The system, called Signed Indonesian, has been designed by education researchers from Australia and Indonesia. A dictionary based on the system has been produced and the Indonesian Education Ministry decided recently to introduce the system to mainstream schools. This means that deaf children will not have to attend special schools.

Signed Indonesian is based on a compilation of a variety of existing Indonesian sign languages, American sign language, and in some cases, newly-created signs.

But according to Merv Hyde, an expert in special education from Griffith University in Queensland, Signed Indonesian is not a new sign language. It is a set of signs which represent Indonesian words in the same word order as spoken or written Indonesian.

This approach, says Hyde, will give teachers immense flexibility in the ordinary classroom. Teachers will be able to speak and sign at the same time so that lessons can be given to both hearing and deaf children. The system will reduce the child’s dependence on lip-reading.

The Indonesian Health Ministry estimates there are up to 600 000 deaf children in Indonesia. Of these, only 10 per cent go to school. For the rest, the severity of their deafness and a shortage of suitable hearing aids makes attending school impractical.

The development of Signed Indonesian stemmed from advice provided by Hyde to the Education Ministry which set up a committee to compile the language. Hyde, who was a member of the committee, says that Signed Indonesian will also be used outside the classroom. “It’s even being used on television during news bulletins,” Hyde said.

Hyde expects other joint projects in education and training to flow from a Memorandum of Understanding that is currently being drafted between the Australian and Indonesian governments. The memorandum, when signed, will cover training in industry, special education, and secondary schooling.

The system, known as the Australian Asian Visible Imaging Spectrometer (AAVIS), is essentially an electronic eye or scanner which can capture digital images of the Earth’s surface in fine detail. It is able to analyse an area of land or sea as small as 12 square metres, compared with a minimum of 100 to 900 square metres for satellites.

The electronic eye – which is mounted on an aircraft – can distinguish 40 to 70 times the number of individual colours in an image than can be achieved by instruments carried on satellites, according to Steven Chadd from the Melbourne engineering firm, Trippett Shedden. This capability will allow users, for example, to distinguish easily between toxic blue-green algae and benign green algae within a single lake or river.

“Our goal is to reach a level of spatial and spectral resolution which will indicate the health of whatever is being looked at,” Chadd said.

The power of the instrument is due in large part to scientific algorithms developed by Australia’s chief research agency, the CSIRO, in collaboration with Trippett Shedden, and the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville. Indonesia, which is seeking to boost its expertise in advanced electronics for the aviation industry, is collaborating in the development of a commercial product which can be marketed throughout the Asia-Pacific region (see Box 2).

Research over the past decade, principally by CSIRO’s Institute of Natural Resources and Environment, has culminated in the development of image- processing software which can extract detailed information from an image such as the condition of plants and other organisms growing in a paddock, or even on the bottom of a lake.

Organisms reflect light in a particular way. This characteristic, called a spectral signature, allows them to be identified. In visible light, these signatures would be called colours or fine shades of colour, but they also include parts of the infrared spectrum invisible to the human eye. CSIRO’s understanding of the spectral signatures, combined with the physics of how reflected light travels through and is absorbed by water, allows scientists to see into a body of water from the air, and determine the presence or absence of particular organisms at a depth of up to 15 metres.

Using a prototype of the AAVIS system, Trippett Shedden recently surveyed Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay to map areas where scallops may live and regions containing seagrass mats, which provide a home for many species of commercial fish.

“From the air, in a period of about five days, we surveyed the entire bottom of the bay except for the deep channels,” said Chadd, who is Trippett Shedden’s project manager for AAVIS. “We can tell you that the water is the colour it is due to a particular organism living on the bottom.”

The prototype system uses a scanner built by a Canadian company, Itris Research. The scanner is able to distinguish 288 spectral bands or “colours” of light in the visible and near-infrared electromagnetic spectrum. A more powerful instrument is likely to be built in Australia, and will be able to distinguish 512 spectral bands. By comparison, the widely-used Landsat satellite imagery contains only 7 spectral bands.

Chadd claims AAVIS has three main advantages over satellites: more spectral data is possible, it can be used when and where needed, and the data produced is owned by those using the system, whereas satellite is available to anyone willing to pay.

