Tolga, Queensland
Tolga is a town and locality on the Atherton Tableland in the Tablelands Region in Far North Queensland, Australia. It is the centre of the region's peanut industry. In the 2016 census, the population of Tolga was 2718. Tolga is located on the Atherton Tableland; the Kennedy Highway traverses the locality from the north-west to the south of the locality, passing through the town, in the southern part of the locality. To the north-west of the town is a large residential development, marketed under the names of Tandara and Panorama Views; the Barron River forms the north-east boundary of the locality. The south-western boundary of the locality is the drainage divide that separates the drainage basin of the Barron River from that of the Mitchell River; the northern and eastern parts of Tolga are flat land used for cropping. However, the western parts of the region are more mountainous and are undeveloped, but is to be the location of the Mount Emerald Wind Farm under construction on the Great Dividing Range.
The Tolga Scrub on the southern side of town is one of the last remaining areas of Mabi rainforest on the Atherton Tableland. It is the most drought resistant type of rainforest in Australia; the Tolga Scrub is 100 metres wide. The name Tolga is thought to be derived from the Aboriginal word for red volcanic soil; the town was called Martin Town, grew out of a Cobb and Co staging post at Rocky Creek. The town's name was changed to Tolga in 1903. During World War II in 1943 the Australian Army established their largest storage and repair centre to the west of the town centred on Griffin Road and Tate Road to support the War in the Pacific, it was known as the 13 Australian Advanced Ordnance Depot and was operated by the Royal Australian Army Ordnance Corps under the command of lieutenant colonel LW Gale with a staff of about 1000 including 200 from the Australian Women's Army Service. The complex had about 150 buildings, including 18 large igloo storage shed; the complex stored and maintained Army vehicles and vehicle parts and ammunition, clothing.
Most buildings on the site were removed in 1946 after the war had ended with one building being relocated to the Atherton Hospital for the use of the Queensland Country Women's Association. On Friday 29 November 1946, three Army personnel were working to remove cordite from the shells in the ammunition dump when the cordite ignited in a blinding flash; the three men were burned in the explosion but managed to crawl over a mile to their headquarters. Although they were rushed to the Atheron hospital, the three men died and were buried at the Atherton War Cemetery. At the 2006 census, Tolga had a population of 843. By the 2011 census, Tolga's population had increased to 2,426 people. Tolga State School opened on 10 October 1895 and is co-educational, catering for Prep - Year 6 with an enrolment of 366 students; the school celebrated its centenary in 1995. Tolga Markets are held at the Tolga Racecourse from 7am to 12pm on the first Sunday of each month. Local produce, hand crafted items, clothing and food are found for sale.
It is considered the second most popular market held on the Atherton Tableland, only smaller than the Yungaburra Markets. The Tolga branch of the Queensland Country Women's Association meets at the QCWA Hall at 60 Main Street. Tolga has a number of heritage-listed sites, including: Bowcock Road: Bones Knob Radar Station Kennedy Highway: Rocky Creek World War Two Hospital Complex University of Queensland: Queensland Places: Tolga Town map of Tolga, 1977
Barron Gorge National Park
Barron Gorge National Park is a protected area in the Cairns Region, Australia. It is predominantly within the locality of Barron Gorge; the park is 2 kilometres from Kuranda. Barron Gorge is part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area. Skyrail Rainforest Cableway is a 7.5 kilometre scenic cableway running above the Barron Gorge National Park in the Wet Tropics of Queensland's World Heritage Area north of Cairns which has won more than 25 awards. The Kuranda Scenic Railway line passes through the park with a station at Barron Falls. Two trains returns to Cairns daily; the original weir, constructed in 1934 at the top of the falls, is visible from the station lookout and Skyrail's Barron Falls Station lookouts. Barron Gorge formed where the Barron River passes over the eastern escarpment of the Atherton Tablelands. Barron Falls cascade 265 m to the gorge below. Two waterfalls—Stoney Creek Falls and Surprise Creek Falls exist on tributaries of the Barron River within the park. Slopes around the gorge are steep with some at a 45° angle.
