Cyclone season

The Bureau of Meteorology has released their Tropical Cyclone Seasonal Outlook for the upcoming wet season and it looks like it’s not going to be very wet.

The 2009-10 season is expected to be largely influenced by a comparatively weak El Niño event. Therefore rainfall and flooding should not be as extensive as the past two seasons and a tropical cyclone impact on the east coast is a little less likely than in neutral or La Niña years. These conditions would favour a late start to the monsoon.

After a very dry winter this isn’t good news.

Aboriginal rock art

The world’s largest rock art database.

The Jawoyn Association – which represents the Jawoyn people, whose traditional land spans from Katherine up into Arnhem Land – says it has uncovered more than 3,000 Aboriginal rock art sites.

The association’s cultural manager, Ray Whear, says two of the rock paintings seem to depict tasmanian tigers.

I wonder why modern-day paints only last a few years but indigenous Australians could make paint that lasted for millennia.

Farmers accused of wombat slaughter

This is too sick for words:

Farmers are illegally slaughtering thousands of wombats in South Australia, a nature group says.

Brigitte Stevens from the Wombat Awareness Organisation says burrows of southern hairy-nosed wombats are being bulldozed or blown up on Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas and in the Murraylands.

She says farmers can get permits to destroy a few wombats, but that it not a licence to wipe out the entire population.

“There’s not enough or not good enough regulations on what actually happens to the wombat if those numbers are being killed,” she said.

Idiots.