Audio Transcript

Published: 16 September 2017
APA 7 Citation: Newsome, B. (Host). (2017, September 16). Establishing a bone museum in regional QLD [Audio podcast transcript]. Fizzics Education. https://www.fizzicseducation.com.au/podcast/fizzicsed/establishing-a-bone-museum-in-regional-qld/

Ben Newsome CF is the recipient of the 2023 UTS Chancellor’s Award for Excellence and a Churchill Fellow. He is a global leader in science communication and the founder of Fizzics Education.

[00:00:01]
Debra Cook: Every kid says to me I have to have a dig pit. So I’ll be having some sort of a sandbox somewhere where they can get in and dig out their own bones. That lends itself to the ability to have special guests come in and, if we bury something in particular into that dig pit, we can perhaps have an expert in that particular animal come in.

[00:00:24]
Ben Newsome: That was Deb Cook who, along with Jamie, are putting together the Gympie Bone Museum project in Gympie in regional Queensland. Gotta love people supporting their community.

[00:00:34]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:50]
Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to another Fizzics Ed podcast. This episode is quite interesting because Deb and Jamie are not only doing the Gympie Bone Museum project, they also run two businesses, not one, two: Dissection Connection and Rockhounds. Which is incredibly interesting considering that Deb also still helps out as a lab technician for Gympie State High School, and both of them are heavily involved with the local STEM hub too. Talk about really, really busy. Let’s dive into this interview, we got a lot to learn here.

[00:01:20]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed podcast.

[00:01:22]
Ben Newsome: Debra Cook, welcome to the Fizzics Ed podcast.

[00:01:24]
Debra Cook: Thank you very much. It’s quite exciting.

[00:01:27]
Ben Newsome: It is. I’ve actually been wanting to get you involved for quite a while now because I know that you’ve been heavily involved in science for many years, and I was trying to work out, to be honest, how I would even start this interview because you don’t just do one thing, you do a lot of things. So let’s go with that for a start. Deb, what do you do?

[00:01:48]
Debra Cook: What do we do? Look, primarily we sell body parts.

[00:01:51]
Ben Newsome: That’s a good way to start.

[00:01:53]
Debra Cook: That’s what we say at parties.

[00:01:55]
Ben Newsome: Okay, gotcha. So you’re referring to Dissection Connection.

[00:01:58]
Debra Cook: That’s right. So we run Dissection Connection and we have done for seven years with my partner Jamie. And we supply dissection specimens to schools and unis and now quite a lot of medical training as well, surgeons training and skill up-to-dateness. Yep. So yeah, we do the software, other people do the hardware.

[00:02:24]
Debra Cook: And then four years ago we thought, oh, we like rocks. And we didn’t like the rocks that other people were supplying to schools. So now we do Rockhounds rocks as well, which is geology specimens that rock. Really big, nice, hand-size specimens where teachers can really see the parts of the rock and the features of the specimen so that they can really teach. Not those little thumbnail-size things that kids are trying to work out how that came out of a volcano. Because volcanoes are big and that rock’s tiny and that’s really boring.

[00:03:04]
Debra Cook: And then a year ago or two years ago, I said to Jamie, I’ve had an idea. And Jamie’s lovely and he always says, yep, that sounds great. So now we’re a year into the Gympie Bone Museum, which is a not-for-profit project that we’ve got going in our town because our town is imminently going to be bypassed by the highway. So we would like to have something really unique here in Gympie to encourage people to continue to visit Gympie after that highway has gone past. So, yeah, no sleep for Deb and Jamie.

[00:03:41]
Ben Newsome: Especially when in amongst this, you also help out at Gympie State High School.

[00:03:46]
Debra Cook: Oh, that’s right. When they get sick or injured, they ring me up and I say yes, I’ll do that. And that’s kind of nice because I get to go back into the classroom and it keeps you a bit up to date with where teachers are at and just reminds you that teachers and labbies work really hard.

[00:04:03]
Ben Newsome: Actually, speaking of which, when we contacted you a couple of weeks ago to say, hey, we would love you to come on this podcast, you were scrambling to put on an event for Science Week as well.

[00:04:11]
Debra Cook: That’s right. Recently the Gympie Regional STEM Hub has started up in Gympie, Inspiring Australia are behind that. And we’ve joined up with them. So that’s quite a large group of schools and other STEM people in town. And, yeah, we thought we haven’t done any physics for a while, so Jamie built a hologram projector and took it up to a school and there you go, STEM Hub as well. It’s all happening, Ben.

[00:04:40]
Ben Newsome: It is! And that’s why I was trying to think in my head, where are we going to talk about first? You know what I mean? Like, where do we go? So, alright, let’s go to the start. What got you involved right to the very start, getting involved as a lab tech in the first place, before we even get into all the other stuff that you do?

[00:04:58]
Debra Cook: I did industrial chemistry at uni.

[00:05:01]
Ben Newsome: Ah, right.

[00:05:02]
Debra Cook: And in the very last semester of that degree, it was a very heavily practical degree, we had 30 hours in the lab every week and I really loved lab work. But in the very last semester, they took us on a site tour and we went to a number of different industrial sites to give us an idea of what we would be doing when we graduated.

