How did a simple molecule found in smoke change the way we regenerate native plants? Find out in this episode of #TheFutureOf
How did a simple molecule found in smoke change the way we regenerate native plants? Find out in this episode of #TheFutureOf
In this episode, Professor Kingsley Dixon joins host David Karsten to discuss the critical role smoke plays in seed germination, the evolution of plant conservation and restoration practices, and how these insights are being applied to revitalise Western Australia's unique biodiversity.
How Prof Dixon’s career started [01:32]
Biodiversity regeneration efforts in Kings Park, WA [12:21]
How smoke can help with ecologic regeneration [11:23]
How Prof Dixon’s discovery impacted the nursery industry [21:04]
Discussion on cryogenics history and potential [31:4]
Bushland conservation and restoration
Professor Kingsley Dixon
Professor Dixon has led transformational research in plant conservation and restoration. As Foundation Director at Kings Park, he built a team of over 50, pioneering 'science-into-practice' approaches with $24M in industry funding. His work has positioned WA as a global leader in environmental restoration, securing $7.6M in competitive funding and establishing significant science partnerships.
This podcast is brought to you by Curtin University. Curtin is a global university known for its commitment to making positive change happen through high-impact research, strong industry partnerships and practical teaching.
Email thefutureof@curtin.edu.au
Host: David Karsten
Content creator: Alex Foot
Producer and Recordist: Emilia Jolakoska
Social Media: Celeste Fourie
Executive Producers: Matthew Sykes
Curtin University acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which Curtin Perth is located, the Whadjuk people of the Nyungar Nation, and on Curtin Kalgoorlie, the Wongutha people of the North-Eastern Goldfields; and the First Nations peoples on all Curtin locations.
OKAY by 13ounce Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Music promoted by Audio Library.
Curtin University supports academic freedom of speech. The views expressed in The Future Of podcast may not reflect those of Curtin University.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:26:05
David Karsten
This is the future of where experts share their vision of the future, how their work is helping shape it for the better. Hello, I'm David Karsten. Professor Kingsley Dixon, a distinguished researcher and academic, stands as a pioneering force in ecological restoration and mining Environmental science. Well, look, I think we need some context about you, Kingsley, and where you've come from.
00:00:26:06 - 00:00:57:19
David Karsten
I mean, you hold a professorship at Curtin University now, but your story started quite a while ago now. And it's. And it's been a storied and an altogether exquisite career in botany and to become an expert in biodiversity. You were a doyen of think of Western Australian botany. So but every story has a start. Where did your love of plants begin?
00:00:57:21 - 00:01:31:22
Kingsley Dixon
I guess I was born with a natural inkling then that was cultivated by parents who were avid gardeners. Never formally trained. They never finished high school. But. And then a grandmother who was an absolute five star vegetable grower, community grower and had ponds. And that's where I got my great love of building fishponds and stuff. But I guess where I got into the nitty gritty was native plants and Western Australian plants.
00:01:31:24 - 00:01:54:04
Kingsley Dixon
When I was young, were not accessible. There were a couple of little books. They all had complicated names and then there was just some pictorial books. And we used to go on little family picnics to the hills, often into gravel pits, because they were always the ones with the best wildflowers and things like Lula Shenault here and the red and green kangaroo paws just to plot the most special plants.
00:01:54:06 - 00:02:25:01
Kingsley Dixon
But I couldn't say the Latin names. My parents couldn't say them. But then Nan and Sue Harper came into my life. Now, who is Nan and Sue Harper? So, Nan and Sue Harper were two women who established one of Western Australia's first native plant nurseries. 1959, about 1960. Extraordinary women devoted to native flora as a kid just in primary school. I walked through their front entrance because I begged my father to drop me off one day.
00:02:25:03 - 00:02:49:16
Kingsley Dixon
He left me there for the whole day. I had my lunch. He went back to work. It was a different time. Kingsley was like, When you go, who is it also? It was a safe time. And I just knocked on the door and the relationship started. And they were the ones that demystified for me, the Latin names. So with our university educated and then and then by Botha, they both did nursing degrees.
