Currency Revival research stories

Automotive industry
In 1977, the Ford Falcon was already 17 years old. The XC Fairmont was first released the year before and would continue to be sold until 1979, featuring what was then the latest in automotive innovation – a 115kW, 4.1-litre, six-cylinder engine coupled with a three-speed automatic transmission. It also had the latest in safety equipment – power four-wheel disc brakes, inertia reel seat belts in the front, high-backed front seats to help eliminate whip-lash, a steering column designed to collapse on impact and a zone-toughened safety glass windscreen.

Drive forward almost 30 years to 2007 and the difference between the XC Fairmont and the current Falcon, the BF MkII Fairmont, is what Ford historian Adrian Ryan describes as ‘chalk and cheese’.

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If you're happy and you know it clap your hands...
How happy are we in 2007? It may seem like the impossible question. Too broad and way too complex. After all, humans are complicated creatures and each of us can experience happiness differently.

While the notion and pursuit of happiness has been around since long before Socrates started scribbling, it’s probably one of the most crucial (if not poignant) questions of the new millennium. And it’s being spoken of in ways and places that were unheard of in 1977.

Full Story (PDF - 197KB )

Let's do lunch
Dig around in a box of old school photos from the 1970s and you just might notice something. Not only the shaggy haircuts or the daggy school uniforms. There’s something else: the size of the students. In the grinning rows of 1970s scholars, there were few who were seriously overweight. Generally, it was all knobbly knees, lean limbs and trim tummies.

The school photographs of the new millennium, however, are telling another story and it seems that willowy is now being replaced by weighty.

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Sustainable future
Deakin University now has one of the largest concentrations of environmental scientists in Australia.

‘We have assembled a significant body of expertise from all over the world to look at four main programs,’ says Associate Professor John Sherwood, Director of the Natural Resources Management Research Priority Area.

‘These are sustainable water management, sustainable landscape management, sustainable fisheries and aquaculture and sustainable marine and coastal eco-systems.’

Full Story (PDF - 285KB )

Communication and technology
The year was 1977. Colour TV in Australia was just two years old, credit cards were not yet in common use and music was played on vinyl LPs or cassette tapes. Cooking was mostly done in convection ovens, telephone calls were made on a fixed landline, and Space Invaders – that revolutionary forerunner of modern video games – wouldn’t be released until the following year.

Full Story (PDF - 2MB )