[00:05:27]
Debra Cook: And I looked at all those jobs and went, I really don’t want to do that. And I’m three and a half years into a degree, only because they all looked pretty repetitive to me. So not that I didn’t like the science, and probably if I’d gone into there and gotten more tied up in the research and development areas of industrial chemistry then maybe I would have been interested. But the day-to-day how salty are the chips coming off the production line kind of chemistry just didn’t turn me on at all.

[00:06:05]
Debra Cook: So I ran away to Japan for a couple of years. And when I came back I thought, oh no, what am I going to do? And I saw an ad in the local paper for a lab technician at a local high school. And my high school had lab technicians that were really involved in extracurricular stuff. So I did that crystal growing competition and we made paper and all that sort of thing.

[00:06:33]
Debra Cook: It was the lab techs that ran those activities at lunchtime and after school. So I knew what that person did and I thought, I might have a crack at that because that’s quite varied. And I did get my first job in a school and I was lucky enough to work with someone who was really experienced and had been doing it for a long time. And I really loved it. I loved it. You get to do all sorts of different science and you get to pull things out of your back pocket at the last minute. You have to do a lot with not much money and it was engaging and interesting and I really enjoyed it.

[00:07:10]
Ben Newsome: It must be clear because you’ve got a lot on your plate and you’re still doing a bit of work here and there to help out the local high school. You could have easily just fallen into this and mind you, not for the word just, the technicians are the backbone of any science department at any high school. And the fact that you’re doing all those extracurricular activities as well, I can imagine you could have easily been in your element alone let alone doing all the other stuff you do as well. What made you go, you know what, I’m going to go do other stuff on top of this?

[00:07:40]
Debra Cook: I think Jamie and I were just sick of the public service. I went and worked in tissue culture research for a little while just as a secondment and that was a nice change from schools and I got some new skills there. But that’s where I met Jamie and we just found ourselves talking about different businesses that we might do together. And I did go back to school after that secondment finished, but I had the bug there to be doing something for myself and after a while the public service will grind you down to a tiny little knob.

[00:08:17]
Ben Newsome: That’s a very geological process of you.

[00:08:20]
Debra Cook: Yes, indeed! Yes. And honestly I thought that Dissection Connection might get me out of school for a day or two every week and I fully expected to be part-time school, part-time business, but it just took off and it grew really quickly. And now we’re both full-time in the business and we’ve got a young man that works for us most of the week as well. And here we are, spreading our wings further and further every year.

[00:08:46]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. Okay, let’s go into what Dissection Connection does. To be honest, we love you guys. Full disclosure for everyone listening, yes, we use Dissection Connection ourselves at Fizzics because of a number of reasons which I want to go into. What does Dissection Connection actually do for high schools and education departments across the country? Chop up animals, right? To produce the materials and all the bits that you can do. Why wouldn’t a high schooler just go down to the local butcher?

[00:09:17]
Debra Cook: Yeah, which is what we all used to do. And when I worked in the city, that’s what I used to do, I had to use the local butcher around the corner. Butchers in the city are rarely in touch directly with the abattoirs anymore, they tend to go through meat wholesalers.

[00:09:42]
Debra Cook: So the meat goes from the abattoir to the wholesaler and the wholesaler is the one that actually takes the orders and delivers to the butcher. So you’ve now got an extra layer of complexity between yourself as the school customer and the abattoir when you need a heart that hasn’t been slashed open and still has its top on so the great vessels are there, and an eye that hasn’t had the abattoir worker’s thumb pushed through it.

[00:10:04]
Debra Cook: And it’s not something that abattoirs do every day. So they’re generally reasonably happy to do it for schools, but it’s one of those things that they’ll out of the blue get an order for two hearts, seven eyes, a brain and a bit of spinal cord and it’s completely out of their normal range of production. So they get forgotten or it gets collected but it gets left in the cold room and doesn’t make it to the city to the butcher. So you as a customer rock up to the butcher and either receive nothing because they’ve forgotten to collect it or forgotten to deliver it, or what they’ve delivered is slashed or ruined or unsuitable for the teachers so you go back to school and you actually haven’t got anything.

[00:10:52]
Ben Newsome: And that’s exactly why we work with you guys because not only do you source this stuff ethically, I mean that’s critically important, but you get why they’re going to a classroom in the first place. You can actually see the aorta, you can see all of the different valves and everything’s all intact. Otherwise you’re just giving kids some pulp.

[00:11:12]
Debra Cook: Yeah, that’s right. And I would like to say that we’ve got the abattoirs sorted out and we’ve had the lash out and they deliver perfect product all the time, but they still don’t. It still happens that we have to visually inspect every single specimen that comes through the shed here. So we still have a lot of wastage, but at least once it gets to you guys or to the school or to the surgeons, they know that what they pull out of the packet is going to be useful.

[00:11:40]
Ben Newsome: That’s interesting. So you’re helping surgeons become trained? I mean, who are you working with with that?

[00:11:46]
Debra Cook: Royal North Shore Hospital, the Australian College of Cardio and Thoracic Surgeons, lots and lots of different places and occasionally emergency airway management is something that we provide trachea specimens for. And they’re done in most hospital regions at least once a year. It’s one of those things that they don’t actually have to perform that procedure very much, you know, MacGyver and the pen?

