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ABC Listen. Hello there, my friends.
It's Ruby here, and you're listening to News Time.
Hey, Ruby. Hi, Ruby.
I have gathered up five fantastic news stories for you this week from around Australia and the world.
On today's episode, we're headed to Outback, Queensland, an estuary in New South Wales, a cave in Indonesia and a river in Thailand that's home to a helpful hippo.
What do you think? Are you ready?
Let's hear the news.
Story number five. This story takes place on the banks of a coastal estuary.
That's a part of the coast where the river meets the sea and the water is not quite salty and not quite fresh.
Year six students from a school in Coffs Harbour were on an excursion to an estuary.
The students had balanced themselves on paddle boards.
They were propelling themselves down the coast when all of a sudden, one of the students, whose name was Mimka, spotted a creature unlike anything she'd seen before.
What is that? Looks like a lobster.
It has some creepy little crab legs.
It looks like a brawn.
Mimka said it was hot pink, about the size of a yabby, and it was sitting on top of a sandbank near the mangroves.
She had spotted a pink mangrove lobster.
They are super rare.
Mimka's teacher had only ever seen them in photos.
In fact, only about 40 pink mangrove lobsters have ever been spotted in Australia.
That's probably because they spend most of their time underground in tunnels.
The kids started squealing with excitement and the teacher was making a hullabaloo as well.
I would say, whoa, that looks really cool.
I'm going to tell my mum and dad.
The students and their teacher sent a picture of the creature to scientists at the Australian Museum Research Institute.
That meant the sighting could be officially recorded.
Professor Shane R. Yong, one of the scientists at the Museum, says the discovery of a pink lobster is a great sign.
It means the environment is in good, healthy shape.
I like to see what I can find and what's out there.
Nice one. Professor Shane hopes this discovery will encourage more people to get out and explore their environment.
Story number four. John and Helen Taylor live in Victoria, but they spend most of their time travelling around the country, helping people get into the Australian Book of Records.
They might break swimming world records, running world records, any world record.
Somebody in my class, they broke a folding record.
John and Helen have helped people achieve all kinds of weird and wonderful records.
They've helped people in New South Wales create the largest human image of a country, where thousands of people stood around to create the shape of Australia on the ground.
They helped people play the biggest game of keepy -uppy.
People stretched across 2 ,000 kilometres in Queensland to take part in that.
And they've watched on as 252 people in Victoria poured icy water over their heads, all to help raise money for charity.
Maybe you would get a prize for it or to put your name in a book or something.
That would be so cool.
People come to Helen and John with a wacky dream and they help them make it come true.
There are lots of rules to make sure these records are official and that they can be added to the book.
Helen and John say that when people break records, it gives them confidence in their everyday lives.
It makes people feel like they can achieve anything they set their mind to.
It's fun to help people.
I think it would be a great job, because you can make people's dreams come true.
What record would you like to break?
Probably the longest game of keepy -uppy.
To do the biggest fart.
That's an idea. Well, remember, if you do have an idea for a record you'd like to try, make sure you ask a grown -up first.
Story number three.
Bangkok is the capital city of the country Thailand.
It has lots of rivers and streams flowing through it.
And one of the rivers is called the Chau Phraya River.
A monk named Pramaha Pranam Dhammalankaro has lived in the area for a long time.
He remembers that about 40 years ago, the river was full of fish and kids would play and swim in it.
But now, the Chau Phraya River is dirty and rubbish sits on the banks on either side.
Prar is an abbot at a monastery near the river.
That means he's the monk in charge.
He decided to build a recycling centre in the monastery and it's made a big difference to the rubbish problem.
Maybe because he wanted to do something that mattered instead of waiting for someone else to do it.
Because he was sick of waiting.
But the river was still dirty.
Recently, Pram met a man named Tom.
Tom has a company called Seven Clean Seas, which cleans up plastic pollution.
Pram and Tom worked together to launch a boat into the river called the Hippo.
The Hippo boat is solar powered.
It uses energy from the sun and it travels up and down the river, removing more than a million kilograms of plastic from the water every year.
It gathers up the plastic and delivers it to the monastery where Pram and the other monks sort through it.
Because it's the right thing to do.
That's a good idea.
But why did they have to name it Hippo?
Good question. Hippo stands for High Impact Plastic Pollution Remover and the team hopes they can release more hippos into waterways around the country to make an even bigger difference to the environment in Thailand.
Story number two. The Mount Isa Indigenous Rodeo Championship is held every year in Outback Queensland on Calcadoon country.
Is that where they ride horses?
THEY LAUGH Just like a place where you ride and do fun tricks?
Yeah. A rodeo is an event where people ride horses and bulls and show off their skills that could help them working on farms.
People sit and watch galloping horses and bucking bulls.
The Mount Isa Indigenous Rodeo especially shows off the skills of indigenous competitors and tells stories about indigenous stockmen and stockwomen who've worked on farms and looked after livestock and cows.
They feel proud and like they're doing this for their country.
This year, a Māori family from New Zealand were invited to be special guests at the rodeo.
The Māori people are the First Nations people of New Zealand and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are the First Nations people of Australia.
So this was an exciting opportunity for two groups of First Nations people to spend time together and celebrate their history.
The visiting family performed a haka.
That's a ceremonial dance to pay respect to the Kalkadoon Country and the traditional owners of the land that they were visiting.
They started the very first Trans Tasman Indigenous Rodeo Challenge and people from Australia and New Zealand went head to head in competition.
I want to thank my friends!
I think it would feel great so that they can come together as one and practice with this rodeo.
The crowd loved it.
Locals and rodeo lovers are already counting down to next year's event.
Yee -haw! And now it's time for...
Wow, the week! This journey made me go wild because I learned something new.
We've talked about fossils on Newstime before.
A fossil is bones that are buried in the ground.
A fossil is a big piece of bone and it's like you find dinosaurs and some sea creatures even.
Yep, a fossil is a piece of a living thing that's been captured in rock or sand and preserved over time.
We usually talk about dinosaur bones or ancient megafauna, but scientists have recently discovered a different sort of fossil.
It's a bone from an ancient human.
That's amazing! Would they be like a caveman?
Before there were humans like you and me, called homo sapiens, there were different species of human, like Homo erectus and Homo habilis.
They were much smaller than modern humans and their brains were smaller too.
A few years ago, a piece of an arm bone was found on an island in Indonesia.
Recently, scientists worked out the bone was about 700 ,000 years old and it's from an early human ancestor called a hobbit.
The scientific name for this hobbit species is Homo floresiensis.
This species only grew to about 100cm tall.
That's just taller than a cricket bat.
Really? Maybe it would be hard for them to survive because everything else around them might have made their living harder.
The early human hobbit is much shorter than scientists expected from this species, so they're coming up with ideas as to why Homo floresiensis was so tiny.
Maybe it was the kind of food they ate, or maybe it was their environment.
Scientists are hoping to find more fossils in the area to fill in the gaps in our understanding of human evolution.
And that's it, my friends.
Five fantastic stories all accounted for.
Thanks, Ruby. Thank you.
You are very welcome.
I'll be back next week.
Catch you then. Bye.
Bye, Ruby. Bye. See you later.
Or, as they say in Farsi, hoda hafez.
