Saturday Morning for Saturday 21 May 2022

8.10 Barrie Cassidy: will Scott Morrison be re-elected?

With Australians heading to the polls this weekend, the race between incumbent prime minister and Liberal party leader Scott Morrison and the Labor Party’s Anthony Albanese looks too close to call, following what has been called “an unedifying campaign”. 

Barrie Cassidy is the former host of ABC’s political commentary program Insiders and has covered federal politics for more than 40 years – reporting on 13 federal elections.

Cassidy says it’s not the campaign that determines elections, but the performance of both the government and the opposition over the last three years.

 

8.35 Jonathan Drori: saving bananas and rediscovering orchids

Author, plant lover and former BBC documentary maker Jonathan Drori joins the show for a chat about recent botanical news. 

This week, experts from Cambridge University look set to save the humble banana from extinction after developing a technique to graft different species of the fruit together, something previously thought impossible. And a mignonette leek orchid, which was last documented in 1933, has been rediscovered in Australia - which is home to approximately 1550 species of Orchidaceae. 

 Drori is the author of Around the World in 80 Trees and Around the World in 80 Plants.

 

9.05  Helen Thompson: are we facing an international energy crisis?

The world is not just seeing high oil prices, it is at the beginning of a fully-fledged energy crisis, says Helen Thompson, a professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University. 

Thompson’s latest book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, explains the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political shocks of recent years, showing how much unrest has originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and the major role played by banks and debt. 

Thompson’s previous books include Oil and the Western Economic Crisis (2017) and China and the Mortgaging of America (2010). 

 

9.35 Maryrose Crook: taking The Renderers on tour 

Having moved to Joshua Tree after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, husband-and-wife duo Maryrose and Brian Crook are back on home soil for a string of shows with their swirling psychedelic-rock act The Renderers.

The five-date tour marks the pair’s first proper New Zealand shows in 10 years, and also coincides with a Christchurch exhibition of large-scale paintings by Maryrose that draw on traditions of surrealism, still life and folk art.

Click here to visit Maryrose's website. 

 

10.05 Professor Craig Cary: exploring extreme bacteria in Antarctica

A robot that can sample planktonic communities under the Antarctic ice shelf is the latest tool developed by Professor Craig Cary and his colleagues to help forecast the future impacts of climate change. 

A microbial ecologist, Cary has studied bacteria in the world's most extreme environments, including deep sea hydrothermal vents and our own geothermal areas. He is the director of the International Centre for Terrestrial Antarctic Research at the University of Waikato, and has clocked up 22 deployments to Antarctica looking at the continent’s bioscience - from what is in the soil and ice, to examining penguin guano. 

Cary is currently conducting work on Mount Erebus and remote North Victoria Land. 

 

11.05 Playing Favourites with artist Dame Robin White

From her regionalist-style painting in the 70s to her more recent collaboratively-made giant tapa, Dame Robin White is widely recognised as a key figure in contemporary New Zealand art, with a career stretching back more than 50 years. As a painter and printmaker, Dame Robin’s works are characterised by the use of bold tones, rhythmic outlines, symbols and pattern-making to depict scenes of small-town New Zealand and life in the Pacific.

A new book from Te Papa Press, Robin White: Something is Happening Here, is the first publication to be devoted to Dame Robin’s art in 40 years. 

The book’s release is being followed by a retrospective exhibition of more than 70 works from across her career, opening at Te Papa in June and then at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in late October.

 

Books mentioned in this show: 

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century
By Helen Thompson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN-13: 978-0198864981
 

Oppositions
By Mary Gaitskill
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 9781788168151
 

Robin White: Something is Happening Here
Edited by Sarah Farrar, Jill Trevelyan and Nina Tonga
Publisher: Te Papa Press
ISBN: 978-0-9951384-3-8

 

Music featured on this show:

Seaworthy
The Renderers
Played at 9.30am

Once in a Lifetime
Talking Heads
Played at 10.35am

Underwater
Sun's Signature
Played at 10.52am

Sweet Nothin's
Brenda Lee
Played at 11.15am

Lone Pilgrim
Bob Dylan
Played at 11.40am