[00:12:15]
Ben Newsome: Yes, yes.

[00:12:17]
Debra Cook: They don’t have to do it very often, but when they do have to do it, you’re really in trouble. And so they have to know what they’re doing and they need to practice it, even a very experienced doctor will practice it. And they used to practice on plastic electrical conduit tube.

[00:12:32]
Ben Newsome: Oh, that’s no good compared to what you’re doing.

[00:12:34]
Debra Cook: It’s not the same. It’s just not the same. So, yeah, I like to think that if I’m ever in that much trouble, somebody’s actually had their hands on a piece of meat.

[00:12:46]
Ben Newsome: Yep. And the thing is, you’re not just supplying stuff, like taking an order and then sending it off and clipping the ticket effectively, you genuinely are involved in teaching and you do a lot of professional development with teachers, which is fantastic.

[00:12:57]
Debra Cook: We do. And we do a lot of teach the teacher because actually it’s the quickest way to get to a really large group of kids is to get a group of teachers in a room, throw a specimen in front of them that they’ve either never seen or, the ones I really like is when I throw something like a pluck in front of them and they’ve all been doing it for quite a long time these teachers, but I’m always able to give them something new. I like to go into that room with three things that you probably didn’t know about that specimen when you came to it.

[00:13:36]
Debra Cook: And I just see a bit of enthusiasm and interest come back into those teachers. Because, you know, teaching life is a lot of meetings and a lot of hard grind and when you actually give them something that enthuses them a little bit more, it gets straight back to the classroom. So if I had 30 teachers in a classroom, you can imagine how many kids benefit from that in the long run.

[00:14:04]
Ben Newsome: Oh totally. Now there’ll be some people who will be totally aware exactly what pluck is, but there might be some people who have got no idea what pluck is. So just describe what that would look like.

[00:14:13]
Debra Cook: Oh, pluck’s really great. It’s like five kilos of everything from your tongue down to your liver. Your throat and your lungs and your heart, the diaphragm, the liver. And you can blow up the lungs and you can do a heart dissection and you can check out the trachea and the tongue and the taste buds and all of that sort of thing. So it’s actually a gateway to all the body systems, a pluck.

[00:14:41]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I mean it’s not just about traditional dissecting a rat or a chicken wing and that’s it. I mean there’s lots of different things you can look at. Which is very, very cool. So how do you balance this with Rockhounds? Because Rockhounds is a completely different kettle of fish. Or rocks, so to speak.

[00:15:00]
Debra Cook: It is. So, it’s got its own corner of the shed and some pretty heavy-duty shelving to hold them all up because geez rocks are heavy. One day I’m going to come up with a business where we sell something that’s very small and very light and doesn’t require special freight considerations.

[00:15:17]
Ben Newsome: Actually, one of the people that work here, Holly, was saying she’d come across a blog about Obama who joked with his friend, I hope this is correct, I’ll have to go check this out and sorry if I got this wrong, but he joked with his friend that he wished he’d set up a shop just called Medium White T-Shirt. And what Medium White T-Shirt does is exactly what it sounds like. You get a medium white t-shirt. Not large, not small, and not any other colour, it’s medium white. I think maybe he wishes for simplicity.

[00:15:50]
Debra Cook: Jamie’s just saying someone’s done it.

[00:15:53]
Ben Newsome: Someone’s done it. Jamie in the background there, I can actually hear you sort of pottering away getting things ready. What are you doing back there, Jamie?

[00:16:01]
Jaimie Cook: I’m preparing orders to go out on tomorrow Tuesday and Wednesday.

[00:16:08]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, that’s the thing. I knew full well that, thank you very much for giving away a bit of your time because you really got stuff to do in the middle of term three.

[00:16:17]
Jaimie Cook: Yeah, term three is usually very busy for us with a focus on body systems and the national curriculum now. So we’ve got a lot more schools coming online and doing our sort of stuff during term three, so it puts the pressure on a bit.

[00:16:34]
Ben Newsome: Hey Jamie, while you’re with us here, just tell us how you went with the holograms.

[00:16:38]
Jaimie Cook: Oh, yeah. So the holograms run through an app on your smartphone and it develops a video with four images playing at the same time. And you place a plastic truncated pyramid upside down on the screen of your smartphone and it projects the images onto the four sides of the pyramid. And if you step back from it a bit, it looks like that image is actually inside the pyramid, which is pretty cool.

[00:17:11]
Jaimie Cook: So I went up to one of the local schools and took some of the more interesting specimens from the bone museum up there, and the kids had to make their own projector, and then we filmed video of some of the specimens and then they projected the video onto their projectors. So yeah, fun and games.

[00:17:34]
Ben Newsome: That’s awesome. I love how that tied in with your local project with the Gympie Bone Museum project. I mean, apart from just driving an awareness, those kids may well be involved in your first, when you actually get up and running with that.

[00:17:47]
Jaimie Cook: Yeah, we’re hoping so. You know how it is, you get a couple of kids in each class that are really involved with what you’re doing. And you see potential volunteers or employees for a project like this, which is a not-for-profit that you can bring into the organisation at a later date.

