Australian government Water Fund Grants

Community Water Grants
Call for Applications

The Australian Federal Government is calling for applications from Indigenous organisations, conservation groups and other community organisations for water grants up to AU$50,000 each to help save, reuse or improve the health of local water sources.

The Community Water Fund totals AU$2 billion with AU$200 million being allocated over the next five years to assist communities play a positive role in alleviating Australia's water crises.

Australia has large tracts of desert, however it is also known to have massive sub-terranean water reserves, especially in South Australia, the driest state in the driest continent on earth when annual rainfall is tallied.

Grants' are available for projects related to:

1. Water saving & efficiency
2. Water reuse & recycling
3. Improving surface & groundwater health

Applications close October 4th, 2005 and may be made by calling
Freecall 1800 780 730 within Australia or access the water grants website Here!

Earliest songbirds had an Aussie twang

Republished

Judy Skatssoon
ABC Science Online

The world's songbirds, including this tree sparrow, originated in Australia, then spread throughout the globe (Image: Science/Tommy Holden/BTO)

Nightingales, mockingbirds and songbirds around the world originated in Australia then populated the rest of the globe, a new DNA study suggests.

Until relatively recently, researchers had believed the opposite, that sparrows, finches, wrens, crows, canaries, ravens and sparrows originated in Europe and north America, then had populated Australia.

The U.S. and Swiss study was reported online today by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research led by Dr Keith Barker from the Bell Museum of Natural History in Minnesota looked at the passerines, or perching birds, which make up half the world's birds. Three-quarters of passerines are songbirds.

The scientists conducted the largest ever analysis of passerine DNA to trace the origins of perching birds back to the super-continent Gondwana.

The study showed passerines originated in Western Gondwana, which split into Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica, with the sub-species of songbirds evolving in what is now Australia.

Assistant director of the Australian Museum in Sydney, Associate Professor Les Christidis said the study built on research by Australian authors, including himself, in the late 1980s.

He said the suggestion that songbirds originated in Australia was considered "ludicrous" when it was first published.

"When we first suggested this ...we got laughed at by the Americans," he said.

"Australia doesn't have that many birds relative to the rest of the world, so how could it be the centre of everything?

"It turns out that lowly Australia really is the centre. Australia can lay claim to the songbirds without a shadow of a doubt."

He said passerine birds found along the east coast of Australia, such as lyre birds, bower birds, tree creepers and honey eaters were living examples of tens of millions of years of evolution.

Australian ornithologist Wayne Longmore from Museum Victoria said the hypothesis challenged 200 years of thinking.

"Up until the last four or five years it's always been thought that the passerine birds originated in the northern hemisphere and spread south and that's been the gospel for the last 200 years," he said.

The oldest passerine fossil was also found in Australia, dating back to the early Eocene period about 55 million years ago.

First Americans may have been Aussies

Ancient Worlds News - First Americans may have been Aussies - 07/09/2004

Find ABC article HERE! Inhabitants of what is now Australia travelled by canoe to settle in the Americans more than 30,000 years ago, say anthropologists in light of new research.

They would have island hopped via Japan and Polynesia to the Pacific coast of the Americas at a time when sea levels were lower than they are today, Dr Silvia Gonzalez fromJohn Moores University in Liverpool told this week's annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Exeter.

The claim will be unwelcome to today's native Americans who came overland from Siberia and say they were there first.

Most researchers say they came across the Bering Straits from Russia to Alaska at the end of the Ice Age, up to 15,000 years ago.

But Gonzalez said skeletal evidence pointed strongly to Australian origins and hinted that recovered DNA would corroborate it.

"This is very contentious," said Gonzalez. "[Native Americans] cannot claim to have been the first people there."

She said there was very strong evidence that the first migration came from Australia to the Pacific coast of America.

Skulls of a people with distinctively long and narrow heads discovered in Mexico and California predated by several thousand years the more rounded features of the skulls of native Americans.

One particularly well preserved skull of a long-face woman had been carbon dated to 12,700 years ago, whereas the oldest accurately dated native American skull was only about 9000 years old.

"We have extracted her DNA. It is going to be a bomb," she said, declining to give details but adding that the tests carried out so far were being replicated to make sure they were accurate.

She said there were tales from Spanish missionaries of an isolated coastal community of long-face people in Baja California, known as the Pericues, who were of a completely different race and rituals from other communities in America at the time.

"They appear more similar to southern Asians and the populations of the Pacific Rim than they do to northern Asians," she said. "You cannot have two face shapes coming from the same place."

The last survivors were wiped out by diseases imported by the Spanish conquerors, Gonzalez said.

with AFP and ABC Science Online