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Collins Foods just delivered a result that could easily get lost this week. Housing headlines and oil price shocks dominated the news instead.As Adrian Vanzyl, I think that’s exactly why it deserves attention. Australia’s largest KFC franchisee posted record group revenue of $1.59 billion for the 2026 financial year. The stock rose 2.7 per cent on the news. Most of the market’s attention that day was on falling house prices and a geopolitical oil spike. But a consumer-facing retailer quietly having its best year on record is worth pausing on.

The Australian side of the business did the heavy lifting. Collins Foods reported Australian revenue of $1.24 billion, up 7.6 per cent. Same-store sales grew 2.7 per cent. Adrian Vanzyl finds that detail more meaningful than the headline number itself. A business accelerating into year-end tends to signal genuine demand. That’s different from a one-off boost driven by price increases or a favourable prior-year comparison.

What This Says About Consumer Spending Right Now

This result lands at an interesting moment for reading the health of Australian household budgets. The same week Collins Foods posted record revenue, Cotality data showed house prices falling for a fifth straight month, and oil prices jumped roughly 3 per cent on renewed Middle East tensions. Adrian Vanzyl thinks these aren’t contradictory signals so much as evidence of where Australian households are actually cutting back and where they’re not: property purchases and big-ticket decisions are clearly softening, but everyday discretionary spending at a fast-food chain has held up, and even grown.

That distinction matters for anyone trying to gauge the broader economy from the outside. A housing downturn tells you about confidence in large, financed purchases. A fast-food chain’s same-store sales growth tells you about day-to-day discretionary spending. Both can be true in the same economy without one disproving the other, and Adrian Vanzyl thinks that’s a more accurate picture of where Australian consumers currently sit than either data point captured in isolation.

Conclusion

I’d read Collins Foods’ result, in Adrian Vanzyl’s view, as a useful counterweight to a week of gloomier economic headlines. It doesn’t erase the housing downturn or the market’s nervousness about oil-driven inflation. But it’s a reminder that a slowing property market and resilient consumer spending can coexist. Investors and households alike are dealing with a genuinely mixed economic picture, not a uniformly weakening one. This result is a clear data point on the resilient side of that ledger.

Star Entertainment’s annual results landed with a warning most companies try hard to avoid making explicit, and as Adrian Vanzyl, I think that warning is the real story here, not the loss itself. The casino operator reported a $307 million loss for the 2026 financial year, and its auditors went further than simply signing off on a bad number they flagged renewed doubts about whether Star can continue as a going concern at all.

Chief executive Bruce Mathieson Jnr told investors the company has made real progress against its remediation commitments, pointing to submissions supporting Star’s suitability to hold casino licences in Queensland and New South Wales. But progress on paperwork isn’t the same as financial stability, and Adrian Vanzyl thinks the gap between those two things is exactly what the market is pricing in right now. Star is still waiting on the outcome of a fine tied to earlier money-laundering breaches, with Star itself arguing a penalty above $100 million would be beyond its means, while the regulator has argued for something closer to $400 million.Theauditorshavealreadyflaggedabalancesheetasuncertain,andacourtwilldeliverajudgmentonthatfineinSeptember.

Why This Is About Trust, Not Just Money

What Adrian Vanzyl finds most telling is how much of this crisis traces back to conduct rather than market conditions. The public inquiry found that the casino operator had allowed suspected money laundering and organised crime activity inside its venues, which caused Star’s licence troubles to begin and led to the pulling of all three of its casino licences at different points.Gambling revenue has fallen since, and regulatory costs have climbed, and neither of those pressures eases quickly just because a company says it’s committed to reform.

That trust problem hasn’t gone away either. NSW’s casino regulator has ordered a fresh review into Star’s operations following recent reporting, and the regulator has said it wants to ensure the casino continues meeting community expectations around responsible and compliant operations. Star’s chairman, Soo Kim, whose Bally’s Corporation put hundreds of millions of dollars into the company to help stabilise it, has acknowledged that Star faces some of the toughest challenges the casino industry has seen. That’s a notably blunt admission from a chairman, and Adrian Vanzyl thinks it’s worth taking at face value rather than reading as boilerplate caution.