[00:18:10]
Ben Newsome: So how far along are you with that project? Because initially these things start off with the fledgling of an idea, but I believe you’re a bit further along than that. Where are you up to at this point?

[00:18:22]
Debra Cook: Well, we have just closed down our first art exhibition. We got some regional arts grant funding for some artwork. And at the moment it’s a lot easier to get art grants than it is to get science grants. So that was a nice little way to introduce what we wanted to do to the town. Because what we don’t want is a big white room full of skeletons in glass cases.

[00:18:49]
Debra Cook: Because that’s the vision that everybody has when you say bone museum. People think big room, hall of bones, everything’s going to be white and black and we’ll walk around and we’ll look at it and we’ll read the little sign that says horse, cow, pig, chicken.

[00:19:06]
Ben Newsome: Yep.

[00:19:07]
Debra Cook: We want something much more interactive and something much more interesting. And we want to involve not only scientists but artists and musicians and anybody that’s got an interest in bones or using them to make things or do things with. So an art exhibition was a nice way to start. Jamie did build us an entire camel in the middle of the room.

[00:19:30]
Ben Newsome: Oh right.

[00:19:31]
Debra Cook: Which was really cool. Her name’s Nora because he spent a lot of time saying bloody Nora. But we had some really beautiful framed artworks, we had four different artists involved, and it was hugely popular. It was extended from four weeks to six weeks and we’ve just closed that down.

[00:19:56]
Debra Cook: But we have been offered a shop in our main street for the Christmas holidays and it’s about twice the size of that exhibition space. So now we’re gearing up to have a small museum exhibition open for the Christmas holidays. Incorporating some of the stuff that came out of the art exhibition that we’ve just finished and some more stuff, and starting to gear it more towards the scientific side of things now that we’ve sort of whetted everybody’s appetite.

[00:20:28]
Debra Cook: And if that’s successful and it’s paying for itself, we will just stay open either by appointment or permanently if we’ve got volunteers, and just grow from there. And if it’s not patronised as well as we would like it to be, well then we’ll shut it down and we’ll open up next school holidays at Easter.

[00:20:45]
Ben Newsome: Yeah.

[00:20:46]
Debra Cook: Because Jamie and I are generally of the opinion that you can plan things for years and years and years or you can just pull your finger out and get going. Just do it.

[00:20:54]
Ben Newsome: I love that. I really, really respect and love that because I mean, I think there’s so much stagnation in perfection. There really is. I’m sure there’s some actual phrase I’m meant to say, but the number of people who just rework and rethink and rework and rethink something within an inch of its life and all it is, is just sitting on a whiteboard or in some word document and it never actually gets shown to the world. For, what they say, no idea survives its first front with the public anyway. So I love the idea that you’re doing that, that’s great.

[00:21:31]
Debra Cook: You know, your website will never be perfect. If you want to fiddle with it until it’s perfect before you release it onto the internet, you will be doing that until the day that you die. Just put it out there, just get it going, you know? And the more that Jamie and I get out and talk about these projects that we’re doing, the more interesting people come out of the woodwork that want to help.

[00:21:56]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, it’s cool. And the thing is like what you’re doing is modelling exactly what modern thinking is when it comes to teaching kids about how engineers actually think and the way scientists think in the real world is test and perfect, test and perfect, test and perfect. But you never really get to perfection in the first place.

[00:22:13]
Debra Cook: That’s exactly right. And Nora the camel was a good example of that. In the beginning, we discussed just having the exhibition completely set up when the doors opened. As you would see at a museum or an art gallery, you walk in and it’s all done. But in the end, we decided that Jamie would actually build Nora through the duration of the exhibition so people could come in and see her being put together. And that meant that he spent a bit of time lying on the floor holding ribs on and things like that, and people were walking over him. But it generated discussion and people got to see Nora being put together.

[00:22:54]
Jaimie Cook: Yeah, it gave me the opportunity to talk to people not just about the camel, which most people couldn’t recognise from first sight as to what it was, and talk to them a bit about the rest of the exhibition as well while I was down there.

[00:23:10]
Ben Newsome: That’s really cool. And I mean even eminent scientists get these anatomical differences messed up quite often. I don’t know what’s grabbing my memory is remember when they first showed an Iguanodon like a long time ago and they had it all on all fours and the thumb spikes that we know exist on an Iguanodon, they had it on its nose because they thought it was part of like a rhino. I know that this constantly happens and obviously we refine things over time, but there’s probably a good example of hey here’s what we think it looks like and go from there.

[00:23:48]
Ben Newsome: That’d be interesting actually watching kids try to emulate that same thing. In terms of hands-on activities, because I totally get that the Gympie Bone Museum will not be a museum in the traditional sense of collecting dust in any way, it’ll be interactive and all the rest. What are you planning on the kids getting to be able to possibly do on those site visits if it goes beyond just holiday programs?

[00:24:11]
Debra Cook: Look the first thing that we got a grant for was a set of x-ray light boxes. So we’ve got five bays of x-ray light boxes and a whole lot of x-rays that have been donated by different people. They were on the wall in the art exhibition and they will be a permanent part of the collection. People can either bring in their own x-rays or they can use the x-rays that we’ve had donated and they can stand there and actually put them up on the light boxes, have a look at what it is. We’ll have some interpretative books and things so that they can discover what that x-ray is of and who it came from, you know, a male or a female and what general age they were and what was the matter with them.

