I refuse to disgrace myself in front of a crowd, but I swear! This presentation-thing doesn’t get easier! I’ll be very lucky if one day I make it to my old age without gaining the reputation of the girl who shit her pants in front of an auditorium full of smart people! My presentation was scheduled for 11.20am. Which mean’t I had the first session of “Coastal Dynamics and Processes”, which I actually found extremely interesting and relevant to my own research, and funnily enough I managed to understand the majority of what was said, to fidget through! This session, being the most relevant to my Long-Suffering Mentor’s speciality meant that a barrage of questions were being scribbled down on post-it notes for me to ask at the end of certain presentations, due to her complete loss of vocal abilities, with only 24 hours to go before the Good Doctor had to present herself (God help me!). Pretending to know what she was asking about, while withstanding her rib-stabbing and gesticulations was somewhat embarrassing, but I put it all down to the experience of being a student to a very passionate, intelligent and highly-regarded scientist, who just happened to see something […]

Today began with another watching of the sunrise as I was too excited to sleep! The mid-conference field trip is always a highlight of any conference but the promise of seeing multiple volcanoes in one day was too much for this budding geologist! So, having dragged the Long-Suffering Mentor through our now common early-morning ritual of caffeine, and more caffeine (keep-cups anyone?!) we arrived at the bus stop complete with hiking packs and comfy boots! Our first stop was Mount Eden (Maungawhau). It’s a volcanic cone with a huge crater that is 50 metres deep. We were able to walk around the edge of the crater and the views over Auckland were stunning! Due to indigenous beliefs we weren’t allowed to walk down into the crater – Mataaho was a deity said to live in the crater and to be the guardian of the secrets hidden in the earth. The volcano is a scoria cone so, of course, lots of scoria was to be found (and some collected!). Next we went to the magical place of Cascades Kauri Park. This park consists of some remnant native forest and had the most magnificent Kauri Trees. They were absolutely huge – I’ve never […]

Okay…..so it always gets better on the second day doesn’t it?…… Our first sessions for today began with Human-Environment Interactions. Sounds great doesn’t it? Nice and simple? Yeah I thought so too…..and then talks such as “Anthropogenic Influences on the Sedimentary Evolution of Coromandel Harbour” (Alexander Harpur), and “Testing Lessons from the Past : Using Paleoenvironmental data to define pre-human baselines at Lake Pounui, New Zealand” (Andrew Rees)……and I was starting to rock in a corner while thumb-sucking. Despite my Long-Suffering Mentor assuring me that I was going to be okay and wasn’t, in fact, on another planet having an out-of-body experience that wasn’t altogether enjoyable, I remained dubious until morning tea rolled around and I all but ran for the scones and tea bags! It was while waiting in line for the English Breakfast that I met the lovely Dr Helen Bostock who was one of those presenters from the first day that I had been trying very hard to avoid! She assured me that even she was having trouble understanding some of the science (although I think she was just being kind and having noticed the skittishness in my eyes and the panic in my voice had sensed I […]

The sunrise from our beautiful apartment was breathtaking! And I can testify first hand to that because I was so nervous that I was awake and watching it! Having managed to get some caffeine into my Long-Suffering Mentor and prompt her to perform some personal hygiene ablutions (she is NOT a morning person!), we ambled across the road to our first sessions of the 2016 AQUA Biennial Conference – Quaternary Perspectives from the City of Volcanoes. The first sessions were on Millennial Scale Climate Variability. Huh? After a wonderful and inspiring morning tea which consisted of me scarfing scones in a corner trying to convince myself it was all going to be okay and I wasn’t the only idiot in the room, we began the second sessions on Australian Peat Deposits and the Paleoecological Potential. I was shitting kittens….. I was bombarded with wiggle graphs. Paleoecologists LOVE wiggle graphs! It’s like cocaine to them – they can’t get enough and the more the wiggle the better the high! It was like being the only sober person in a room full of happy drunks! The only words I understood were the ones I was busy googling while trying to keep track […]

It’s not like I’ve lived under a rock (excuse the pun!) but, I have never been outside of Australia in my whole life! While others were travelling Contiki tours, AB and I were married at 21 and having babies at 23! While others were building careers, I was looking after 4 children and juggling a job as a vet nurse. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change a thing! But to say that at the age of 43 I still didn’t have a passport was somewhat strange…… So, when my Long-Suffering Mentor suggested we go to the AQUA conference (Australasian Quaternary Association) that was being held in Auckland, New Zealand, I said…..”yeah, okay!”……actually……I jumped up and down squealing like a little girl whilst holding my hands between my legs to contain my pee….but that would be setting a rather undignified scenario for you…..so we shall just say I agreed, and applied for my passport! Here is a picture on the day it arrived…..and no I didn’t wear the shirt on purpose! And so began our planning for my first EVER trip outside of Australia! The conference was for five days, starting with an ice-breaker on the Sunday night (which my […]