AAVIS also promises quicker results than surveys done on the ground or by boat. A survey of algae in Sydney’s Hawkesbury River was completed by Trippett Shedden in three days – a task that would normally take divers months or even years to complete to the same level of accuracy.

The company plans to offer a commercial remote sensing service internationally within the next two years. The service will provide information such as whether a coral reef is living or dead, whether a wheat crop is healthy or stressed by drought, or whether a grassland is becoming environmentally degraded.

AAVIS is one of a number of aerospace technologies, including a network of ground stations for satellites and a service to predict changes in the ionosphere, which are being considered for possible joint development between Australia and Indonesia as part of an agreement known as COSTAI (see page 5).

Box 1

A SIGN that the Indonesians were particularly interested in AAVIS came last month when Trippett Shedden, an engineering firm in Melbourne, was invited by Indonesia’s Agency for that Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) to take part in the initial planning of a scheme combining industry, agriculture and hydroelectricity generation in the remote Mamberamo Valley in northwestern Irian Jaya.

But the scheme could run into problems. In the past, conservation groups have claimed such schemes were not suitable for tropical regions. The creation of large bodies of water in warm regions can cause the sudden influx of new species, particularly birds and insects. These can have a detrimental effect on indigenous species and may introduce disease.

Indonesian officials are likely to argue that, by using AAVIS, the scheme can be designed and managed in an environmentally sensitive way.

But Australia is giving tacit endorsement to the scheme by assisting with the introduction of AAVIS. “If Indonesia is going to get into a massive development project, then it would be sensible for them to do some surveying and that is where we can help,” says David McEwan, of the Department of Industry, Science and Technology’s International Collaboration Branch. In its commercial dealings with Indonesia, Australia is not in a position to make a moral judgment on the way the country develops, he said. “We can help to repair the effects of rapid development that has occurred and help plan development to avoid problems in the future.”

Box 2

LATE LAST year the deputy chairman of Indonesia’s Bureau of Industry Strategy, Dr Wisnubroto, said: “Indonesia has an aerospace industry but no infrastructure. Australia has an infrastructure to support a global aerospace industry. So the two should be able to cooperate for mutual benefit.”

It is this thinking which lies behind the joint venture to develop a high resolution imaging technology.

Over the past 18 years Indonesia has poured about A$1.5 billion into the creation of an aviation industry. But it is struggling to compete on the world market because of a lack of support industries, such as advanced electronics, and a dearth of skilled workers.

Just across the Timor Sea, Australia performs world class research and development and has well established training facilities. But it only has a small manufacturing base and a limited local market.

Bucharuddin Jusuf Habibie, Indonesia’s Minister for Research and Technology and the driving force behind the aviation industry, wants Indonesia to be a collaborator in high technology ventures, not just a consumer. The AAVIS project is appealing to Indonesia because it could lead to a commercial system that could fly on an Indonesian aircraft. The aim will be to market a service based on AIVIS throughout the region.

The demonstration unit – a hybrid of diesel and battery power – generates about 1 megawatt of electricity. The unit uses advanced microcomputer technology designed by Powercorp to control and adjust its generator and battery performance in accordance with power demands. Powercorp says the demonstration will take place before the end of the year.

If the demonstration is a success, the company – which supplies similar power generation systems to remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory may win contracts to supply dozens of medium-size power plants over the next decade for use in rural Indonesia. One of the main markets will be the less- developed eastern provinces of Indonesia. More than 600 islands in this region have little or no electricity.

The trial on Flores Island is the first of a series of projects expected to flow from the signing in January of an alternative energy agreement between Indonesia’s technology assessment agency, BPPT, and the Northern Territory’s Department of Industries and Development.

Now scientists from the CSIRO’s Australian Tree Seed Centre in Canberra have developed tests which could help foresters improve the seed for the millions of acacia trees to be planted in Sumatra and Kalimantan. The plans call for the establishment of hundreds of millions of trees a year.

In recent years, Australia and Indonesia have collaborated closely on research into tree species common to both countries, particularly Acacia mangium and Eucalyptus urophylla.

The tests will help pinpoint the original source of the genetic material for the A. mangium in Indonesia’s seed orchards. And researchers expect to develop further tests in the near future that can be used to eliminate in- breeding, which is reducing the quality of tree seed from these orchards.

If the research programme is successful, CSIRO scientists estimate the productivity of Indonesia’s acacia plantations could be improved by 30 to 50 per cent.

