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Know your Sea Cucumbers!
The Great Sandy Strait (Korrawinga) and surrounding Hervey Bay area are known habitats for many sea cucumber species, including those that were historically targeted in the local bêche-de-mer fishery during the 1980s and 1990s.
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Review of Saving K’gari from the Sand Miners: Memoir of the Fraser Island Environmental Inquiry, 1975–76 by Chris Loorham
Chris Loorham’s memoir is a rich, engaging, and historically valuable contribution to Australian environmental history. It blends personal narrative, legal analysis, and political context to illuminate the Fraser Island Environmental Inquiry (1975–76), a pivotal moment in the evolution of Commonwealth environmental powers. The paper succeeds in offering both a reflective personal account and a substantive explanation of how respectful relationships, inclusive leadership, and independent inquiry shaped a landmark conservation outcome.
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Celebrating Tokiko’s Contribution to K’gari
On 25 May 2026, Tokiko (Su) Dawson will officially be hanging up her work boots. For over two decades, the FIDO volunteer and environmentalist has coordinated FIDO’s quarterly week-long weeding, bush regeneration and monitoring program operating from Talinga (the former Sinclair family home) at Eurong.
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Lessons for K’gari: Wolf Management in Yellowstone National Park
K’gari QPWS rangers, BNTAC rangers and QPS staff were treated to an afternoon one-hour session with renowned wildlife researcher Professor Dan MacNulty, learning about the similarities of Yellowstone National Park visitor and wildlife risk mitigation management to the K’gari management program. Let’s just say the rangers were glad they don’t work with bears on K’gari.
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Building Stewardship for K’gari through Citizen Science
The Australian Citizen Science Association defines citizen science as ‘public participation and collaboration in scientific research to increase scientific knowledge.’
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Sea Cucumber Research Update
As we wrote in the last newsletter, PhD student Alison Hammond from the University of the Sunshine Coast is currently undertaking a research project on the sea cucumber (bêche-de-mer) fishery in Hervey Bay, the Great Sandy Strait and Tin Can Bay in the 1980s and 1990s. Project results will be used to map the historical and current distribution of sea cucumbers.
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K’gari Conference 2025
The University of the Sunshine Coast’s 2025 conference celebrated the theme Voices of K’gari: Research, Respect and Responsibility, bringing together K’gari’s Traditional Owners, the Butchulla people, leading researchers, conservationists and artists who together explored the cultural, ecological and geological stories of K’gari and the surrounding Great Sandy region.
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Will killing dingoes on K’gari make it safer? We think it’s unlikely.
After the tragic death of Canadian backpacker Piper James on K’gari (Fraser Island) on January 19, a coroner found the 19–year–old had been bitten by dingoes while she was still alive, but the most likely cause of death was drowning. Days later, the Queensland government announced it would cull the entire pack of ten dingoes seen near where Piper’s body was found. Most of those animals have now been killed.
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Dingoes are not domestic dogs
For decades, scientists, policymakers, graziers and land managers have been locked in a surprisingly high stakes debate over what defines a dingo. Are these wild canids their own species? Or are they simply feral dogs?
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K’gari Tops the Island Charts for Frog and Freshwater Fish Biodiversity
Researchers have completed the first comprehensive database of freshwater species on Australian islands. The results of the research have been published in Diversity and Distributions journal.
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FINIA 