Journal articles on the topic 'Academic achievement Victoria Melbourne Case studies'

Women in Universities Women have been fighting for the right to participate in universities since 1873, when Sophia Jex Blake went to court with her fight to enrol at Edinburgh University. In rejecting her application, one of the judges stated: It is a belief, widely entertained, that there is a great difference in the mental constitution of the two sexes, just as there is in their physical conformation. The powers and susceptibilities of women are as noble as those of men; but they are thought to be different, and, in particular, it is considered that they have not the same power of intense labour as men .... (Scutt 224) In Australia, from the 1850s to the 1880s, both the University of Sydney and The University of Melbourne refused to admit women as students. In 1879, the Chancellor of the University of Sydney suggested that: The best course to be taken by advocates of advanced education for women, would be to found some sort of affiliated college for them in the vicinity of the University ... if there really be a widespread wish on the part of young women for a higher education ..." (Scutt 228). Having finally won the right to study at university in 1881, and to enter the academic workforce, women are still finding many of the old prejudices remain. Numerous studies have demonstrated that women's experiences in academe are qualitatively different from men's and that women are systematically paid lower salaries than men of equivalent academic achievement, age and length of service (Bagilhole 431-47; Loder 713-4; McElrath 269-81;). Studies have shown that differences in the experiences of male and female faculty are largely explained by gender (Booth & Burton 312-33; Everett 159-75; Over & Lancaster 309-18; Ready 7) and sex discrimination is highlighted as an ongoing contributor to the inequity (Allport 5-8; Hall & Swadener 1; Tuohy 8). A recent UNESCO-Commonwealth (http://www.unesco.org/) report states that: ... in spite of advances which women have made in many areas of public life in the past two decades, in the area of higher education management they are still a long way from participating on the same footing as men. With hardly an exception, the global picture is one of men outnumbering women at about five to one at middle management level and at about twenty to one at senior management level (Singh 4). The introduction in Australia of Sex Discrimination legislation (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/sex_discrimination/) in 1984 and more recently, Affirmative Action policies ( http://www.austlii.edu.au/) in employment and promotion rounds in some universities has not improved women's situation to the extent expected. In 1978, women held 16% of full time academic posts while gaining 25% of all higher degrees and 30% of undergraduate degrees (Commonwealth Government statistics cited by Over and McKenzie 61-71). In 1999, 54% of students were women yet women's participation in academe had only increased to 35% (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). Women are mainly employed at the lowest academic levels. In 1999, 72% of women were employed at Levels A and B (Associate Lecturer/Lecturer) compared to 46% of men, with only 8% of women reaching Levels D and E (Associate Professor/Professor) compared to 26% of men. Women continue to be clustered in the traditionally female areas of Health, Education and Arts while few seem to have successfully broken through the barriers in the traditionally male areas of Engineering, Architecture or Agriculture (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). Business has traditionally been viewed as a male preserve but enrolments have increased to the point where women almost equal men. However, the staff ratio of men to women remains very low at 70/30 (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). The slow growth rate for women in academe belies the fact that more women than men are now completing university degrees. The purpose of this study was to determine how well the experiences of academic women in the male-dominated faculties of business and commerce, reflect the literature on women in universities, in general. Previous empirical studies have found inequitable treatment of women without necessarily exploring the processes of discrimination. The Study This study involved interviews with academic women who had been employed in faculties of business and commerce for at least five years. The research used the 'snowballing' technique: participants initially comprised women known to me but as these women told female colleagues of my study I was given the names of other women who were willing to participate. Participants comprised twenty-one women from three universities in Western Australia, two universities in New South Wales and one Victorian university. One woman had recently left academe and started her own business because of discriminatory practices she had encountered and another was contemplating leaving. In each university, women comprised a minority of the faculty and felt disadvantaged in some way. A semi-structured interview was used to explore with the women the issues that had been identified from previous studies of sex discrimination in the academic profession. Open-ended questions were used and the interviews conducted face to face, or, in the case of those interstate, via telephone or email. The women spoke frankly about their experiences. Findings and Discussion Promotion Each of the women in this study said that their university had established an internal promotion policy based on merit. However, they felt the greatest problem they had encountered in gaining promotion was in determining the criteria upon which they would be judged each year, and in meeting those criteria. "I have been chasing promotion for over five years. At first I was told that I would not be promoted until I got my masters degree so I worked really hard to complete it but then a male colleague was promoted without a masters. Once I got the masters I was told I needed to publish to be promoted but in the next year someone else was promoted without any publications. You go all out to meet the criteria each year but in the next year the promotions committee changes and so do the criteria for that year"(Lecturer applying for Senior Lecturer position). The promotion procedure at one university was explained by a Senior Lecturer who had served on promotion committees on two occasions. "There are about ten criteria upon which promotion can be based. When the applications are received we all get together to determine which are the criteria to be applied. In the last promotion round only four of the ten criteria were used so only people satisfying those criteria were selected." When asked whether the criteria were the same as the previous year she replied: "Last year there was more emphasis on qualifications and publications. This year community involvement and involvement in university affairs were judged as more important ... it varies from year to year". On questioning about the promotion procedures at their universities, women stated they were largely dissatisfied with the process, that they were presumed to be satisfied with their lot while the men were actively encouraged to apply. "I was told not to bother to apply (for a senior lecturer position) as I would not get it ... that there was a queue of people to be promoted before me - (named males) - and until they were promoted, I would not be considered" (Lecturer). "The position was advertised with a specific male applicant in mind and specifically excluded me by stating that the appointee must have supervisory experience. Women in my department are not given the opportunity to supervise students so I didn't even bother applying."(Lecturer aspiring to a Senior Lecturer position). One woman, upon inquiring why she was not promoted, was told that she should be grateful to have tenure and asked why she wanted to be promoted, anyway. "They would never have said that to a male, they would have expected a male to be working towards promotion" (Associate Lecturer). All women interviewed stated that they had problems keeping up with the 'goal posts' which moved from year to year. The 'moving of the goal posts' is one means by which universities are able to maintain the position of women at lower levels. Unsurprisingly, some women said they felt that promotion at their university was based on politics rather than merit. However, defining merit in universities is problematic. According to Burton (430), definitions of what is meritorious depend upon the power of particular groups to define it and, as a result, can change. The narrow view of merit is 'the best person for the job' which Burton (113) describes as an "overwhelming tendency to select in your own image". Burton (430) and Allport (5) claim universities define merit along male cultural lines with current selection, remuneration and career progression practices strongly influenced by an underlying gender bias. Burton (430) argues that there is still a tendency for work to be ranked as 'men's' or women's work with lower status attributed to the latter and an assumption that different skills and abilities are needed for each. Over and McKenzie (61-71) claim that women are disadvantaged by the fact that invalid merit criteria are applied to them which men as a group are more likely to satisfy. They state that the academic careers of most women do not fit the stereotypic male experience and it is mainly men who decide whether women should be promoted. At one university in the study, the merit criteria for senior lecturer include the requirement that aspirants have a number of overseas conference presentations. "Some of us are single working mothers and overseas conference attendance is out of the question because who's going to mind our children while we are away? The senior males were astonished when I mentioned that this was a problem for me. It had never occurred to them" (Associate Lecturer on why women at her university do not apply for promotion). Family Responsibilities The women commented on the numerous difficulties they had encountered in combining an academic career with responsibility for children. They felt that certain male faculty members perceived married women with children as lacking in career commitment, whereas married men with families were viewed as being more stable and committed to their careers. One married woman claimed that when she needed to go home to tend a sick child, her male Head of Department told her she should "get her priorities right". In 1992, Family Responsibility provisions were added to the Sex Discrimination Act (http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/171/top.htm). However, it would appear that individual practice doesn't always follow as a result of changes in policy. Equal Pay On the subject of equal pay for equal work, the women said that they were often paid lower wages than their male colleagues despite having higher qualifications and equivalent teaching and research experience. Some women felt that the barriers between academic levels were used to artificially maintain the wage gap between men and women, regardless of qualifications and ability. This was felt to be particularly the case between the levels of Associate Lecturer (Level A) and Lecturer (Level B). "They find excuses to keep you at Associate Lecturer so that they can pay you less to do the same work that you would be doing as a lecturer ... lecturing, coordinating units and so on"(Associate Lecturer). "There are no men below Lecturer in my Department, either lecturing or with Masters degrees. As soon as they get their Masters they are promoted to Lecturer.... I'm coordinating units as an Associate Lecturer while some male lecturers have less responsibility' (Associate Lecturer with Masters degree and publications) Two women said that they had been performing higher level duties (Level B) for up to five years while working on their Masters but their university refused to pay them at the higher level until they had completed their degree. Even when they satisfied all the requirements for the Masters degree and had a letter from their supervisor saying they had satisfied all the requirements, the university refused to pay them until they had actually graduated, which was some time later. Shortly afterwards their university took on two men to perform the same duties, paying these at the higher level even though they had not completed a masters degree. One former lecturer claimed that she was employed at a time when there was a large turnover of staff in her department. A number of new staff were appointed of whom she was the only female. Although she and the other new staff were all employed at Lecturer Level B, it wasn't until later on that she discovered that the men were appointed at the top of the Lecturer salary scale while she was appointed at the bottom, with a salary differential of about10 000pa. This was despite the fact that both she and the men had similar qualifications and work experience at commencement. Teaching Loads Another complaint by women concerned inequitable teaching loads. An analysis in one Business School showed that women had higher teaching loads while men were given more time off for research. The women complained that the supervision of post-graduate students was divided up between the men, and women were excluded. Since research publication and student supervision are usually the most highly ranked criteria in academic promotion rounds, women who are not given the opportunity to participate in these areas are disadvantaged when applying for promotion. This problem is compounded since women are overwhelmingly employed at the lower levels where responsibility for the majority of teaching takes place. This leaves them with little time left to devote to research even if given the opportunity. The women also said they were often pressured into taking on higher duties than those prescribed in the Position Classification Standards for their level. They tended to acquiesce because of their need to prove they were better than men to gain promotion. One woman said that the extra administrative duties she had been given meant that she had less time for research which actually reduced her prospects for tenure and promotion. She said she didn't dare complain as the men in her department would use it as an excuse to question her commitment to her job. Conclusion An examination of women's perceptions and experiences in the workplace can help us understand the informal processes that work against women. The experiences of the women discussed in this paper provide an insight into the subtle processes that continue to operate in some higher education institutions to prevent women from reaching their full potential. Although equal opportunity legislation (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about_the_commission/legislation/index.html) has been enacted to prevent discrimination and disadvantage to women, the implementation of policy does not always filter through to the operational levels. It is still possible to circumvent legislation in subtle ways, perhaps without even being aware that these practices are discriminative. The women in this study spoke frankly about their experiences and the difficulties they had encountered in gaining equal recognition to men, with very few satisfied that they were receiving equitable treatment. The women felt that their work was not valued as highly as that of the men they worked with and they were given less opportunities for advancement. Overall, the interviews with the women revealed interesting insights into their experiences in pursuing academic careers and in trying to gain recognition for their achievements. The collective experiences of the women provide an insight into the subtle ways in which disadvantage can be engendered. The findings of this study have serious implications for university administrators, particularly deans and heads of schools. There are many well-qualified women academics and universities cannot afford to overlook the valuable contribution these women can make to teaching, research and university governance. References Allport, Caroline. 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Tuohy, John. "Sex Discrimination Infects Med Schools: Women Say Bias Blocks Chances for Advancement". USA Today2000. 8. Links http://www.unesco.org/ http://www.deet.gov.au/ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/sex_discrimination/ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about_the_commission/legislation/index.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgibin/disp.pl/au/legis/cth/consol%5fact/aaeofwa 1986634/?query=title+%28+%22affirmative+action%22+%29 http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/171/top.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer. "Women and Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml >. Chicago Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer, "Women and Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer. (2001) Women and Work. 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Introduction For some time now there has been a strong critical framework that identifies a significant shift in the politics of homosexuality in the Anglo-oriented West over the last fifteen to twenty years. In this article I draw on this framework to describe the current moment in the Australian cultural politics of homosexuality. I focus on the issue of same-sex marriage as a key indicator of the currently emerging era. I then turn to two Australian texts about marriage that were produced in “the period before” this time, with the aim of recovering what has been partially lost from current formations of GLBT politics and from available memories of the past. Critical Histories Lisa Duggan’s term “the new homonormativity” is the frame that has gained widest currency among writers who point to the incorporation of certain versions of homosexuality into the neo-liberal (U.S.) mainstream. She identifies a sexual politics that “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (50). More recently, writing of the period inaugurated by the so-called “war on terror” and following Duggan, Jasbir Puar has introduced the term “homonationalism” to refer to “a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves” (39). Damien Riggs adds the claims of Indigenous peoples in ongoing colonial contexts to the ground from which contemporary GLBT political claims can be critiqued. He concludes that while “queer people” will need to continue to struggle for rights, it is likely that cultural intelligibility “as a subject of the nation” will be extended only to those “who are established through the language of the nation (i.e., one that is founded upon the denial of colonial violence)” (97). Most writers who follow these kinds of critical analyses refer to the discursive place of homosexual couples and families, specifically marriage. For Duggan it was the increasing focus on “full gay access to marriage and military service” that defined homonormativity (50). Puar allows for a diversity of meanings of same-sex marriage, but claims that for many it is “a demand for reinstatement of white privileges and rights—rights of property and inheritance in particular” (29; see also Riggs 66–70). Of course not all authors locate the political focus on same-sex marriage and its effects as a conservative affair. British scholar Jeffrey Weeks stresses what “we” have gained and celebrates the rise of the discourse of human rights in relation to sexuality. “The very ordinariness of recognized same-sex unions in a culture which until recently cast homosexuality into secret corners and dark whispers is surely the most extraordinary achievement of all” (198), he writes. Australian historian Graham Willett takes a similar approach in his assessment of recent Australian history. Noting the near achievement of “the legal equality agenda for gay people” (“Homos” 187), he notes that “the gay and lesbian movement went on reshaping Australian values and culture and society through the Howard years” (193). In his account it did this in spite of, and untainted by, the dominance of Howard's values and programs. The Howard period was “littered with episodes of insult and discrimination … [as