00:02:49:18 - 00:03:24:13
Kingsley Dixon
They both were heavily involved in World War Two. They lost their fiancees, their and then devoted their subsequent lives to both native plants and Aboriginal child health care. So that's where I also got really involved with understanding the plight of First nations, particularly First Nations children, which stays with me today. Well, that understanding of connection to country and to the floor of Western Australia is something that you have obviously been familiar with for most of your life.
00:03:24:13 - 00:03:56:21
David Karsten
And has that colored your, your, direction of research and what you've favored in terms of what you studied in botany over the years? That is spot on for my PhD. And I had a wonderful mentor in Professor John Pape, who came to you WA in 1972, and I started my PhD in 1977, and he was one of the world's leading legume physiologists.
00:03:56:21 - 00:04:21:17
Kingsley Dixon
This is crop legumes. Now, he couldn't get more poles apart than West Australian native plants, and he saw me as his entree into understanding this bewildering diversity, which he couldn't understand. He was a very good Irish botanist, in fact, ran his own gardening show in Northern Ireland for a few years because he was an I veggie grower. If you couldn't eat it, you didn't grow it.
00:04:21:18 - 00:05:11:12
Kingsley Dixon
That was his view. And so we got on really well and I became his eyes and ears into the flora, and so was it really a two way kind of exchange of information and knowledge? It was his legume. Physiology was inconsequential, but he came with a wonderful plant and a physiological how plant grow and develop, which which I greedily saw the values of, you know, munched it all up because I could see we could start telling the stories of how do Western Australian plants survive on the poor soils in one of the harshest places on earth and have for 20 to 30 million years more, more climate changes than you could imagine.
00:05:11:14 - 00:05:47:09
Kingsley Dixon
And even today I look at the forest. Yeah, it looks dry, it looks poorly, but it's saying I know how to how to win this battle. And through that mentorship and me trading, that sort of insight into the flora, we developed a great research collaboration which went on for many years and including my time into Kings Park after my Ph.D., and we subsequently wrote a book from my day on plants with underground storage organs, which was the subject of my PhD.
00:05:47:11 - 00:06:08:20
Kingsley Dixon
Although the amusing story is John Pate said to me when I got my first class honors degree in 1976, he said, good. So you've got first class honors. You'll come on to a PhD. I gather I said it will have a lot to do that. And he said, Good, What would you like to do? I said, My great passion is Western Australian orchids.
00:06:08:22 - 00:06:33:15
Kingsley Dixon
And there's this uncomfortable silence. I just challenged the leg CEOs just with the concept of working on the ecology of orchids, and he quickly looked at me brush of the hand and he said, Orchids are too hard to grow, they're too slow. You can work on plants with underground storage organs, which I accepted heartily because all of our orchids have underground storage organs.
00:06:33:15 - 00:06:59:10
Kingsley Dixon
So it was a sort of back door into my orchid. Find a fascination well played by the young Kingsley Dixon. Indeed, yes. You got what you wanted. Now you met you mentioned Western Australian orchids being being very difficult to grow and at that at that stage and really, really quite poorly understood. Did your research, sort of extend further into your career?
00:06:59:10 - 00:07:24:09
Kingsley Dixon
Has that been sort of running in parallel to your professional positions? Orchids yeah, I have have been those sort of things where once you get the orchid bug, which, which I got when I was eight years old, I remember seeing my first white spider orchid, which, you know, we've got this wonderful things, common orchids. And I just was enamored.
00:07:24:11 - 00:07:49:11
Kingsley Dixon
I couldn't believe this thing. Got Rick Erickson's little book, Orchids of the West, and used to read every page and pore over the pages and gradually tick off all of the species. And back in those days, they were clearing all around us so as to go on big rescue digs. On weekend, my wheelbarrow and trusty spade little kid walk off into the bush and would come back with pots.
00:07:49:13 - 00:08:31:15
Kingsley Dixon
My parents tolerated my gradually growing collection of bush orchids from that point all the way through to today. We've retained, and I'm a strong research interest with the research group. We've got a big collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew with the Orchid Specialists there, which is right in mid-stream looking at climate change impacts on West Australian orchids. I've had a number of great collaborations and students on pollination, but the really important stuff has been the conservation where we've worked on some of our rarest orchids to try and rescue them through seed propagation, which is complicated because all of our orchids have a special partner.
