Michael West’s Blog

I’ve been meaning to write this post for quite a while, but life is busy (as usual) so here it is now…

One of the real privileges that I have is to be an Australia Day Ambassador. This came about because back in 2006 I was a New South Wales Finalist in the Young Australian of the Year Awards - an enormous honour indeed. It was a privilege just to be nominated! There is a little more information about this here and you can find a list of the other finalists here.

Following this I was invited by the NSW Australia Day Council to participate in the Australia Day Ambassador Program. Thanks to the sponsorship of Woolworths, the Australia Day Ambassador Program sends about 400 high achieving Australians to community Australia Day celebrations all over NSW and Australia. Ambassadors are invited as guests of honour at celebrations around the country and are often part of the activities and events on the day. As part of the celebrations, Ambassadors are asked to deliver the keynote address which captures the true spirit of being Australian.

Its quite a big deal and something that I thoroughly enjoy as it has given me the opportunity to visit some fantastic places and meet some really interesting people. In 2006 I visited Tumut Shire Council and the towns of Tumut, Talbingo and Adelong and in 2007 I visited the Kyogle Shire Council in northern NSW and participated in Australia Day celebrations at a small town called Tabulam, west of the Border Ranges National Park. You can read a little more about my visit to Tabulam in an article that appeared in the ANU College of Science’s ScienceWise magazine by David Salt. See page 10 of the PDF or you can find the website for it here.

Each time I have had the opportunity to give an Australia Day Address and given my profession and my passion, I’ve spoken about Australia’s involvement in space exploration, past, present and future; and how Australian’s benefit from space derived services everyday. My speeches have usually been very well received - I guess mainly because its not the usual thing people would hear on Australia Day (most Ambassadors are sports people or media personalities - you can find a list here) - and has always resulted in some interesting conversations with people afterwards.

This past Australia Day I was the Ambassador to the Snowy River Shire Council and attended celebrations in Jindabyne, Berridale, Adaminaby and Dalgetty as well as a visit to the local elderly persons hostel. It was a jam packed day but one that I really enjoyed. The weather was divine and the region that we got to drive through were just stunning. In the lead up to and following Australia Day I got a little bit of publicity about my visit to the Snowy River region, including an interview on ABC Canberra Radio and a few other regional radio stations. I also got mentioned in Engineers Australia’s magazine and E-News and on Mars Society Australia’s website.

Being an Ambassador has been fantastic in the past. I hope I have the opportunity to participate again in the future.

I’m currently sitting in the Qantas Club in Sydney watching the sunrise over the city - a really amazing site. I’m here because I got upgraded to business class for my flight to Cairns and subsequently get free use of the Qantas Club. I’m off to Cairns for the week to attend the 9th International Workshop on the Interrelationship of Plasma Experiments and Space (IPELS2007), which is a conference on space physics that my research group SP3 is running. I’m really looking forward to conference and making the most of the warm weather. It was 28 degrees there yesterday and the minimum was higher than Canberra’s maximum yesterday!

It will also be nice to have the conference completed as I have been on the organising committee and been responsible for the conference website and online abstract submission system etc - quite a time consuming task. I will be presenting a poster at the conference so fortunately I don’t have the stress of doing an oral presentation. My abstract on my work on the Helicon Double Layer Thruster can be found here. The conference includes a day out at Green Island so I will do my best to post some photos.

The past 4 weeks have been pretty hectic and the last week has been just plain awful (more on that later). It probably best to start at the beginning. So far this month has consisted of …

• Christina and I had an engagement party in Sydney (which was great) and then another one in Canberra the next afternoon (which was also great). Photos are coming soon.
• The upgrades on the vacuum chamber for the HDLT were finally finished allowing me to reassemble everything (about 2 weeks of work) and attempt to get experiments underway. More on that in my next post.
• I had a French engineering student shadow me at work for a week. It was good to have the extra set of hands to help with things, but keeping him busy was draining.
• I’ve been off to the physio on average twice a week for treatment on my hand, which is improving so at last I can return to goalkeeping duties. My two games playing in defense were admirable but contained moments of madness including conceding a direct free kick for a tackle in the box. Fortunately our substitute keeper saved it (and my dignity).
• Canberra was forecast to get snow down to 500 metres (basically everywhere) and it didn’t. Such an anti-climax. All we got instead were a few nights at -6 deg C and a nice white blanket on the ranges.
• I traveled to Brisbane for Christina and my final engagement party. After some running around to organise things the day before it all went smoothly and was also good. I even made raspberry & white chocolate muffins from scratch (under Christina’s guidance)!! Photos coming soon as well.
• I’ve been staying up to watch the Socceroos woeful performance thus far in the Asian Cup. Thankfully they rediscovered playing professionally and beat Thailand to progress to a quarter-final showdown against Japan.
• Finally, I got the reviewer’s comments back on my first journal paper. Their comments were positive but much work is required to get all the changes they requested done.

The photo above is a of brushtail possum that was perched in one of the trees outside the Research School of Physical Sciences & Engineering where I work. The poor thing looked pretty cold and was happy to sleep there most of the day. Even the noise from the workshops didn’t trouble it.

The weekend before last I joined Christina and some of friends from her church for a weekend at Broken Head just south of Byron Bay. We stayed in the caravan park there, right on the beach and had a great time. The weather was amazing - sunny, clear and warm (~27 deg C). We went up to Byron Bay on the Saturday for breakfast and checked out the lighthouse later. While we were there we spotted several pods of dolphins playing out amongst the breakers. I managed to get some good photos as well. It was good to hang out with some of Christina’s friends from Brisbane and get to know them a bit better. Going somewhere warm and sunny was exactly what I needed after several long and busy weeks (hence the absence of posts here). Getting off the plane on the Monday morning was a bit of a shock to the system though. It was 5 deg C in Canberra when I arrived!

Over the weekend I visited an old friend from high school, Matt Beaver and his wife Vanita in Australia’s largest inland city, Wagga Wagga. I met up with Jason & Naomi Barber (I also went to school with Jay) in Yass and we proceeded on to Wagga late on Friday night. We all had a great weekend hanging out and catching up - I hadn’t seen Matt & Vanita in well over a year and hadn’t actually had a chance to talk with them properly since their wedding just over 3 years ago! On Saturday it was 38 degrees C so we headed to Wagga Beach for a swim. Despite being a long way in land, Wagga does have a beach! It’s actually the Murrumbidgee River and it was very refreshing.

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