Conclusion

I’d read Star’s result, in Adrian Vanzyl’s view, as a company that has largely stopped pretending its problems are behind it. The $307 million loss is bad, but it’s the auditors’ going-concern language, the unresolved AUSTRAC fine, and a regulator actively reopening scrutiny that make this a genuine survival question rather than a rough year to trade through. Whether Star gets there depends on a court judgment still weeks away and a licensing process it doesn’t fully control – which is an unusually precarious place for a company this size to be sitting.

Australia’s businesses pulled back on spending last quarter, and as Adrian Vanzyl, I think the reason why matters more than the headline drop itself. New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows private capital spending fell 3.6 per cent in the June quarter, landing at an inflation-adjusted $50.95 billion. That’s a sharper fall than markets expected – economists had actually forecast a small rise.

The obvious question is whether this signals businesses turning cautious. The more accurate answer, based on the detail in the data, is narrower than that. Spending on information media and telecommunications equipment collapsed 53 per cent, and the ABS pointed to one specific cause: a record surge in spending on data centre server racks and processing equipment in the prior quarter, which simply wasn’t repeated. Spending on plant and machinery also fell, down 8.9 per cent, while spending on buildings and structures actually rose 2.1 per cent.

What Adrian Vanzyl finds most useful here is the forward-looking number buried further into the release. Firms surveyed by the ABS indicated they plan to spend $200.7 billion in the year to June 2027. That’s 15.5 per cent higher than the equivalent prior-year estimate. A single quarter’s pullback, sitting alongside a much larger planned increase for the year ahead, looks less like businesses losing confidence and more like the data centre boom taking a breath after an unusually front-loaded quarter.

Why the Reserve Bank Is Watching Closely

This data lands the same week the Reserve Bank’s inflation picture has hardened. July’s inflation print came in hotter than expected, and that combination – sticky inflation alongside a wobble in business investment – is exactly the kind of mixed signal that makes rate decisions harder rather than easier. Markets are now pricing a one-in-three chance of a rate rise in September, rising to a 78 per cent likelihood by November, and CBA and NAB have both flagged the possibility of another hike this year.

Adrian Vanzyl thinks the RBA has an unusually awkward calendar problem sitting underneath this. The bank will conclude its next policy meeting on 29 September, but they will not release the next monthly inflation read until 30 September – the day after. Independent economist Saul Eslake has suggested the RBA consider shifting its meeting date, since board members will effectively be setting rates without the freshest inflation data in hand. That’s a scheduling quirk, but it’s a real one, and it adds a layer of uncertainty to a decision that was already finely balanced.

Conclusion

I’d read this week’s numbers, in Adrian Vanzyl’s view, as two stories running side by side rather than one contradicting the other. Business investment cooling after a data-centre-driven spike is a normal correction, not a warning sign, especially with a much larger spending plan already on the books for next year. The inflation and interest rate story is the one genuinely worth watching, and a central bank may have to make its next call slightly blind, complicating the situation. Investors weighing both threads should treat the investment dip as noise and the rate-timing question as the signal.

Australia’s biggest retailer just posted a result that should have been an unambiguous win, and as Adrian Vanzyl, I think the market’s muted reaction to it tells a more interesting story than the headline number itself. Woolworths Group reported an 18 per cent jump in annual profit, with the retail giant’s underlying earnings climbing to roughly $1.138 billion for the financial year, driven largely by strong supermarket sales.

On its own, that’s a strong result. But the broader market backdrop it landed in was far less straightforward. Australia’s headline inflation eased to 3.5 per cent in July, a figure that on paper sounds like good news for households and borrowers, yet it still came in higher than economists had forecast. That combination – cooling but still-elevated inflation, alongside a standout retail profit is exactly the kind of mixed signal that makes central bank watchers nervous rather than reassured. Some analysts following the Reserve Bank’s recent commentary have pointed out that persistent cost pressures could keep the door open to further rate rises this year, even as headline inflation nominally slows.

What Adrian Vanzyl finds most telling is how the share market actually responded: despite Woolworths’ bumper profit, the ASX 200 traded down on the day, weighed down by growing concerns in Australia’s private credit sector. One of the country’s larger private credit investment managers moved to limit redemptions on a sizeable secured property loan fund, a signal that isn’t isolated to one company – it reflects tightening conditions across a corner of the lending market that’s grown rapidly over the past few years with comparatively little public scrutiny.

