TAFE, said the project was “an exciting opportunity for a VET provider and a university to work together”. “It’s exciting because of its use of online technology, and because it gives students the opportunity to gain employment through the acquisition of VET qualifications while continuing their university studies,” she said.

The first of the “concurrent articulation” programs being developed are in the fields of agri-foods (business and technology) and health and community services. “These are both areas in which employers want people with practical skills rather than graduates who they have to send back to TAFE for practical training,” Ms Woodberry said. “Overall, we’ll be working in areas where there is a well-documented demand for people with these kinds of qualifications, and we’ll be seeking partnerships with employer groups that have an interest in employing such people.” These first two programs should be open for enrolment in 2014. Their development is one of eight projects being undertaken at UNE, with the support of a $36.6 million grant from the Australian Government’s Structural Adjustment Fund, aimed at aligning UNE degree programs with regional workforce requirements.

Both Ms Woodberry and Mrs Walls agreed that the key to the successful delivery of these “dual sector” educational programs was the long-standing, productive relationship between UNE and TAFE that has seen, among other developments, the establishment of UNE Regional Study Centres at seven TAFE locations in the New England North West Region. “It’s a reflection of the growing maturity of the UNE/TAFE relationship,” Mrs Walls said.

Sarah Hanson-Young, Australian Greens Senator for South Australia, will give a public lecture at the University of New England’s Earle Page College on Wednesday 1 August.

The lecture, at 8.30 pm in the Earle Page College Dining Hall, will be the 29^th in the College’s Annual Politics Lecture series. Titled “The time has come for marriage equality in Australia”, it will follow a formal dinner for College members and invited guests at which Ms Hanson-Young will be guest of honour.

Sarah Hanson-Young, who lives in Adelaide, took her seat as South Australia’s first Greens Senator – and the youngest person ever elected to the Australian Senate – on the 1^st of July 2008. Her portfolio responsibilities include youth, childhood education and care, immigration and citizenship, consumer affairs, water and the Murray-Darling Basin, human rights, sexuality issues, and Tibet. She leads the Greens’ efforts to have the Marriage Act amended to achieve marriage equality for same-sex couples, lobbies the Federal Government to protect the Murray-Darling Basin, and is a strong advocate of compassion in Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers.

Her varied career before entering the Australian Senate included positions as a campaign manager for Amnesty International (2004-2008), and State Secretary for the Australian Greens (2006).

Each year, Earle Page College invites a prominent political figure to speak at its Annual Politics Dinner. Previous speakers have included Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Bob Brown and Joe Hockey.

Sir Earle Christmas Grafton Page, after whom the College and lecture series are named, was chairman of the advisory council for the University of New England College from 1938 until 1954, and then the University’s first Chancellor from 1954 to 1960. He was Prime Minister of Australia for a brief period in 1939.

Everyone is welcome to attend Ms Hanson-Young’s lecture. A $5 donation on the night to the Earle Page College Charity Coast Run appeal in aid of the Children’s Medical Research Institute would be appreciated. For more information about the event, ring the College on (02) 6773 5300 or e-mail epc@une.edu.au.

A new book about development by University of New England political sociologist, Habib Zafarullah, promises to earn a cherished place on academic bookshelves, as well as at the elbows of NGO workers, community activists, and the leaders of grassroots movements in developing countries.

Managing Development in a Globalized World: Concepts, Processes, Institutions takes a broad look at stories of development success and failure in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. According to its publisher, it “underscores development as a continuous process that must be supported by sound policies and efficient management, supplying a wider understanding of the field.”

An important theme running throughout the book is that development must be an inclusive process and “always have people at its centre”, Dr Zafarullah said.

“The state is not the sole proprietor of the country’s development,” Dr Zafarullah said. “The people must be involved at a decision-making level in bringing about their own development. That way they will have true ownership of the development process.”

As an example of grass-roots development in action, Dr Zafarullah pointed to the Nobel prize-winning Grameen Bank founded by Prof Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1976.