[00:24:54]
Debra Cook: And they can stand there to their hearts’ content and people do, people just love it. They will stand there and go through every single x-ray that you’ve got out for them. A lot of the bones will be from animals that are really easy to get our hands on, so because Dissection Connection’s got good connections in the abattoirs, it’s easy for us to get our hands on pig skulls and beef skulls and bits of rib and that sort of thing that are pretty easily produced and they’re not precious like fossils are.

[00:25:23]
Ben Newsome: Yep.

[00:25:24]
Debra Cook: So if they get dropped or broken or need repairs or need to be chucked out and replaced, well that’s an easy thing to do. So it will be a place where there will be plenty of things where you can just pick up a rib and walk around with it and try and find the skeleton that it belongs to for instance.

[00:25:43]
Debra Cook: Every kid says to me I have to have a dig pit. So I’ll be having some sort of a sandbox somewhere where they can get in and dig out their own bones. And sort of that lends itself to the ability to have special guests come in and, you know, if we bury something in particular into that dig pit, we can perhaps have an expert in that particular animal come in and run a workshop where they will help us put it together and talk about that animal and identify the bones and do a little scientific dig.

[00:26:17]
Ben Newsome: Well that opens up the opportunity for collaborations with other museums. For example, in Queensland, the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum is a working laboratory with finding dinosaur digs all the time or even just keeping it more because you’re working with predominantly mammals, I’m thinking about you could have a visiting scholar or invite a visiting scholar from the La Brea Tar Pits in California. Like there’s a few different ways that you could sort of tweak this either way. I mean it could be very interesting.

[00:26:47]
Ben Newsome: I was even just sitting here thinking a couple of episodes ago I interviewed Derek Williamson who’s the director of the Museum of Human Disease out of University of New South Wales. And he’s got a fantastic collection of human disease specimens. And I wonder like I mean obviously you wouldn’t expect it wouldn’t be fit for human consumption with the animals that go through abattoirs if they’re diseased, but I wonder if occasionally they come across gallstones or all sorts of weird deformities that may exist in the bones themselves that perhaps you might be able to get your hands on that people may not even realize exist.

[00:27:23]
Debra Cook: Yeah, well and yeah they do see things like that from time to time. And in fact, we’ve got an older horse there, Nora’s got a broken rib that she’s actually remodelled. So it was broken when she was alive and she’s put herself back together. And just this weekend we were at a local farm and they pointed out they’ve got a particular horse that’s got a cancerous tumour on its leg. So when they put it down, we will go and have a look at the bone and see whether that’s actually affected the bone. Is that right, Jamie?

[00:27:59]
Jaimie Cook: I’ll be going and extracting the bones out of the leg of that particular horse once they put it down to see what effect that tumour’s had upon the bones and the joints of the leg and bring it back, rearticulate it and put it on display so that people can actually see what damage a cancerous tumour can actually do to bone structure.

[00:28:24]
Ben Newsome: Well it opens up the world of pathology, doesn’t it?

[00:28:27]
Debra Cook: Yes, it definitely does.

[00:28:29]
Jaimie Cook: Well and also too there’s lots of conditions such as ringbone and sidebone and pedal osteitis that affect hooves and fetlock joints of horses. Bringing those sort of specimens in to allow people to see what can possibly go wrong, it helps them when they look back upon a live horse and see them sort of lame and they can see what happens when those particular conditions are active in a joint or a leg.

[00:28:55]
Ben Newsome: Yep. And I look at this all in front of me now from thinking, all the different ways you could map a curriculum to this to the point where, yeah, it definitely matches high school.

[00:28:59]
Debra Cook: Oh absolutely. Yep, we can definitely map plenty of curriculum documents directly to this. But the other one that’s really interesting is veterinary and allied health pathology. So yes, there’s a whole range of things and you can bring in an expert in human disease who will look at a horse bone and be able to explain how that would affect humans and this is what you’ll see. So the possibilities are endless especially with the technology that we have now, to be able to have online webinar hookups and things like that.

[00:29:48]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. So and I was just thinking about even just looking at the processes and things that are on bones, I mean yes you can go into the physiology, but there’s a fair bit of mathematics and biomechanics that goes that’s involved with this. I mean if someone wants to just talk about the simple version of levers, I mean levers are all over a body, you just got to look for them.

[00:30:08]
Debra Cook: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, and you know there’s no reason that we couldn’t be pulling things apart and putting them back together.

[00:30:18]
Ben Newsome: Yeah.

[00:30:19]
Debra Cook: So kids can have a play with those knees and things like that.

[00:30:23]
Ben Newsome: Now there’ll be some lab tech, science teachers and people who may want to extend their career horizons who may be considering, you know they might be in another country or another district that want to start doing the types of work that you do. I mean what sort of advice would you have whether it’s doing some of your commercial aspects in Dissection Connection or Rockhounds or setting up a museum project like the Gympie Bone Museum project? What sort of advice would you have for someone who’s considering escaping the school’s cubicle so to speak?

