I started to develop an interest in what was happening in the school canteen.
I think that came about when my children started school and I could see that it wasn't great the options at at ours at our school.
So I was asked to actually run the school canteen and change the canteen at at my daughter's school.
I've done further studies in public health and health education to create that background that I needed, and then the opportunity to actually look at how we could feed children differently came about.
So we set up the school lunch programme initially to address the need of children who have trouble accessing food.
So it was from a food security perspective to start with, but always with the intent to link every child eating a school lunch meal to impact on their learning outcomes, their health and wellbeing and also their social connectedness to school and with the real focus of using local and seasonal produce in Tasmania. We mainly focus on primary schools because we want to develop that understanding of food from an early age.
This actually started when I had depression, when I actually retired, and I was most surprised.
One expects, obviously you're just going to sail into your last 30 years feeling quite happy.
And I realised that the only thing that was going to get me out of depression was to reconnect.
So I found myself sitting behind a desk four days a week volunteering but not getting paid and thoroughly enjoying it.
I was volunteering at the weather Bureau and basically it was a project from the heart.
We saw all of these old weather documents that were seeing the light of day for the first time in a long time. So senior meteorologist said to me, look, Mac, why don't you just start up a project to image these things so that they can live on forever, which is what we did.
And it was fun looking back at our meteorological history going back to the early 1800s.
But when we got near the end of that, I went back to see the meteorologist and said, all right, we've, we've now done all the imaging. What's next?
So she said, well, the UK Met Office is actually starting a programme.
They need digital data for the climate models that are now looking at benchmarking climate change.
The Southern Ocean is a major creator of climate change globally.
So any information we can pick up along the South Coast of Australia is a valuable addition at a global level in terms of being able to recreate weather in inside a computer to look back what was happening back in the 19th century.
Malcolm ‘Mac’ Benoy has made a significant contribution to climate change research in his role as a volunteer citizen scientist, helping to preserve valuable records and data relating to South Australia’s meteorological history.
Over the past two decades, Mac has volunteered with the Bureau of Meteorology in South Australia, where he set up a citizen science group to record and preserve valuable hand-written meteorological records from the 19th century. Under Mac’s astute guidance, the group has digitised over 90,000 synoptic charts and related documents, providing an invaluable research tool for modern-day climatologists.
International climate change and meteorological researchers have used the group’s records to reconstruct historical weather patterns in the southern hemisphere, helping to better understand how the global climate is changing.
Mac’s professionalism, enthusiasm and insight continue to guide the team of citizen scientists in its work to document and preserve critical weather data.
Learn more about positive ageing at health.gov.au/positive-ageing.