This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from Australia — covering advances in conservation, public health, Indigenous rights, clean energy, and more. Each entry highlights progress worth knowing about.
In a move that will make the Sydney institution the world’s first university to be energy carbon neutral, the University of New South Wales has inked a deal to meet all its electricity needs with solar energy from next year onwards.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has announced the government will ban single use plastic bags “as quickly as we can”.
A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia created the biggest perovskite solar cell so far, also setting a new efficiency record with it.
Australian Greens party Sen. Larissa Waters breast-fed her baby, Alia Joy, during a session in the Senate Chamber at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia.
South Australia is not just likely to have already met its target of 50 per cent renewables some eight years ahead of time, it is now heading for an extraordinary penetration rate of 80 per cent wind and solar by 2021.
MSC-certified fishing began in 2000, when Western Australia’s Western Rock Lobster fishery became the first in the world to earn the Marine Stewardship Council’s blue label. Auditors scrutinized its pot-based methods, stock health, and management rules — and it has since been recertified four times, offering early proof that commercial fishing and ocean stewardship can hold together.
The International Coral Reef Initiative launched in December 1994, when eight nations — from Jamaica to Japan — met in the Bahamas and pledged the first global partnership devoted entirely to coral reefs. Reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor but shelter roughly a quarter of marine species, and until then, no international body had spoken for them alone.
Penicillin’s first human trial took place at Oxford in February 1941, when Howard Florey’s team treated a dying police constable named Albert Alexander. He improved dramatically for five days before the scarce drug ran out, and he later died. The experiment still opened the door to antibiotic medicine, which Florey estimated would go on to save tens of millions of lives.
Australian federation arrived on January 1, 1901, when six British colonies voted themselves into a single Commonwealth. The draft constitution was hammered out across conventions in the 1890s, then ratified by popular referendum in each colony. In an age of empires and revolutions, Australia became a nation largely by asking its people to say yes.
In 1606, a small Dutch ship called the Duyfken nudged into the waters off Cape York, and its captain Willem Janszoon became the first European on record to set foot on Australia. He charted about 320 kilometers of coast, convinced he was still tracing New Guinea — unaware he’d brushed the edge of a continent Aboriginal peoples had called home for at least 65,000 years.