the] government tried to stem the tide of gay, lesbian and transgender rights that had been flowing so strongly since 1969”, Willett writes (188). My own analysis of the Howard years acknowledges the significant progress made in law reform relating to same-sex couples and lesbian and gay parents but draws attention to its mutual constitution with the dominance of the white, patriarchal, neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies which dominated social and political life (2013 forthcoming). I argue that the costs of reform, fought for predominantly by white and middle class lesbians and gay men deploying homonormative discourses, included the creation of new identities—single lesbians and gays whose identity did not fit mainstream notions, non-monogamous couples and bad mothers—which were positioned on the illegitimate side of the newly enfranchised. Further the success of the reforms marginalised critical perspectives that are, for many, necessary tools for survival in socially conservative neoliberal times. Same-Sex Marriage in Australia The focus on same-sex marriage in the Australian context was initiated in April 2004 by then Prime Minister Howard. An election was looming and two same-sex couples were seeking recognition of their Canadian marriages through the courts. With little warning, Howard announced that he would amend the Federal Marriage Act to specify that marriage could only take place between a man and a woman. His amendment also prevented the recognition of same-sex marriages undertaken overseas. Legislation was rushed through the parliament in August of that year. In response, Australian Marriage Equality was formed in 2004 and remains at the centre of the GLBT movement. Since that time political rallies in support of marriage equality have been held regularly and the issue has become the key vehicle through which gay politics is understood. Australians across the board increasingly support same-sex marriage (over 60% in 2012) and a growing majority of gay and lesbian people would marry if they could (54% in 2010) (AME). Carol Johnson et al. note that while there are some critiques, most GLBT people see marriage “as a major equality issue” (Johnson, Maddison and Partridge 37). The degree to which Howard’s move changed the terrain of GLBT politics cannot be underestimated. The idea and practice of (non-legal) homosexual marriage in Australia is not new. And some individuals, publicly and privately, were calling for legal marriage for same-sex couples before 2004 (e.g. Baird, “Kerryn and Jackie”). But before 2004 legal marriage did not inspire great interest among GLBT people nor have great support among them. Only weeks before Howard’s announcement, Victorian legal academic and co-convenor of the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby Miranda Stewart concluded an article about same-sex relationship law reform in Victoria with a call to “begin the debate about gay marriage” (80, emphasis added). She noted that the growing number of Australian couples married overseas would influence thinking about marriage in Australia. She also asked “do we really want to be part of that ‘old edifice’ of marriage?” (80). Late in 2003 the co-convenors of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby declared that “many members of our community are not interested in marriage” and argued that there were more pressing, and more practical, issues for the Lobby to be focused on (Cerise and McGrory 5). In 2001 Jenni Millbank and Wayne Morgan, two leading legal academics and activists in the arena of same-sex relationship politics in Australia, wrote that “The notion of ‘same-sex marriage’ is quite alien to Australia” (Millbank and Morgan, 295). They pointed to the then legal recognition of heterosexual de facto relationships as the specific context in Australia, which meant that marriage was not viewed as "paradigmatic" (296). In 1998 a community consultation conducted by the Equal Opportunity Commission in Victoria found that “legalising marriage for same-sex couples did not enjoy broad based support from either the community at large or the gay and lesbian community” (Stewart 76). Alongside this general lack of interest in marriage, from the early-mid 1990s gay and lesbian rights groups in each state and territory began to think about, if not campaign for, law reform to give same-sex couples the same entitlements as heterosexual de facto couples. The eventual campaigns differed from state to state, and included moments of high profile public activity, but were in the main low key affairs that met with broadly sympathetic responses from state and territory ALP governments (Millbank). The previous reforms in every state that accorded heterosexual de facto couples near equality with married couples meant that gay and lesbian couples in Australia could gain most of the privileges available to heterosexual couples without having to encroach on the sacred territory (and federal domain) of marriage. In 2004 when Howard announced his marriage bill only South Australia had not reformed its law. Notwithstanding these reforms, there were matters relating to lesbian and gay parenting that remained in need of reform in nearly every jurisdiction. Further, Howard’s aggressive move in 2004 had been preceded by his dogged refusal to consider any federal legislation to remove discrimination. But in 2008 the new Rudd government enacted legislation to remove all discrimination against same-sex couples in federal law, with marriage and (ironically) the lack of anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds of sexuality the exceptions, and at the time of writing most states have made or will soon implement the reforms that give full lesbian and gay parenting rights. In his comprehensive account of gay politics from the 1950s onwards, published in 2000, Graham Willett does not mention marriage at all, and deals with the moves to recognise same-sex relationships in one sixteen line paragraph (Living 249). Willett’s book concludes with the decriminalisation of sex between men across every state of Australia. It was written just as the demand for relationship reform was becoming the central issue of GLBT politics. In this sense, the book marks the end of one era of homosexual politics and the beginning of the next which, after 2004, became organised around the desire for marriage. This understanding of the recent gay past has become common sense. In a recent article in the Adelaide gay paper blaze a young male journalist wrote of the time since the early 1970s that “the gay rights movement has shifted from the issue of decriminalising homosexuality nationwide to now lobbying for full equal rights for gay people” (Dunkin 3). While this (reductive and male-focused) characterisation is not the only one possible, I simply note that this view of past and future progress has wide currency. The shift of attention in this period to the demand for marriage is an intensification and narrowing of political focus in a period of almost universal turn by state and federal governments to neoliberalism and an uneven turn to neo-conservatism, directions which have detrimental effects on the lives of many people already marginalised by discourses of sexuality, race, class, gender, migration status, (dis)ability and so on. While the shift to the focus on marriage from 2004 might be understood as the logical final step in gaining equal status for gay and lesbian relationships (albeit one with little enthusiasm from the GLBT political communities before 2004), the initiation of this shift by Prime Minister Howard, with little preparatory debate in the LGBT political communities, meant that the issue emerged onto the Australian political agenda in terms defined by the (neo)conservative side of politics. Further, it is an example of identity politics which, as Lisa Duggan has observed in the US case, is “increasingly divorced from any critique of global capitalism” and settles for “a stripped-down equality, paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality” (xx). Brides before Marriage In the last part of this article I turn to two texts produced early in 1994—an activist document and an ephemeral performance during the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. If we point only to the end of the era of (de)criminalisation, then the year 1997, when the last state, Tasmania, decriminalised male homosex, marks the shift from one era of the regulation of homosexuality to another. But 1994 bore the seeds of the new era too. Of course attempts to identify a single year as the border between one era and the next are rhetorical devices. But some significant events in 1994 make it a year of note. The Australian films Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and The Sum of Us were both released in 1994, marking particular Australian contributions to the growing presence of gay and lesbian characters in Western popular culture (e.g. Hamer and Budge). 1994 was the UN International Year of the Family (IYF) and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras chose the theme “We are Family” and published endorsement from both Prime Minister Keating and the federal opposition leader John Hewson in their program. In 1994 the ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to pass legislation that recognised the rights and entitlements of same-sex couples, albeit in a very limited and preliminary form (Millbank 29). The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby's (GLRL) 1994 discussion paper, The Bride Wore Pink, can be pinpointed as the formal start to community-based activism for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. It was a revision of an earlier version that had been the basis for discussion among (largely inner Sydney) gay and lesbian communities where there had been lively debate and dissent (Zetlein, Lesbian Bodies 48–57). The 1994 version recommended that the NSW government amend the existing definition of de facto in various pieces of legislation to include lesbian and gay relationships and close non-cohabiting interdependent relationships as well. This was judged to be politically feasible. In 1999 NSW became the first state to implement wide ranging reforms of this nature although these were narrower than called for by the GLRL, “including lesser number of Acts amended and narrower application and definition of the non-couple category” (Millbank 10). My concern here is not with the politics that preceded or followed the 1994 version of The Bride, but with the document itself. Notwithstanding its status for some as a document of limited political vision, The Bride bore clear traces of the feminist and liberationist thinking, the experiences of the AIDS crisis in Sydney, and the disagreements about relationships within lesbian and gay communities that characterised the milieu from which it emerged. Marriage was clearly rejected, for reasons of political impossibility but also in light of a list of criticisms of its implication in patriarchal hierarchies of relationship value (31–2). Feminist analysis of relationships was apparent throughout the consideration of pros and cons of different legislative options. Conflict and differences of opinion were evident. So was humour. The proliferation of lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies was listed as both a pro and a con of marriage. On the one hand "just think about the prezzies” (31); on the other, “what will you wear” (32). As well as recommending change to the definition of de facto, The Bride recommended the allocation of state funds to consider “the appropriateness or otherwise of bestowing entitlements on the basis of relationships,” “the focusing on monogamy, exclusivity and blood relations” and the need for broader definitions of “relationships” in state legislation (3). In a gesture towards a political agenda beyond narrowly defined lesbian and gay interests, The Bride also recommended that “the lesbian and gay community join together with other groups to lobby for the removal of the cohabitation rule in the Social Security Act 1991” (federal legislation) (34). This measure would mean that the payment of benefits and pensions would not be judged in the basis of a person’s relationship status. While these radical recommendations may not have been energetically pursued by the GLRL, their presence in The Bride records their currency at the time. The other text I wish to excavate from 1994 is the “flotilla of lesbian brides” in the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. These lesbians later appeared in the April 1994 issue of Sydney lesbian magazine Lesbians on the Loose, and they have a public afterlife in a photo by Sydney photographer C Moore Hardy held in the City of Sydney archives (City of Sydney). The group of between a dozen and twenty lesbians (it is hard to tell from the photos) was dressed in waist-to-ankle tulle skirts, white bras and white top hats. Many wore black boots. Unshaven underarm hair is clearly visible. Many wore long necklaces around their necks and the magazine photo makes clear that one bride has a black whip tucked into the band of her skirt. In an article about lesbians and legal recognition of their relationships published in 1995, Sarah Zetlein referred to the brides as “chicks in white satin” (“Chicks”). This chick was a figure that refused the binary distinction between being inside and outside the law, which Zetlein argued characterised thinking about the then emerging possibilities of the legal recognition of lesbian (and gay) relationships. Zetlein wrote that “the chick in white satin”: Represents a politics which moves beyond the concerns of one’s own identity and demands for inclusion to exclusion to a radical reconceptualisation of social relations. She de(con)structs and (re) constructs. … The chick in white satin’s resistance often lies in her exposure and manipulation of her regulation. It is not so much a matter of saying ‘no’ to marriage outright, or arguing only for a ‘piecemeal’ approach to legal relationship regulation, or lobbying for de facto inclusion as was recommended by The Bride Wore Pink, but perverting the understanding of what these legally-sanctioned sexual, social and economic relationships mean, hence undermining their shaky straight foundations.(“Chicks” 56–57) Looking back to 1994 from a time nearly twenty years later when (straight) lesbian brides are celebrated by GLBT culture, incorporated into the mainstream and constitute a market al.ready anticipated by “the wedding industrial complex” (Ingraham), the “flotilla of lesbian brides” can be read as a prescient queer negotiation of their time. It would be a mistake to read the brides only in terms of a nascent interest in legally endorsed same-sex marriage. In my own limited experience, some lesbians have always had a thing for dressing up in wedding garb—as brides or bridesmaids. The lesbian brides marching group gave expression to this desire in queer ways. The brides were not paired into couples. Zetlein writes that “the chick in white satin … [has] a veritable posse of her girlfriends with her (and they are all the brides)” (“Chicks” 63, original emphasis). Their costumes were recognisably bridal but also recognisably parodic and subverting; white but hardly innocent; the tulle and bras were feminine but the top hats were accessories conventionally worn by the groom and his men; the underarm hair a sign of feminist body politics. The whip signalled the lesbian underground sexual culture that flourished in Sydney in the early 1990s (O’Sullivan). The black boots were both lesbian street fashion and sensible shoes for marching! Conclusion It would be incorrect to say that GLBT politics and lesbian and gay couples who desire legal marriage in post-2004 Australia bear no trace of the history of ambivalence, critique and parody of marriage and weddings that have come before. The multiple voices in the 2011 collection of “Australian perspectives on same-sex marriage” (Marsh) put the lie to this claim. But in a climate where our radical pasts are repeatedly forgotten and lesbian and gay couples increasingly desire legal marriage, the political argument is hell-bent on inclusion in the mainstream. There seems to be little interest in a dance around the margins of inclusion/exclusion. I add my voice to the concern with the near exclusive focus on marriage and the terms on which it is sought. It is not a liberationist politics to which I have returned in recalling The Bride Wore Pink and the lesbian brides of the 1994 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, but rather an attention to the differences in the diverse collective histories of non-heterosexual politics. The examples I elaborate are hardly cases of radical difference. But even these instances might remind us that “we” have never been on a single road to equality: there may be incommensurable differences between “us” as much as commonalities. They also remind that desires for inclusion and recognition by the state should be leavened with a strong dose of laughter as well as with critical political analysis. References Australian Marriage Equality (AME). “Public Opinion Nationally.” 22 Oct. 2012. ‹http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/wp/who-supports-equality/a-majority-of-australians-support-marriage-equality/›. Baird, Barbara. “The Politics of Homosexuality in Howard's Australia.” Acts of Love and Lust: Sexuality in Australia from 1945-2010. Eds. Lisa Featherstone, Rebecca Jennings and Robert Reynolds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013 (forthcoming). —. “‘Kerryn and Jackie’: Thinking Historically about Lesbian Marriages.” Australian Historical Studies 126 (2005): 253–271. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences 13.1 (2002): 14–44. Cerise, Somali, and Rob McGrory. “Why Marriage Is Not a Priority.” Sydney Star Observer 28 Aug. 2003: 5. City of Sydney Archives [061\061352] (C. Moore Hardy Collection). ‹http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org//image/40440?zoom_highlight=c+moore+hardy›. Duggan Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Dunkin, Alex. “Hunter to Speak at Dr Duncan Memorial.” blaze 290 (August 2012): 3. Hamer, Diane, and Belinda Budege, Eds. The Good Bad And The Gorgeous: Popular Culture's Romance With Lesbianism. London: Pandora, 1994. Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Johnson, Carol, and Sarah Maddison, and Emma Partridge. “Australia: Parties, Federalism and Rights Agendas.” The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State. Ed. Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte and Carol Johnson. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 27–42. Lesbian and Gay Legal Rights Service. The Bride Wore Pink, 2nd ed. Sydney: GLRL, 1994. Marsh, Victor, ed. Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Melbourne: Clouds of Mgaellan, 2011. Millbank Jenni, “Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Families in Australian Law—Part one: Couples.” Federal Law Review 34 (2006): 1–44Millbank, Jenni, and Wayne Morgan. “Let Them Eat Cake and Ice Cream: Wanting Something ‘More’ from the Relationship Recognition Menu.” Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships: A Study of National, European and International Law. Ed. Robert Wintermute and Mads Andenaes. Portland: Hart Publishing, 2001. 295–316. O'Sullivan Kimberley. “Dangerous Desire: Lesbianism as Sex or Politics.” Ed. Jill Julius Matthews. Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997. 120–23. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007 Stewart, Miranda, “It’s a Queer Thing: Campaigning for Equality and Social Justice for Lesbians and Gay Men”. Alternative Law Journal 29.2 (April 2004): 75–80. Walker, Kristen. “The Same-Sex Marriage Debate in Australia.” The International Journal of Human Rights 11.1–2 (2007): 109–130. Weeks, Jeffrey. The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life. Abindgdon: Routledge, 2007. Willett, Graham. Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Willett, Graham. “Howard and the Homos.” Social Movement Studies 9.2 (2010): 187–199. Zetlein, Sarah. Lesbian Bodies Before the Law: Intimate Relations and Regulatory Fictions. Honours Thesis, University of Adelaide, 1994. —. “Lesbian Bodies before the Law: Chicks in White Satin.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 5 (1995): 48–63.