[00:30:57]
Debra Cook: I would say two things. One is just get going on it. Like we discussed before, just get going on it. You know, every little step in the right direction will get you further away from where you started. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. You know, it’s like a good shampoo.

[00:31:17]
Ben Newsome: I was thinking that. It was Rachel Hunter I think who said that originally in the original ad a long time ago. Gee I’m showing my age. But anyway, keep on going.

[00:31:28]
Debra Cook: And the second thing that I would say, and we learned this one really quickly, is that it takes a village to run a business. It’s nice to think that you’ve got a really unique idea and you need to sit on it until you can unleash it on the world. Just you know, a lot of people are very afraid of somebody stealing their brilliant idea. What we have found is that you just can’t do it on your own. You need, we need freight partners that really understand what we do. We can’t just put our stuff onto any old freight carrier, it has to be the right one to get it there on time and in good nick.

[00:32:09]
Debra Cook: We need good partners in the abattoirs, and we need scientists to talk to, and we need people who supply the styrofoam eskies to us. And it takes a village to run a business. So you really have to get out there and talk about what you want to do. And if anything, the museum project has really shown us that this is a true concept. The more that we talked about it, the more people will come out of the woodwork and help you.

[00:32:47]
Ben Newsome: Yeah.

[00:32:48]
Debra Cook: So that would be my second thing was just get going and don’t be afraid to talk to people about what you want to do. You obviously you need to be smart about that, but ask questions, be open, listen to what people are trying to tell you and seek out people who are not necessarily experienced in the area that you want to go into because you might be doing something really unique, but find people that have experience in areas that are a bit similar because they’ll be a wealth of information to you. And if you’ve come out of a classroom, you know you can never have enough knowledge, ever.

[00:33:41]
Ben Newsome: Wise words. And I think having a bit of fun. I love the way you and Jamie work, I mean clearly not only engaged with your work but you’re having fun doing it. And I have to sort of wonder, I can see, so this connection’s been, you mentioned how these days we have ways of connecting with people over the globe and we’re using Zoom right now to connect with you, and I can see behind you that you’ve got an x-ray set up on a light box. What am I looking at there? Because it’s a little bit far away there.

[00:34:10]
Debra Cook: Ah.

[00:34:11]
Ben Newsome: Looks like a neck, a thoracic vertebrae perhaps?

[00:34:14]
Debra Cook: I have. I’ve got a neck on the on the left there. And whose knees are they Jamie? Somebody’s knees. Possibly my mum’s knees.

[00:34:23]
Jaimie Cook: I think so.

[00:34:24]
Debra Cook: Yeah, my mum’s knees. She’s just had a double knee replacement.

[00:34:28]
Ben Newsome: Oh wow, that’s not good.

[00:34:30]
Debra Cook: I’ll be getting some really excellent after shots of those knees pretty soon.

[00:34:36]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I bet, with the pins and all.

[00:34:39]
Debra Cook: Yeah! So anything with pins in it, anything that’s got pins or plates or screws or anything like that. People love that.

[00:34:51]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, the more gory the better, isn’t it?

[00:34:54]
Debra Cook: Absolutely.

[00:34:55]
Ben Newsome: It is true. Hey well thank you very much. I know you got a very busy day, you got things to get up onto couriers and out around the country and all the rest. But look, much appreciate for jumping on the podcast and I really think what you guys are doing is fantastic and I like how you overstretch then do something about it. In terms of just yeah, you got so much going on, it’s awesome. It’s really entrepreneurial and it does a really good thing for the community at large, which is awesome. Hey how can people get in touch with you?

[00:35:28]
Debra Cook: If they want to follow Gympie Bones, then you pretty much just have to put Gympie Bones into Google and all of our social media stuff will come back. Otherwise we’re at dissectionconnection.com.au or rockhounds.com.au. Depending on what your poison is at the moment.

[00:35:46]
Ben Newsome: So yeah, we’ll put all those links onto the show notes of course, and you can write to Deb what poison you want, you’re interested in I suppose.

[00:35:54]
Debra Cook: Yay!

[00:35:55]
Ben Newsome: That’ll be good. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens up in Gympie with the Bone Museum project. I really hope it goes well beyond your wildest expectations, because I really, I like the idea that it’s not just in a capital city. I think it’s great that it looks after regional centres and gives a reason for people to pop off the highway.

[00:36:13]
Debra Cook: Yeah, we are really hoping that is successful for the town too. And look we’re really looking forward to having people like yourself, you know, join us and get involved. We’d love to hear what you’ve got to add to the project. So… Oh! Jamie’s just held a sign up. Can I give a little plug for our event?

[00:36:31]
Ben Newsome: Plug away.

[00:36:32]
Debra Cook: September 15th, which is Friday, last day of school, Queensland, you’ll be needing a drink by the time we get there. 6pm at the Australian Hotel in Gympie, we’ve got Australian of the Year Professor Alan Mackay-Sim coming to do Science in the Pub.

