Zhang Huyi, in Global Times,15 August 2022, where the title reads ….“Exclusive: Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka to launch welcoming ceremony for arrival of Chinese research vessel: source”
The Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka will hold a welcoming ceremony for the arrival of the Chinese Yuan Wang 5 scientific research vessel at the port of Hambantota, a source close to the matter told the Global Times on Monday. “The Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka will hold a simple but warm welcoming ceremony on the premise of epidemic prevention and control,” the source said.
Tamara Fernando: “Seeing Like the Sea: A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery 1800–1925″*Past & Present, Volume 254, Issue 1, February 2022, Pages 127–60, ……………………………………………. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab002
ABSTRACT of the Article: The pearl fishery of Ceylon was a lucrative source of pearls as well as a theatre of colonial power. But instead of narrating a story of abstracted governmentality, this paper dives below the waves, braiding Tamil poetry with scientific material relating to the oyster and state sources concerning fishery administration. Taken together, these unearth a multi-species history of the human relationship to the seas. In the same way that pearl divers’ labour was a mode of knowing nature, so too, natural processes and marine creatures shaped, in turn, the economic, social and cultural worlds at the fishery. This nacreous, layered approach combines natural history, maritime labour and historical ecology to explore the fragile and interlocking balance below the waves which extended beyond humans to the molluscs, sharks, boring sponges and parasitic tapeworms of the Gulf of Mannar. The archive around the pearl fishery advances the animal and ecological histories of the Indian Ocean and also points towards ways of suturing the gulf between Indian and Sri Lankan scholarship.
Christabel, Fiona, Cat and Connor in November 2021 … with frontispiece pix from Samantha Wright
One of the top ten natural wonders of the world, according to David Attenborough, is happening right now in the thriving rainforests and deserted beaches of Australia’s Christmas Island. Christmas Island is globally significant, home to a wealth of unique and rare sea birds, land crabs and marine life. There are few comparable unspoiled tropical environments left in the world.