Researchers from the CSIRO Division of Forestry have found several genetic markers which they say will be able to confirm the origin of many of the acacia trees growing in seed orchards near Palembang in southern Sumatra. These orchards produce 90 per cent of the A. mangium seed used in plantations and reafforestation work.

The tests already can identify specific sequences in the genetic material of A. mangium chloroplasts inside the cells where photosynthesis occurs. Unlike the DNA in a plant cell nucleus, chloroplast DNA passes from generation to generation virtually unaltered, making it possible to trace the original source of a tree’s genes.

Forestry scientists suspect many of the Indonesian seed trees are descended from the acacias of a small area near Cairns in north Queensland. The trees were exported to Indonesia during breeding programmes over many years. Scientists believe the seed orchards in Indonesia would produce faster-growing trees if they included genetic material from A. mangium trees elsewhere, particularly Papua New Guinea and the Cape York Peninsula.

Gavin Moran, a geneticist at the tree seed centre, says the search is well advanced for genetic markers in the nucleus which will make it possible for foresters to determine the level of genetic diversity in A. mangium. Foresters can use this information to weed out highly inbred trees from the Indonesian seed orchards.

“We’re doing the screenings now and we’re perhaps about six months away from finding what we want,” he said.

Indonesia has more than 500 000 hectares of A. mangium plantations for pulpwood production. It plans to double the plantation area within 10 years. A further 100 000 hectares are being planted as part of reafforestation projects.

In the past five years, the tree seed centre has sent more than a tonne of tree seed to Indonesia for evaluation and commercial planting. Several Indonesian forest scientists have visited Australia for training in tree-breeding techniques.

By gradually moving into the jungle as part of a group, each individual might be able to learn lost survival skills more quickly from its fellows, says Ralph Swan who works at Murdoch University and the Perth Zoo.

Swan has been involved for 18 years in returning orang-utans to their native habitat at the Bohorok Rehabilitation Centre near Medan in northern Sumatra. One of his graduate students, Kristin Warren, now heads another rehabilitation centre at Wanariset, near Balikpapan, in east Kalimantan where 115 orang-utans are being prepared for life in the rainforest.

The animals are a small proportion of the baby orang-utans sold into captivity each year by poachers in Malaysia and Indonesia. The asking price is about US$350 each. Typically, the babies are obtained by shooting the mother. An estimated 700 orang-utans are kept as pets in Taiwan, according to Swan. They often suffer health and psychological problems before being killed or abandoned.

Swan says many of the former pets arrive at the centres addicted to beer and pizza and other unnatural foods. They often suffer from malnutrition and diseases such as polio. After treating these health problems, the staff begins the long and difficult process of weaning the orang-utans off human contact.

This involves feeding the animals a deliberately monotonous diet of milk and bananas, which is designed to encourage them to forage in the surrounding jungle. Visitors are not allowed to touch the animals.

Even so, says Swan, rehabilitation can take years, depending on the age of the animal and the length of the time it spent in captivity. Many adults have never acquired the ability to hunt for food or build nests in trees, which they must do to avoid predators such as tigers.

Under a recently signed science and technology agreement with Indonesia called COSTAI (see page 5), an Australian company will be given the opportunity next month to show that it has the capability to clean up waste water from dyehouses in Indonesia. The company, Sepa Waste Water Treatment in Sydney, will set up a demonstration plant at a dyehouse in Jakarta.

The plant, which will be able to handle 10 cubic metres of waste water an hour, will use a combination of chemical and physical processes to extract the organic dye component and concentrate it into a sludge suitable for disposal in a landfill.

According to John Meyer, Sepa Waste’s managing director, the treatment will mean that 70 to 80 per cent of the water in the dyehouse effluent will be suitable for reuse in the factory. The other 20 to 30 per cent could be discharged to a creek or river within the existing – but largely unenforced – environmental standards.

If the pilot plant performs as expected, it will be followed by a full-scale demonstration plant, paid for by Indonesia.

Water quality has become a big issue in Indonesia. For example, Jakarta’s consumption of groundwater for industry and domestic use has been so high that sea water has infiltrated shallow wells as far as 10 kilometres inland.