[00:36:47]
Ben Newsome: Oh that’s awesome. So this should just go out in time for that. Generally we tend to be producing these on a Saturday or a Sunday, lately it’s been Saturday. So not this weekend but next weekend, which will be just the day before your night. So those people listening, hopefully you’ve downloaded it, you’ve listened to it and you’re in the local area, go check out that because that would be an amazing talk. I love Science in the Pub, it’s always good fun.

[00:37:12]
Debra Cook: Yeah! And completely free. So just jump onto our Facebook page and you’ll find the event there with all the maps and the details and everything that you need to know. So we’re really looking forward to it. He’s a stem cell champion, Alan Mackay-Sim.

[00:37:28]
Ben Newsome: That’s unreal. And you get to hang around with like minds and that’s always good fun too.

[00:37:34]
Debra Cook: Yeah, that’s right.

[00:37:35]
Ben Newsome: Awesome. So hey, thank you very much. Have a great afternoon and I will no doubt catch you in the near future.

[00:37:40]
Debra Cook: Thank you Ben, we look forward to seeing you. Always a good time.

[00:37:45]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed podcast. We’re all about science, ed tech and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s Fizzics spelt F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S and click 100 free experiments.

[00:38:00]
Ben Newsome: And there you go. That’s the incredibly talented Deb and Jamie Cook up in Gympie who are doing a massive effort to get their community into science in such a big way. They’ve formed three entities, I mean how cool is that? Dissection Connection, Rockhounds and the Gympie Bone Museum project. There’s definitely three different learnings that I took away from this interview, and no doubt you’d have more too, but certainly one for me is just do it. Start small and aim big. And that’s exactly what Deb and Jamie have been doing up in Gympie. If you’re either in a museum or a school, I really think we could definitely take a bit of their lead in doing that. Just start off a little bit, start a little bit small, take little bites off and grow something that people can definitely get involved in. I just love that, that’s awesome.

[00:38:40]
Ben Newsome: Speaking of something they’re getting involved in, is that they’ve listened to their audience, they’ve been listening to the people visiting their museum. Well, let’s just say their fledgling museum, but I can imagine it’ll be very, very cool as it builds and builds and builds. They are making things as hands-on as possible, and they’re responding to people’s needs. I mean, they’re listening to kids saying, hey, make a dig pit, it’ll be awesome if you put the bones in there. Yes, they’re pivoting and they’re making it happen, that’s just wicked.

[00:39:10]
Ben Newsome: The last thing I grabbed out of this is, hey, don’t be afraid to show works in progress. I mean that’s just so cool. Often people want to just have the finished product in front of people, and I just love how Deb and Jamie are working with their, well the Bone Museum can grow and build, and they can look under the covers and let people see the warts and all for what it is. But critically they’ll get to love the place because they get to see it grow, and that’s just awesome.

[00:39:35]
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Fizzics Ed podcast. Love your science? We do too. Here’s this episode’s education tip of the week. Grab your pencil and get ready to make some notes.

[00:39:40]
Ben Newsome: Yes, it’s time for another Ed tip of the week. And this time it’s a little bit different. The weather’s warming up, at least in Australia anyway, starting to warm up as we come into summer, and I thought it’d be kind of interesting to look at what could we do with kids and students if you can get them to a farm. What science can they learn when they’re fruit picking? So what could they learn? Well the first thing that certainly comes to mind is where does our food come from? It’s fairly obvious to us as adults, but to kids they’ve often got no idea when it comes to where cucumbers grow, tomatoes, rockmelons, pineapples. Now seriously, pineapples. I mean some kids literally think they just grow straight out of the ground exactly as the pineapple that they see in the grocery store, not realising how it actually grows. There’s so many different ways that kids have kind of very strange conceptions about how our food grows and they don’t really realise what it actually is.

[00:40:20]
Ben Newsome: Number two, what is a fruit and what is a vegetable? Hey, jump onto the Fizzics website and type in what is a fruit, what is a vegetable, you’ll find a blog post which actually looks into this. You’d be amazed how many kids have got no idea as to what a seed is, what a tuber is, what a root is, a stem, what a flower is, specifically when it comes to the food that we find in our supermarket. Now you get to show them on the farm where it grows, it’ll certainly help out. Hey, you can go a bit more deeper than this. You can look at food security and looking after our resources. You could show what actually gets put into the grocery market and what actually doesn’t, just by the misshapenness of certain fruit. Seriously, you won’t have all fruit will be brought to market purely because they’re either too big, too small, wrong colour, wrong shape. And so because of this you often will find that there’s quite a lot of food waste and that can be really brought into the discussion as well.

[00:40:55]
Ben Newsome: You could look at how farmers protect their crops from the weather, from frost, from hail, from too much heat or snow or whatever. People have no idea the sort of efforts that farmers actually go to, to protect their crop so they can bring it into market. Also another thing to bring up with kids is just what does organic farming actually mean? That’s a bit of a contentious topic these days because to a scientist organic means the thing is growing. It’s pretty much, it’s organic, it’s a growing thing, it has carbon in it. But to the public, organic farming often means no pesticides, insecticides, etc. So you could go into that discussion as well with them. Another thing you could also bring in is the role of quarantine and biosecurity in protecting crops.

