For more details about the lectures and presenters please visit the webpage here.
Please note: Because of Covid restrictions it is important to contact the Captain before turning up to ensure there is a vacancy on that date. U3A members are able to attend two lectures as guests before being asked to enrol.
3 February : Mudjimba – Jane Stephens – Flowers in the Desert – local news and the importance of journalism
15 February : Sippy Downs – Paul Ryan – An Itinerant Forester
8 March : Sippy Downs – Relations Australia, Ben O’Rourke, Lola Mashado, Russell Faulkner
15 March : Sippy Downs – Ken Granger – Mysteries of the Polynesian Triangle
16 March : Nambour – Dr Sarah Pye – Saving the Sun Bears
22 March : Sippy Downs – Keir Tierney – Scams – digital legacy (how to manage social media and digital presence after passing away)
An Introduction to Cancer – Causes, Investigations and Treatments – Professor Alex Crandon
Archaeology in Australia – Fiona McGill
Mongolia by train – Gwyn Jarrott
Climate: everything you need to know but were afraid to ask. – Ken Granger
Expanding Tropics, Arctic amplification, meandering jet streams, stalled and blocking weather systems and climatic extremes : global perspectives – Professor Stephen Turton
The History of Wood – Paul Ryan
Salt & Sugar the Silent Killers, and Pro & Prebiotics – Paul Munchenberg
The World Wide Web – Is the Internet the wild, wild west? – Jane Stephens
The Case for Battery Electric Vehicles – John Saint-Smith
Presented by: Joe SmithJoe Smith has kept honey and native bees for over 5 years in Brisbane, before moving to the Sunshine Coast. This lecture covers organic hobby bee keeping which ranges all the way from basic tools needed to harvesting honey and then splitting the hive.
Presented by: John Saint-Smith By 2040 there will be half a million people living on the Sunshine Coast, similar to the current population of the Goaled (sic) Coast. By then almost half of the population will be over the age of 55, and most of those over 65, and contrary to rumours, we’re neither infirm nor demented. Long before then, the die will be cast as the unplanned car-based strip expansion of the population centres will be cast in concrete and bitumen. How should we be influencing the development of the Sunshine Coast now so that it caters for the on-going needs and aspirations of the older half of the population in years to come?
Presented by: Professor Dr David FryerModern research into the relationship between work, unemployment and mental health effectively began in the Vienna of Sigmund Freud amidst rising antisemitism and the beginnings of contemporary social science. It continued across Europe during the Great Depression, expanded and intensified under the sweeping political changes made by Margret Thatcher in the UK and under Ronald Reagan in the USA and received fresh impetus, in Australia, as austerity policies were adopted. We will look at the social history of unemployment and its accompanying health research, ways in which social scientists have attempted to demonstrate that unemployment causes misery, morbidity and mortality, theoretical approaches to explaining what it is about the lived experience of unemployment which is psychologically toxic and how politicians and policy makers have responded to the research. We will close by thinking through implications for the psychological impacts of part time, precarious, employment and retirement.
Professor Dr David Fryer is currently Honorary Research Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, where he supervises PhD research students, and is Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa. He was an invited speaker at an international conference, Pathologies of Capitalism and a contribution to his travel costs by Sunshine Coast Council enabled his attendance.
Professor Dr David Fryer formerly held positions as Professor of Community Psychology at Charles Sturt University, Professor of Psychology and Head of Research at the Australian Institute of Psychology (Brisbane), co-Editor of the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology and President of the European Community Psychology Association. David is currently Honorary Research Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, where he supervises PhD research students, and is Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa. David lives in Maleny and is a volunteer in Maleny Film Society. David was an invited speaker at an international conference, Pathologies of Capitalism, at City University of New York in November 2018, on which is U3a presentations will draw. The conference was attended by researchers from Africa, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Central America, Denmark, England, Hungary, the Indian Sub-Continent, Japan and the USA. David was the sole Australian conference delegate.
I have been fascinated by volcanoes from a young age and through my career as a geographer. I have had many opportunities to visit and study these powerhouses of nature. In this lecture I will introduce some of the science and terminology of volcanoes before talking about five active volcanoes in PNG. They are:
These fascinating features dominate the landscapes in which they lie and have become tourist attractions in their own right. I have selected a few of the more interesting destinations I have visited over the past 20 years or so, at least in part to see their volcanic landscapes.
Many of these sites have great historic interest, such as Vesuvius which buried the Italian towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD, or the even more devastating eruption of the Greek island of Santorini around 1620 BC. These have attracted tourists for hundreds of years. More active centres such as Yasur on the Vanuatu island of Tanna attract the more adventurist tourists to witness its spectacular night-time displays (photo). For me, however, the must-visit location for anyone with an interest in the forces of nature is Iceland, the Land of Fire and Ice, where ice sheets cap, and massive glaciers spill off, active volcanoes.
The graphitic nature of both sedimentary host rocks and some fault intersections at Nashville (now Gympie) provoked initial precipitation of precursor gold masses within quartz veins. Over geological time, a network of soft gold veinlets was compressed into a dense gold nugget.
In February 1868, George Silas Curtis and Valentine Curtis Brigg, uncle and nephew working as partners, unearthed a 905ozs gold nugget from an alluvial claim in Sailors Gully. This event occurred before the establishment of a local newspaper. Names associated with the nugget include; “Curtis”, “Perseverance” and “Gympie Creek “ and others. Within two months, the nugget was monetized to £3,132/9/9 by being smelted into gold bullion at the Sydney Mint. The branch network of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney provided transit to the Mint during which fragments of information were left behind. At today’s values, the nugget would be worth at least $2,500,000. A touch of royalty into this odyssey was provided when the nugget was displayed to a wounded Prince Alfred, on-tour in Sydney. Unfortunately, an image has been not been found to illustrate the character of this rare natural specimen. With such a short, transient life, the identity of this nugget has been obscure relative to many others, despite still being the largest ever found in Queensland.
Dr Tom Hewitt is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers (UK), a Member of the Design Institute of Australia and an inductee in the Australian Designers Hall of Fame (2008). He has completed his PhD thesis and is a guest lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He gained his doctorate in 2016 after a career designing museum galleries, exhibitions, and commemorative features.
Just as humans are linked through family connections, so are languages. The English language has evolved from the Indo-European Language Family and it has many linguistic cousins. These include the Germanic group of languages, as well as French, Latin and Greek, among others. Our current language usage is derived from its past. Where will it head from here?