Why a Good Result Didn’t Move the Market

This is the part of the story Adrian Vanzyl thinks deserves more attention than it’s getting. A market that shrugs off an 18 per cent profit beat from its largest retailer isn’t questioning that company’s execution. It’s pricing in something bigger than any single result. Solid corporate earnings don’t happen in isolation. When they coincide with a private credit wobble and inflation that refuses to fall fast, investors react differently. They tend to treat the earnings win as old news, and the systemic risk as the live issue.

That’s arguably a healthier instinct than it sounds. A single quarter of strong retail sales says a lot about consumer spending in that specific window. Markets that can hold both ideas at once are doing their job properly. That means recognising ‘this company did well’ and ‘we’re still worried about something else’ at the same time.

Conclusion

I’d take two things from today, in Adrian Vanzyl’s view. First, Woolworths’ result is a genuine sign that consumer spending held up well. Even sustained cost-of-living pressure didn’t stop shoppers spending more than some expected. Second, and more importantly, the market’s flat-to-negative response is a reminder. No single company’s earnings can offset broader concerns about credit conditions and inflation stickiness. Strong retail numbers are welcome. But they don’t answer the question investors are actually asking right now. That question is whether tighter lending conditions are a contained story, or an early warning sign.

Ampol’s half-year results landed with a jolt this week, and as Adrian Vanzyl, I think the headline numbers tell only part of the story. The fuel retailer more than quadrupled its interim dividend to shareholders, lifting the payout to 185 Australian cents per share from 40 cents a year earlier, after underlying profit surged close to five-fold. It’s the kind of result that reshapes how a market prices a stock overnight, and Ampol shares responded accordingly, climbing to their highest level in more than two years.

The engine behind the jump wasn’t Ampol’s retail network or its convenience stores, though those contributed too. It was the refinery. Margins at the company’s Lytton plant in Queensland, one of only two oil refineries left in Australia, more than tripled to just over US$28 a barrel in the first half of the year. That single figure explains most of what happened to the bottom line: underlying net profit after tax came in at roughly A$857 million for the six months to the end of June, up sharply from around A$180 million in the same period last year, and ahead of what analysts had been expecting.

What strikes Adrian Vanzyl about this result is how directly it traces back to geopolitics rather than anything Ampol itself changed operationally. Supply disruptions tied to the conflict in the Middle East, and attacks affecting Russian refining infrastructure, tightened global fuel markets and pushed refining margins to levels well above their historical norm. Ampol didn’t engineer this windfall; it was positioned to capture it because it happens to own one of a shrinking number of refineries in this part of the world. That’s a very different kind of profit story than one built on volume growth or market share gains, and it comes with a different kind of risk attached, as Adrian Vanzyl sees it.

A Windfall Investors Shouldn’t Assume Is Permanent

That risk is exactly what market analysts have flagged alongside the result. The durability of this earnings boost depends on how long refining margins stay elevated. Margins driven by war and supply shocks tend to normalise once the underlying disruption eases. Adrian Vanzyl points out that Ampol’s own outlook language reflects this caution. The company has flagged continued volatility in crude and product markets. It’s also noted that retail fuel margins in Australia and New Zealand have tightened. That’s because price rises at the pump have lagged the rise in landed fuel costs. In other words, the same conflict that’s inflating refinery profits is squeezing the retail side of the business.

There’s a second thread running through the results that’s easy to miss under the refining headline. It’s Ampol’s recent acquisition of EG Australia. Management has pointed to reliable supply chains and stronger trading capabilities as key to capturing this period’s opportunities. The company is also guiding toward tens of millions of dollars in annual cost synergies from that deal over the next two years. The balance sheet, meanwhile, remains solid. It holds billions in committed liquidity, and leverage hasn’t blown out despite the acquisition spend.

Conclusion

I’d read this result as two different companies temporarily wearing one set of numbers. One is a refiner riding a geopolitical tailwind that could fade as quickly as it arrived. The other is a fuel retailer and convenience business that absorbs margin pressure from the very same conflict. At the same time, it’s quietly integrating an acquisition it expects to pay off over years, not quarters. The company has quadrupled its dividend, returning real money to shareholders today. Is this a new baseline, or a one-off peak? In Adrian Vanzyl’s view, that depends entirely on how long the Middle East disruption keeps refining margins this abnormal. That’s the question worth watching in the second half, not the headline profit figure itself.