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. 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Introduction Most developed countries, including Australia, have a strong focus on national, state and local strategies for emergency management and response in the face of disasters and crises. This framework can include coping with catastrophic dislocation, service disruption, injury or loss of life in the face of natural disasters such as major fires, floods, earthquakes or other large-impact natural events, as well as dealing with similar catastrophes resulting from human actions such as bombs, biological agents, cyber-attacks targeting essential services such as communications networks, or other crises affecting large populations. Emergency management frameworks for crisis and disaster response are distinguished by their focus on the domestic context for such events; that is, how to manage and assist the ways in which civilian populations, who are for the most part inexperienced and untrained in dealing with crises and disasters, are able to respond and behave in such situations so as to minimise the impacts of a catastrophic event. Even in countries like Australia that demonstrate a strong public commitment to cultural pluralism and social cohesion, ethno-cultural diversity can be seen as a risk or threat to national security and values at times of political, natural, economic and/or social tensions and crises. Australian government policymakers have recently focused, with increasing intensity, on “community resilience” as a key element in countering extremism and enhancing emergency preparedness and response. In some sense, this is the result of a tacit acknowledgement by government agencies that there are limits to what they can do for domestic communities should such a catastrophic event occur, and accordingly, the focus in recent times has shifted to how governments can best help people to help themselves in such situations, a key element of the contemporary “resilience” approach. Yet despite the robustly multicultural nature of Australian society, explicit engagement with Australia’s cultural diversity flickers only fleetingly on this agenda, which continues to pursue approaches to community resilience in the absence of understandings about how these terms and formations may themselves need to be diversified to maximise engagement by all citizens in a multicultural polity. There have been some recent efforts in Australia to move in this direction, for example the Australian Emergency Management Institute (AEMI)’s recent suite of projects with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities (2006-2010) and the current Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee-supported project on “Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism” (Grossman and Tahiri), which I discuss in a longer forthcoming version of this essay (Grossman). Yet the understanding of ethno-cultural identity and difference that underlies much policy thinking on resilience remains problematic for the way in which it invests in a view of the cultural dimensions of community resilience as relic rather than resource – valorising the preservation of and respect for cultural norms and traditions, but silent on what different ethno-cultural communities might contribute toward expanded definitions of both “community” and “resilience” by virtue of the transformative potential and existing cultural capital they bring with them into new national and also translocal settings. For example, a primary conclusion of the joint program between AEMI and the Australian Multicultural Commission is that CALD communities are largely “vulnerable” in the context of disasters and emergency management and need to be better integrated into majority-culture models of theorising and embedding community resilience. This focus on stronger national integration and the “vulnerability” of culturally diverse ethno-cultural communities in the Australian context echoes the work of scholars beyond Australia such as McGhee, Mouritsen (Reflections, Citizenship) and Joppke. They argue that the “civic turn” in debates around resurgent contemporary nationalism and multicultural immigration policies privileges civic integration over genuine two-way multiculturalism. This approach sidesteps the transculturational (Ortiz; Welsch; Mignolo; Bennesaieh; Robins; Stein) aspects of contemporary social identities and exchange by paying lip-service to cultural diversity while affirming a neo-liberal construct of civic values and principles as a universalising goal of Western democratic states within a global market economy. It also suggests a superficial tribute to cultural diversity that does not embed diversity comprehensively at the levels of either conceptualising or resourcing different elements of Australian transcultural communities within the generalised framework of “community resilience.” And by emphasising cultural difference as vulnerability rather than as resource or asset, it fails to acknowledge the varieties of resilience capital that many culturally diverse individuals and communities may bring with them when they resettle in new environments, by ignoring the question of what “resilience” actually means to those from culturally diverse communities. In so doing, it also avoids the critical task of incorporating intercultural definitional diversity around the concepts of both “community” and “resilience” used to promote social cohesion and the capacity to recover from disasters and crises. How we might do differently in thinking about the broader challenges for multiculturalism itself as a resilient transnational concept and practice? The Concept of Resilience The meanings of resilience vary by disciplinary perspective. While there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, it is widely acknowledged that resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to do well in spite of exposure to acute trauma or sustained adversity (Liebenberg 219). Originating in the Latin word resilio, meaning ‘to jump back’, there is general consensus that resilience pertains to an individual’s, community’s or system’s ability to adapt to and ‘bounce back’ from a disruptive event (Mohaupt 63, Longstaff et al. 3). Over the past decade there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the clinical, community and family sciences concerning resilience to a broad range of adversities (Weine 62). While debate continues over which discipline can be credited with first employing resilience as a concept, Mohaupt argues that most of the literature on resilience cites social psychology and psychiatry as the origin for the concept beginning in the mid-20th century. The pioneer researchers of what became known as resilience research studied the impact on children living in dysfunctional families. For example, the findings of work by Garmezy, Werner and Smith and Rutter showed that about one third of children in these studies were coping very well despite considerable adversities and traumas. In asking what it was that prevented the children in their research from being negatively influenced by their home environments, such research provided the basis for future research on resilience. Such work was also ground-breaking for identifying the so-called ‘protective factors’ or resources that individuals can operationalise when dealing with adversity. In essence, protective factors are those conditions in the individual that protect them from the risk of dysfunction and enable recovery from trauma. They mitigate the effects of stressors or risk factors, that is, those conditions that predispose one to harm (Hajek 15). Protective factors include the inborn traits or qualities within an individual, those defining an individual’s environment, and also the interaction between the two. Together, these factors give people the strength, skills and motivation to cope in difficult situations and re-establish (a version of) ‘normal’ life (Gunnestad). Identifying protective factors is important in terms of understanding the particular resources a given sociocultural group has at its disposal, but it is also vital to consider the interconnections between various protective mechanisms, how they might influence each other, and to what degree. An individual, for instance, might display resilience or adaptive functioning in a particular domain (e.g. emotional functioning) but experience significant deficits in another (e.g. academic achievement) (Hunter 2). It is also essential to scrutinise how the interaction between protective factors and risk factors creates patterns of resilience. Finally, a comprehensive understanding of the interrelated nature of protective mechanisms and risk factors is imperative for designing effective interventions and tailored preventive strategies (Weine 65). In short, contemporary thinking about resilience suggests it is neither entirely personal nor strictly social, but an interactive and iterative combination of the two. It is a quality of the environment as much as the individual. For Ungar, resilience is the complex entanglements between “individuals and their social ecologies [that] will determine the degree of positive outcomes experienced” (3). Thinking about resilience as context-dependent is important because research that is too trait-based or actor-centred risks ignoring any structural or institutional forces. A more ecological interpretation of resilience, one that takes into a person’s context and environment into account, is vital in order to avoid blaming the victim for any hardships they face, or relieving state and institutional structures from their responsibilities in addressing social adversity, which can “emphasise self-help in line with a neo-conservative agenda instead of stimulating state responsibility” (Mohaupt 67). Nevertheless, Ungar posits that a coherent definition of resilience has yet to be developed that adequately ‘captures the dual focus of the individual and the individual’s social ecology and how the two must both be accounted for when determining the criteria for judging outcomes and discerning processes associated with resilience’ (7). Recent resilience research has consequently prompted a shift away from vulnerability towards protective processes — a shift that highlights the sustained capabilities of individuals and communities under threat or at risk. Locating ‘Culture’ in the Literature on Resilience However, an understanding of the role of culture has remained elusive or marginalised within this trend; there has been comparatively little sustained investigation into the applicability of resilience constructs to non-western cultures, or how the resources available for survival might differ from those accessible to western populations (Ungar 4). As such, a growing body of researchers is calling for more rigorous inquiry into culturally determined outcomes that might be associated with resilience in non-western or multicultural cultures and contexts, for example where Indigenous and minority immigrant communities live side by side with their ‘mainstream’ neighbours in western settings (Ungar 2). ‘Cultural resilience’ considers the role that cultural background plays in determining the ability of individuals and communities to be resilient in the face of adversity. For Clauss-Ehlers, the term describes the degree to which the strengths of one’s culture promote the development of coping (198). Culturally-focused resilience suggests that people can manage and overcome stress and trauma based not on individual characteristics alone, but also from the support of broader sociocultural factors (culture, cultural values, language, customs, norms) (Clauss-Ehlers 324). The innate cultural strengths of a culture may or may not differ from the strengths of other cultures; the emphasis here is not so much comparatively inter-cultural as intensively intra-cultural (VanBreda 215). A culturally focused resilience model thus involves “a dynamic, interactive process in which the individual negotiates stress through a combination of character traits, cultural background, cultural values, and facilitating factors in the sociocultural environment” (Clauss-Ehlers 199). In understanding ways of ‘coping and hoping, surviving and thriving’, it is thus crucial to consider how culturally and linguistically diverse minorities navigate the cultural understandings and assumptions of both their countries of origin and those of their current domicile (Ungar 12). Gunnestad claims that people who master the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, values and social support are more resilient than those who tenaciously maintain their own culture at the expense of adjusting to their new environment. They are also more resilient than those who forego their own culture and assimilate with the host society (14). Accordingly, if the combination of both valuing one’s culture as well as learning about the culture of the new system produces greater resilience and adaptive capacities, serious problems can arise when a majority tries to acculturate a minority to the mainstream by taking away or not recognising important parts of the minority culture. In terms of resilience, if cultural factors are denied or diminished in accounting for and strengthening resilience – in other words, if people are stripped of what they possess by way of resilience built through cultural knowledge, disposition and networks – they do in fact become vulnerable, because ‘they do not automatically gain those cultural strengths that the majority has acquired over generations’ (Gunnestad 14). Mobilising ‘Culture’ in Australian Approaches to Community Resilience The realpolitik of how concepts of resilience and culture are mobilised is highly relevant here. As noted above, when ethnocultural difference is positioned as a risk or a threat to national identity, security and values, this is precisely the moment when vigorously, even aggressively, nationalised definitions of ‘community’ and ‘identity’ that minoritise or disavow cultural diversities come to the fore in public discourse. The Australian evocation of nationalism and national identity, particularly in the way it has framed policy discussion on managing national responses to disasters and threats, has arguably been more muted than some of the European hysteria witnessed recently around cultural diversity and national life. Yet we still struggle with the idea that newcomers to Australia might fall on the surplus rather than the deficit side of the ledger when it comes to identifying and harnessing resilience capital. A brief example of this trend is explored here. From 2006 to 2010, the Australian Emergency Management Institute embarked on an ambitious government-funded four-year program devoted to strengthening community resilience in relation to disasters with specific reference to engaging CALD communities across Australia. The program, Inclusive Emergency Management with CALD Communities, was part of a wider Australian National Action Plan to Build Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security in the wake of the London terrorist bombings in July 2005. Involving CALD community organisations as well as various emergency and disaster management agencies, the program ran various workshops and agency-community partnership pilots, developed national school education resources, and commissioned an evaluation of the program’s effectiveness (Farrow et al.). While my critique here is certainly not aimed at emergency management or disaster response agencies and personnel themselves – dedicated professionals who often achieve remarkable results in emergency and disaster response under extraordinarily difficult circumstances – it is nevertheless important to highlight how the assumptions underlying elements of AEMI’s experience and outcomes reflect the persistent ways in which ethnocultural diversity is rendered as a problem to be surmounted or a liability to be redressed, rather than as an asset to be built upon or a resource to be valued and mobilised. AEMI’s explicit effort to engage with CALD communities in building overall community resilience was important in its tacit acknowledgement that emergency and disaster services were (and often remain) under-resourced and under-prepared in dealing with the complexities of cultural diversity in emergency situations. Despite these good intentions, however, while the program produced some positive outcomes and contributed to crucial relationship building between CALD communities and emergency services within various jurisdictions, it also continued to frame the challenge of working with cultural diversity as a problem of increased vulnerability during disasters for recently arrived and refugee background CALD individuals and communities. This highlights a common feature in community resilience-building initiatives, which is to focus on those who are already ‘robust’ versus those who are ‘vulnerable’ in relation to resilience indicators, and whose needs may require different or additional resources in order to be met. At one level, this is a pragmatic resourcing issue: national agencies understandably want to put their people, energy and dollars where they are most needed in pursuit of a steady-state unified national response at times of crisis. Nor should it be argued that at least some CALD groups, particularly those from new arrival and refugee communities, are not vulnerable in at least some of the ways and for some of the reasons suggested in the program evaluation. However, the consistent focus on CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ and ‘in need’ is problematic, as well as partial. It casts members of these communities as structurally and inherently less able and less resilient in the context of disasters and emergencies: in some sense, as those who, already ‘victims’ of chronic social deficits such as low English proficiency, social isolation and a mysterious unidentified set of ‘cultural factors’, can become doubly victimised in acute crisis and disaster scenarios. In what is by now a familiar trope, the description of CALD communities as ‘vulnerable’ precludes asking questions about what they do have, what they do know, and what they do or can contribute to how we respond to disaster and emergency events in our communities. A more profound problem in this sphere revolves around working out how best to engage CALD communities and individuals within existing approaches to disaster and emergency preparedness and response. This reflects a fundamental but unavoidable limitation of disaster preparedness models: they are innately spatially and geographically bounded, and consequently understand ‘communities’ in these terms, rather than expanding definitions of ‘community’ to include the dimensions of community-as-social-relations. While some good engagement outcomes were achieved locally around cross-cultural knowledge for emergency services workers, the AEMI program fell short of asking some of the harder questions about how emergency and disaster service scaffolding and resilience-building approaches might themselves need to change or transform, using a cross-cutting model of ‘communities’ as both geographic places and multicultural spaces (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan) in order to be more effective in national scenarios in which cultural diversity should be taken for granted. Toward Acknowledgement of Resilience Capital Most significantly, the AEMI program did not produce any recognition of the ways in which CALD communities already possess resilience capital, or consider how this might be drawn on in formulating stronger community initiatives around disaster and threats preparedness for the future. Of course, not all individuals within such communities, nor all communities across varying circumstances, will demonstrate resilience, and we need to be careful of either overgeneralising or romanticising the kinds and degrees of ‘resilience capital’ that may exist within them. Nevertheless, at least some have developed ways of withstanding crises and adapting to new conditions of living. This is particularly so in connection with individual and group behaviours around resource sharing, care-giving and social responsibility under adverse circumstances (Grossman and Tahiri) – all of which are directly relevant to emergency and disaster response. While some of these resilient behaviours may have been nurtured or enhanced by particular experiences and environments, they can, as the discussion of recent literature above suggests, also be rooted more deeply in cultural norms, habits and beliefs. Whatever their origins, for culturally diverse societies to achieve genuine resilience in the face of both natural and human-made disasters, it is critical to call on the ‘social memory’ (Folke et al.) of communities faced with responding to emergencies and crises. Such wellsprings of social memory ‘come from the diversity of individuals and institutions that draw on reservoirs of practices, knowledge, values, and worldviews and is crucial for preparing the system for change, building resilience, and for coping with surprise’ (Adger et al.). Consequently, if we accept the challenge of mapping an approach to cultural diversity as resource rather than relic into our thinking around strengthening community resilience, there are significant gains to be made. For a whole range of reasons, no diversity-sensitive model or measure of resilience should invest in static understandings of ethnicities and cultures; all around the world, ethnocultural identities and communities are in a constant and sometimes accelerated state of dynamism, reconfiguration and flux. But to ignore the resilience capital and potential protective factors that ethnocultural diversity can offer to the strengthening of community resilience more broadly is to miss important opportunities that can help suture the existing disconnects between proactive approaches to intercultural connectedness and social inclusion on the one hand, and reactive approaches to threats, national security and disaster response on the other, undermining the effort to advance effectively on either front. This means that dominant social institutions and structures must be willing to contemplate their own transformation as the result of transcultural engagement, rather than merely insisting, as is often the case, that ‘other’ cultures and communities conform to existing hegemonic paradigms of being and of living. In many ways, this is the most critical step of all. A resilience model and strategy that questions its own culturally informed yet taken-for-granted assumptions and premises, goes out into communities to test and refine these, and returns to redesign its approach based on the new knowledge it acquires, would reflect genuine progress toward an effective transculturational approach to community resilience in culturally diverse contexts.References Adger, W. Neil, Terry P. Hughes, Carl Folke, Stephen R. Carpenter and Johan Rockström. “Social-Ecological Resilience to Coastal Disasters.” Science 309.5737 (2005): 1036-1039. ‹http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5737/1036.full> Bartowiak-Théron, Isabelle, and Anna Corbo Crehan. “The Changing Nature of Communities: Implications for Police and Community Policing.” Community Policing in Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) Reports, Research and Policy Series 111 (2010): 8-15. Benessaieh, Afef. “Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality.” Ed. A. Benessaieh. Transcultural Americas/Ameriques Transculturelles. Ottawa: U of Ottawa Press/Les Presses de l’Unversite d’Ottawa, 2010. 11-38. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Sociocultural Factors, Resilience and Coping: Support for a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Resilience.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 197-212. Clauss-Ehlers, Caroline S. “Cultural Resilience.” Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Ed. C. S. Clauss-Ehlers. 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NotesThe concept of ‘resilience capital’ I offer here is in line with one strand of contemporary theorising around resilience – that of resilience as social or socio-ecological capital – but moves beyond the idea of enhancing general social connectedness and community cohesion by emphasising the ways in which culturally diverse communities may already be robustly networked and resourceful within micro-communal settings, with new resources and knowledge both to draw on and to offer other communities or the ‘national community’ at large. In effect, ‘resilience capital’ speaks to the importance of finding ‘the communities within the community’ (Bartowiak-Théron and Crehan 11) and recognising their capacity to contribute to broad-scale resilience and recovery.I am indebted for the discussion of the literature on resilience here to Dr Peta Stephenson, Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University, who is working on a related project (M. Grossman and H. Tahiri, Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism, forthcoming 2014).