According to Dennis Glennon, managing director of Environmental Solutions International (ESI), a company in Perth, the Brantas River in East Java is “extremely polluted” as a result of discharges from more than 700 industries and the urban homes of 15 million people. Pollutants include heavy metals, long-lasting organic chemicals, and biological matter.

ESI recently completed a year long demonstration of its wastewater treatment technology called Hybractor at a distillery in the East Javan city of Mojokerto, near Surabaya. Mojokerto is on the lower reaches of the Brantas River.

The Hybractor plant is a so-called “hybrid anaerobic reactor” which uses anaerobic microorganisms to break down the organic chemicals in wastewater. In the lower section of the reactor, where the effluent is fed into a chamber, microorganisms are kept in high concentrations suspended within the effluent. The upper section of the reactor is filled with a packing material which acts as a “biofilm” to provide a large surface area on which the microorganisms can grow.

ESI claims the process can treat potent effluents in less than 20 hours, compared with 20 to 25 days for conventional anaerobic methods. The process also produces methane gas which can provide an extra source of energy. The trial was funded by ESI, the East Javan government, and Austrade.

Trials of other Australian technologies to treat wastewater are likely to flow from agreements being negotiated between Melbourne Water and government-owned water authorities which are known as water enterprises, in West Java. The agreements, likely to involve 15 regencies or provincial governments by the end of June, cover technology transfer and technical advice on water supply and waste treatment.

The equipment failure, apparently triggered by faulty parts, is a setback for the team which is trying to understand the driving forces behind climate change in the region, including the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The experiment will be extended for another year in an attempt to re-collect some of the data the researchers believe has been lost.

Scientists from Australia and the Association of South-East Asian Nations last June began a 12-month study of the so-called Indonesian throughflow, an ocean current which carries billions of kilowatts of heat energy from the warm tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean into the cooler waters of the Indian Ocean and beyond.

The flow, which passes through the Indonesian archipelago, is thought to play a crucial role in world climate, especially the formation of ENSO events which periodically cause severe droughts and floods throughout Southeast Asia and Australia.

To measure the throughflow, a team of 20 scientists and technicians deployed a series of current meters at various depths in the Strait of Makasar, between Kalimantan and Sulawesi, and in the Molucca and Halmahera Seas.

Five of the meters, called current profilers, were designed to use sound waves to measure currents from the surface to a depth of about 200 metres. It is these instruments which are believed to have failed, although a different type of meter used at greater depths appears to have functioned normally.

According to George Cresswell, a CSIRO oceanographer and co-chief scientist for the study, the American manufacturer of the profilers has told the team not to expect any data from its instruments, although the failures cannot be confirmed until the meters are collected on this month’s cruise.

Faulty electronic boards obtained by the American company from a sub-contractor may have been installed in the instruments, Creswell said. The meters, which had worked well in previous applications, had also been “upgraded in some way” by the manufacturer. The boards and the modification apparently corrupted the stored data, he said. In addition, doubts have emerged about how long the batteries of the instruments could maintain an adequate power supply.

Cresswell believes the experiment can still meet its objectives. The American manufacturer has agreed to lend the researchers another three meters for a further 12 months. The meters will be deployed this month in the Strait of Makasar, through which most of the water of the Indonesian throughflow is known to pass. The CSIRO has agreed to provide specially-designed moorings for the new meters at no extra cost.

All the meters will be collected as part of an Indonesian scientific cruise scheduled for 1995. “The extra costs won’t be great, and from the conventional deep meters, we will get a couple of years of data instead of one year,” Cresswell said.

Cresswell described the year’s delay and the expected loss of surface current data from the Halmahera and Molucca Seas as a disaster of “2 on a scale of 1 to 10”. He was pleased the problem appeared to have been resolved.

Under the arrangement, signed in 1988, QMC acquired the rights to CSIRO’s
research on magnesium ore until 2001, plus the rights to previous research.
The company also has control over the direction of research by a core group of
about 30 CSIRO scientists.

In return, CSIRO has been paid the full cost of the research, either in QMC
shares, or cash, or both. It is the only arrangement with industry where CSIRO
has taken equity in a publicly listed company.

The method of payment is at the company’s discretion. To date, QMC has largely
paid CSIRO in shares, making the organisation one of the company’s major
shareholders. QMC’s share price has steadily risen in recent years from less
than A$1.50 to over A$5. CSIRO last year sold a parcel of QMC
shares for A$2.4 million, and still holds shares valued at
A$5.73 million.