00:08:31:17 - 00:08:57:02
Kingsley Dixon
They don't do it alone, they cheat on a fungus. Fortunately, fungi aren't that broad and the fungi get tricked into providing nutrients to the orchid. And the orchid in exchange can give it a little bit of its process inside the material comes through from the sunshine on the green leaves and all of our orchids all have unique relationships and often it's species specific.
00:08:57:02 - 00:09:20:16
Kingsley Dixon
And that's the work that I took into Kings Park. And we developed one of the biggest orchid programs in Australia, which is now grown orchid programs in other botanic gardens, both in Australia and overseas. Fungus and orchids. It sounds so salacious, but entirely transactional, that you mentioned Kings Park, a massive part of your career. But it was it was a very modest beginning, wasn't it?
00:09:20:17 - 00:09:50:14
David Karsten
Talk to us about how that got underway. so originally I, I applied for a position at Kings Park, just out of, out of my Ph.D., and the position was for a research assistant to the director. And I thought a botanic garden job. my God, I didn't get it. What's I was deflated. And so I waited another four months.
00:09:50:16 - 00:10:16:18
Kingsley Dixon
And then the director phoned and he said, We have another position coming up for display botanist. And I thought, right. So I asked him what's involved and he said, it's putting up information, pamphlets, taking tours, and then if you've got spare time you can do other things botanical. I thought, okay, I'll do that and had great fun.
00:10:16:18 - 00:10:43:05
Kingsley Dixon
That's where I met lots of people. I actually learned guiding and information, pamphlet development, a whole lot of stuff. But the great thing was I managed to do that a more quickly but efficiently, which gave me a little bit of research time. The one thing, though, when I did ask about the research position at the interview, I remember they said, yes, we have a lab, I've got microscopes.
00:10:43:05 - 00:11:02:02
Kingsley Dixon
Yes, it's very brittle, but I should have gone and seen it. What what did you find when you opened that door for the first time? What did I see? When I walked down the hill on my first day, a tin shed and a little door. And I opened the door on the tin shed and there was this musty old laboratory.
00:11:02:04 - 00:11:26:02
Kingsley Dixon
It had one microscope, which I thought, gosh, that's from East Germany. They're really cheap versions. They're the real dodgy ones. And it it had really been left a little bit abandoned for a number of years, but I thought, I'll get some somewhere to start. You had a little rickety old air conditioner you remember was more noisy than anything and a telephone.
00:11:26:02 - 00:11:48:04
Kingsley Dixon
So we were very modern and we began there with some of our early programs in that little building. And then it gradually grew up to what it is today. And and what is it today? And over that that time period with your involvement there at Kings Park, did you did you study what sort of research headway did you make?
00:11:48:06 - 00:12:08:10
Kingsley Dixon
So the research was never funded at Kings Park. There was no budgets given. There was no central budget. So if you wanted to do research and fund a field trip or go to somewhere exciting to get rare and endangered species, you had to drive your own car, pay your own fuel and all the rest, which wasn't a problem, but it was the very early days.
00:12:08:10 - 00:12:28:14
Kingsley Dixon
In fact, just two years, about 1984, after I took the position at Kings Park that I had a call from a mining company, they were operating in any area on mineral sands, and they said, We understand that you know a bit about native plants. We've got a rare species. We were wondering whether you could work on it for us.
00:12:28:14 - 00:12:45:21
Kingsley Dixon
I said, yeah, that'd be fine. Bone here was a long way and, you know, could you find somebody to give me some assistance? So they did. That was our first research funding and it was all very novel for Kings Park. Had never got any money. It was all state funded material and they all thought it was very amusing.
00:12:45:21 - 00:13:09:06
Kingsley Dixon
And then suddenly other people started turning up in the lab, which everyone was really quizzical all about. Who are these and what are they doing, what are they doing, and where are all these white lab coats coming from? But that was really the ignition point on multiple strands and the first strand was threatened species. I am working on that species.