This made construction of the railway hazardous. 23 lives were lost during its construction. The landscape of what is now Barron Gorge National Park was formed under the sea 400 million years ago when Australia was part of the super-continent, Gondwana. In 1885 the explorer Archibald Meston described the Barron Falls in flood where the raging waters "rush together like wild horses as they enter the straight in the dread finish of their last race... the currents of air created by the cataract waved the branches of the trees hundreds of feet overhead... the rock shook like a mighty steamer tumbling with the vibrations of the screw." In 1935, the waters of the Barron River were harnessed in the Barron Gorge Hydroelectric Power Station to generate Queensland's first hydroelectric power. Two hundred metres from the base of the Barron Falls an underground power station was carved into the cliff face. Water was delivered through pipes to drive two 1200 kW turbo-alternators; the substation and staff houses were built around the area now forming the Skyrail station.
Ownership of the park returned to its traditional owners on 17 December 2004. Visitors to the park have not faced any changes under the new owners but Aboriginals were able to hold traditional religious ceremonies. Bird's-nest fern and elkhorn ferns grow amongst Candlenut, Native olive and False Red Sandalwood trees at the bottom of the gorge; the park forms part of the Wooroonooran Important Bird Area, identified as such by BirdLife International because it supports populations of a range of bird species endemic to Queensland's Wet Tropics. Noisy pittas and the orange-footed scrubfowl are two species of bird that may be seen; the southern cassowary is spotted in the southern section of the park. Nocturnal animals are common; these include a variety of possums and flying foxes as well as Lumholtz's tree-kangaroo and the northern quoll. Protected areas of Queensland Barron Gorge National Park Queensland Holidays Barron George National Park protectedplanet.net
Redlynch, Queensland
Redlynch is a town and suburb of Cairns in the Cairns Region, Australia. In the 2016 census, Redlynch had a population of 9,728 people. Redlynch lies along the valley created by Freshwater Creek with the Redlynch Intake Road being the major artery running from north to south parallel and west of the creek; the residential development occurs along the lower slopes of the valley while the eastern and western sides of the suburb are undeveloped bushland on steep slopes rising to 500-600 metres which form part of the Barron Gorge National Park. The Kuranda Scenic Railway winds its way up the north-eastern slopes of Redlynch with two stations in the suburb and Jungara; the first stage of the Cairns-to-Herberton railway line was from Cairns to a location, known to the project as the Eight Mile Camp. This first stage stage opened in November 1887 at which time the railway station at the Eight Mile Camp was named Redlynch railway station. According to the Queensland Railway Department, the name Redlynch refers to Redlynch, Wiltshire in England, but other government information suggests it was named after Redlynch, Somerset in England.
In anticipation of the railway's opening, Thomas Dillon constructed the Terminus Hotel built near the Redlynch railway station. The hotel was sold to Joseph Best in December 1888, passed to Thomas Lavercombe in July 1889. Subsequent licensees included William Arthur. In March 1891, Arthur was bankrupted and the hotel was sold to Mangus Petersen, it was destroyed by fire in the 1920s. The Redlynch Hotel was constructed in 1926 opposite the railway station. Redlynch State School opened on 15 February 1932 and in 2007 added a secondary component to become Redlynch State College; the Redlynch Central Shopping Centre opened in 2005 and expanded in 2014. Redlynch has the following heritage listings: 399 Kamerunga Road: Xavier and Sadie Herbert's Cottage Redlynch to Kuranda: Cairns-to-Kuranda railway line Redlynch Shopping Villiage is opposite the hotel and diagonally opposite the railway station on the corner of Redlynch Intake Road and Margaret Street. Redlynch Central Shopping Centre is located in Larsen Road off Redlynch Connection Road.