[00:41:25]
Ben Newsome: Why should you not bring fruit across borders, especially into areas where they’re growing fruit? Because it could be transporting fruit fly or maybe you shouldn’t be bringing grapes or vines into areas where there are vineyards. That type of idea that, you know, some kids have no idea about how vectors of disease actually can be transported around the place and that can be an issue. Plant propagation techniques can be certainly brought up as well. Kids can learn about cutting and ways that they actually arrange the trees in an orchard so they can get the best sunlight to grow the best fruit. All that type of thing can be definitely there. So there you go, there’s a bit of an ed tip of the week. If you get a chance, take the students out on a trip to a farm and go check out what an agronomist is actually doing with their farm. Or if you’re with your family, take them out, they’ll have a great time picking fruit.

[00:41:50]
Announcer: This is the Fizzics Ed podcast. We’re excited about science. Grab a copy of our new book, Be Amazing: How to Teach Science the Way Primary Kids Love, from our website. Just search Be Amazing book. It’s available in hard copy and ebook. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s Fizzics spelt F-I-Z-Z-I-C-S.

[00:42:00]
Ben Newsome: One of the things students rarely get to do is to see scientists work on a day-to-day basis, actually see what they actually do for a living. On last week’s episode, I got to speak with Tim Smith, who is an alumni of the National Youth Science Forum and currently working at Swinburne University on an innovation engineering project. He actually had a bit of a take on what the National Youth Science Forum does for students understanding about what STEM is all about.

[00:42:20]
Tim Smith: A fantastic opportunity to be exposed to so many different scientific disciplines and get some real hands-on experiences to what working as a scientist is actually like.

[00:42:30]
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Fizzics Ed podcast. Sign up now for our fortnightly email newsletter. It’s loaded with details on new experiments you can do, STEM teaching articles, new gadgets, exclusive offers and upcoming events. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au. Scroll to the bottom and add your email.

[00:42:40]
Ben Newsome: And that just about brings us to the end of yet another Fizzics Ed episode. Hey, check next week’s episode out. I’m speaking with Steve Sherman from Living Maths, who for the last 20 years or so has been doing maths outreach for schools and libraries and all sorts of people across South Africa and beyond. Hey, check that out. And in the meantime, please make your classes fun. Make them as engaging as possible, and I hope you really grab the students’ imagination. You’ve been listening to me, Ben Newsome from the Fizzics Ed podcast. And I’m from Fizzics Education as well. I might catch you another day.

[00:43:05]
Announcer: You’ve been listening to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Subscribe to us on iTunes to download the next episode as soon as it’s released. And don’t forget, for hundreds of ideas, free experiments, our new Be Amazing book and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Gympie Bone Museum project?
The Gympie Bone Museum is a not-for-profit initiative aimed at creating a highly interactive and educational space for the local community and visitors. Rather than a traditional setup with skeletons in glass cases, the museum encourages hands-on learning through activities like bone digs and pathology examinations, helping to boost local tourism once the town is bypassed by the highway.

Why is it better for schools to use dissection specimens from Dissection Connection instead of a local butcher?
While local butchers source their meat through wholesalers, the specific requirements of schools—such as keeping the aorta and top vessels intact on a heart, or leaving the eye unpunctured—are easily lost or ruined in the commercial process. Dissection Connection works directly with abattoirs to ensure that specimens arrive completely intact, ethically sourced, and perfectly suited for educational dissections.

What is a “pluck” in the context of biological dissections?
A pluck is a large dissection specimen, usually weighing around five kilos, that includes everything from the animal’s tongue down to its liver. It contains the throat, trachea, lungs, heart, diaphragm, and liver, making it an excellent gateway specimen for teaching multiple interconnected body systems at once.

How can farmers and the agricultural industry be used to teach students about science?
Taking students to a farm offers numerous science lessons, including understanding where food comes from, distinguishing between fruits and vegetables from a biological perspective, and exploring organic farming versus traditional methods. It also opens up discussions on topics like food security, weather protection strategies, plant propagation, and the crucial role of biosecurity in preventing disease vectors.

What advice do Debra and Jaimie give to teachers or technicians wanting to start their own educational business?
Their two main pieces of advice are: first, “just get going on it,” as every small step moves you closer to your goal rather than getting bogged down in seeking perfection. Second, they emphasize that “it takes a village to run a business,” meaning you shouldn’t be afraid to talk about your ideas and seek out partners, freight companies, and experienced mentors to help bring your vision to life.

Extra thought ideas to consider

• The Value of “Works in Progress” in Education: Building the camel skeleton “Nora” in plain view of the public generated organic curiosity and discussion. This highlights how showing students the messy, iterative process of a project can often be more engaging and educational than simply presenting a polished final product.
• Bridging the Gap Between Agriculture and Supermarkets: The discussion around farm visits highlights a significant disconnect in modern society regarding where food comes from. Exploring the concept of “ugly fruit” and food waste could serve as a powerful catalyst for classroom discussions on sustainability, biology, and the economics of our food supply chain.
• Pathology as a Tool for Engagement: The museum’s focus on showcasing animal bones with healed fractures or tumours opens up an entirely new dimension of biology for students. Analyzing what goes wrong in a biological system (pathology) can sometimes provide a deeper understanding of biomechanics and physiology than studying a perfectly healthy specimen.