00:13:09:06 - 00:13:50:03
Kingsley Dixon
I got to understand the the plight of West Australian plans for the first time. So it was very early in in that that starting part of my career. The second part was working with industry to try and come up with effective solutions after they've got their approval. Now that work continued, expanded and grew into the program. So when I left in 2015, we'd grown it from May and a wet East German microscope to a really fantastic facility of about 50 research staff and pay PhDs.
00:13:50:05 - 00:14:24:19
Kingsley Dixon
We had a research outputs of around 40 papers a year coming out. So one of the most productive of global botanic gardens. But importantly, we were one of the leaders in innovation in species conservation before we go down that route, because that's it's a really interesting avenue to explore. Did your changing understanding as the head of that research team of Western Australia's threatened species, did that change the overall remit of Kings Park and Botanic Gardens role?
00:14:24:21 - 00:15:05:12
Kingsley Dixon
It was interesting because up until that stage it was the State Botanic Garden. It was developed as one of the great UN enclosed free entry, 24 seven Botanic Gardens, but devoted to the Indigenous floor of the region. There was only one other place and that was a little botanic garden in Los Angeles, Rancho Santa Ana, and they were the two gardens with this concept that, we're in a hot spot, we've got these amazing plants, why don't we just have a garden about them instead of bringing all the imported things in and having this sort of hotchpotch Irish stew of plants of the world, which is all very interesting, very much the Kew Gardens Store,
00:15:05:13 - 00:15:31:07
Kingsley Dixon
which is, you know, fantastic, an amazing garden to go to. And that was a smash hit. But the garden was really a garden for pleasure. It didn't give any messages. And when we started the first of those programs on Threatened Species, and then I started getting involved with networking through other colleagues at that stage around what we could see was happening in Australia.
00:15:31:11 - 00:16:10:19
Kingsley Dixon
That is, we were finding more species going from common to rare than was comfortable that Kings Park then installed its first. It was called the Rare and Endangered Garden and that was fabulous. Had amazing plants put in it, had good visitation. and then ultimately in some of the main displays that they still have today, they still have threatened species sections to highlight people both the issues of where we've taken our plants, but also potentially just some of the solutions that that you can do through solid research.
00:16:10:21 - 00:16:33:07
Kingsley Dixon
Well, through that solid research, your well, our collective knowledge, thanks to you and your research team, has expanded greatly and one of those areas was was germination and some of the discoveries you made of that area. Talk us through that. Kingsley It's absolutely fascinating to look. I'll let the secret out now. I was never that interested in seeds.
00:16:33:09 - 00:17:04:01
Kingsley Dixon
Everyone seemed to work on seeds and I thought, Well, I like working on whole plants. So I was very much interested in the whole plant. And then gradually the whole issue that came from that first threatened species, which is called the Hidden Bay De Luca Hogan on Protect US For those inclined in the Latin way and but there was intriguing thing as a kid there would be a bushfire we would always go the year after bushfire and the bush was amazing.
00:17:04:01 - 00:17:28:08
Kingsley Dixon
There would be all these plants germinating and two years later there'll be all these flowers and all of this. And we all knew there was this regeneration from bushfires. It's it is what our plants have got resilience to and it's something that they respond to. And seeds loomed large with our rare species and then with a whole swag of other research programs that we got on.
00:17:28:14 - 00:17:57:10
Kingsley Dixon
How do you germinate? So, so I became the reluctant seed scientist and now loved them. And there was this perplexing problem, a third out of our 12,000 species, 4000 species, and we can't germinate on demand. You know, you put a bean seed in your garden or tomato said you're water. What happens? It comes up, right? They've lost their dormancy.
00:17:57:10 - 00:18:22:06
Kingsley Dixon
You plant a wheat seed, it's lost its dormancy. So ancestral wheat has dormancy. That's why we don't grow them with dormancy because they're easy to grow. But our Australian plants, with those very long periods of geological stability, have learned the tricks of the trade. And there are particular reasons that we've now uncovered in their ecological adaptive capacity why they do this.
