Changing Rural Spaces: Deregulation and the decline of tobacco farming in the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area,Far North Queensland

The growing of tobacco was one of the most tightly regulated industries in Australia, until deregulation in 1995. Commonwealth regulations controlled the area cultivated with tobacco, the number of growers (i.e. quota holders) and marketing arrangements for tobacco leaf. This paper begins by outlining the nature and historical development of controls in the tobacco-growing industry, and discusses how the Commonwealth government removed the industry's regulatory and protective framework in 1995. The third part of the paper examines how deregulation has impacted upon the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area, Far North Queensland, where small farmers produced 60 per cent of Australia's tobacco in 1995. The discussion will show that the agricultural landscape once dominated by tobacco has been transformed, as local farmers abandoned growing tobacco in favour of sugar cane, avocadoes, mangoes, macadamia nuts and other small vegetable crops (e.g. navy beans, pumpkins). Tobacco, once promoted by the Queensland government as a crop to facilitate closer settlement in the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area, will have almost vanished from the landscape by 2002.     

A canonical theory for short GPS baselines. Part II: the ambiguity precision and correlation

The present contribution is the second of four parts. It considers the precision and correlation of the least-squares estimators of the carrier phase ambiguities. It is shown how the precision and correlation of the double-differenced ambiguities as well as of the widelane ambiguities are effected by the observation weights, by the number of satellites tracked, by the number of observation epochs used, and by the change over time of the relative receiver-satellite geometry. Also the ability of the widelane transformation to decorrelate and to improve the precision is investigated. Received: 16 July 1996 / Accepted: 14 November 1996     

SENSITIVITY OF MALARIA, SCHISTOSOMIASIS AND DENGUE TO GLOBAL WARMING

Global assessment of the potential impacts of anthropogenically-induced climate change on vector-borne diseases suggests an increase in extent of the geographical areas susceptible to transmission of malarial Plasmodium parasites, dengue Flavivirus and Schistosoma worms. The transmission potential of the three associated vector-borne diseases studied is highly sensitive to climate changes on the periphery of the currently endemic areas and at higher altitudes within such areas. Our findings vis-à-vis the present endemic areas indicate that the increase in the epidemic potential of malaria and dengue transmission may be estimated at 12–27% and 31–47%, respectively, while in contrast, schistosomiasis transmission potential may be expected to exhibit a 11–17% decrease.     

New palaeogeographic and lake-level reconstructions of Lake Tanganyika: implications for tectonic, climatic and biological evolution in a rift lake

Palaeogeographic and lake-level reconstructions provide powerful tools for evaluating competing scenarios of biotic, climatic and geological evolution within a lake basin. Here we present new reconstructions for the northern Lake Tanganyika subbasins, based on reflection seismic, core and outcrop data. Reflection seismic radiocarbon method (RSRM) age estimates provide a chronological model for these reconstructions, against which yet to be obtained age dates based on core samples can be compared. A complex history of hydrological connections and changes in shoreline configuration in northern Lake Tanganyika has resulted from a combination of volcanic doming, border fault evolution and climatically induced lake-level fluctuations. The stratigraphic expression of lake-level highstands and lowstands in Lake Tanganyika is predictable and cyclic (referred to here as Capart Cycles), but in a pattern that differs profoundly from the classic Van Houten cycles of some Newark Supergroup rift basins. This difference results from the extraordinary topographic relief of the Western Rift lakes, coupled with the rapidity of large-scale lake-level fluctuations. Major unconformity surfaces associated with Lake Tanganyika lowstands may have corresponded with high-latitude glacial maxima throughout much of the mid- to late Pleistocene.
Rocky shorelines along the eastern side of the present-day Ubwari Peninsula (Zaire) appear to have had a much more continuous existence as littoral rock habitats than similar areas along the north-western coastline of the lake (adjacent to the Uvira Border Fault System), which in turn are older than the rocky shorelines of the north-east coast of Burundi. This model of palaeogeographic history will be of great help to biologists trying to clarify the evolution of endemic invertebrates and fish in the northern basin of Lake Tanganyika.