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In early 1888, Miss Margaret Pearson arrived in Melbourne under engagement to the Working Men’s College there to give cookery lessons to young women. The College committee had applied to the National School of Cookery in London—an establishment effusively praised in the colonial press—for a suitable culinary educator, and Pearson, a graduate of that institute, was dispatched. After six months or so spent educating her antipodean pupils she published a cookbook, Cookery Recipes For The People, which she described in the preface as a handbook of “plain wholesome cookery” (Pearson 3). The book ran to three editions and sold more than 13,000 copies. A decade later, Hanna Maclurcan, co-proprietor of the popular Queen’s Hotel in Townsville, published Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book: A Collection of Practical Recipes, Specially Suitable for Australia. A review of this work in the Brisbane Courier described it, positively, as a book of “good plain cooking”. Maclurcan had gained some renown as a cook after the Governor of Queensland, Lord Lamington, publicly praised the meals he had eaten at the Queen’s as “exceptionally good and above the average of Australian hotels” (Morning Bulletin 5). The first print run of Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book sold out in weeks, and a second edition was swiftly produced. By 1903 there were 26,000 copies of Maclurcan’s book in print—one of which was deposited in the library of Queen Victoria. While the existence of any particular cookbook does not constitute evidence that any person ever reproduced a recipe from it, the not immodest sales enjoyed by Pearson and Maclurcan can, at the least, be taken to indicate a popular interest in the style of cookery, that is “plain cookery”, delineated in their respective works. If those who bought these books never actually turned them into working copies—that is, cooked from them—they likely aspired to do so. Practical classes in plain cookery were also popular in Australia in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The adjectival coupling of the word “plain” to “cookery” in colonial Australia can be seen then to have formed an appealing duet at that time If a modern author or reviewer described the body of recipes encapsulated in a cookbook as “plain cookery”, it would not serve to recommend it to the contemporary market—indeed it would likely condemn such a publication to pulping, rather than sales of many thousands—as the term would be understood by most modern cooks, and eaters, to describe food that was dull and lacking in flavour and cosmopolitan appeal. We now prefer cookery books that offer instruction on the preparation of dishes that are described as “exotic”, “global”, “ethnic”, “seasonal”, “local”, and “full of flavour”, and that lend those that prepare and consume the dishes they contain the “glamour of culinary ethnicity” (Appadurai 10). It would seem to be stating the obvious then to say that “plain cookery” meant something entirely different to colonial Australians, except that modern Australians commonly believe that their nineteenth century brethren ate an “abominable”, “monotonous”, “low standard” diet (Santich, The High and The Low 37), and therefore if they preferred their meals to be plain cooked, that these would have been exactly as our present-day interpretation would have them. Yet Pearson describes plain cookery as an “art” (3), arguably a rhetorical epithet, but she was a zealous educator and would not have used such a term to describe a style of cookery that she expected to turn out low quality dishes that were vile and dull. What Pearson and Maclurcan actually present in their respective books is English cookery: which was also known as plain cookery. The Anglo-Celtic population of Australia in the nineteenth century held varied opinions—ranging from obsequious to hateful—about England, depending on their background. The majority, however, considered it their natural home—including many who were colonial born—and the cultural model they reproduced, with local modifications, was that of the “mother country” (Abbott 10) some 10,000 long miles away. English political, legal, economic, and social systems were the foundation of white Australian society. In keeping with this, colonial cooks “perpetuated an English style of cookery, English food values, [and] an English meal structure” (Santich, Looking for Flavour 6) and English cookbooks were the models that colonial cooks and cookery writers drew upon. When Polly, the heroine of Henry Handel Richardson’s novel The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, teaches herself to make pastry from a cookbook in her rudimentary kitchen on the Victorian goldfields circa 1853, historical accuracy requires her to have employed an imported publication to guide her. It was another decade before the first Australian cookbook, Edward Abbott’s The English And Australian Cookery Book, was published in 1864. Prior to the appearance of Abbott’s work, colonial cooks wanting the guidance of a culinary manual were reliant on the imported English titles stocked by Australian booksellers, such as Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families, Beeton’s Book of Household Management and William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle. These three particular cookbooks were amongst the most successful and influential works in the nineteenth century Anglo-sphere and were commonly considered as manuals of plain cookery: Acton’s particular work is also the source of the most commonly quoted definition of “plain cookery” as “the principles of roasting, boiling, stewing and baking” (Acton 167) and I am going let it stand as the model of such in this piece. If a curt literary catalogue, such as that used by Acton to delineate plain cookery, were used to describe any cuisine it would serve to make it seem austere, and the reputation of English food and cookery has likely suffered from a face value acceptance of it (and by association so has its Australian culinary doppelganger). A considered inspection of Acton’s work shows that her instructions for the plain methods of roasting, boiling, and stewing of food, cover 13 pages, followed by more than 100 pages of recipes for 19 different varieties of meat, poultry, and game that are further divided into numerous variant cuts. Three pages were dedicated to instruction for boiling potatoes properly. When preparing any of these dishes she enjoins her readers to follow the “slow methods of cooking recommended” (167) to ensure a superior end product. The principles of baking were elucidated across several chapters, taking under this classification the preparation of various types of pastry and a multitude of baked puddings, cakes and biscuits: all prepared from base ingredients—not a packet harmed in their production. We now venerate the taste of so-called “slow cooked” food, so to discover that this was the method prescribed for producing plain cooked dishes suggests that plain cookery potentially had more flavour than we imagine. Acton’s work also challenges the charge that the product of plain cookery was monotonous. We have developed a view that we must have a multitudinous array of different types of food available, all year round, for it to be satisfactory to us. Acton demonstrates that variety in cookery can be achieved in other ways such as in types and cuts of meat, and that “plain” was not necessarily synonymous with sameness. The celebrated twentieth century English food writer Elizabeth David says that Modern Cookery was the “most admired and copied English cookery book of the nineteenth century” (305). As the aspiration of most colonial cooks was the reproduction of English cookery it is not unreasonable to expect that Acton’s work might have had some influence on those that wrote cookery manuals for them. We know that Edward Abbott borrowed from her as he writes in his introduction that he has combined “the advantages of Acton’s work” (5) into this own. Neither Pearson or Maclurcan acknowledge any influence at all upon their works but their respective manuals are not particularly original in content—with the exception of some unique regional recipes in Maclurcan—and they must have drawn upon other cookery manuals of the same style to develop their repertoire. By the time they were writing, “large portions [of Acton’s] volume [had] been appropriated [by] contemporary [cookbook] authors [such as Abbott] without the slightest acknowledgment” (Acton 4): the famous Mrs. Beeton is generally considered to have borrowed heavily from Acton for the cookery section of her successful tome Household Management. If Pearson and Maclurcan did not draw directly on Acton—and they well might have—then they likely used culinary sources that had subsumed her influence as their inspiration. What was considered to constitute plain cookery was not as straightforward as Acton’s definition; it was also “generally understood” to be free of any French influence (David 35). It was a commonly held suspicion amongst nineteenth century English men and women that Gallic cooks employed sauces and strong flavourings such as garlic and other “low and treacherous devices” (Saunders 4), to disguise the fact that they had such poor quality ingredients to work with. On the other hand, the English “had such faith” in the superior quality of their native produce that they considered it only required treatment with plain cookery techniques to be rendered toothsome: this culinary Francophobia persisted in the colonies. In the novel, The Three Miss Kings, set in Melbourne in 1880, the trio of the title take lodgings with a landlady, who informs them from the outset that she is “only a plain cook, and can’t make them French things which spile [sic] the stomach” (Cambridge 36). While a good plain cook might have defined herself by the absence of any Gallic, or indeed any other “foreign”, influence in the meals she created, there had been a significant absorption of elements of both of these in the plain cookery she practised, but these had become so far embedded in English cookery that she was unaware of it. A telling example of this is the unremarked inclusion of curry in the plain cookery cannon. While the name and homogenised form of this dish is of British invention, it retained the varied spices, including pungent chillies, of the Indian cuisine it simulated. Pearson and Maclurcan, and Abbott, all included recipes for curries and curried dishes in their respective cookery books. Over time, plain cookery seems to have become conflated with “plain food”, but the latter was not necessarily the result of the former. There was little of Pearson’s “art” involved in creating plain food, except perhaps an ability to keep this style of food so flavourless and dull that it offered neither pleasure nor temptation to eat any more than that required to sustain life. This very real plainness was actively sought by some as “plain food was synonymous with moral rectitude […] and the plainer the food the more virtuous the eater” (Santich, Looking 28). A common societal appreciation of moral virtue is barely perceptible in modern Australian society but it was an attribute that was greatly valued in the nineteenth century Anglo-world and the consumption of plain food a necessary practice in the achievement of good character. (Our modern habit of labelling of foods “good” or “bad” shows that we continue to imbue food with moral overtones.) The list of “gustatory temptations” “proscribed by the plain food lobby” included “salt, spices, sauces and any flavourings that might have cheered the senses” (Santich, Looking 28). If this were the case then both Pearson and Maclurcan’s cookbooks would have dramatically failed to qualify as manuals of plain food. The recipes contained in their respective works feature a much greater use of components associated with flavour enhancement than we imagine to have been employed in plain cookery, particularly if we erroneously believe it to be analogous to plain food. Spices are used extensively in sweet and savoury dishes, as are various fresh green herbs and lemon juice and rind; homemade condiments such as mushroom ketchup (a type of essence pressed from a seasonal abundance of fungi), and a liberal employment of sherry, port, Madeira, and brandy that a “virtuous” plain food advocate would have considered most intemperate. Pearson and Maclurcan both give instructions for preparing rich stocks and gravies drawn from meat, bones and aromatic vegetables, and prescribe the end product of this process as the foundation for a variety of soups, sauces, and stews. Recipes are given for a greater diversity of vegetables than the stereotyped cabbage and potatoes of colonial culinary legend. Maclurcan displays a distinct tropical regionalism in her book providing recipes that use green bananas and pawpaw as vegetables, alongside other exotic species—for that time—such as eggplant, choko, mango, granadilla, passionfruit, rosella, prickly pear, and guava. Her distinct location, the coastal city of Townsville, is also reflected in the extensive selection of recipes for local species of fish and seafood such as beche-de-mer, prawns, and barramundi, which won Maclurcan a reputation as an expert on seafood. Ultimately, to gain a respectably informed understanding as to the taste, aroma, and texture of the plain cookery presented in the respective works of Pearson and Maclurcan one needs to prepare their recipes: I have done so, reproducing a wide selection of dishes from both books. Admittedly, I am a professionally trained cook with the skills to execute recipes to a high standard, but my practice is to scrupulously maintain the original listing of ingredients in the reproduction and follow the method as best I can. Through this practice I have made some delicious discoveries, which have helped inform my opinion that some colonial Australians, and perhaps significant numbers of them, must have been eating meals that were a long way from dull, flavourless and monotonous. It has been said that we employ our tongues for the “twin offices of rhetoric and taste” (Jaine 61). Words can exercise a significant influence on how we value the taste of—or actually taste—any particular food or indeed a cuisine. In the case of the popularly held opinion about the unappetizing state of colonial meals, it might be that the absence of rhetoric has contributed to this. Colonial food writers such as Pearson and Maclurcan did not “mince words” (Bannerman 166) and chose to use “plain titling” (David 306) and language that lacked the excessive adjectives and laudatory hyperbole typically employed by modern food writers. Perhaps if Pearson or Maclurcan had indulged in anointing their own works with enthusiastic recommendation and reference to international influences in their recipes, this might have contributed to a more positive impression of the food of our Anglo-Celtic ancestors. As an experiment with this idea I have taken a recipe from Cookery Recipes For The People and reframed its title and description in a modern food writing style. The recipe in question is titled “White Sauce” and Pearson writes that “this sauce will answer well for boiled fowl” (48): hardly language to make the dish sound appealing to the modern cook, and likely to confirm an expectation of plain cookery as tasteless and boring. But what if the recipe remained the same but the words used to describe it were changed, for example: the title to “Salsa Blanca” and the introductory remark to “this luxurious silky sauce infused with eschalot, mace, lemon, and sherry wine is perfect for perking up poached free-range chicken”. How much better might it then taste? References Abbott, Edward. The English And Australian Cookery Book: Cookery For The Many, As Well As The Upper Ten Thousand. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1864. Acton, Eliza. Modern Cookery for Private Families. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858. Appadurai, Arjun. “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1988): 3–24. Bannerman, Colin. A Friend In The Kitchen. Kenthurst NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1996. Brisbane Courier. “Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book: A Collection of Practical Recipes, Specially Suitable for Australia [review].” Brisbane Courier c.1898. [Author’s manuscript collection.] Cambridge, Ada. The Three Miss Kings. London: Virago Press, 1987 (1st pub. Melbourne, 1891). David, Elizabeth. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. London: Penguin, 1986. Freeman, Sarah. Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and their Food. London: Victor Golllancz, 1989. Humble, Nicola. Culinary Pleasures. London, Faber & Faber, 2005. Jaine, Tom. “Banquets and Meals”. Pleasures of the Table: Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium of Australian Gastronomy (1991): 61–4. Jones, Shar, and Otto, Kirsten. Colonial Food and Drink 1788-1901. Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1985. Hartley, Dorothy. Food in England. London: Macdonald General, 1979. Hughes, Kathryn. The Short Life & Long Times of Mrs Beeton. London: Harper Perennial, 2006. Maclurcah, Hannah. Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book: A Collection of Practical Recipes, Specially Suitable for Australia. Melbourne: George Robertson, 1905 (1st pub. Townsville, 1898). Morning Bulletin. “Gossip.” Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton) 10 May 1898: 5. Pearson, Margaret. Cookery Recipes for the People. Melbourne: Hutchinson, 1888. Richardson, Henry Handel. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. London: Heinemann, 1954. Santich, Barbara. What the Doctors Ordered: 150 Years of Dietary Advice in Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1995. ---. “The High and the Low: Australian Cuisine in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”. Journal of Australian Studies 30 (2006): 37–49. ---. Looking For Flavour. Kent Town: Wakefield, 1996 Saunders, Alan. “Why Do We Want An Australian Cuisine?”. Journal of Australian Studies 30 (2006): 1-17. Young, Linda. Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmilian, 2002.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)We need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination … so we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts … each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest (Hulme 347). Acclaimed climate scientist, the late Stephen Schneider, made this comment in 1988. Later he regretted it and said that there are ways of using metaphors that can “convey both urgency and uncertainty” (Hulme 347). What Schneider encapsulates here is the great conundrum for those attempting to communicate climate change to the everyday public. How do scientists capture the public’s imagination and convey the desperation they feel about climate change, but do it ethically? If scientific findings are presented carefully, in boring technical jargon that few can understand, then they are unlikely to attract audiences or provide an impetus for behavioural change. “What can move someone to act?” asks communication theorists Susan Moser and Lisa Dilling (37). “If a red light blinks on in a cockpit” asks Donella Meadows, “should the pilot ignore it until in speaks in an unexcited tone? … Is there any way to say [it] sweetly? Patiently? If one did, would anyone pay attention?” (Moser and Dilling 37). In 2010 Tim Flannery was appointed Panasonic Chair in Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University. His main teaching role remains within the new science communication programme. One of the first things Flannery was emphatic about was acquainting students with Karl Popper and the origin of the scientific method. “There is no truth in science”, he proclaimed in his first lecture to students “only theories, hypotheses and falsifiabilities”. In other words, science’s epistemological limits are framed such that, as Michael Lemonick argues, “a statement that cannot be proven false is generally not considered to be scientific” (n.p., my emphasis). The impetus for the following paper emanates precisely from this issue of scientific uncertainty — more specifically from teaching a course with Tim Flannery called Communicating climate change to a highly motivated group of undergraduate science communication students. I attempt to illuminate how uncertainty is constructed differently by different groups and that the “public” does not necessarily interpret uncertainty in the same way the sciences do. This paper also analyses how doubt has been politicised and operates polemically in media coverage of climate change. As Andrew Gorman-Murray and Gordon Waitt highlight in an earlier issue of M/C Journal that focused on the climate-culture nexus, an understanding of the science alone is not adequate to deal with the cultural change necessary to address the challenges climate change brings (n.p). Far from being redundant in debates around climate change, the humanities have much to offer. Erosion of Trust in Science The objectives of Macquarie’s science communication program are far more ambitious than it can ever hope to achieve. