Banking On Fire

A speech to the Westpac Scholars National Selection Panel

I was recently invited to give a talk to the National Selection Panel of the Westpac Scholars Trust. The Trust are the people behind the Westpac Research Fellowship, which is what brought me and my family down from Sydney to Melbourne two years ago. It’s a pretty amazing scheme, providing three years of salary, expenses and training opportunities to early career researchers (roughly 3-6 years post PhD).

Two of these golden tickets are awarded per year, along with 98 (!) other scholarships spread across over several other schemes: Social Change Fellowships and scholarships for Future Leaders (PhD students), Asia Exchange and Young Technologists. The Panel’s formidable task was to narrow down the finalists for these schemes to a Hottest 100. The process takes place over two rather intense early December days, dubbed the National Assessment Centre, at Westpac’s Barangaroo office in Sydney.

Also up on Level 28 of Westpac’s Sydney HQ was a pre-extravaganza dinner for the panel, at which I would be giving my talk. I was joined by another Scholar, Indigo Strudwicke, both of us entreated to talk about our experience with our respective programs to help prime the group for their job over the next 48 hours (Indie is a Future Leader Scholar and is doing a PhD on science communication and policy at ANU).

Westpac’s Scholarship Program Director and all around lovely human Alissa Nightingale had generously (or cruelly) given me a broad remit and so I crammed as much as I possibly could into my allotted eight minutes. I encourage you to read this out loud with a timer on to see if I kept to time. If you really want the gory details about the last two years, look no further than the archives here.

In a curious case of life imitating art, just prior to the dinner the ‘e’ fell off my laptop keyboard. Instead of calmly practicing my speech I was frantically changing my password to one that was typeable, calling IT to organise a loan laptop, and generally feeling rattled. I scrawled out my speech onto paper, making various embellishments, deletions and flourishes to try to win over my audience. I felt a little 18th century clutching my notes during the talk.