The final day of the dig! We are all tired, sore, a little cranky……and in some ways the last day of the dig is always the longest! The final day entails filling in all the trenches (with precise excavating!), bagging and cataloguing the artefacts, washing and packing away the equipment, returning the infamous portaloo (the crapper!), and making sure the dig site has been rehabilitated and left in a somewhat better condition than when we started. There was a flurry of activity trying to get the last of the sieving completed! Directions from the Archeos was to keep sieving buckets until it was tools down and the excavator arrived. This left us with no time to sort through the bone bed pile, and at one stage I looked up from my bathtub of doom, to see Ben elbow deep trying to bag up every last particle of the bone bed into tagged bags. I quickly abandoned the sieving to help as I knew that every bag would offer a treasure trove of bones and teeth, and even as we were scooping the samples into the bags there were exclamations and profanities as we found megafauna teeth and bone. You can’t see […]

After a very late night (hic!) and a VERY early morning (hello keep cup with very strong tea bag!) we travelled back to Lancefield to help prepare for the big event of the Lancefield Megafauna Festival. Every year the township of Lancefield embraces it’s unique history and celebrates the fact that, basically, the town is one big treasure trove of Paleontological artefacts and wherever you dig you are likely to find bone from animals that have been extinct for thousands of years! It’s great! They transform the main township into a market festival with performances, food, and all sorts of treasures to buy! One of the features of this years festival was tours of the dig site. So with everyone prepared to watch out for all sorts of OHS issues regarding the public and what is technically a mining site, we conducted tours of the dig site, allowing the public to see up close and personal what it’s like to dig trenches, sit in pits, and sieve through buckets of sludge. They loved it! And so did the media! Interviews with SBS news, local print media and various radio talkshows gave us more exposure than we had dreamed of! At […]

Today, I could only spend half a day in the field, as my second eldest son, Jason, graduated from Secondary School. Apparently that’s a big deal, so big that a graduation ceremony and dinner had been planned. But there was an open bar so I was partially sated….. So, thinking I would be having to shower before the big Shindig anyway, I decided to try my hand at sieving! Now sieving is what we geos refer to as a “Right of Passage”. Most fieldies will have known the pain of being bent over a bucket trying to push rocks through a mesh! The purpose of sieving is to make sure every tiny artefact is removed from the soil sample, and usually we use a 5mm sieve which means the grid lines are about 5mm square. This usually will sort out very small pieces of bone or rock – which is what Palaeontologists and Geologists look for. But apparently Archeologists require a 1mm sieve to be used. And these are painful! Trying to push almost lithified clay through a 1mm square is just plain nasty! I akin it to cheese grating a piece of clay. I’m not sure what kind of artefact […]

Oh….my……gawd! I had the BEST day in the many BESTEST days I’ve ever had since falling in love with rocks! After rushing around and doing all my jobs to ensure the welfare and comfort of all my volunteers (I take my job very seriously with chocolate zucchini cake – the green bits are NOT those kind of green bits – and giant Anzac cookies), I made my way over to the dig site. Immediately I launched myself upon the mounds that have yielded bone and teeth and began scrambling through dirt, clay and who knows what (could be million year old shit for all I know!) and with sterile rubber gloves, I began plucking bits of bone and teeth. I was happy as a proverbial geologist/paleontologist in mud! With me elbow deep in mud, my walkie talkie went off with my Long-Suffering Mentor needing help in showing a reporter around the site. After cleaning myself off I deftly managed to try and look as professional as I could while wearing flannel and being covered head to toe in mud, and as Sanja showed the reporter to the mound I had just been working on, I looked down…… Right in front […]

So, I went to the Doctor and after being pumped full of drugs I got the all clear to come back to the dig site…..(actually I begged and pleaded and made promises of resting lots and making sure I didn’t overdo it…..yeah right!). Upon arriving back on site the weather was so inclement that the crew had called it a day. It was cold, wet and bitter – to the point people’s fingers didn’t work anymore. So instead of an active dig site, I walked into the common room full of scientists all doing their second most favourite thing! Drinking! So, when Cam and Tim (when I grow up I want to be like Cam and Tim – or marry their brains!) asked me to go and help them do something on the dig site I assumed they were just going to show me around. Five trenches have been opened up and two of them are yielding a lot of bone and teeth. I was desperate to see! We walked over to the dig site and approached a tarp that was covering three heaps of dirt. When we pulled back the tarp the dirt was full of clay and was […]