Media related to Redlynch, Queensland at Wikimedia Commons
Emu
The emu is the second-largest living bird by height, after its ratite relative, the ostrich. It is endemic to Australia where it is the largest native bird and the only extant member of the genus Dromaius; the emu's range covers most of mainland Australia, but the Tasmanian, Kangaroo Island and King Island subspecies became extinct after the European settlement of Australia in 1788. The bird is sufficiently common for it to be rated as a least-concern species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Emus are soft-feathered, flightless birds with long necks and legs, can reach up to 1.9 metres in height. Emus can travel great distances, when necessary can sprint at 50 km/h, they take in copious amounts of water when the opportunity arises. Breeding takes place in May and June, fighting among females for a mate is common. Females can lay several clutches of eggs in one season; the male does the incubation. The eggs hatch after around eight weeks, the young are nurtured by their fathers.
They reach full size after around six months, but can remain as a family unit until the next breeding season. The emu is an important cultural icon of Australia, appearing on the coat of various coins; the bird features prominently in Indigenous Australian mythology. Emus were first reported as having been seen by Europeans when explorers visited the western coast of Australia in 1696; the birds were known on the eastern coast before 1788. The birds were first mentioned under the name of the "New Holland cassowary" in Arthur Phillip's Voyage to Botany Bay, published in 1789 with the following description: This is a species differing in many particulars from that known, is a much larger bird, standing higher on its legs and having the neck longer than in the common one. Total length seven feet two inches; the bill is not different from that of the common Cassowary. The plumage in general consists of a mixture of brown and grey, the feathers are somewhat curled or bent at the ends in the natural state: the wings are so short as to be useless for flight, indeed, are scarcely to be distinguished from the rest of the plumage, were it not for their standing out a little.
The long spines which are seen in the wings of the common sort, are in this not observable,—nor is there any appearance of a tail. The legs are stout, formed much as in the Galeated Cassowary, with the addition of their being jagged or sawed the whole of their length at the back part; the species was named by ornithologist John Latham in 1790 based on a specimen from the Sydney area of Australia, a country, known as New Holland at the time. He collaborated on Phillip's book and provided the first descriptions of, names for, many Australian bird species. In his original 1816 description of the emu, the French ornithologist Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot used two generic names, first Dromiceius and Dromaius, it has been a point of contention since as to which name should be used. Most modern publications, including those of the Australian government, use Dromaius, with Dromiceius mentioned as an alternative spelling; the etymology of the common name "emu" is uncertain, but is thought to have come from an Arabic word for large bird, used by Portuguese explorers to describe the related cassowary in Australia and New Guinea.
Another theory is that it comes from the word "ema", used in Portuguese to denote a large bird akin to an ostrich or crane. In Victoria, some terms for the emu were Barrimal in the Dja Dja Wurrung language, myoure in Gunai, courn in Jardwadjali; the birds were known as murawung or birabayin to the local Eora and Darug inhabitants of the Sydney basin. The emu was long classified, with its closest relatives the cassowaries, in the family Casuariidae, part of the ratite order Struthioniformes. However, an alternate classification was proposed in 2014 by Mitchell et al. based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA. This splits off the Casuariidae into their own order, the Casuariformes, includes only the cassowaries in the family Casuariidae, placing the emus in their own family, Dromaiidae; the cladogram shown below is from their study. Two different Dromaius species were present in Australia at the time of European settlement, one additional species is known from fossil remains; the insular dwarf emus, D. n. baudinianus and D. n. minor present on Kangaroo Island and King Island both became extinct shortly after the arrival of Europeans.
D. n. diemenensis, another insular dwarf emu from Tasmania, became extinct around 1865. However, the mainland subspecies, D. n. novaehollandiae, remains common. The population of these birds varies from decade to de
Tin
Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn and atomic number 50. It is a post-transition metal in group 14 of the periodic table of elements, it is obtained chiefly from the mineral cassiterite, which contains stannic oxide, SnO2. Tin shows a chemical similarity to both of its neighbors in group 14, germanium and lead, has two main oxidation states, +2 and the more stable +4. Tin is the 49th most abundant element and has, with 10 stable isotopes, the largest number of stable isotopes in the periodic table, thanks to its magic number of protons, it has two main allotropes: at room temperature, the stable allotrope is β-tin, a silvery-white, malleable metal, but at low temperatures it transforms into the less dense grey α-tin, which has the diamond cubic structure. Metallic tin does not oxidize in air; the first tin alloy used on a large scale was bronze, made of 1/8 tin and 7/8 copper, from as early as 3000 BC. After 600 BC, pure metallic tin was produced. Pewter, an alloy of 85–90% tin with the remainder consisting of copper and lead, was used for flatware from the Bronze Age until the 20th century.