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The initiative is a response to declining student numbers in maths and science programmes around the country and is designed to address the perceived lack of communication skills in science graduates that the Australian Council of Deans of Science identified in their 2001 report. According to Macquarie Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz’s blog, a broader, and much more ambitious aim of the program is to “restore public trust in science and scientists in the face of widespread cynicism” (n.p.). In recent times the erosion of public trust in science was exacerbated through the theft of e-mails from East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit and the so-called “climategate scandal” which ensued. With the illegal publication of the e-mails came claims against the Research Unit that climate experts had been manipulating scientific data to suit a pro-global warming agenda. Three inquiries later, all the scientists involved were cleared of any wrongdoing, however the damage had already been done. To the public, what this scandal revealed was a certain level of scientific hubris around the uncertainties of the science and an unwillingness to explain the nature of these uncertainties. The prevailing notion remained that the experts were keeping information from public scrutiny and not being totally honest with them, which at least in the short term, damaged the scientists’s credibility. Many argued that this signalled a shift in public opinion and media portrayal on the issue of climate change in late 2009. University of Sydney academic, Rod Tiffen, claimed in the Sydney Morning Herald that the climategate scandal was “one of the pivotal moments in changing the politics of climate change” (n.p). In Australia this had profound implications and meant that the bipartisan agreement on an emissions trading scheme (ETS) that had almost been reached, subsequently collapsed with (climate sceptic) Tony Abbott's defeat of (ETS advocate) Malcolm Turnbull to become opposition leader (Tiffen). Not long after the reputation of science received this almighty blow, albeit unfairly, the federal government released a report in February 2010, Inspiring Australia – A national strategy for engagement with the sciences as part of the country’s innovation agenda. The report outlines a commitment from the Australian government and universities around the country to address the challenges of not only communicating science to the broader community but, in the process, renewing public trust and engagement in science. The report states that: in order to achieve a scientifically engaged Australia, it will be necessary to develop a culture where the sciences are recognized as relevant to everyday life … Our science institutions will be expected to share their knowledge and to help realize full social, economic, health and environmental benefits of scientific research and in return win ongoing public support. (xiv-xv) After launching the report, Innovation Minister Kim Carr went so far as to conflate “hope” with “science” and in the process elevate a discourse of technological determinism: “it’s time for all true friends of science to step up and defend its values and achievements” adding that, "when you denigrate science, you destroy hope” (n.p.). Forever gone is our naïve post-war world when scientists were held in such high esteem that they could virtually use humans as guinea pigs to test out new wonder chemicals; such as organochlorines, of which DDT is the most widely known (Carson). Thanks to government-sponsored nuclear testing programs, if you were born in the 1950s, 1960s or early 1970s, your brain carries a permanent nuclear legacy (Flannery, Here On Earth 158). So surely, for the most part, questioning the authority and hubristic tendencies of science is a good thing. And I might add, it’s not just scientists who bear this critical burden, the same scepticism is directed towards journalists, politicians and academics alike – something that many cultural theorists have noted is characteristic of our contemporary postmodern world (Lyotard). So far from destroying hope, as the former Innovation Minister Kim Carr (now Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) suggests, surely we need to use the criticisms of science as a vehicle upon which to initiate hope and humility. Different Ways of Knowing: Bayesian Beliefs and Matters of Concern At best, [science] produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision. (Oreskes 370) In an attempt to capitalise on the Macquarie Science Faculty’s expertise in climate science, I convened a course in second semester 2010 called SCOM201 Science, Media, Community: Communicating Climate Change, with invaluable assistance from Penny Wilson, Elaine Kelly and Liz Morgan. Mike Hulme’s provocative text, Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity provided an invaluable framework for the course. Hulme’s book brings other types of knowledge, beyond the scientific, to bear on our attitudes towards climate change. Climate change, he claims, has moved from being just a physical, scientific, and measurable phenomenon to becoming a social and cultural phenomenon. In order to understand the contested nature of climate change we need to acknowledge the dynamic and varied meanings climate has played in different cultures throughout history as well as the role that our own subjective attitudes and judgements play. Climate change has become a battleground between different ways of knowing, alternative visions of the future, competing ideas about what’s ethical and what’s not. Hulme makes the point that one of the reasons that we disagree about climate change is because we disagree about the role of science in today’s society. He encourages readers to use climate change as a tool to rigorously question the basis of our beliefs, assumptions and prejudices. Since uncertainty was the course’s raison d’etre, I was fortunate to have an extraordinary cohort of students who readily engaged with a course that forced them to confront their own epistemological limits — both personally and in a disciplinary sense. (See their blog: https://scom201.wordpress.com/). Science is often associated with objective realities. It thus tends to distinguish itself from the post-structuralist vein of critique that dominates much of the contemporary humanities. At the core of post-structuralism is scepticism about everyday, commonly accepted “truths” or what some call “meta-narratives” as well as an acknowledgement of the role that subjectivity plays in the pursuit of knowledge (Lyotard). However if we can’t rely on objective truths or impartial facts then where does this leave us when it comes to generating policy or encouraging behavioural change around the issue of climate change? Controversial philosophy of science scholar Bruno Latour sits squarely in the post-structuralist camp. In his 2004 article, “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern”, he laments the way the right wing has managed to gain ground in the climate change debate through arguing that uncertainty and lack of proof is reason enough to deny demands for action. Or to use his turn-of-phrase, “dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives” (Latour n.p). Through co-opting (the Left’s dearly held notion of) scepticism and even calling themselves “climate sceptics”, they exploited doubt as a rationale for why we should do nothing about climate change. Uncertainty is not only an important part of science, but also of the human condition. However, as sociologist Sheila Jasanoff explains in her Nature article, “Technologies of Humility”, uncertainty has become like a disease: Uncertainty has become a threat to collective action, the disease that knowledge must cure. It is the condition that poses cruel dilemmas for decision makers; that must be reduced at all costs; that is tamed with scenarios and assessments; and that feeds the frenzy for new knowledge, much of it scientific. (Jasanoff 33) If we move from talking about climate change as “a matter of fact” to “a matter of concern”, argues Bruno Latour, then we can start talking about useful ways to combat it, rather than talking about whether the science is “in” or not. Facts certainly matter, claims Latour, but they can’t give us the whole story, rather “they assemble with other ingredients to produce a matter of concern” (Potter and Oster 123). Emily Potter and Candice Oster suggest that climate change can’t be understood through either natural or cultural frames alone and, “unlike a matter of fact, matters of concern cannot be explained through a single point of view or discursive frame” (123). This makes a lot of what Hulme argues far more useful because it enables the debate to be taken to another level. Those of us with non-scientific expertise can centre debates around the kinds of societies we want, rather than being caught up in the scientific (un)certainties. If we translate Latour’s concept of climate change being “a matter of concern” into the discourse of environmental management then what we come up with, I think, is the “precautionary principle”. In the YouTube clip, “Stephen Schneider vs Skeptics”, Schneider argues that when in doubt about the potential environmental impacts of climate change, we should always apply the precautionary principle. This principle emerged from the UN conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and concerns the management of scientific risk. However its origins are evident much earlier in documents such as the “Use of Pesticides” from US President’s Science Advisory Committee in 1962. Unlike in criminal and other types of law where the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to show that the person charged is guilty of a particular offence, in environmental law the onus of proof is on the manufacturers to demonstrate the safety of their product. For instance, a pesticide should be restricted or disproved for use if there is “reasonable doubt” about its safety (Oreskes 374). Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992 has its foundations in the precautionary principle: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation” (n.p). According to Environmental Law Online, the Rio declaration suggests that, “The precautionary principle applies where there is a ‘lack of full scientific certainty’ – that is, when science cannot say what consequences to expect, how grave they are, or how likely they are to occur” (n.p.). In order to make predictions about the likelihood of an event occurring, scientists employ a level of subjectivity, or need to “reveal their degree of belief that a prediction will turn out to be correct … [S]omething has to substitute for this lack of certainty” otherwise “the only alternative is to admit that absolutely nothing is known” (Hulme 85). These statements of “subjective probabilities or beliefs” are called Bayesian, after eighteenth century English mathematician Sir Thomas Bayes who developed the theory of evidential probability. These “probabilities” are estimates, or in other words, subjective, informed judgements that draw upon evidence and experience about the likelihood of event occurring. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses Bayesian beliefs to determine the risk or likelihood of an event occurring. The IPCC provides the largest international scientific assessment of climate change and often adopts a consensus model where viewpoint reached by the majority of scientists is used to establish knowledge amongst an interdisciplinary community of scientists and then communicate it to the public (Hulme 88). According to the IPCC, this consensus is reached amongst more than more than 450 lead authors, more than 800 contributing authors, and 2500 scientific reviewers. While it is an advisory body and is not policy-prescriptive, the IPCC adopts particular linguistic conventions to indicate the probability of a statement being correct. Stephen Schneider convinced the IPCC to use this approach to systemise uncertainty (Lemonick). So for instance, in the IPCC reports, the term “likely” denotes a chance of 66%-90% of the statement being correct, while “very likely” denotes more than a 90% chance. Note the change from the Third Assessment Report (2001), indicating that “most of the observed warming in over the last fifty years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions” to the Fourth Assessment (February 2007) which more strongly states: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (Hulme 51, my italics). A fiery attack on Tim Flannery by Andrew Bolt on Steve Price’s talkback radio show in June 2010 illustrates just how misunderstood scientific uncertainty is in the broader community. When Price introduces Flannery as former Australian of the Year, Bolt intercedes, claiming Flannery is “Alarmist of the Year”, then goes on to chastise Flannery for making various forecasts which didn’t eventuate, such as that Perth and Brisbane might run out of water by 2009. “How much are you to blame for the swing in sentiment, the retreat from global warming policy and rise of scepticism?” demands Bolt. In the context of the events of late 2009 and early 2010, the fact that these events didn’t materialise made Flannery, and others, seem unreliable. And what Bolt had to say on talkback radio, I suspect, resonated with a good proportion of its audience. What Bolt was trying to do was discredit Flannery’s scientific credentials and in the process erode trust in the expert. Flannery’s response was to claim that, what he said was that these events might eventuate. In much the same way that the climate sceptics have managed to co-opt scepticism and use it as a rationale for inaction on climate change, Andrew Bolt here either misunderstands basic scientific method or quite consciously misleads and manipulates the public. As Naomi Oreskes argues, “proof does not play the role in science that most people think it does (or should), and therefore it cannot play the role in policy that skeptics demand it should” (Oreskes 370). Doubt and ‘Situated’ Hope Uncertainty and ambiguity then emerge here as resources because they force us to confront those things we really want–not safety in some distant, contested future but justice and self-understanding now. (Sheila Jasanoff, cited in Hulme, back cover) In his last published book before his death in mid-2010, Science as a contact sport, Stephen Schneider’s advice to aspiring science communicators is that they should engage with the media “not at all, or a lot”. Climate scientist Ann Henderson-Sellers adds that there are very few scientists “who have the natural ability, and learn or cultivate the talents, of effective communication with and through the media” (430). In order to attract the public’s attention, it was once commonplace for scientists to write editorials and exploit fear-provoking measures by including a “useful catastrophe or two” (Moser and Dilling 37). But are these tactics effective? Susanne Moser thinks not. She argues that “numerous studies show that … fear may change attitudes … but not necessarily increase active engagement or behaviour change” (Moser 70). Furthermore, risk psychologists argue that danger is always context specific (Hulme 196). If the risk or danger is “situated” and “tangible” (such as lead toxicity levels in children in Mt Isa from the Xstrata mine) then the public will engage with it. However if it is “un-situated” (distant, intangible and diffuse) like climate change, the audience is less likely to. In my SCOM201 class we examined the impact of two climate change-related campaigns. The first one was a short film used to promote the 2010 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit (“Scary”) and the second was the State Government of Victoria’s “You have the power: Save Energy” public awareness campaign (“You”). Using Moser’s article to guide them, students evaluated each campaign’s effectiveness. Their conclusions were that the “You have the power” campaign had far more impact because it a) had very clear objectives (to cut domestic power consumption) b) provided a very clear visualisation of carbon dioxide through the metaphor of black balloons wafting up into the atmosphere, c) gave viewers a sense of empowerment and hope through describing simple measures to cut power consumption and, d) used simple but effective metaphors to convey a world progressed beyond human control, such as household appliances robotically operating themselves in the absence of humans. Despite its high production values, in comparison, the Copenhagen Summit promotion was more than ineffective and bordered on propaganda. It actually turned viewers off with its whining, righteous appeal of, “please help the world”. Its message and objectives were ambiguous, it conveyed environmental catastrophe through hackneyed images, exploited children through a narrative based on fear and gave no real sense of hope or empowerment. In contrast the Victorian Government’s campaign focused on just one aspect of climate change that was made both tangible and situated. Doubt and uncertainty are productive tools in the pursuit of knowledge. Whether it is scientific or otherwise, uncertainty will always be the motivation that “feeds the frenzy for new knowledge” (Jasanoff 33). Articulating the importance of Hulme’s book, Sheila Jasanoff indicates we should make doubt our friend, “Without downplaying its seriousness, Hulme demotes climate change from ultimate threat to constant companion, whose murmurs unlock in us the instinct for justice and equality” (Hulme back cover). The “murmurs” that Jasanoff gestures to here, I think, can also be articulated as hope. And it is in this discussion of climate change that doubt and hope sit side-by-side as bedfellows, mutually entangled. Since the “failed” Copenhagen Summit, there has been a distinct shift in climate change discourse from “experts”. We have moved away from doom and gloom discourses and into the realm of what I shall call “situated” hope. “Situated” hope is not based on blind faith alone, but rather hope grounded in evidence, informed judgements and experience. For instance, in distinct contrast to his cautionary tale The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery’s latest book, Here on Earth is a biography of our Earth; a planet that throughout its history has oscillated between Gaian and Medean impulses. However Flannery’s wonder about the natural world and our potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change is not founded on empty rhetoric but rather tempered by evidence; he presents a series of case studies where humanity has managed to come together for a global good. Whether it’s the 1987 Montreal ban on CFCs (chlorinated fluorocarbons) or the lesser-known 2001 Stockholm Convention on POP (Persistent Organic Pollutants), what Flannery envisions is an emerging global civilisation, a giant, intelligent super-organism glued together through social bonds. He says: If that is ever achieved, the greatest transformation in the history of our planet would have occurred, for Earth would then be able to act as if it were as Francis Bacon put it all those centuries ago, ‘one entire, perfect living creature’. (Here on Earth, 279) While science might give us “our most reliable understanding of the natural world” (Oreskes 370), “situated” hope is the only productive and ethical currency we have. ReferencesAustralian Council of Deans of Science. What Did You Do with Your Science Degree? A National Study of Employment Outcomes for Science Degree Holders 1990-2000. Melbourne: Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, 2001. Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Inspiring Australia – A National Strategy for Engagement with the Sciences. Executive summary. Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 24 May 2010 ‹http://www.innovation.gov.au/SCIENCE/INSPIRINGAUSTRALIA/Documents/InspiringAustraliaSummary.pdf›. “Andrew Bolt with Tim Flannery.” Steve Price. Hosted by Steve Price. Melbourne: Melbourne Talkback Radio, 2010. 9 June 2010 ‹http://www.mtr1377.com.au/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=6209›. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. 