Working the Gaps: Circularity, Place, and What We Learn Along the Way

Townsville is a place of possibility.

It is one of Australia’s fastest-growing regional cities, yet it still holds a strong sense of closeness. People run into each other. Stories travel. Opportunities surface, sometimes quietly, sometimes all at once. It is a city confident enough to grow and grounded enough to stay connected.

Over the past three years, alongside a wide range of programs and initiatives, I’ve spent time paying close attention to what I’ve come to think of as the gaps, the spaces people move through when linear pathways don’t reflect how they actually build ideas, businesses, or livelihoods.

I did not arrive with a theory of circularity. I arrived with questions, shaped by the people standing in front of me seeking help, by daily practice, and by a growing awareness that many of the challenges people face do not respond well to linear structures.

Learning Circularity from the Reef and Starting at Home

Steve Hannah, Paul Bull and Jason Lange
Atlas Soils

When you live in Townsville long enough, certain things become hard to ignore.

You notice how quickly the city heats up after rain. You notice where the water goes when it runs off streets and yards. You notice how often our valuable soils are scraped, compacted, built on, and then watered into submission. And if you spend enough time around soils, construction sites, lawns, drains, or the reef, you start to see the same pattern repeating itself over and over again.

The moment it really landed for us wasn’t dramatic. It was standing on the Castle Hill lookout after a Movember walk, looking out over the Townsville CBD to Middle Reef only a few kilometres from our favourite restaurants. Offshore and visible in good conditions, sits this extraordinary and mammoth living system, a city in its own right, built entirely from relationships, sunlight, water, and time. No waste. No trucks. No complaining. No landfill. Everything reused, recycled, repurposed, or transformed with partnerships.

As dads, that contrast matters.

Kantha: hand embroidering the environment

Dr Natasha Narain

A unique 19th-century Kantha (hand-embroidered textile) from Bengal, now in the Stella Kramrisch collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, contests the common understanding of kantha as simple domestic folk embroidery. Made entirely from locally grown, spun, and woven cotton (kapas) and embroidered with cotton threads, the work embodies circular, place-based production. It was collected from Jashore (now Bangladesh), near the Sundarban Delta mangrove ecosystem. The composition features a central hibiscus flower — not a human — encircled by paisleys, marigolds, mandalas, and geometric patterns, and can be "entered from any direction," compared by the author to Kurosawa's Rashomon effect. Diagonal punkahs (fans), mangroves, fish, birds, animals, and humans are all given equal visual weight, suggesting a feminised, non-extractive worldview in which the maker positions herself as creator, nurturer, and observer — a custodian of place with embodied ecological knowledge.

Circularity operates on multiple levels throughout this work: material reuse, compositional structure, spiritual practice, and generational continuity through ancestral touch. The design blends Persian, Hindu, and European stylistic influences, reflecting Bengal's syncretic cultural landscape while potentially serving as an aspirational counter-narrative to British colonial turmoil. Through the precise, error-free stitching, the unknown woman maker enacts custodianship of her world — manifesting abundance and possibility, where ecology, spirituality, creativity, and care are intrinsically intertwined rather than separate.

Time for new boots

It was time for new boots, and since I was in Kalgoorlie I bought Redwings. There was life in the old ones though, so they went into a paper bag under the seat, forgotten, on the 900 km drive home. Weeks later Mr D and I were driving to Bell Rock Range to collect urtjanpa (spearwood, Pandorea doratoxylon). We stopped for a cup of tea and there, under the seat, were my old boots. I offered them to Mr D, who was most pleased with them. His old ones went in the bag and under the log we were sitting on. I’d long learned not to speak to people about littering: their country, their rules. All those broken-down cars lining the Gun Barrel Highway? Spare parts.

Probably six months later a whole Toyota load of us were heading back to Bell Rock Range.

Connecting to What We Protect: Marine Photography as a tool for Change

Lawrence Scheele

Within a circular system knowledge is a foundational component—it is required at every step of the journey, from motivation to action to reflection. My work aims to increase the quantity of knowledge around the delicate nature of Magnetic Island’s ocean ecosystem and the many animals who live in it. And to generate the greatest amount of knowledge you need educational tools that are accessible, simple, and inclusive. This way you are inviting everybody to engage and ensuring the widest audience possible. And if those educational tools are unique, visual and beautiful you are also serving to boost motivation due to an emotional, creative connection.

Beyond filling a gap in the literature, the motivation behind my work stems from a central ethos: if people can experience the magic of the ocean they are more likely to care for it.

From Ocean Waste to Industrial Feedstock: How ReefCycle is Closing the Loop on Marine Debris

For over twenty years, the Tangaroa Blue Foundation has operated at the intersection of environmental conservation and data science. While their work began as a frontline response to Australia’s marine debris crisis, it has evolved into a sophisticated exercise in circular resource management.

Through the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI) Database, the foundation has tracked over 30 million items. However, the true breakthrough lies not just in the collection of this data, but in the transformation of degraded, "end-of-life" plastics into high-value secondary raw materials.

The primary challenge in a circular economy for ocean plastics is material quality. Unlike post-consumer waste collected from curbside bins, marine debris is often highly weathered by UV exposure and contaminated by salt and organic matter. Traditionally, these factors made marine-derived plastics (MDP) "unrecyclable," forcing them back into a linear path toward landfill.

Circularity Is Already Here — We Just Need the Courage to Act

Ally Vardy

Australia often speaks about circularity as something we are still trying to invent — a future framework we hope to arrive at. From where I stand, working in water quality and reef protection in North Queensland, we are past that phase. The science is done, the systems exist, and Australia now has a credible market mechanism to support environmental repair through Reef Credits. What’s needed now is the resolve from those who control funding, policy, and infrastructure decisions to put them into practice.

I work with RegenAqua, a water quality bioremediation technology developed in North Queensland to remove harmful nutrients before they reach the Great Barrier Reef. What makes it remarkable is not just its effectiveness, but its paradoxical nature. RegenAqua operates in a fully controlled, ex situ environment, yet the process itself is entirely natural.

How everyday waste materials could help restore coral reefs and bring down costs

Dr Widiastuti and Dr Cathie Page
AIMS

Could breadcrumbs help with coral reef restoration? Scientists from the Australian Institute of Marine Science and Universitas Udayana in Bali, Indonesia have been working together to find out.

Coral reefs around the world are threatened by climate change. Warming temperatures are heating the oceans leading to marine heatwaves which bleach and kill corals.

The future of coral reef ecosystems including the Great Barrier Reef relies on accelerated emissions reduction, management of local and regional pressures, and the development of methods to help reefs adapt to and recover from the impacts of climate change.

The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), which is headquartered in Townsville, Queensland, is investigating with collaborators different ways coral reefs can be protected, restored and aided, developing methods that can be replicated and scaled up to lower costs.

Turning Waste into Opportunity: How Circular Thinking Is Powering North Queensland’s Circular Future

Closing the Carbon Loop: Why SAF is Essential for Aviation’s Future

Riding the Climate Carousel

Museum of Underwater Art: Safeguarding the Reef