In modern times, tin is used in many alloys, most notably tin/lead soft solders, which are 60% or more tin, in the manufacture of transparent, electrically conducting films of indium tin oxide in optoelectronic applications. Another large application for tin is corrosion-resistant tin plating of steel; because of the low toxicity of inorganic tin, tin-plated steel is used for food packaging as tin cans. However, some organotin compounds can be as toxic as cyanide. Tin is a soft, malleable and crystalline silvery-white metal; when a bar of tin is bent, a crackling sound known as the "tin cry" can be heard from the twinning of the crystals. Tin melts at low temperatures of about 232 °C, the lowest in group 14; the melting point is further lowered to 177.3 °C for 11 nm particles. Β-tin, stable at and above room temperature, is malleable. In contrast, α-tin, stable below 13.2 °C, is brittle. Α-tin has a diamond cubic crystal structure, similar to silicon or germanium. Α-tin has no metallic properties at all because its atoms form a covalent structure in which electrons cannot move freely.
It is a dull-gray powdery material with no common uses other than a few specialized semiconductor applications. These two allotropes, α-tin and β-tin, are more known as gray tin and white tin, respectively. Two more allotropes, γ and σ, exist at temperatures above 161 pressures above several GPa. In cold conditions, β-tin tends to transform spontaneously into α-tin, a phenomenon known as "tin pest". Although the α-β transformation temperature is nominally 13.2 °C, impurities lower the transition temperature well below 0 °C and, on the addition of antimony or bismuth, the transformation might not occur at all, increasing the durability of the tin. Commercial grades of tin resist transformation because of the inhibiting effect of the small amounts of bismuth, antimony and silver present as impurities. Alloying elements such as copper, bismuth and silver increase its hardness. Tin tends rather to form hard, brittle intermetallic phases, which are undesirable, it does not form wide solid solution ranges in other metals in general, few elements have appreciable solid solubility in tin.
Simple eutectic systems, occur with bismuth, lead and zinc. Tin was one of the first superconductors to be studied. Tin can be attacked by acids and alkalis. Tin can be polished and is used as a protective coat for other metals. A protective oxide layer prevents further oxidation, the same that forms on pewter and other tin alloys. Tin helps to accelerate the chemical reaction. Tin has ten stable isotopes, with atomic masses of 112, 114 through 120, 122 and 124, the greatest number of any element. Of these, the most abundant are 120Sn, 118Sn, 116Sn, while the least abundant is 115Sn; the isotopes with mass numbers have no nuclear spin, while those with odd have a spin of +1/2. Tin, with its three common isotopes 116Sn, 118Sn and 120Sn, is among the easiest elements to detect and analyze by NMR spectroscopy, its chemical shifts are referenced against SnMe4; this large number of stable isotopes is thought to be a direct result of the atomic number 50, a "magic number" in nuclear physics. Tin occurs in 29 unstable isotopes, encompassing all the remaining atomic masses from 99 to 137.
