| Ben Arbib, a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Latrobe University came to talk about his primary research interest, ‘North Korea’. |
| Ben ‘s first trip to South Korea in 2002 was when he went there on an undergraduate exchange and become fascinated with the area. He explained the history of the Korean peninsular its relationship with its surrounding countries of China and Japan. He went on to give his impressions of South Korea and its relationship with the North and give some detail about North Korea, its people, the country in general and its leadership. On subsequent trips Ben has made visits to the DMZ and short day trips into the North, which are highly supervised so one is never able to be alone or talk to the locals.
His talk was accompanied with a power point presentation with photos of the area and the Chinese city of Dandong on the Yalu river on the border of China and North Korea. Ben spent several months there in 2004 teaching English. |
Category Archives: Guest Speakers
Club Meeting 22 February 2012
Glenys Atkins as Executive Officer of the Border Trust presented an over view of the Trust, how it came into operation, and how it receives and distributes its funds.
The following article taken from their web site www.bordertrust.org.au sums up what she talked about and is the place to go to obtain additional information.
Club Meeting 15 February 2012
Guy Corett commenced, giving a background how he first came to Albury to study Environmental management at CSU and later a graduate diploma at Latrobe. His first environmental job was working with the dairy extension officer in the Kiewa valley on the dairy effluent programme to control run off from dairy sheds into waterways. This program was then rolled out to cover all of the Victorian dairy areas. Then he worked with Laminex Industries in Wagga on both environmental and OH&S, a power station in Queensland running on sugar cane bagasse and wood chips producing renewable energy. After months touring Australia he and his Albury born wife moved back to Albury.With help from Gary Zauner he and his wife set up GMC Environmental consulting, and worked with Zauner Constructions until they were Environmentally certified. They were then employed as environmental consultants from the inception of the building of the gas fired Power station at Uranquinty and although that power station has been sold to Origin Energy they still have an ongoing roll at the plant.
The Uranquinty plant has a 640MW generation capacity, powered by natural gas, came on line in 2009 and only operates as a ‘on demand’ station. It can be powered up to full capacity in 15 minutes and shut down in a similar time and is only used when the demand price warrants.
GMC also specialise in supporting Wind turbine farm applications and are currently working with 3 proposals (South Australia, Yass and Victoria) but it is becoming more difficult to have wind farm applications passed as nobody wants to live near them.
Before handing over to Andrew, Guy indicated that Australia was wasting opportunities to lead the way (as it had done in the 50’s with the Snowy system) in renewable energy through lack of vision.
Andrew Kilsby is another local lad who joined GMC 4 months ago. After his education at RMIT Andrew worked at the News Print Mill, Greenfreight and Woolworths logistics before joining GMC. Andrews role is handling a contract they have with Snowy Hydro rolling out an operational risk protocol for safety and environmental control over the five Snowy Hydro operational areas. Prior to their involvement the 5 operational areas worked independently. He gave some detail of the Snowy scheme, which took 25 years to build, and includes 145 kms of pressure tunnels, 80 kms of aqueducts, 16 dams and 7 power stations