00:18:22:07 - 00:18:41:22
Kingsley Dixon
But they had locked in their secrets that they'll come up after a fire, breakable bags of seed in. And it was Kings Park who said kangaroo paws, red and green, the state floral emblem. We put them in. Sometimes they come up, sometimes they don't. We just put in lots of them and we get enough up. And I just kept thinking, There's got to be something.
00:18:41:22 - 00:19:04:12
Kingsley Dixon
And they come up like hairs on a cat's back. Even in Kings Park bushland after a fire that was you go two years after and the red and green kangaroo paws copied the landscape and we then got on to like everybody else and thought, it'll be the heat from the fire or the ash from the fire. They're the two things that fire makes.
00:19:04:14 - 00:19:30:16
David Karsten
How long? But it didn't make a difference. How long did you, did you study those two elements? Nash Yes, we were on that for probably five or six years. man, Everybody else was. Yeah. And we just thought, well, we think there's a soil aging or we think there's some other thing, so we're just going backwards and forwards on this until I went to a little seminar at an obscure conference in, of all places, Rio de Janeiro.
00:19:30:16 - 00:19:57:16
Kingsley Dixon
It was a Botanic Gardens conference. Sure it was right. Yeah. The Kaffir in Israel, delicious and abundant. But there was this little seminar. There are probably ten people in the audience, and as South Africans stood up and said, blah, blah, blah, we've been blowing smoke onto one species on a hillside in South Africa and we got some seeds to germinate.
00:19:57:18 - 00:20:22:17
Kingsley Dixon
The penny dropped. What was the third thing that comes from? From a fire that's obvious to us? Smoke. You know, we were lighting little experimental fires, you know, wiping tears out of our eyes. No real at the time. The stuff in our eyes was the stuff that we're after. And the rest, as they say, is down to history.
00:20:22:19 - 00:20:52:23
Kingsley Dixon
We made discovery for Australian plants that indeed those many of those one third, those huge number that 4000 species were in fact responsive to the smoke from the fire that just exploded onto center stage in 1995 when we published the paper. It caused great ripples in the Australian research community because overnight all the heat and ash people suddenly were out of a job and they had a research drought.
00:20:52:23 - 00:21:25:08
Kingsley Dixon
So that wasn't intentional, but it transformed the nursery industry. It's interesting. I returned to Nan and Sue, who started me on the journey and I was sowing seeds and then this and they said we never saw those because they never come up, you know. So why bother? Why bother? And I went back. They've long since sold the nursery and I shared with them seedlings that I'd grown with smoke and told them of that story and in their senior years that that brought enormous joy to them.
00:21:25:08 - 00:21:55:14
Kingsley Dixon
Well, I said that you started this and now it's now it's at this point, that would been so satisfying and gratifying for them. Yeah. Yeah. That they opened the door to you and, and many, many years later this was the pay off. You've, you've become a giant of, of research into into Western Australian flora and you've, you've come back with such an amazing discovery in tandem with your entire team of course now with just just on that with the with the smoke, you went one step further.
00:21:55:14 - 00:22:17:01
Kingsley Dixon
You decided to isolate the chemical that that that caused. Yes. Look, I think active chemical I think science always progresses when there's a big helping of naivety that is I thought this will be simple. We'll find the chemical in smoke. You know, we've got this stuff, we can put it in water bubble, smoke through water, and then we can soak the seeds and they come.
00:22:17:01 - 00:22:44:13
Kingsley Dixon
So it's in the water, so that's easy, will identify it. And so we started 11 years later. We were literally down to lamington drives to try that because no one would fund it. Yeah, because after about 3 to 4 years in the pursuit of a discovery like that and not getting hits, your funding dries up. So very interesting lesson in how science operates.
00:22:44:15 - 00:23:26:16
Kingsley Dixon
You know, the high risk stakes, believing that this could be worthwhile and pursuing it. And it was interesting in that 11 year journey, there were two other groups in the world also that we connected with, one in South Africa and one in the Max Planck Institute of Plant Ecology, really high powered machine with equipment from the stops that we you know, Ben and I got on really well with that team and we we didn't share how we were traveling, but we shared frustrations and they then withdrew.