“What the Grameen Bank did was to create a source of credit for villagers and the benefit of the poor. Small social loans are given to use for productive purposes. These loans are given not to individuals, but to groups of people – and, importantly, without requiring any collateral. What is also significant is that most the borrowers are women.

“Remarkably, repayment rates for these loans are around 98% – far better than any government bank. People used these loans to buy livestock and start businesses, and many of them have gotten out of poverty as a result.

“It is these kinds of home-grown, grass-roots initiatives that this book argues provide the paradigms for sustainable development.”

Dr Zafarullah said the book is already being used as a textbook at UNE and at McMaster University in Canada, where Dr Zafarullah’s co-author, Prof Ahmed Shafiqul Huque, teaches in the Faculty of Social Sciences.

He said that the book was already selling well, according to its publisher.

“I have been told by a number of academics that this book provides an excellent link between teaching and practice, which was very much our aim when we were writing it,” Dr Zafarullah said. “Our hope is that it can go beyond merely being a textbook to becoming a genuinely useful manual for people everywhere working in the field of development.”

Media contact: Dr Habib Zafarullah on (02) 6773 2250 or Leon Braun (UNE PR) on (02) 6773 3771.

Fighting an “alien invasion” that costs Australia $7 billion each year was the topic of a recent lecture by Prof Oscar Cacho, an agricultural economist at the University of New England. A video of this lecture is now available online.

“Bio-security is everyone’s business,” says Prof Cacho. “The community has a role to play in protecting Australia’s environment. This includes telling the truth to Customs when returning to Australia from overseas, and reporting noxious weeds.”

Prof Cacho, who has worked at UNE for the last 18 years, gave his inaugural professorial lecture on June 4. Prof Cacho started his professional career as a marine biologist and later became an economist. His career has included being part of a Technical Advisory Group on Control of Invasive Species in the Galapagos Islands, and a visiting expert at the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations in Rome.

A streaming video of Prof Cacho’s lecture can be viewed here: http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/kwidget/cache_st/1341560766/wid/_424421/uiconf_id/7033932/entry_id/1_hlupsr0r.

Rozzie O’Reilly, an Animal Science student at the University of New England, achieved fifth place overall from among 107 competitors at the Australian Intercollegiate Meat Judging Competition (ICMJ) held at Wagga Wagga last week.

The competing teams came from universities all over Australia, and from the United States and Japan.

Rozzie, with 909 points from a possible 1,150, was named one of the “ICMJ top ten finalists” at the Coles Awards Dinner last weekend. “The competition was very challenging,” she said, “and I was shocked – yet very happy – with my overall point score.”

She said that she was “extremely excited” about having the opportunity – as an ICMJ finalist – to travel to Brisbane later in the year to undertake a five-day Meat Standards Australia training course. From there, five students will be selected to travel to the United States to compete in a National Stock Show and gain an extensive industry tour.

UNE entered a team of nine students, all of whom participated in all classes – from retail cut and primal identification through to the judging of pork, lamb and beef carcasses – with four of the students entering as competitors. Their coaches, UNE students Georgie Lawrence and Allister Hamilton, agreed that they had “achieved great results” – and, more importantly, had “gained an insightful experience of the livestock and meat industry”.

Georgie Lawrence, a third-year Rural Science student, said that the team members were grateful to their sponsors – UNE, Jacksons Quality Meats, Teys Australia in Tamworth, and Armitage & Buckley Armidale – for making that invaluable experience possible. “They are also grateful to Glenn Bulloch for driving the bus to and from the competition, as well as for his expertise in meat judging,” she said.

For the first time, the competition was held at Charles Sturt University and Teys Australia in Wagga Wagga. “The facilities were excellent for hosting the competition,” Georgie said.

THE PHOTOGRAPH displayed here, taken at Teys Australia Wagga Wagga, expands to show (back row from left) Coach Allister Hamilton, Fred Broughton, Michael Pocock, Zac Geldof, Jacob McArthur and Adrian Brereton; (front row from left) Anna-Maree Johnston, Bree Kohlase, Emily Hall, Rozzie O’Reilly and Coach Georgie Lawrence.