Apart from 126Sn, with a half-life of 230,000 years, all the radioisotopes have a half-life of less than a year. The radioactive 100Sn, discovered in 1994, 132Sn are one of the few nuclides with a "doubly magic" nucleus: despite being unstable, having lopsided proton–neutron ratios, they represent endpoints beyond which stability drops off rapidly. Another 30 metastable isomers have been characterized for isotopes between 111 and 131, the most stable being 121mSn with a half-life of 43.9 years. The relative differences in the abundances of tin's stable isotopes can be explained by their different modes of formation in stellar nucleosynthesis. 116Sn through 120Sn inclusive are formed in the s-process in most stars and hence they are the most common isotopes, while 122Sn and 124Sn are only formed in the r-process (rapid neutr
Australian Aboriginal kinship
Aboriginal Australian kinship are the systems of law governing social interaction marriage, in traditional Australian Aboriginal cultures. It is an integral part of the culture of every Aboriginal group across Australia. Subsection systems are a unique social structure that divide all of Australian Aboriginal society into a number of groups, each of which combines particular sets of kin. In Central Australian Aboriginal English vernacular, subsections are known as "skins"; each subsection is given a name. Skin is passed down by a person's parents to their children; the name of the groups can vary. There are systems with two such groupings, systems with four and eight; some language groups extend this by having distinct male and female forms, giving a total of sixteen skin names, for example the Pintupi and Warlpiri. While membership in skin groups is ideally based on blood relations, Australian Aboriginal subsection systems are classificatory, meaning that people who are not actual blood relations are assigned to a subsection.
They are universal, meaning that every member of the society is assigned a position in the system. Subsection systems are found in Aboriginal societies across much of Central and Northern Australia. On the basis of detailed analysis and comparison of the various subsection systems and their terminologies, in particular the apparent prefix /j-/ for male and /n-/ for female, it has been identified as a social innovation from the Daly River region of the Northern Territory, which spread southwards to other groups; the Yolŋu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land divide society into two moieties: Yirritja. Each of these is represented by people of a number of different groups through their hereditary estates – so many things are either Yirritja or Dhuwa: Fish, river, sea etc. belongs to one or the other moiety. Things that are not either Dhuwa or Yirritja are called wakinŋu. Yolŋu have a kinship system with eight subsections; the Gamilaraay language group from New South Wales have a four section system.
The Martuthunira language group from the Pilbara region of Western Australia have a four section system.. Similar systems are found across most language groups in the Pilbara, though with some variation in the forms of the names. For example, speakers of Ngarla use Milangka; the Alyawarre language group from Central Australia have a four section system, but use different terms from the Martuthunira. The Lardil of Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria have eight subsection groups, shown here with some of their totems: Each Lardil person belongs to one of these groups, their paternal grandfather's subsection determines their own. Members of each group may only marry members of one other, group. Once a person's subsection group is known, their relationship to any other Lardil can be determined. A Ngarrijbalangi is a'father' to a Bangariny, a'father-in-law' to a Yakimarr and a'son' to another Bangariny, either in a social sense or purely through linearship; the mechanics of the Lardil skin system means that generations of males cycle back and forth between two subsections.
Ngarrijbalangi is father to Bangariny and Bangariny is father to Ngarrijbalangi and for the three other pairs of subsections. Generations of women, cycle through four subsections before arriving back at the starting point; this means. The Pintupi of the Western Desert have an eight subsection system, made more complex by distinct forms for male and female subsection names; the Warlpiri system is the same: The Kunwinjku of Western Arnhem Land have a similar system. Outsiders who have significant interaction with such groups may be given a'skin name' based on the people they have interacted with and the types of interaction; the variety of English used by many Australian Aboriginal people employs kinship terms in ways that are based on their equivalents in Australian Aboriginal languages. Aunty and uncle are terms of address for older people. Brother and sister—as well as siblings this term is used to refer to children of one's mother's sister and of father's brother, just as in many indigenous languages.
Cousin-brother and cousin-sister are used to refer to children of one's mother's sister and father's brother. Cousin refers to children of one's father's sister and mother's brother, but may be extended to any relative of one's own generation, such as one who might share the same great grandparent as their own great grandparent, a second-cousin in Aboriginal terms. In south-east Queensland, daughter is used to refer to any woman of one's great-grandparents' generation; this is due to the cyclical nature of traditional kinship systems and mirrors usage in many Australian languages. Father and mother include any relative of one's parents' generation, such as uncles, their own cousins and in-laws. Grandfather and grandmother can refer to anyone of one's grandparents' generation. Grandfa