00:23:26:18 - 00:23:52:02
Kingsley Dixon
It wasn't, it was an informal race, let's put it that way. They withdrew and I remember they wrote us a lovely, lovely letter because I did those in those days, pre emails, a lovely letter saying, look, it's with with closing this down. They said it's using up enormous amounts of resources. It's not getting us anywhere. But, you know, if we can help you out, we wish you well and all risks and so on.
00:23:52:02 - 00:24:26:04
Kingsley Dixon
We pursued what we did as typical Australian researchers. We spun a hole on their head. What those researchers didn't do was they didn't have a rapid. They had one species they could use to check for the chemical. We had a whole lot of them so we could cross-check with those. The other thing that we did was we and it's with the wonderful chemists from that we collaborated with at UW I who just, just remarkable people.
00:24:26:06 - 00:24:47:12
Kingsley Dixon
We took the spectrum of the chemicals and, you know, my naivety was we didn't realize those over 4000 chemicals in, in the smoke. So in that millisecond of ignition, 4000 chemicals are produced. That's phenomenal. Which one is it? Naturally, everybody else thought it would be one of the big ones. So they were looking at a more quantitative thing.
00:24:47:12 - 00:25:17:15
Kingsley Dixon
They're looking for the thing that was coming off the most. What we did then discovered we didn't do that. We decided to break the spectrum up along the long axis and just take some samples and check with our rapid germinating species to say when we get a hit. And the difference in that is time. The time but also the chemical turned out to be one of the rarest in smoke, which ecologically didn't make any sense.
00:25:17:15 - 00:25:42:05
Kingsley Dixon
If you're going to use smoke, why wouldn't you use something that's super common? These are the tricks of nature and there are a whole lot of reasons for that molecule in the end. So in 2014 we published the paper. The patent was lodged in November 2013 because it was a brand new molecule. It's a tiny little molecule. We celebrated the new our culture by calling a Cara Kim a lot, which Carrick is now for Smoke.
00:25:42:11 - 00:26:15:19
Kingsley Dixon
Allied refers to the particular chemical structure that it has, and that chemical has gone onwards to be in an entire new group of growth promoting hormones new to science called the Catechins. And every time you look at a tree catechins are helping it to get branching patterns and systematizing that a little bit of work in this West Australian bush with smoky hair and eyes and led to that whole molecule being discovered and still to die.
00:26:15:21 - 00:26:43:02
Kingsley Dixon
All these years on we have active programs and they're ramping up again looking at smoke interactions and seed because we're now on a whole new phase still working on that same species from any ember that we never actually clinched the germination. So the saga continues by never going to stop until we get the hidden bird hate to germinate, persist, and thus can Kingsley persistence.
00:26:43:02 - 00:27:06:18
Kingsley Dixon
Now that that period of your career at Kings Park, how long does that go for and what what is, what are some of the other significant, I guess, discoveries and initiatives that that you were part of? Yeah, look, the research freedoms and that's a fundamental ingredient. Research freedom was allowed to blossom. That inquiry would ultimately lead to good outcomes and great science.
00:27:06:23 - 00:27:39:20
Kingsley Dixon
And there's no greater truism. You can't performance manage high quality research. It has to come from down in the belly and from the heart and just well up in people and have that freedom. And so Kings Park grew from those days to the large groups that it had. I managed to bring in a botanic garden, go to many of the great Botanic Gardens, developed collaborations with about 11 of them, which was pretty heavy work, maintaining but terrific partnerships.
00:27:39:22 - 00:28:02:11
Kingsley Dixon
And we were able to bring back breakthrough technologies. So we were the first research group in the world to finally crack cryopreservation. That is the freezing of organized plant tissues in liquid nitrogen. It meant we could take out threatened species that I could say were in big trouble and we could finally lock them in space and time in perpetuity.
00:28:02:13 - 00:28:32:09
Kingsley Dixon
That took us almost five years to get the first species to work, and then we're gradually working through others. The second side of the research program was developing the Threatened Species Research Restoration research Program. This is a growing up species using often quite complex technology, including tissue culture, including fungi, which we did with the orchids and using those for reintroduction programs.
