Gecko Talks – 26 September – How You Can Help Koalas, Native Birds—and Your Pets—Thrive If you’re interested in making life better for your pet—and keen to learn more on how you can help vulnerable koala or native bird populations

Currumbin Special School teacher, Toby Osborne, has started an inspiring programme which provides learning opportunities to hone the employment skills and social skills development for the students. The programme commenced in June 2018 after some months of setup and has met with resounding success with the students.

On 21 and 22 July the second planning workshop for the Master Plan was held at SeaWorld resort with approximately 80 people present for the ‘enquiry by design’ phase. This means that each table would discuss their topic which would then be translated onto the map of the Spit in visual form. There were 8 tables with topics such as having fun at the point, greening the Spit, commercial opportunities, all forms of getting around, promoting tourism, the cruise terminal, and participants were free to choose the table at which they wanted to work.

Make these school holidays exciting by joining Gecko's EcoDiscoverers Program and searching for stupendous spiders, lively lizards, incredible insects or going on the discovery trail - each one is an adventure.

“Earthman” John Palmer OAM, is an experienced environmental educator with four decades of experience and knowledge of Australian natural environment, local bushtucker, nature tours and Indigenous Australia. He is, and has always been, truly one with nature and taken his connection and love for it to great heights by actually living in a tree at one point of his life! John believes in celebrating our environment and looking for positive connections with it. He uses music, human interaction, art and any other means suitable to do that. He calls his concept of connecting us, the land, the flora and fauna, “The Opera of Existence” and wished to share this concept with us in an engaging and interactive way. Come along, leave your daily worries behind, open your mind and celebrate the beauty of our world and your place in it through this interactive presentation!

When a leading local environmentalist says her trip to Africa was probably one of her best holidays ever, you can bet she’ll have a rich story to tell of the trip. Lois Levy, founding president and Campaign Coordinator of Gecko, the Gold Coast’s peak environmental body, recently returned from a safari in Botswana which fulfilled a lifelong dream. Hear her distinctive view on the ecology and some of the animals of that country, which she chose not only because of her research and because it’s considered politically stable—but also she’d enjoyed the movie, A United Kingdom!

Volunteers are wanted to help with campaign actions. Have an hour or two a week to spare? Want to help save the environment on the Gold Coast? Do you love koalas? All help welcome; a wide variety of campaigns are being researched etc. Contact Gecko office@gecko.org.au if you can help with Campaigns and a person from the Team will contact you.

The City plan, planning scheme and the Crime and Corruption Committee

The Spit Master Plan by Lois Levy The campaign to protect the public open space of The Spit at the Gold Coast Broadwater has been a fierce and often divisive one for over thirty years. The development industry has wanted

The Cane Toad Challenge is based on a clever new way to turn the creatures' own toxins against them.   It is a way all of us can help eradicate this fast-breeding pest. Professor rob Capon and his team have developed an innovative cane toad tadpole trapping technology that uses a nature road pheromone to lure toad tadpoles into a trap. Better still, he's coming to the Gold Coast to tell us about it.