A handwritten account of an extraordinary trip to the remote areas of Western Australia's North-West Coast is being auctioned at Bonham's Travel and Exploration sale in London.

In 1982, five famous Australians, the artist John Olsen, writers Dame Mary Durack and Geoffrey Dutton, the conservationist Vincent Serventy and the art dealer and collector Alex Bortignon, set out on a 10 week journey to visit Aboriginal and other isolated communities and to study the land forms of the area.

Mark Podlasly complains of aboriginal stereotypes: poverty, crime, poor education, unemployment. All are present to varying extents in aboriginal Canada, but there are lots of Mark Podlaslys, too: well-educated, articulate, professional aboriginals, living off-reserve, who don’t accept the vision of most of the country’s native political leaders.

Canada’s aboriginal people and others at high risk of drowning are among those least served by conventional water safety training, say injury prevention experts.

“There’s been a longstanding stigma that aboriginal people are too stupid or don’t want to learn about water safety, and that’s just ridiculous,” says Audrey Giles, an associate professor in the School of Human Kinetics at the University of Ottawa in Ontario. “Aboriginal communities on frozen waterfronts get sent posters and instructions targeted at white children in heated swimming pools. We shouldn’t be shocked that this isn’t getting the right message across.”

IF you take the road from Bergville that seems to wind slowly towards the Drakensberg mountains, as though it knows it’s in the presence of majesty, you cross over the Woodstock Dam. Pass a trading store that looks like the set of a Western movie, carry on up the hill and you will see a thatched cottage to the right.

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record.
Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date — but the point is that the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on its own terms.