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Sharing this article, the act of writing and then having it read, legitimises the point of it – that is, we (and we speak on behalf of each other here) managed to negotiate western academic expectations and norms from a just-as-legitimate-but-not-always-heard female Buginese perspective written in Standard Australian English (not my first choice-of-language and I speak on behalf of myself). At times we transgressed roles, guiding and following each other through different academic, cultural, social, and linguistic domains until we stumbled upon ways of legitimating our entanglement of experiences, when we heard the similar, faint, drum beat across boundaries and journeys.This article is one storying of the results of this four year relationship between a Buginese PhD candidate and an Indigenous Australian supervisor – both in the writing of the article and the processes that we are writing about. This is our process of knowing and validating knowledge through sharing, collaboration and cultural exchange. Neither the successful PhD thesis nor this article draw from authoethnography but they are outcomes of a lived, research standpoint that fiercely fought to centre a Muslim-Buginese perspective as much as possible, due to the nature of a postgraduate program. In the effort to find a way to not privilege Western ways of knowing to the detriment of my standpoint and position, we had to find a way to at times privilege my way of knowing the world alongside a Western one. There had to be a beat that transgressed cultural and linguistic differences and that allowed for a legitimised dialogic, intersubjective dance.The PhD research focused on potential dialogue between Australian culture and Buginese culture in terms of feminism and its resulting cultural hybridity where some Australian feminist thoughts are applicable to Buginese culture but some are not. Therefore, the PhD study centred a Buginese standpoint while moving back and forth amongst Australian feminist discourses and the dominant expectations of a western academic process. The PhD research was part of a greater Indonesian tertiary movement to include, study, challenge and extend feminist literary programs and how this could be respectfully and culturally appropriately achieved. This article is written by both of us but the core knowledge comes from a Buginese standpoint, that is, the principal supervisor learned from the PhD candidate and then applied her understanding of Indigenous standpoint theory, Tuhiwahi Smith’s decolonising methodologies and Spivakian self-reflexivity to aid the candidate’s development of her dancing methodology. For this reason, the rest of this article is written from the first-person perspective of Dr Abbas.The PhD study was a literary analysis on five stories from Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers (1985). My work translated these five stories from English into Indonesian and discussed some challenges that occurred in the process of translation. By using Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s metaphor of the subaltern dancing, I, the embodied learner and the cultural translator, moved back and forth between Buginese culture and Australian culture to consider how Australian women and men are represented and how mainstream Australian society engages with, or challenges, discourses of patriarchy and power. This movement back and forth was theorised as ‘dancing’. Ultimately, another dance was performed at the end of the thesis waltz between the work which centred my Buginese standpoint and academia as a Western tertiary institution.I have been dancing with Australian feminism for over four years. My use of the word ‘dancing’ signified my challenge to articulate and engage with Australian culture, literature, and feminism by viewing it from a Buginese perspective as opposed to a ‘Non-Western’ perspective. As a Buginese woman and scholar, I centred my specific cultural standpoints instead of accepting them generally and therefore dismissed the altering label of ‘Non-Western’. Juxtaposing Australian feminism with Buginese culture was not easy. However, as my research progressed I saw interesting cultural differences between Australian and Buginese cultures that could result in a hybridized way of engaging feminist issues. At times, my cultural standpoint took the lead in directing the research or the point, at other times a Western beat was more prominent, for example, using the English language to voice my work.The Buginese, also known as the Bugis, along with the Makassar, the Mandar, and the Toraja, are one of the four main ethnic groups of the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia. The population of the Buginese in South Sulawesi spreads into major states (Bone, Wajo, Soppeng, and Sidenreng) and some minor states (Pare-Pare, Suppa, and Sinjai). Like other ethnic groups living in other islands of Indonesia such as the Javanese, the Sundanese, the Minang, the Batak, the Balinese, and the Ambonese, the Buginese have their own culture and traditions. The Buginese, especially those who live in the villages, are still bounded strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). This concept of ade’ provides living guidelines for Buginese and consists of five components including ade’, bicara, rapang, wari’, and sara’. Pelras clarifies that pangadereng is ‘adat-hood’, a corpus of interlinked ruling principles which, besides ade’ (custom), includes also bicara (jurisprudence), rapang (models of good behaviour which ensure the proper functioning of society), wari’ (rules of descent and hierarchy) and sara’ (Islamic law and institution, derived from the Arabic shari’a) (190). So, pangadereng is an overall norm which includes advice on how Buginese should behave towards fellow human beings and social institutions on a reciprocal basis. In addition, the Buginese together with Makassarese, mind what is called siri’ (honour and shame), that is the sense of honour and shame. In the life of the Buginese-Makassar people, the most basic element is siri’. For them, no other value merits to be more detected and preserved. Siri’ is their life, their self-respect and their dignity. This is why, in order to uphold and to defend it when it has been stained or they consider it has been stained by somebody, the Bugis-Makassar people are ready to sacrifice everything, including their most precious life, for the sake of its restoration. So goes the saying.... ‘When one’s honour is at stake, without any afterthought one fights’ (Pelras 206).Buginese is one of Indonesia’s ethnic groups where men and women are intended to perform equal roles in society, especially those who live in the Buginese states of South Sulawesi where they are still bound strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). These two basic concepts are guidelines for daily life, both in the family and the work place. Buginese also praise what is called siri’, a sense of honour and shame. It is because of this sense of honour and shame that we have a saying, siri’ emmi ri onroang ri lino (people live only for siri’) which means one lives only for honour and prestige. Siri’ had to remain a guiding principle in my theoretical and methodological approach to my PhD research. It is also a guiding principle in the resulting pedagogical praxis that this work has established for my course in Australian culture and literature at Hasanuddin University. I was not prepared to compromise my own ethical and cultural identity and position yet will admit, at times, I felt pressured to do so if I was going to be seen to be performing legitimate scholarly work. Novera argues that:Little research has focused specifically on the adjustment of Indonesian students in Australia. Hasanah (1997) and Philips (1994) note that Indonesian students encounter difficulties in fulfilling certain Western academic requirements, particularly in relation to critical thinking. These studies do not explore the broad range of academic and social problems. Yet this is a fruitful area for research, not just because of the importance of Indonesian students to Australia, and the importance of the Australia-Indonesia relationship to both neighbouring nations, but also because adjustment problems are magnified by cultural differences. There are clear differences between Indonesian and Australian cultures, so that a study of Indonesian students in Australia might also be of broader academic interest […]Studies of international student adjustment discuss a range of problems, including the pressures created by new role and behavioural expectations, language difficulties, financial problems, social difficulties, homesickness, difficulties in dealing with university and other authorities, academic difficulties, and lack of assertiveness inside and outside the classroom. (467)While both my supervisor and I would agree that I faced all of these obstacles during my PhD candidature, this article is focusing solely on the battle to present my methodology, a dialogic encounter between Buginese feminism and mainstream Australian culture using Helen Garner’s short stories, to a Western process and have it be “legitimised”. Endang writes that short stories are becoming more popular in the industrial era in Indonesia and they have become vehicles for writers to articulate the realities of social life such as poverty, marginalization, and unfairness (141-144). In addition, Noor states that the short story has become a new literary form particularly effective for assisting writers in their goal to help the marginalized because its shortness can function as a weapon to directly “scoop up” the targeted issues and “knock them out at a blow” (Endang 144-145). Indeed, Helen Garner uses short stories in a way similar to that described by Endang: as a defiant act towards the government and current circumstances (145). My study of Helen Garner’s short stories explored the way her stories engage with and resist gender relations and inequality between men and women in Australian society through four themes prevalent in the narratives: the kitchen, landscape, language, and sexuality. I wrote my thesis in standard Australian English and I complied with expected forms, formatting, referencing, structuring etc. My thesis also included the Buginese translations of some of Garner’s work. However, the theoretical approaches that informed my analysis cannot be separated from the personal. In the title, I use the term ‘dancing’ to indicate a dialogue with white Australian women by moving back and forth between Australian culture and Buginese culture. I use the term ‘dancing’ as an extension of Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading but employ it as a signifier of my movement between insider and outsider (of Australian feminism), that is, I extend it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. According to Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, the “essence of Said’s argument is to know something is to have power over it, and conversely, to have power is to know the world in your own terms” (83). Ashcroft and Ahluwalia add how through music, particularly the work of pianist Glenn Gould, Said formulated a way of reading imperial and postcolonial texts contrapuntally. Such a reading acknowledges the hybridity of cultures, histories and literatures, allowing the reader to move back and forth between an internal and an external standpoint of cultural references and attitudes in “an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (Said 66). While theorising about the potential dance between Australian and Buginese feminisms in my work, I was living the dance in my day-to-day Australian university experience. Trying to accommodate the expected requirements of a PhD thesis, while at the same time ensuring that I maintained my own personal, cultural and professional dignity, that is ade’, and siri’, required some fancy footwork. Siri’ is central to my Buginese worldview and had to be positioned as such in my PhD thesis. Also, the realities that women are still marginalized and that gender inequality and disparities persist in Indonesian society become a motivation to carry out my PhD study. The opportunity to study Australian culture and literature in that country, allowed me to increase my global and local complexity as an individual, what Pieterse refers to as “ a process of hybridization” and to become as Beck terms an “actor” and “manager’’ of my life (as cited in Edmunds 1). Gaining greater autonomy and reconceptualising both masculinity and femininity, while dominant themes in Garner’s work, are also issues I address in my personal and professional goals. In other words, this study resulted in hybridized knowledge of Australian concepts of feminism and Buginese societies that offers a reference for students to understand and engage with different feminist thought. By learning how feminism is understood differently by Australians and Buginese, my Indonesian students can decide what aspects of feminist ideas from a Western perspective can be applied to Buginese culture without transgressing Buginese customs and habits.There are few Australian literary works that have been translated into Indonesian. Those that have include Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2007) and My Life is a Fake (2009), James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout (1957), Emma Darcy’s The Billionaire Bridegroom (2010) , Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), and Colleen McCullogh’s The Thorn Birds (1978). My translation of five short stories from Postcards from Surfers complemented these works and enriched the diversity of Indonesian translations of world literary works, the bulk of which tends to come from the United Kingdom, America, the Middle East, and Japan. However, actually getting through the process of PhD research followed by examination required my supervisor and I to negotiate cross-cultural terrain, academic agendas and Western expectations of what legitimate thesis writing should look like. Employing Said’s contrapuntal pedagogy and Warrior’s notion of subaltern dancing became my illegitimate methodological frame.Said points out that contrapuntal analysis means that students and teachers can cross-culturally “elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (318). He adds that “we must be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others” (32). Contrapuntal is a metaphor Said derived from musical theory, meaning to counterpoint or add a rhythm or melody, in this case, Buginese and Anglo-Australian feminisms. Warrior argues for an indigenous critique of how power and knowledge is read and in doing so he writes that “the subaltern can dance, and so sometimes can the intellectual” (85). In his rereading of Spivak, he argues that subaltern and intellectual positions can meet “and in meeting, create the possibility of communication” (86). He refers to this as dancing partly because it implicitly acknowledges without silencing the voices of the subaltern (once the subaltern speaks it is no longer the subaltern, so the notion of dancing allows for communication, “a movement from subalternity to something else” (90) which can mark “a new sort of non-complicitous relationship to a family, community or class of origin” (91). By “non-complicit” Warrior means that when a member of the subaltern becomes a scholar and therefore a member of those who historically silence the subaltern, there are other methods for communicating, of moving, between political and cultural spaces that allow for a multiplicity of voices and responses. Warrior uses a traditional Osage in-losh-ka dance as an example of how he physically and intellectually interacts with multiple voices and positions:While the music plays, our usual differences, including subalternity and intellectuality, and even gender in its own way, are levelled. For those of us moving to the music, the rules change, and those who know the steps and the songs and those who can keep up with the whirl of bodies, music and colours hold nearly every advantage over station or money. The music ends, of course, but I know I take my knowledge of the dance away and into my life as a critic, and I would argue that those levelled moments remain with us after we leave the drum, change our clothes, and go back to the rest of our lives. (93)For Warrior, the dance becomes theory into practice. For me, it became not only a way to soundly and “appropriately” present my methodology and purpose, but it also became my day to day interactions, as a female Buginese scholar, with western, Australian academic and cultural worldviews and expectations.One of the biggest movements I had to justify was my use of the first person “I”, in my thesis, to signify my identity as a Buginese woman and position myself as an insider of my community with a hybrid western feminism with Australia in mind. Perrault argues that “Writing “I” has been an emancipatory project for women” (2). In the context of my PhD thesis, uttering ‘I’ confirmed my position and aims. However, this act of explicitly situating my own identity and cultural position in my research and thesis was considered one of the more illegitimate acts. In one of the examiner reports, it was stated that situating myself centrally was fraught but that I managed to avoid the pitfalls. Judy Long argues that writing in the female first person challenges patriarchal control and order (127). For me, writing in the first person was essential if I had any chance of maintaining my Buginese identity and voice, in both my thesis and in my Australian tertiary experience. As Trinh-Minh writes, “S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given permission to do so or not” (8).Van Dijk, cited in Hamilton, notes that the west and north are bound by an academic ethnocentrism and this is a particular area my own research had to negotiate. Methodologically I provided a comparative rather than a universalising perspective, engaging with middle-class, heterosexual, western, white women feminism but not privileging them. It is important for Buginese to use language discourses as a weapon to gain power, particularly because as McGlynn claims, “generally Indonesians are not particularly outspoken” (38). My research was shaped by a combination of ongoing dedication to promote women’s empowerment in the Buginese context and my role as an academic teaching English literature at the university level. I applied interpretive principles that will enable my students to see how the ideas of feminism conveyed through western literature can positively improve the quality of women’s lives and be implemented in Buginese culture without compromising our identity as Indonesians and Buginese people. At the same time, my literary translation provides a cultural comparison with Australia that allows a space for further conversations to occur. However, while attempting to negotiate western and Indonesian discourses in my thesis, I was also physically and emotionally trying to negotiate how to do this as a Muslim Buginese female PhD candidate in an Anglo-Australian academic institution. The notion of ‘dancing’ was employed as a signifier of movement between insider and outsider knowledge. Throughout the research process and my thesis I ‘danced’ with Australian feminism, traditional patriarchal Buginese society, Western academic expectations and my own emerging Indonesian feminist perspective. To ensure siri’ remained the pedagogical and ethical basis of my approach I applied Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s employment of a traditional Osage dance as a self-reflexive, embodied praxis, that is, I extended it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. The notion of ‘dance’ allows for movement, change, contact, tension, touch and distance: it means that for those who have historically been marginalised or confined, they are no longer silenced. The metaphoric act of dancing allowed me to legitimise my PhD work – it was successfully awarded – and to negotiate a western tertiary institute in Australia with my own Buginese knowledge, culture and purpose.ReferencesAshcroft., B., and P. Ahluwalia. Edward Said. London: Routledge, 1999.Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel. Random House LLC, 2007.Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake: A NNovel. Random House LLC, 2009.Darcy, Emma. Billionaire Bridegroom 2319. Harlequin, 2010.Endang, Fransisca. "Disseminating Indonesian Postcoloniality into English Literature (a Case Study of 'Clara')." Jurnal Sastra Inggris 8.2: 2008.Edmunds, Kim. "The Impact of an Australian Higher Education on Gender Relations in Indonesia." ISANA International Conference "Student Success in International Education", 2007Garner, Helen. Postcards from Surfers. Melbourne: McPhee/Gribble, 1985.Hamilton, Deborah, Deborah Schriffrin, and Heidi E. Tannen, ed. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Victoria: Balckwll, 2001.Long, Judy. 1999. Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. New York: New York UP, 1999.McGlynn, John H. "Silent Voices, Muted Expressions: Indonesian Literature Today." Manoa 12.1 (2000): 38-44.Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle Press, 1987.Pelras, Christian. The Bugis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Perreault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995.Pieterse, J.N. Globalisation as Hybridisation. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, eds., Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications, 1995.Marshall, James V. Walkabout. London: Puffin, 1957.McCullough, C. The Thorn Birds Sydney: Harper Collins, 1978.Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989.Novera, Isvet Amri. "Indonesian Postgraduate Students Studying in Australia: An Examination of Their Academic, Social and Cultural Experiences." International Education Journal 5.4 (2004): 475-487.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Book, 1993. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 1999.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of lllinois, 1988. 271-313.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.Warrior, Robert. ""The Subaltern Can Dance, and So Sometimes Can the Intellectual." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.1 (2011): 85-94.