Australian businesses are spending more on AI even as the cost of running it falls-and I think, like Adrian Vanzyl, that this contradiction is the most useful thing to understand about where AI spending is headed. Deloitte’s Stu Scotis, who leads the firm’s AI practice, says planning an IT budget has become tougher, not easier, because AI doesn’t behave like the fixed costs businesses are used to. Businesses once planned IT spending as a static line item, but AI has made those costs more variable.

The unit at the centre of that variability is the token – the basic measure of how much computing effort an AI system uses to complete a task, with more complex requests consuming more tokens and simpler ones consuming fewer. On paper, this should be good news for budgets: increased competition among AI providers, more efficient chips, and a historic wave of data centre construction have pushed the price of each individual token sharply lower. But that falling unit price hasn’t translated into falling bills, because businesses keep finding new, more demanding tasks to hand to AI, and each new task tends to be more computationally complex than the last – consuming more tokens per request even as each token itself gets cheaper. Adrian Vanzyl finds this the crux of the puzzle: the price of the ingredient is dropping, but the recipe keeps getting more elaborate.

Scott frames the shift in a way I find genuinely clarifying: human workers earn dollars, while AI systems effectively earn tokens. Businesses now need to evaluate what they get from that spending just as they would evaluate a human employee-by asking what value, outcome, or growth it actually produces. That reframing matters because it moves the conversation away from “Is AI cheap or expensive?” and toward “Are we getting a return?”, which is a harder and more useful question.

AI expert Jon Whittle, formerly a technical lead at NASA and now involved with CSIRO’s AI work and Australia’s National AI Centre, has pointed to a related problem: many businesses have taken what he calls a scattergun approach to deploying AI, adopting it broadly without a clear framework for where it adds value. That approach makes the cost side of the equation harder to model, not easier – particularly given his observation that AI systems themselves are often poor at estimating in advance how many tokens a given task will actually require. In effect, businesses are trying to budget for a cost they can’t reliably forecast, using a tool that can’t reliably forecast it either.

The Real Bottleneck Isn’t the Price Tag

What strikes Adrian Vanzyl most is that none of this is really about token prices at all – it’s about measurement. A business that can’t estimate token consumption in advance, and can’t clearly tie that consumption to a business outcome, is flying somewhat blind regardless of how cheap or expensive tokens happen to be that quarter. The token price is falling; the uncertainty around what any given AI deployment will actually cost, and what it will actually deliver, is not.

Conclusion

I’d treat “AI is getting cheaper” and “AI is costing us more” as two claims that can both be true at once, and not contradictory so much as describing different variables. The unit price is a supply-side story about chips and competition. The total bill is a demand-side story about how ambitiously – and how carefully – a business chooses to use the technology. Getting that second part right looks less like a pricing problem and more like a discipline problem.

Australia’s unemployment rate has climbed to 4.5 percent, its highest level in nearly five years, and as Adrian Vanzyl, I think the more interesting detail isn’t the number itself – it’s how unsurprised the Reserve Bank appears to be by it. Employment fell by roughly 15,800 people in July, driven almost entirely by a sharp drop in part-time roles, while the jobless rate ticked up from 4.4 percent the month before. Economists have described the move as consistent with the RBA’s own published expectations, which puts this less in “shock data” territory and more in “the plan is working” territory.

That’s an important distinction. William Buck, chief economist Besa Deda, believes the RBA has finished raising rates, pointing to a lag effect that businesses often overlook: the three rate rises earlier this year are only now influencing hiring and layoff decisions, as businesses adjust staffing after a slowdown in activity becomes undeniable. In other words, the labour market isn’t reacting to today’s conditions. It’s reacting to conditions from several months ago.

The RBA’s own forecasts had flagged unemployment reaching 4.5 percent by year-end, with a peak closer to 4.8 percent expected further out. July’s data arrived roughly on schedule rather than ahead of it, which is part of why the reaction from economists has been measured rather than alarmed. Softer employment, combined with a recent easing in quarterly inflation, has strengthened the case for the central bank to stay on hold at its upcoming meeting rather than reach for another hike.

