Fran Molloy teaches Journalism and Society: Science, Environment and Politics at NYU Sydney. She describes her exciting approach below:
Environmental journalism lies at a fascinating crossroad today. Focus on environmental issues has never been stronger as the crisis of climate change becomes apparent; and at the same time, media is transforming hugely, subject to unprecedented shifts in power and audiences as the web drives participation and a demand for information and conversations that can no longer be one-way.
Sydney is a great place to learn about environmental journalism as we are close to some fascinating places and people, and can get first-hand observations as we explore this journalistic tradition, its forms and its themes, and the place it takes in the new media world.
In the Journalism and Society course, we spent four weeks of the first half of the semester in the field, which really informed our writing-based second session.
Students walked through coastal wetlands, visited a bird sanctuary, and remnant urban forests; they met Senators, activists, developers and scientists – (at least one in each category!); and then they all developed a news and a feature story for publication and wrote about the latest in environment media and various environment topics for our class blog: http://ozonenyu.wordpress.com. .

We took a train to Wolli Creek, walking through threatened urban forest where we were thrilled to see a three-metre black snake devouring a frog. (Some of us were less thrilled than others!)
We also went by bus to the sensitive Kurnell peninsula, where local expert John Atkins of the Botany Bay Environment Centre guided us through the National Park. We visited the Cape Solander whale-watching research platform, and looked at the impact of heavy development on Botany Bay and the adjoining wetland of Towra Point, a listed bird sanctuary where many threatened migratory bird species rest from journeys of more than 12,000km, from distant sites in Siberia, China and Japan.
We went from observing tiny, brightly coloured anemones in rockpools to marveling at beautiful littoral rainforest inhabited by kookaburras and parrots and the odd wallaby. Our timing was a little out, we realized, when finding out that the cast of Modern Family had been at the same spot just a week earlier.

Though we stopped for lunch and potentially a swim at the beautiful Cronulla beach, this semester the weather turned cold, so no-one braved the water – though we did look at the million-dollar mansions being built just one sand-dune away from the open sea and mused on the impact that sea level rise might have on these homes.
Our other field trips included a visit to the $6 billion Barangaroo development, where we heard about their sustainability initiatives and challenges, and a walk up to NSW Parliament, where we met with Jeremy Buckingham, a Member of the Legislative Council – the equivalent of a US State Senator – who is part of the Greens Party. It was a favourite with our students and gave us all a real insight into the political process.

Dr. Anna Westbrook is NYU Sydney’s lecturer in Creative Writing and has recently been offered a book deal. Anna was shortlisted for the prestigious Australian/Vogel Literary Award for unpublished manuscripts by writers under the age of 35. Her debut novel, The Quiet Noise, will be published by Scribe Publications in 2015.
Dr. Westbrook’s novel The Quiet Noise is eloquent and spare, based on the real-life murder of a young girl in inner Sydney in the 1940s.
Dr. Westbrook, who has a PhD in creative writing, says of the book, “The Quiet Noise came from a chance dalliance in a coffee shop with a pictorial history of Newtown and a story about a murder in a cemetery. The cemetery I knew intimately – it was around the corner. The dark night in 1946 I knew nothing about, but could not shake. It took more than five years to listen to the noise and learn about the history of my community in those turbulent years after the Second World War and find the traces of that world left in this one. I’m thrilled to be publishing with Scribe because I want to see more diverse voices in Australian historical novels to tell the stories that the ghosts want told.”
The Quiet Noise will be published next year, but you those of you in Sydney can see Dr. Westbrook at the Emerging Writers’ Festival next week.

Dr. Toby Martin, who teaches Global Orientations: Australian Society and Culture at NYU Sydney, describes his approach to the course and a recent trip with students to an Anzac day dawn service. Professor Martin is musician and historian and he’ll be teaching a second course – The Australian Experience (within the Social & Cultural Analysis program) – starting next semester. His first monograph, Yodelling Boundary Riders: Country Music in Australia, will be published next year. Here is his description:
In the Global Orientations course at Sydney we seek to understand what has contributed to that thorny issue of ‘Australian identity.’ We look at how Australians have imagined themselves as somehow ‘distinctive’, and we look at how the Australian experience differs from the American experience. We also equip students with a framework that will enrich their time in Sydney: helping them to become ‘critical tourists.’ Where possible, we connect these course aims with field trips, both as part of Global Orientations and as part of the Student Life program.
With this in mind, a trip to the Anzac Day dawn service was a marvellous opportunity to bring to life some of the things we had been discussing in the classroom and to take part in one of the big events of the Australian calendar. Anzac Day commemorates the landing at the Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey, by Australian and New Zealand troops on 25th April 1915 as part of the First World War. It was a failure. It resulted in huge losses of life and limb, and the eventual retreat by the Anzac troops. It was the first time Australia had gone to war as a nation and although losing the battle (which was the fault of the British anyway, or so the legend goes) had acquitted themselves nobly. Australians seem to love stories about noble, or even ignoble, losers, and this story is the mother of them all.
Anzac Day seems to have risen in significance and popularity in the last few decades. Some 10,000 Australians now make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli every year, while at home, thousands attend dawn services and the subsequent veterans parade. Television specials extol the wonders of the ‘Anzac Spirit’ while an eager audience gobble it up along with their ‘Anzac Biscuits’. For many people the ‘Anzac Spirit’ is otherwise known as ‘mateship’, an Australian word for a very universal ideal: loyalty to one’s friends in times of struggle. This idea of ‘mateship’ is seen to be embodied in the deeds of Anzac. Anzac Day has its critics. Notable historians have recently argued that it glorifies death and militarism, or encourages ugly displays of jingoistic nationalism. The problem is not that war is remembered, but that Anzac Day seems to make war the central experience of the nation, and in doing so excludes many other experiences and people from ‘nation-building’. It’s a thorny issue indeed.
With all this cultural significance in the backs of their minds, several students braved the early (4am!) hour and came with me to Sydney’s dawn service. There we stood with 5,000 other early risers in the narrow canyon of a city street while hymns were sung, excerpts from soldiers’ diaries were read and the ‘Last Post’ was played. Crowds are usually loud. This one was eerily silent. Onlookers ranged from WWII veterans, to Afghanistan War veterans, to those in boyscout uniforms. There were young people who had perhaps not gone to bed yet, to families with small children, not long roused from sleep. For a country not known for its religiosity, the service had an unusually spiritual feeling. This feeling has led some commentators to call Anzac a ‘secular religion.’
However, Australians’ sense of occasion always has its limits. When the national anthem Advance Australia Fair was played, barely anyone sung along. Very few Australians even know the words and it is not uncommon to see Australian Olympians on the gold medal dais stumbling over the lyrics. I asked the students what they thought would be different about such an event in America. Certainly everyone would be singing the national anthem, one of them noted.