Guest Speaker April General Meeting

Dr Stephen Ives is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Division of University College and a Research Fellow at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture. He is interested in integrated cropping and livestock systems within a value chain context, together with understanding drivers of practice change within local and international agricultural communities. Stephen is an advocate of clear education pathways into Agriculture, the interaction of industry, education providers and the learner.
(Ref https://www.utas.edu.au/profiles/staff/tia/stephen-ives, 3/5/2022)

Stephen currently leads research projects in Vietnam and Laos in conjunction with local universities that are focussed on improving livelihoods for smallholder cattle farmers through innovative methods of forage production and soil management. He discussed the challenges in creating sustainable change in cultural traditions of farming. One initiative was to establish a school based learning program into forage production for the next generation of farmers.

Hamish explained that he is leading a professional team as well as numerous volunteers and local historians to digitise, clean, code and link historical record groups relating to convict transportation and the convict landscape in general.

In recent years the team has put together over 78,000 individual records as well as 1.6 million digitised Tasmanian records in order to explore the factors responsible for influencing life course and intergenerational outcomes.

Various correlations and patterns between punishments of solitary confinement and lashes given, outbreaks of disease, life expectancies and even labour market forces were put forward in a dazzling and slick interactive presentation. The ability to link and expand on digitised data was truly incredible and indicative of the massive work that has gone into making this mind blowing achievement.