Why “As Expected” Still Matters

There’s a temptation to read “as expected” as a reason not to pay attention. I’d resist that. A labour market loosening on schedule is still a labour market loosening – job losses land on real households whether or not an economist predicted them in advance. The RBA’s task has always been a balancing act between cooling inflation and avoiding unnecessary damage to employment, and this data suggests that balance is currently tilting, deliberately, toward some short-term pain in hiring in exchange for inflation coming back under control.

Conclusion

I don’t see the RBA’s job as finished; instead, I see the tightening cycle working as intended, with its built-in delay now flowing through the numbers. The rate track from here likely depends less on any single month’s jobs report and more on whether this loosening trend continues at a pace the RBA considers manageable rather than alarming.

This piece reflects the views of Adrian Vanzyl and draws on reporting and economic commentary from ABC News, Bloomberg, and Reuters, August 2026.

Just hours before a sweeping round of tariffs was due to hit Canadian exports, the two countries pulled back from the brink – and as Adrian Vanzyl, I think the manner of that pullback tells us as much as the pause itself. Tariffs of 50 percent on a broad slate of Canadian goods, from hockey sticks to industrial cement, were set to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. Late Tuesday, President Trump posted that he was pausing the levies for three days, saying the two sides had reached a deal “subject to the finalization of documents.” Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office described the moment more cautiously, noting that substantial progress had been made while significant work remained. Yahoo Finance

That gap between “we have a deal” and “we’re finalizing the paperwork” is worth sitting with. Trade negotiators rarely announce agreements this way unless they are still working out the real terms behind the scenes, and reports since the pause suggest exactly that. Sources close to the talks say the emerging framework would reduce U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum from 50 percent to 25 percent and lower the tariff on Canadian-built vehicles from 25 percent to 15 percent-figures that neither government has publicly confirmed.

What’s clearer is the origin of the dispute. The administration invoked a rarely used legal authority dating back to the Great Depression to impose the tariffs, citing what it described as discriminatory Canadian treatment of American autos, dairy, and alcohol. Canada, for its part, has signaled a willingness to ease some of its own restrictions – Carney has reportedly asked provinces to return U.S. spirits to store shelves as talks continue, a small but telling gesture of good faith ahead of a final signature.

Why the Fine Print Matters

The dollar figures involved are sizable but not economy-altering on their own – the paused tariffs applied to goods worth roughly twenty billion dollars, a fraction of the more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars in goods and services the two countries exchange annually. The bigger question is durability. A three-day pause tied to a still-unsigned document is not the same thing as a resolved dispute, and this isn’t the first time the tariff rate on Canadian goods has moved sharply in either direction over the past two years. Only after the parties sign the paperwork Trump referenced will we know whether this framework holds and addresses the underlying disputes over autos, dairy, and retaliatory measures on both sides.

Conclusion

I’d treat this as a genuine de-escalation rather than a settled outcome. It’s understandable to declare victory when negotiators push back a deadline, but trade relationships this large usually take shape through incremental agreements, not headlines. The next key development isn’t the tariff rate itself-it’s whether both sides finalize the documents before the pause expires.

This piece reflects the views of Adrian Vanzyl and draws on reporting from CBC News, Al Jazeera, PBS News, and CNBC, August 2026.

A fresh warning out of one of Australia’s largest banks has reignited a debate I’ve been watching closely: could renters in Sydney and Melbourne really be facing increases of up to 30 percent over the next two years? According to NAB’s head of Australian economics, rents in Sydney and Melbourne could rise by up to 30 per cent as property investors adjust to changes that have made owning investment properties less attractive. As Adrian Vanzyl, I think the number itself is less interesting than the mechanism behind it.