00:28:32:11 - 00:28:57:03
Kingsley Dixon
But guess what? We were running out of Bush to put them in everywhere we went where these were, they were often just a roadside population. There was one species, the Corrigan Group, India. Wonderful thing had gone extinct. Someone knew where the location was. It was one of the few sites where we applied in what we call in situ smoke.
00:28:57:03 - 00:29:18:22
Kingsley Dixon
That is, we took our smoke tents out. They looked like little Telstra tents that they put up over there. Little holes in the ground. Yep. And much to the amusement of rural people saying this drum being stoked up in these little tent and they tracked botanical people. And when we saw the seedlings erupting from the ground, we realized that we could save it.
00:29:19:02 - 00:29:47:15
Kingsley Dixon
And the local community then adopted it as the floral emblem. We got the farming community on board, but we had no land left. We could now grow it on demand from seed, but we had no land left, and that's when we developed the third lodge of Kings Park, which is how do you restore bushland? And back to my roots, my beloved banksia woodland that I was raised in, in Beach Park is now a threatened ecological community on the Swan Coastal plain.
00:29:47:15 - 00:30:18:18
Kingsley Dixon
Who could have imagined that was certainly not you as a 12 year old right now in my short lifetime. But we were able to put together packages where you could understand how bushland should be put back together so you can then put homes for threatened species. But we also discovered just how complicated it is. And just as we're still working on those niggling species and there's many of them that we cannot germinate, we still can't put my beloved Banksia bushland back together.
00:30:18:18 - 00:30:54:11
Kingsley Dixon
So it's a bit like Humpty Dumpty who got bits and pieces still missing. So that's the journey that we're now full steam ahead. I've taken that Kings Park work and expanded it and we've now got a major program called the Australian Research Council Center for Healing Country. It's the Indigenous led restoration economy. It's giving First Nations a chance to develop a means of returning our bushland, their bushland, the bushland of my childhood and back to good health, and until after we've cleared it essentially that That's right, yeah.
00:30:54:12 - 00:31:30:08
Kingsley Dixon
And we have in the West we had just 30% left uncleared in 200 years. We took 20 million years and reduced it to just 30%, it's time to pause, think and rebuild before it's too late. It Kingsley that that work that you undertook at Kings Park, you you've, you've just mentioned that you've, you've adopted that as part of a, I guess an independent initiative, but you've also taken that into your work here at Curtin as well.
00:31:30:10 - 00:31:56:15
Kingsley Dixon
Could you tell us a little bit about your work here, both in terms of the restoration side of your expertise but also the cryogenics as well? Yeah, So the cryogenics is now more in the physics of cryogenics. Why can't you put every species into cryogenics? We've now redirected our focus because that staying with the people more specialized in a cryo biology.
00:31:56:17 - 00:32:27:04
Kingsley Dixon
And I look forward to seeing the major breakthroughs there. back to home turf, the nitty gritty of how can you grow every species effectively and how can you put back a million acres a year? We cleared in the sixties as a kid. There was a catchcry, a million acres a year put to the plow, and I thought that was good was something called progress that we had the local Morley Progress Association, whose primary role was to knock over the bush.
00:32:27:06 - 00:33:00:06
Kingsley Dixon
And I just thought it was all inexhaustible because a kid, you know, there's just the stuff that went on. But didn't we all? Yep, right. We hope we all would have thought that. Well, we think of it of everything with nature, that nature is inexhaustible and has an extraordinary ability to rebound no matter what. And you know, today, as I was walking here, the calendar bees arrived, as they do in Curtin campus, which is one of the hotspots, and we're trying to work with Curtin now to donate 100 macadamias so we can get some fast food options for cannabis.
00:33:00:08 - 00:33:26:04
Kingsley Dixon
But looking at those birds here with their bubs reminds me of what we've done. You know, they're now critically endangered. and, and we, we're not certain of their trajectory, but we now need to do everything we can, which includes rebuilding bushland, which means in the home garden, doing things differently. Let's break it down to brass tacks here.
