By Anita Brown, Program Officer, UNE Discovery Voyager

You might have come across our Voyager characters, created by UNE’s Graphic Designer and Learning Media Producer, Trish Donald. Some of these cute characters hitch a ride on our truck and all of them pop up on our website. Towards the end of last year’s lockdown, we had the idea to have some fabric made up, highlighting all of our cool characters.

We went to work on the design and there was much excitement when the fabric landed in our lab. Mmmm, how could we put our fun fabric to practical use? Face masks of course! However, soon after our new masks been sewn and delivered, restrictions were eased and we didn’t need to wear them. We are now in the middle of 2021, and things have changed once again. Now we’re not saying that we’re excited about the prospect of wearing masks in schools, but we are excited about having the opportunity to wear these cool character masks! We’ve also had some character stickers made to share with our small schools’ students.

I asked the Voyager team members to name their favourite character/s.

Phil’s favourite character is Sol. Sol is the centre of our Astrometrics activity as it is the centre of the Solar System.

Jean’s favourite characters are the Living Latin animals. She finds the combination of creativity and science in this activity inspiring, and loves seeing the wacky, outside of the box creations that children invent and play with.

Kieran’s favourites are the smiling rock and the walking landscape because their cute storytelling-faces remind us that every rock tells a story!

My favourite character is Tiny the Lesser Long Eared Bat. She features in our show, The Sound Factor, because of her amazing echolocation skills.

Imogen was out in the field when she was asked to name her favourite Voyager character and had handy the mask she likes to wear when facilitating our Plants, Poop and Pollinators activity. She loves bees, of course, because they help plants reproduce through pollination AND they make delicious honey!