La Trobe University will launch a virtual research centre at its Albury-Wodonga campus on Friday.
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The $1 million Centre for the Study of the Inland won’t have a physical location but will bring together researchers from all of its regional and metro locations.
La Trobe Transforming Human Societies research focus area director Katie Holmes said the idea came from wanting to identify research strengths and bring together expertise from across Victoria.
“In one sense it’s a virtual centre made up of researchers working in different areas both geographically and disciplinary,” she said.
“It’s an interdisciplinary approach to this question of long-term environmental change to what we're broadly calling the inland.
“We’re interested in how the Australian experience translates to international experiences too.”
Professor Holmes said the centre was interested in exploring six themes.
“Water, landscape and land use, agriculture and pastoral history, settlement and migration, resource extraction and human response to long-term climate and environmental change,” she said.
“We have researchers working across all those areas … so we have the capacity to look in quite some depth at issues of real contemporary concern.”
La Trobe vice-chancellor John Dewar said places like the Murray Darling Basin had not been subject to a historical study of environmental change ever before.
“The Murray Darling Basin encompasses the most important ecological region in Australia and the centre will concentrate La Trobe's expertise on exploring the changes it has sustained over millennia,” he said.
Professor Holmes said the centre would strive to form connections and relationships with researchers doing similar work from outside of the university.
She said the launch was an opportunity to showcase its research.
The Friday launch will include short presentations from four related projects.
They include studies into migration in the Murray Darling and the history of gold mining in Australia’s rivers and the spread of tailing refuse through river systems.
The launch will run from 11am to 3pm at the main lecture theatre of the West Wodonga campus.
The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion on regional journalism.