00:33:26:04 - 00:34:12:01
David Karsten
What, what is your position here and what is your domain? And and tell us a little bit about your student cohort. so I'm a professor of botany and conservation biology restoration ecology. That's a bit of a mouthful. So just so I'm a botanist and everyone smiles. and we have, a significant postgraduate and postdoctoral research team, who are working on multiple simultaneous aspects, everything from seed to more effective ways of using seed, native seed, dormancy breaking on demand and building capacity with Indigenous communities.
00:34:12:03 - 00:34:50:03
Kingsley Dixon
And there's a broad remit in even includes developing through restoration an Indigenous honey supply chain using the bushland that we rebuild to develop Indigenous owner produced honeys from restored damaged lands. And I'm confident that where we're going is the right way. My anxiety is the clock is ticking and we don't have a decade anymore. We have five years to get the technology toolkit aligned and operational to begin delivering large scale restoration.
00:34:50:05 - 00:35:13:16
Kingsley Dixon
We need to be able to put back more than we're putting back as proper bushland if we're going to provide those homes for threatened species if we're going to get cannabis. COCKATOO New homes amongst the gum trees, which they haven't had for many years. Well, it seems to to me as as you tell us about these various strategies that you've got a multi-pronged approach.
00:35:13:16 - 00:35:41:01
Kingsley Dixon
There are different avenues of of research taking place that are all part of an integrated almost picture to tackle this issue. But where you have provided the expertise and your researchers have provided expertise and solutions will be other. The other half of the other side of the coin is policy at a government level and industry engagement. Tell us about both of those.
00:35:41:03 - 00:36:20:19
Kingsley Dixon
Now you're making headway. I sit on a number of boards, advise on a number of committees to government and industry. Are listening. The technical know how that we need to address the problems is falling short in terms of an alignment with policy that enables industry to make more and and any developer main roads, department rail authorities for them to make an informed evidence based decision that what they're about to do is going to be an irreplaceable loss of nature.
00:36:20:19 - 00:36:48:01
Kingsley Dixon
It's not nature positive. It will be nature negative. And that's where the policy, I believe, is still lagging and needs to be brought into a more contemporary lens. it's, it's interesting that we now live with a population that when I was a kid, the bulk of Western Australians were connected to the land and the Bush. Now nine out of ten Western Australians never been in a piece of bush because they're urbanites.
00:36:48:03 - 00:37:18:07
Kingsley Dixon
So we're disconnected from the reality of what's happened on those landscapes and the urgent need for change and in wanting and demanding that the policies of government provide for future generations, something that that I had. I have a colleague and she spoke very eloquently last September in Darwin at a big international meeting that I was convening. And she said, we have to think seven generations ahead.
00:37:18:09 - 00:37:50:05
Kingsley Dixon
Why? Why seven? Because we're only five generations from the Industrial Revolution that has given us the problems of the planet. So we're four by seven generations since industrial revolution, most of it will be gone. So what we do is now plan what will the country look like in seven generations? And I think with the present rate of loss, it's not looking like a place that's going to be good for our plants and animals and certainly a place that won't be the wildflower state by a long shot.
00:37:50:07 - 00:38:24:22
Kingsley Dixon
So it's about aligning policy with where we've come from and the reality that we can't patch this easily. It's going to be a very complicated pathway. I and each year that we're delayed is a year of greater net loss. Well, Kingsley, at this juncture, your career, it's looking increasingly like your your time is spent less in the lab and less in the classroom and more about I lobbying, lobbying for change.
00:38:24:22 - 00:38:54:15
David Karsten
And that that seems to be a large part of who you are and what your role is now. Well, I'd like to call it informing people and policymakers of the reality of what we're now facing and the duty we have to those seven generations in the future. And there is a great duty that we hand something over where they can enjoy the extraordinary things that I have and present day West Australians or enjoy in our wonderful natural environments.
00:38:54:17 - 00:39:14:11
David Karsten
Kingsley, always a pleasure to chat and thank you very much for your time today. Really appreciate this. Thank you very much, David And you've been listening to the future of a podcast powered by Curtin University. If you've enjoyed this episode, please share it. And if you want to hear more from experts, stay up to date by subscribing to us on your favorite podcast app.
00:39:14:13 - 00:39:16:14
David Karsten
Bye for now.