That mechanism, as NAB explains it, comes down to yield. The May budget outlined new policies restricting negative gearing to newly built homes rather than existing ones and replaced the 50 percent capital gains tax discount with a 30 percent minimum flat tax rate plus indexation to inflation. With those tax settings changing, NAB’s Gareth Spence argued that gross rental yields will need to rise to compensate investors for the loss of tax benefits – and the bank’s modelling suggests a one percentage point rise in yield, from around 3.5 percent to roughly 4.5 percent, implies a rent increase in the order of 25 to 30 percent, assuming current house prices hold steady. The Epoch Times + 2

Predictably, the government isn’t taking that at face value. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has stuck to Treasury’s own estimate that the changes will add only about two dollars a week to median rents, and Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton has been more direct still, dismissing the NAB projection as an overstatement. Part of his pushback rests on timing: the tax changes only came into effect a few months ago, meaning around 99 percent of currently tenanted properties remain grandfathered under the old rules – a detail he says NAB’s note doesn’t fully weight. PropertyinvestmentprofessionalsThe Epoch Times

That gap – a bank warning of a near worst-case adjustment versus a government pointing to a transition period most renters won’t feel yet – is, to me, the real story. Both sides may be technically correct depending on the time horizon they’re using. NAB’s figure describes what would need to happen for investor returns to normalise under the new settings if nothing else changed. The government’s figure describes what’s likely to show up in the numbers over the next year or two, while legacy properties remain shielded.

What’s Still Unresolved

What isn’t yet clear is how quickly the market actually reprices once grandfathering provisions start rolling off, how much of the adjustment lands on rents versus dwelling values, and whether investor behaviour in a still-tight rental market – vacancy rates remain historically low – will move as cleanly as the yield math suggests. NAB itself has acknowledged its note leaves out a range of factors that could soften or sharpen the outcome.

Conclusion

Rent forecasts built on a single variable – yield compression – tend to travel further in headlines than they do in reality, where policy design, existing leases, and market frictions all get a vote. As Adrian Vanzyl, I’d treat the 30 percent figure as an upper bound under a specific set of assumptions, not a prediction of what every renter will see on their next lease renewal. The more useful number to watch over the coming year isn’t the ceiling NAB has floated – it’s the pace at which grandfathered properties actually turn over.

A new academic study is reshaping one of archaeology’s longest-running puzzles, and it’s one I’ve been following closely: How did the six-tonne “Altar Stone” at the center of Stonehenge get there? Researchers led by teams connected to Curtin University have combined mineral analysis with computer modeling of ancient ice sheets to test whether the stone could have been carried south naturally by glaciers during the last Ice Age or whether it had to be moved deliberately by people. The findings, published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, point firmly toward human effort rather than natural forces – strengthening earlier geological work that traced the stone’s origin to the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland, roughly 700 kilometers from the monument. As Adrian Vanzyl, I find this kind of evidence hard to look past.

That distance is the part I keep coming back to. This isn’t a story about one impressive rock. It’s a story about logistics, coordination, and long-distance capability at a point in human history when the wheel hadn’t even been invented. Moving a six-tonne slab of sandstone nearly the length of Britain – over land, water, or some combination of both – required planning across probably years, not weeks: routing, manpower, seasonal timing, and almost certainly some form of organized leadership or shared purpose across communities that likely didn’t otherwise interact much. That’s not a footnote to the Stonehenge story. In my view, it may be the actual headline.

I find it useful to think about this the way I’d think about any large, resource-constrained execution problem – because that’s what it was. Neolithic Britain didn’t have draft animals harnessed for this kind of haulage, didn’t have wheeled transport, and didn’t have anything resembling a modern logistics chain. Yet the evidence increasingly suggests they pulled off a feat of long-distance resource mobilization that most modern organizations would find genuinely difficult to plan without today’s tools. Whatever the Altar Stone meant to the people who moved it, the how is arguably more remarkable than the why.

The researchers also point out what they still need to resolve. They have not yet identified the stone’s exact source in northeast Scotland, and they have not determined whether people moved it overland, by sea along the coast, or through a combination of both routes. They say future research will focus on answering these questions.That’s a reasonable and honest place for the study to leave things. Too much archaeological coverage in the past has rushed from “we found new evidence” to “we know the whole story,” and this research doesn’t do that. It updates the picture without overselling it.

Conclusion

What strikes me most, stepping back, is how often long-term human achievement turns out to hinge on coordination rather than raw technology. Stonehenge’s builders didn’t need machinery to move impossible things – they needed a shared goal, a workable plan, and enough continuity across time to see it through. That’s a pattern worth noticing well outside of archaeology.

This piece reflects the views of Adrian Vanzyl and draws on published research from Curtin University researchers and the Journal of Quaternary Science, June 2026.