Portrait of Samuel Johnson, by Joshua Reynolds ~1775 (Source: Wikimedia Commons

~~~

First of all

• Thank you for the invitation. It’s an honour to be here.

• In the short time I have, I’m going to talk a bit about the past and a bit about the future.

Let’s start with The Fellowship and me

• It changed my life. Some would say going from a smaller, regional uni to Melbourne Uni was a “small fish in big pond” moment. But that’s not actually how it felt. I felt (and still feel) like a kid in a gigantic candy store. Excited, immensely savouring the delicious fare, but ending up slightly queasy.

• By which I mean: I met a lot of people, drank a lot of coffee and applied for a lot of grants. Almost 30!

• I nearly burnt myself out when 2/3 of what I applied for came in. For those who like to count money, this came to $5.7m in funding, $1.6m of it as “chief investigator”.

So what’d I do? Here’s a quick rundown

• I supervised 3 postdocs and RAs, oversaw 3 Masters completions plus two teams of Masters of Data Science students. My favourite project title: Doughnut Pyronomics.

• I helped run a bushfire data hack event with the Melbourne Centre for Data Science.

• I was one of two regional experts for Australasia in the first ever global State of Wildfires report, which had a massive global reception, drew interest from the UN and industry, and spawned the promise of spin-offs (more on that in a moment).

• I led bushfire sections of a journal article on climate change extreme attribution in Australia, a community climate change and bushfire communication project, and the recently released Victoria’s Climate Science Report 2024

• I led a project consulting with most of Australia’s fire simulator user community to find out what they need. It turns out that the stuff that’s hardest to measure is often the most important, which may or may not have been music to the ears of the funders of this research…

• I organised a workshop on whether we need evidence briefs for bushfire i.e. short and snappy summaries for managers and communities about the evidence and knowledge on different fire topics. Everyone there - researchers, fire managers, a representative of a Traditional Owner group, the Australian Academy of Science, Natural Hazards Research Australia - said yes. But no one could agree on who should do it or how. Stay tuned.

• With a lot of help, I created a data-driven bushfire communication website. We’ve just run some user testing for the website and gotten some very exciting feedback from a secondary education bigwig. Stay tuned.

• We’re also building a bushfire modelling platform which is going to be very good. Stay tuned.

• I started a blog [you’re reading it]. It has a small but influential subscriber base [you’re it]. The main achievement of the blog is keeping me sane. If I could wax lyrical for a moment: I love writing. In its own humble way it is an act of creation and I say that there is magic in creation. I sometimes wonder what I’m doing on the natural sciences side of the fence, when so many people I admire and collaborate with are designers, writers, creatives, policy makers and system orchestrators.

My next steps

• Would you believe, I struck gold twice. I got an ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellowship which will keep me employed until mid-2029. That’s four years, or roughly quadruple that in academic years, which are similar to dog years. This is a new scheme (it started the year before I applied) and is all about bringing industry and academia closer together. The partners are the lead fire agencies in Victoria. The project is understanding fire management effectiveness now and under climate change. Piece of cake.

• Next year I’ll have at least two PhD students, one for the Industry Fellowship and another soon to arrive here from the Indonesian weather service. Did you know Indonesia is moving its capital from Jakarta to fire-prone Kalimantan?

• I’m leading a review of climate change assessments of wildfire, a project I’ve been dreaming of for a while. To my surprise and delight, I managed to convince one of my academic heroes, Prof Mike Flannigan from Canada (pretty much the world leader in fire and climate change) to join me. With him on board it was a cinch assembling a crack team of other international experts and we aim to submit something early next year.

• It was suggested to me that I might like to lead the first ever State of Wildfires Management and Governance report (that’s not actually the name of the proposed report, but I think perhaps it should be). This is the spinoff of the State of Wildfires report that I was talking about earlier. If the first report is about what fire is doing, this one is about what people are doing about fire. Very tempting, but without an RA or postdoc to help me, I suspect I’ll pay with what’s left of my sanity if I try to coordinate it.

• I’ve drafted a book proposal, inspired by the wild success of this blog. It may or may not amount to a hill of beans.

• In my spare time I plan to apply for promotion to Associate Professor

The Future of Fire

• My message is simple: fire is complex. Forget silver bullet solutions. We need new ideas, more perspectives and better alignment across disciplines and sectors. We need all hands on deck.

• Climate change is pouring fuel on the fire. Not making rapid and deep emissions cuts is a kick in the guts to fire fighters and communities.

• We have much to learn from Indigenous fire knowledge holders.

Reflections on science, society and support

• I’m more convinced than ever that academia, and even science, are powerless… [gasp!] on their own.

• Ok, I do think they’re critical pieces of the puzzle, but they only work when they are deeply connected to society; to all of society. If they’re not, they will be left behind.

• And that’s what keeps me up at night right now. If I stay in academia, will I be left behind? I plan to use the gift of my Industry Fellowship to do some serious work finding out what the next level is and whether academia is the place to get there.

• Which brings us back to Westpac and the Scholars Trust. What an awesome opportunity to have a fellowship explicitly targeting impact and leadership. But what a tide it’s swimming against. To quote Garry Brewer, “The world has problems, universities have departments”. And before any of you non-academics get too smug, that problem is far from unique to academia.

• Let me close by offering two final thoughts

  1. Can we design a Fellowship that undermines rather than reinforces silos? What about a joint appointment - one foot in academia, one in government, or industry, or an NGO? I’d be up for that…

  2. Let’s use our voice - the growing community of Westpac Research Fellows is a good place to start - to push for reform across academia, industry and government. Right now a few intrepid souls are blazing trails between these sectors, but there’s too few of them, they’re still considered niche, and too often the paths are one way. Let’s open up some superhighways.

• Thank you

~~~

In retrospect this was a slightly egocentric take on the last two years, which of course has been characterised by very rewarding collaborations with a bunch of really cool people, not to mention wide ranging support from family, colleagues and many others. I, me, mine, as George Harrison might say.

After the rapturous applause had died down and the Panel members had dried their eyes, we had a great little conversation about some of the themes I raised. One senior panel member gently chided me for my comment about being left behind in academia, noting the huge changes that have taken place in recent decades that aim to make universities more applied and impact focused.

On reflection, I could have chosen my words better. I think basic research is very important and I am deeply inspired by the marvellous tales revealed by science (or rather scientists and writers) about biology, evolution, the universe and everything. Nor do I think that all applied research is by definition good - it all depends who it is applied for. Cui bono? Nor do I think I have no future in academia! I’m very lucky here, even though I often feel out of place and on the edge of burnout.

Really, I think what I was trying to say was that it so freaking hard these days to pay attention to the things that really matter, because we are constantly distracted by emails and social media and jobs and organisations and projects and industries. I would like to sustain focus on the things that really matter (ideally to some useful end, but I shouldn’t be too greedy). Can one do that from uni?

Can one do it anywhere?