“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

Refereed publications (also known as peer-reviewed) are the currency of academia, yet many PhD theses in Australia result in only one or two such papers. Typically, a doctoral thesis requires the candidate to present (and pass) a public Confirmation Seminar, around nine to twelve months into candidacy, in which a panel of the candidate’s supervisors and invited experts adjudicate upon whether the work is likely to continue and ultimately succeed in the goal of a coherent and original contribution to knowledge. A Final Seminar, also public and sometimes involving the traditional viva voce or oral defence of the thesis, is presented two or three months before approval is given to send the 80,000 to 100,000 word tome off for external examination. And that soul-destroying or elation-releasing examiner’s verdict can be many months in the delivery: a limbo-like period during which the candidate’s status as a student is ended and her or his receipt of any scholarship or funding guerdon is terminated with perfunctory speed. This is the only time most students spend seriously writing up their research for publication although, naturally, many are more involved in job hunting as they pin their hopes on passing the thesis examination.There is, however, a slightly more palatable alternative to this nail-biting process of the traditional PhD, and that is the PhD by Published Papers (also known as PhD by Publications or PhD by Published Works). The form of my own soon-to-be-submitted thesis, it permits the submission for examination of a collection of papers that have been refereed and accepted (or are in the process of being refereed) for publication in academic journals or books. Apart from the obvious benefits in getting published early in one’s (hopefully) burgeoning academic career, it also takes away a lot of the stress come final submission time. After all, I try to assure myself, the thesis examiners can’t really discredit the process of double-blind, peer-review the bulk of the thesis has already undergone: their job is to examine how well I’ve unified the papers into a cohesive thesis … right? But perhaps they should at least be wary, because, unfortunately, the requirements for this kind of PhD vary considerably from institution to institution and there have been some cases where the submitted work is of questionable quality compared to that produced by graduates from more demanding universities. Hence, this paper argues that in my subject area of interest—film and television studies—there is a huge range in the set requirements for doctorates, from universities that award the degree to film artists for prior published work that has undergone little or no academic scrutiny and has involved little or no on-campus participation to at least three Australian universities that require candidates be enrolled for a minimum period of full-time study and only submit scholarly work generated and published (or submitted for publication) during candidature. I would also suggest that uncertainty about where a graduate’s work rests on this continuum risks confusing a hard-won PhD by Published Papers with the sometimes risible honorary doctorate. Let’s begin by dredging the depths of those murky, quasi-academic waters to examine the occasionally less-than-salubrious honorary doctorate. The conferring of this degree is generally a recognition of an individual’s body of (usually published) work but is often conferred for contributions to knowledge or society in general that are not even remotely academic. The honorary doctorate does not usually carry with it the right to use the title “Dr” (although many self-aggrandising recipients in the non-academic world flout this unwritten code of conduct, and, indeed, Monash University’s Monash Magazine had no hesitation in describing its 2008 recipient, musician, screenwriter, and art-school-dropout Nick Cave, as “Dr Cave” (O’Loughlin)). Some shady universities even offer such degrees for sale or ‘donation’ and thus do great damage to that institution’s credibility as well as to the credibility of the degree itself. Such overseas “diploma mills”—including Ashwood University, Belford University, Glendale University and Suffield University—are identified by their advertising of “Life Experience Degrees,” for which a curriculum vitae outlining the prospective graduand’s oeuvre is accepted on face value as long as their credit cards are not rejected. An aspiring screen auteur simply specifies film and television as their major and before you can shout “Cut!” there’s a degree in the mail. Most of these pseudo-universities are not based in Australia but are perfectly happy to confer their ‘titles’ to any well-heeled, vanity-driven Australians capable of completing the online form. Nevertheless, many academics fear a similarly disreputable marketplace might develop here, and Norfolk Island-based Greenwich University presents a particularly illuminating example. Previously empowered by an Act of Parliament consented to by Senator Ian Macdonald, the then Minister for Territories, this “university” had the legal right to confer honorary degrees from 1998. The Act was eventually overridden by legislation passed in 2002, after a concerted effort by the Australian Universities Quality Agency Ltd. and the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee to force the accreditation requirements of the Australian Qualifications Framework upon the institution in question, thus preventing it from making degrees available for purchase over the Internet. Greenwich University did not seek re-approval and soon relocated to its original home of Hawaii (Brown). But even real universities flounder in similarly muddy waters when, unsolicited, they make dubious decisions to grant degrees to individuals they hold in high esteem. Although meaning well by not courting pecuniary gain, they nevertheless invite criticism over their choice of recipient for their honoris causa, despite the decision usually only being reached after a process of debate and discussion by university committees. Often people are rewarded, it seems, as much for their fame as for their achievements or publications. One such example of a celebrity who has had his onscreen renown recognised by an honorary doctorate is film and television actor/comedian Billy Connolly who was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by The University of Glasgow in 2006, prompting Stuart Jeffries to complain that “something has gone terribly wrong in British academia” (Jeffries). Eileen McNamara also bemoans the levels to which some institutions will sink to in search of media attention and exposure, when she writes of St Andrews University in Scotland conferring an honorary doctorate to film actor and producer, Michael Douglas: “What was designed to acknowledge intellectual achievement has devolved into a publicity grab with universities competing for celebrity honorees” (McNamara). Fame as an actor (and the list gets even weirder when the scope of enquiry is widened beyond the field of film and television), seems to be an achievement worth recognising with an honorary doctorate, according to some universities, and this kind of discredit is best avoided by Australian institutions of higher learning if they are to maintain credibility. Certainly, universities down under would do well to follow elsewhere than in the footprints of Long Island University’s Southampton College. Perhaps the height of academic prostitution of parchments for the attention of mass media occurred when in 1996 this US school bestowed an Honorary Doctorate of Amphibious Letters upon that mop-like puppet of film and television fame known as the “muppet,” Kermit the Frog. Indeed, this polystyrene and cloth creation with an anonymous hand operating its mouth had its acceptance speech duly published (see “Kermit’s Acceptance Speech”) and the Long Island University’s Southampton College received much valuable press. After all, any publicity is good publicity. Or perhaps this furry frog’s honorary degree was a cynical stunt meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the practice? In 1986 a similar example, much closer to my own home, occurred when in anticipation and condemnation of the conferral of an honorary doctorate upon Prince Philip by Monash University in Melbourne, the “Members of the Monash Association of Students had earlier given a 21-month-old Chihuahua an honorary science degree” (Jeffries), effectively suggesting that the honorary doctorate is, in fact, a dog of a degree. On a more serious note, there have been honorary doctorates conferred upon far more worthy recipients in the field of film and television by some Australian universities. Indigenous film-maker Tracey Moffatt was awarded an honorary doctorate by Griffith University in November of 2004. Moffatt was a graduate of the Griffith University’s film school and had an excellent body of work including the films Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) and beDevil (1993). Acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Williamson was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by The University of Queensland in December of 2004. His work had previously picked up four Australian Film Institute awards for best screenplay. An Honorary Doctorate of Visual and Performing Arts was given to film director Fred Schepisi AO by The University of Melbourne in May of 2006. His films had also been earlier recognised with Australian Film Institute awards as well as the Golden Globe Best Miniseries or Television Movie award for Empire Falls in 2006. Director George Miller was crowned with an Honorary Doctorate in Film from the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School in April 2007, although he already had a medical doctor’s testamur on his wall. In May of this year, filmmaker George Gittoes, a fine arts dropout from The University of Sydney, received an honorary doctorate by The University of New South Wales. His documentaries, Soundtrack to War (2005) and Rampage (2006), screened at the Sydney and Berlin film festivals, and he has been employed by the Australian Government as an official war artist. Interestingly, the high quality screen work recognised by these Australian universities may have earned the recipients ‘real’ PhDs had they sought the qualification. Many of these film artists could have just as easily submitted their work for the degree of PhD by Published Papers at several universities that accept prior work in lieu of an original exegesis, and where a film is equated with a book or journal article. But such universities still invite comparisons of their PhDs by Published Papers with honorary doctorates due to rather too-easy-to-meet criteria. The privately funded Bond University, for example, recommends a minimum full-time enrolment of just three months and certainly seems more lax in its regulations than other Antipodean institution: a healthy curriculum vitae and payment of the prescribed fee (currently AUD$24,500 per annum) are the only requirements. Restricting my enquiries once again to the field of my own research, film and television, I note that Dr. Ingo Petzke achieved his 2004 PhD by Published Works based upon films produced in Germany well before enrolling at Bond, contextualized within a discussion of the history of avant-garde film-making in that country. Might not a cynic enquire as to how this PhD significantly differs from an honorary doctorate? Although Petzke undoubtedly paid his fees and met all of Bond’s requirements for his thesis entitled Slow Motion: Thirty Years in Film, one cannot criticise that cynic for wondering if Petzke’s films are indeed equivalent to a collection of refereed papers. It should be noted that Bond is not alone when it comes to awarding candidates the PhD by Published Papers for work published or screened in the distant past. Although yet to grant it in the area of film or television, Swinburne University of Technology (SUT) is an institution that distinctly specifies its PhD by Publications is to be awarded for “research which has been carried out prior to admission to candidature” (8). Similarly, the Griffith Law School states: “The PhD (by publications) is awarded to established researchers who have an international reputation based on already published works” (1). It appears that Bond is no solitary voice in the academic wilderness, for SUT and the Griffith Law School also apparently consider the usual milestones of Confirmation and Final Seminars to be unnecessary if the so-called candidate is already well published. Like Bond, Griffith University (GU) is prepared to consider a collection of films to be equivalent to a number of refereed papers. Dr Ian Lang’s 2002 PhD (by Publication) thesis entitled Conditional Truths: Remapping Paths To Documentary ‘Independence’ contains not refereed, scholarly articles but the following videos: Wheels Across the Himalaya (1981); Yallambee, People of Hope (1986); This Is What I Call Living (1988); The Art of Place: Hanoi Brisbane Art Exchange (1995); and Millennium Shift: The Search for New World Art (1997). While this is a most impressive body of work, and is well unified by appropriate discussion within the thesis, the cynic who raised eyebrows at Petzke’s thesis might also be questioning this thesis: Dr Lang’s videos all preceded enrolment at GU and none have been refereed or acknowledged with major prizes. Certainly, the act of releasing a film for distribution has much in common with book publishing, but should these videos be considered to be on a par with academic papers published in, say, the prestigious and demanding journal Screen? While recognition at awards ceremonies might arguably correlate with peer review there is still the question as to how scholarly a film actually is. Of course, documentary films such as those in Lang’s thesis can be shown to be addressing gaps in the literature, as is the expectation of any research paper, but the onus remains on the author/film-maker to demonstrate this via a detailed contextual review and a well-written, erudite argument that unifies the works into a cohesive thesis. This Lang has done, to the extent that suspicious cynic might wonder why he chose not to present his work for a standard PhD award. Another issue unaddressed by most institutions is the possibility that the publications have been self-refereed or refereed by the candidate’s editorial colleagues in a case wherein the papers appear in a book the candidate has edited or co-edited. Dr Gillian Swanson’s 2004 GU thesis Towards a Cultural History of Private Life: Sexual Character, Consuming Practices and Cultural Knowledge, which addresses amongst many other cultural artefacts the film Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean 1962), has nine publications: five of which come from two books she co-edited, Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two, (Gledhill and Swanson 1996) and Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives (Crisp et al 2000). While few would dispute the quality of Swanson’s work, the persistent cynic might wonder if these five papers really qualify as refereed publications. The tacit understanding of a refereed publication is that it is blind reviewed i.e. the contributor’s name is removed from the document. Such a system is used to prevent bias and favouritism but this level of anonymity might be absent when the contributor to a book is also one of the book’s editors. Of course, Dr Swanson probably took great care to distance herself from the refereeing process undertaken by her co-editors, but without an inbuilt check, allegations of cronyism from unfriendly cynics may well result. A related factor in making comparisons of different university’s PhDs by Published Papers is the requirements different universities have about the standard of the journal the paper is published in. It used to be a simple matter in Australia: the government’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) held a Register of Refereed Journals. If your benefactor in disseminating your work was on the list, your publications were of near-unquestionable quality. Not any more: DEST will no longer accept nominations for listing on the Register and will not undertake to rule on whether a particular journal article meets the HERDC [Higher Education Research Data Collection] requirements for inclusion in publication counts. HEPs [Higher Education Providers] have always had the discretion to determine if a publication produced in a journal meets the requirements for inclusion in the HERDC regardless of whether or not the journal was included on the Register of Refereed Journals. As stated in the HERDC specifications, the Register is not an exhaustive list of all journals which satisfy the peer-review requirements (DEST). The last listing for the DEST Register of Refereed Journals was the 3rd of February 2006, making way for a new tiered list of academic journals, which is currently under review in the Australian tertiary education sector (see discussion of this development in the Redden and Mitchell articles in this issue). In the interim, some university faculties created their own rankings of journals, but not the Faculty of Creative Industries at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where I am studying for my PhD by Published Papers. Although QUT does not have a list of ranked journals for a candidate to submit papers to, it is otherwise quite strict in its requirements. The QUT University Regulations state, “Papers submitted as a PhD thesis must be closely related in terms of subject matter and form a cohesive research narrative” (QUT PhD regulation 14.1.2). Thus there is the requirement at QUT that apart from the usual introduction, methodology and literature review, an argument must be made as to how the papers present a sustained research project via “an overarching discussion of the main features linking the publications” (14.2.12). It is also therein stated that it should be an “account of research progress linking the research papers” (4.2.6). In other words, a unifying essay must make an argument for consideration of the sometimes diversely published papers as a cohesive body of work, undertaken in a deliberate journey of research. In my own case, an aural auteur analysis of sound in the films of Rolf de