Found only in a restricted area of north-west Australia, the Australian boab (Adansonia gregorii) is recognisable by its massive, bottle-shaped trunk, and is an economically important species for Indigenous Australians, with the pith, seeds and young roots all eaten. Many of these trees are also culturally significant and are sometimes carved with images and symbols. The authors discuss the history of research into carved boabs in Australia, and present a recent survey to locate and record these trees in the remote Tanami Desert. Their results provide insight into the archaeological and anthropological significance of dendroglyphs in this region and add to a growing corpus of information on culturally modified trees globally.

The study of personal experiences of British and Australian soldiers during the First World War can be further developed through a discrete analysis of married men’s interactions with wartime masculine ideals. This article seeks to provide a preliminary insight into such interactions through the case-study of two officers serving on the Western Front in 1916 and the correspondence they wrote to their wives throughout their military service. British Lieutenant Max Shaw and Australian Lieutenant Cecil Mills both voluntarily enlisted and served in France in 1916. Once they departed their homes to commence training, they immediately began corresponding with their wives, which can be seen as attempts to mediate a clashing sense of domestic and military loyalties. As these men transitioned from a civilian to a military lifestyle, their lingering domestic identities and the importance of their marriage within their sense of manhood continued to influence their adoption of a military identity.

Trust arises from confidence in a person or confidence in the practices of an institution. Theorists argue that institutional trust depends, to varying extents on intrapersonal trust, which is trust between people who know each other. Science rests its claim to expert knowledge on the practices of knowledge production engaged in by its institutions. Most people cannot check these practices themselves and effectively must trust the experts who explain and vouch for those practices of science, and thus, there is an element of intrapersonal trust needed if the laity is to have trust in science. Much of the sociology of science is concerned with democratic exchanges between scientists and other citizens, in which scientists are expected to show a commitment to open-mindedness and transparency, yet this may leave scientists and their knowledge vulnerable to contestation in terms that may undermine trust in their science. In this article, I draw on data generated in a study of Australian scientists to describe the ways in which trust was important in the work of these scientists and consider the consequences for a scientist who is prepared to admit to uncertainty. Drawing upon these data and from media accounts of the COVID-19 vaccination debate in Australia, I argue that science education for contemporary society must equip scientists and the laity for relationships that are more than narrowly cognitive. I argue for an education that makes explicit the ways in which the community of science interacts to produce and verify knowledge, and that equips students to recognise uncertainty and dissent as central to science and value expert knowledge. I suggest approaches that may achieve this goal.

Zoonotic viruses have sacrificed hundreds of millions of people throughout human history. There are currently 1.7 million unidentified viruses estimated to be circulating in mammal and bird populations. It is foreseeable that in the near future, another of these will transmit to people, heralding the start of the next pandemic—one potentially more deadly than COVID-19. At the core of this article is a call for pre-emptive protection of the natural environment and its regenerative systems as the first fundamental step in the prevention of future epidemics and pandemics. While zoonoses originate in nature, the predominant legal discipline, managing these crises, is international health law which is invoked reactively once an outbreak has been reported. In this paper, we identify the need for a legal shift in epidemic and pandemic responses. In particular, we call for the incorporation of international environmental agreements to prevent the initial viral spillover from animal to human populations. We propose a strategy of strengthening existing agreements and a coupling of legal disciplines, such as health and environmental law, emphasizing the need for synergies across legal disciplines to enhance the emergence and management of future pandemics and epidemics. We introduce Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) Law to frame the required integration across legal instruments to regulate inextricably human-nature connections and advocate for the development of a Convention on Epidemics and Pandemics.