“It’s been an excellent arrangement,” says Alan Reid, director of the CSIRO
Institute of Minerals, Energy and Construction and a member of the QMC board.
“QMC is one of the few companies which has agreed to pay the full cost of the
research. This doesn’t happen with many companies. Most feel they can ride on
the backs of the taxpayers.”

The research programme, said Reid, had benefited from having a specific goal
and being focused on what “the company really wants us to do”. One of the main
goals has been to find a new process for preparing magnesium ore for high-
grade smelting. The research is important because magnesium producers overseas
tightly police their processing technology, making it virtually impossible for
new players to enter the industry without a novel method for preparing
feedstock.

Documents lodged recently by QMC with the Australian Stock Exchange indicate
that the project is close to developing a new process based on the production
of high-grade magnesium chloride without impurities.

Small-scale tests show that the metal produced by electrolysis of the
magnesium chloride will be more than 99.9 per cent pure and contain low levels
of heavy metal contaminants. The new process is yet to be demonstrated with
commercial quantities, but design work is underway for the construction of a
pilot magnesium metal plant at Gladstone, Queensland. The plant, due to open
in 1995, is expected to make 1000 tonnes of magnesium metal a year.

The research project is funded by QMC, MIM Holdings, and the Japanese firm,
Ube Industries, with support from state and federal sources. “I would
personally do it again,” says Reid. “CSIRO has to move more to a risk-taking
environment,” he said.

Last June, McKinsey & Co released a report, called Emerging Exporters, which
showed that – as is happening elsewhere in the world – small to medium-sized
enterprises of 500 employees or less are producing large amounts of export
income. By 1997, McKinsey estimates that the 700 leading SMEs in Australia
will export almost A$16 billion worth of manufactured goods. The report
has sparked a debate within government over how these companies – and many
thousands like them – can be supported.

But, according to George Argyrous, from the School of Social Science at the
University of New South Wales, the report places too much emphasis on the
export potential of individual companies and the role of company heads, rather
than on the structural needs of industries (Journal of Australian Political
Economy, no. 32, p. 106).

The report, says Argyrous, “gives the impression that there is a nothing
between many Australian firms and export markets than an heroic entrepreneur
armed with a fax machine”. “By elevating this factor as the key variable in
export success, and down-playing structural features, the report has been able
to skirt around issues of general industry assistance and manufacturing
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In December, the Innovation Study Commission of the BCA released a 430-page
book, Managing the Innovating Enterprise, which stressed the key to successful
innovation is small, incremental changes to existing products, processes and
services, aimed at better serving the customer. Science and technology were
given a back seat.

According to Plunkett, technological innovation is vital if Australia is to
compete on world markets. “You need exclusive technology to capture markets,”
he says. “The importance of technology is right there in the BCA report. Many
examples they quote feature technology as a way to achieve change. The way
they went public about science and technology was a shame.”

Stronger words come from Stephen Hill, director of the Centre for Research
Policy at the University of Wollongong. He describes the book’s views on
innovation as myopic. It creates a “straw man”, he says. The book attacks the
“linear” or “pipeline” model of innovation in which research results flow
smoothly into commercial products. But this model was discarded years ago in
favour of a complex of interactive networks. “Today, instead of a relay race,
we have a basketball game, with many fiercely competitive participants, all
playing with the ball of knowledge.”

The downplaying of science and technology was “very dangerous”, he said. “If
we relied solely on incremental and small improvements then today we’d have a
bigger and better iron lung. These improvements may be all right for the short
term, but eventually a firm has to make larger decisions, even change fields,
or go out of business.”

The book says that governments spend large amounts on public sector R & D but
very little on the management of innovation. Businesses should have a greater
say in how public R & D money is spent. The book sold out within three months
– all 2 500 copies.

This is what BCA had to say about science and technology:

“The first and principal conclusion of our research is that innovation in
Australia in the 1990s is about people and enterprises, not about science and
technology. For the vast majority of enterprises, science and technology are
vital tools that need to be applied effectively and developed selectively. But
for these enterprises, innovation is more a matter of flexible, productive and
focused employee relations in the workplace than it is the result of
technological resources or the impact of science and science policies.”