Heer, I argue that my published papers (eight in total) represent a journey from genre analysis (one paper) to standard auteur analysis (three papers) to an argument that sound should be considered in auteur analysis (one paper) to the major innovation of the thesis, aural auteur analysis (three papers). It should also be noted that unlike Bond, GU or SUT, the QUT regulations for the standard PhD still apply: a Confirmation Seminar, Final Seminar and a minimum two years of full-time enrolment (with a minimum of three months residency in Brisbane) are all compulsory. Such milestones and sine qua non ensure the candidate’s academic progress and intellectual development such that she or he is able to confidently engage in meaningful quodlibets regarding the thesis’s topic. Another interesting and significant feature of the QUT guidelines for this type of degree is the edict that papers submitted must be “published, accepted or submitted during the period of candidature” (14.1.1). Similarly, the University of Canberra (UC) states “The articles or other published material must be prepared during the period of candidature” (10). Likewise, Edith Cowan University (ECU) will confer its PhD by Publications to those candidates whose thesis consists of “only papers published in refereed scholarly media during the period of enrolment” (2). In other words, one cannot simply front up to ECU, QUT, or UC with a résumé of articles or films published over a lifetime of writing or film-making and ask for a PhD by Published Papers. Publications of the candidate prepared prior to commencement of candidature are simply not acceptable at these institutions and such PhDs by Published Papers from QUT, UC and ECU are entirely different to those offered by Bond, GU and SUT. Furthermore, without a requirement for a substantial period of enrolment and residency, recipients of PhDs by Published Papers from Bond, GU, or SUT are unlikely to have participated significantly in the research environment of their relevant faculty and peers. Such newly minted doctors may be as unfamiliar with the campus and its research activities as the recipient of an honorary doctorate usually is, as he or she poses for the media’s cameras en route to the glamorous awards ceremony. Much of my argument in this paper is built upon the assumption that the process of refereeing a paper (or for that matter, a film) guarantees a high level of academic rigour, but I confess that this premise is patently naïve, if not actually flawed. Refereeing can result in the rejection of new ideas that conflict with the established opinions of the referees. Interdisciplinary collaboration can be impeded and the lack of referee’s accountability is a potential problem, too. It can also be no less nail-biting a process than the examination of a finished thesis, given that some journals take over a year to complete the refereeing process, and some journal’s editorial committees have recognised this shortcoming. Despite being a mainstay of its editorial approach since 1869, the prestigious science journal, Nature, which only publishes about 7% of its submissions, has led the way with regard to varying the procedure of refereeing, implementing in 2006 a four-month trial period of ‘Open Peer Review’. Their website states, Authors could choose to have their submissions posted on a preprint server for open comments, in parallel with the conventional peer review process. Anyone in the field could then post comments, provided they were prepared to identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review’ process was closed and the editors made their decision about publication with the help of all reports and comments (Campbell). Unfortunately, the experiment was unpopular with both authors and online peer reviewers. What the Nature experiment does demonstrate, however, is that the traditional process of blind refereeing is not yet perfected and can possibly evolve into something less problematic in the future. Until then, refereeing continues to be the best system there is for applying structured academic scrutiny to submitted papers. With the reforms of the higher education sector, including forced mergers of universities and colleges of advanced education and the re-introduction of university fees (carried out under the aegis of John Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training from 1987 to 1991), and the subsequent rationing of monies according to research dividends (calculated according to numbers of research degree conferrals and publications), there has been a veritable explosion in the number of institutions offering PhDs in Australia. But the general public may not always be capable of differentiating between legitimately accredited programs and diploma mills, given that the requirements for the first differ substantially. From relatively easily obtainable PhDs by Published Papers at Bond, GU and SUT to more rigorous requirements at ECU, QUT and UC, there is undoubtedly a huge range in the demands of degrees that recognise a candidate’s published body of work. The cynical reader may assume that with this paper I am simply trying to shore up my own forthcoming graduation with a PhD by Published papers from potential criticisms that it is on par with a ‘purchased’ doctorate. Perhaps they are right, for this is a new degree in QUT’s Creative Industries faculty and has only been awarded to one other candidate (Dr Marcus Foth for his 2006 thesis entitled Towards a Design Methodology to Support Social Networks of Residents in Inner-City Apartment Buildings). But I believe QUT is setting a benchmark, along with ECU and UC, to which other universities should aspire. In conclusion, I believe further efforts should be undertaken to heighten the differences in status between PhDs by Published Papers generated during enrolment, PhDs by Published Papers generated before enrolment and honorary doctorates awarded for non-academic published work. Failure to do so courts cynical comparison of all PhD by Published Papers with unearnt doctorates bought from Internet shysters. References Brown, George. “Protecting Australia’s Higher Education System: A Proactive Versus Reactive Approach in Review (1999–2004).” Proceedings of the Australian Universities Quality Forum 2004. Australian Universities Quality Agency, 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.auqa.edu.au/auqf/2004/program/papers/Brown.pdf>. Campbell, Philip. “Nature Peer Review Trial and Debate.” Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science. December 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/> Crisp, Jane, Kay Ferres, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Deciphering Culture: Ordinary Curiosities and Subjective Narratives. London: Routledge, 2000. Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). “Closed—Register of Refereed Journals.” Higher Education Research Data Collection, 2008. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/online_forms_services/ higher_education_research_data_ collection.htm>. Edith Cowan University. “Policy Content.” Postgraduate Research: Thesis by Publication, 2003. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.ecu.edu.au/GPPS/policies_db/tmp/ac063.pdf>. Gledhill, Christine, and Gillian Swanson, eds. Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War Two. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Griffith Law School, Griffith University. Handbook for Research Higher Degree Students. 24 March 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/slrc/pdf/rhdhandbook.pdf>. Jeffries, Stuart. “I’m a celebrity, get me an honorary degree!” The Guardian 6 July 2006. 11 June 2008 ‹http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,1813525,00.html>. Kermit the Frog. “Kermit’s Commencement Address at Southampton Graduate Campus.” Long Island University News 19 May 1996. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.southampton.liu.edu/news/commence/1996/kermit.htm>. McNamara, Eileen. “Honorary senselessness.” The Boston Globe 7 May 2006. ‹http://www. boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/05/07/honorary_senselessness/>. O’Loughlin, Shaunnagh. “Doctor Cave.” Monash Magazine 21 (May 2008). 13 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/monmag/issue21-2008/alumni/cave.html>. Queensland University of Technology. “Presentation of PhD Theses by Published Papers.” Queensland University of Technology Doctor of Philosophy Regulations (IF49). 12 Oct. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/Appendix/appendix09.jsp#14%20Presentation %20of%20PhD%20Theses>. Swinburne University of Technology. Research Higher Degrees and Policies. 14 Nov. 2007. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.swinburne.edu.au/corporate/registrar/ppd/docs/RHDpolicy& procedure.pdf>. University of Canberra. Higher Degrees by Research: Policy and Procedures (The Gold Book). 7.3.3.27 (a). 15 Nov. 2004. 11 June 2008 ‹http://www.canberra.edu.au/research/attachments/ goldbook/Pt207_AB20approved3220arp07.pdf>.

Introduction The exhibition of an artist’s work is traditionally accepted as representing the final stage of the creative process (Staniszewski). This article asks, however, whether this traditional view can be reassessed so that the curatorial practice of mounting an exhibition becomes, itself, a creative outcome feeding into work that may still be in progress, and that simultaneously operates as a learning and teaching tool. To provide a preliminary examination of the issue, we use a single case study approach, taking an example of practice currently used at an Australian university. In this program, internal and external students work together to develop and deliver an exhibition of their own work in progress. The exhibition space has a professional website (‘CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space’), many community members and the local media attend exhibition openings, and the exhibition (which runs for three to four weeks) becomes an outcome students can include in their curriculum vitae. This article reflects on the experiences, challenges, and outcomes that have been gained through this process over the past twelve months. Due to this time frame, the case study is exploratory and its findings are provisional. The case study is an appropriate method to explore a small sample of events (in this case exhibitions) as, following Merriam, it allows the construction of a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed. Although it is clear that this approach will not offer results which can be generalised, it can, nevertheless, assist in opening up a field for investigation and constructing a holistic account of a phenomenon (in this case, the exhibition space as authentic learning experience and productive teaching tool), for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from a particular case” (51). Jennings adds that even the smallest case study is useful as it includes an “in-depth examination of the subject with which to confirm or contest received generalizations” (14). Donmoyer extends thoughts on this, suggesting that the single case study is extremely useful as the “restricted conception of generalizability … solely in terms of sampling and statistical significance is no longer defensible or functional” (45). Using the available student course feedback, anonymous end-of-term course evaluations, and other available information, this case study account offers an example of what Merriam terms a “narrative description” (51), which seeks to offer readers the opportunity to engage and “learn vicariously from an encounter with the case” (Merriam 51) in question. This may, we propose, be particularly productive for other educators since what is “learn[ed] in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (Merriam 51). Breaking Ground exhibition, CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space, 2014. Photo by Ulrike Sturm. Background The Graduate Certificate of Creative Industries (Creative Practice) (CQU ‘CB82’) was developed in 2011 to meet the national Australian Quality Framework agency’s Level 8 (Graduate Certificate) standards in terms of what is called in their policies, the “level” of learning. This states that, following the program, graduates from this level of program “will have advanced knowledge and skills for professional or highly skilled work and/or further learning … [and] will apply knowledge and skills to demonstrate autonomy, well-developed judgment, adaptability and responsibility as a practitioner or learner” (AQF). The program was first delivered in 2012 and, since then, has been offered both two and three terms a year, attracting small numbers of students each term, with an average of 8 to 12 students a term. To meet these requirements, such programs are sometimes developed to provide professional and work-integrated learning tasks and learning outcomes for students (Patrick et al., Smith et al.). In this case, professionally relevant and related tasks and outcomes formed the basis for the program, its learning tasks, and its assessment regime. To this end, each student enrolled in this program works on an individual, self-determined (but developed in association with the teaching team and with feedback from peers) creative/professional project that is planned, developed, and delivered across one term of study for full- time students and two terms for part- timers. In order to ensure the AQF-required professional-level outcomes, many projects are designed and/or developed in partnership with professional arts institutions and community bodies. Partnerships mobilised utilised in this way have included those with local, state, and national bodies, including the local arts community, festivals, and educational support programs, as well as private business and community organisations. Student interaction with curation occurs regularly at art schools, where graduate and other student shows are scheduled as a regular events on the calendar of most tertiary art schools (Al-Amri), and the curated exhibition as an outcome has a longstanding tradition in tertiary fine arts education (Webb, Brien, and Burr). Yet in these cases, it is ultimately the creative work on show that is the focus of the learning experience and assessment process, rather than any focus on engagement with the curatorial process itself (Dally et al.). When art schools do involve students in the curatorial process, the focus usually still remains on the students' creative work (Sullivan). Another interaction with curation is when students undertaking a tertiary-level course or program in museum, and/or curatorial practice are engaged in the process of developing, mounting, and/or critiquing curated activities. These programs are, however, very small in number in Australia, where they are only offered at postgraduate level, with the exception of an undergraduate program at the University of Canberra (‘215JA.2’). By adopting “the exhibition” as a component of the learning process rather than its end product, including documentation of students’ work in progress as exhibition pieces, and incorporating it into a more general creative industries focused program, we argue that the curatorial experience can become an interactive learning platform for students ranging from diverse creative disciplines. The Student Experience Students in the program under consideration in this case study come from a wide spectrum of the creative industries, including creative writing, film, multimedia, music, and visual arts. Each term, at least half of the enrolments are distance students. The decision to establish an on-campus exhibition space was an experimental strategy that sought to bring together students from different creative disciplines and diverse locations, and actively involve them in the exhibition development and curatorial process. As well as their individual project work, the students also bring differing levels of prior professional experience to the program, and exhibit a wide range of learning styles and approaches when developing and completing their creative works and exegetical reflections. To cater for the variations listed above, but still meet the program milestones and learning outcomes that must (under the program rules) remain consistent for each student, we employed a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching that included strategies informed by Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, Frames of Mind), which proposed and defined seven intelligences, and repeatedly criticised what he identified as an over-reliance on linguistic and logical indices as identifiers of intelligence. He asserted that these were traditional indicators of high scores on most IQ measures or tests of achievement but were not representative of overall levels of intelligence. Gardner later reinforced that, “unless individuals take a very active role in what it is that they’re studying, unless they learn to ask questions, to do things hands on, to essentially re-create things in their own mind and transform them as is needed, the ideas just disappear” (Edutopia). In alignment with Gardner’s views, we have noted that students enrolled in the program demonstrate strengths in several key intelligence areas, particularly interpersonal, musical, body-kinaesthetic, and spacial/visual intelligences (see Gardner, ‘Multiple Intelligences’, 8–18). To cater for, and further develop, these strengths, and also for the external students who were unable to attend university-based workshop sessions, we developed a range of resources with various approaches to hands-on creative tasks that related to the projects students were completing that term. These resources included the usual scholarly articles, books, and textbooks but were also sourced from the print and online media, guest speaker presentations, and digital sites such as You Tube and TED Talks, and through student input into group discussions. The positive reception of these individual project-relevant resources is evidenced in the class online discussion forums, where consecutive groups of students have consistently reflected on the positive impact these resources have had on their individual creative projects: This has been a difficult week with many issues presenting. As part of our Free Writing exercise in class, we explored ‘brain dumping’ and wrote anything (no matter how ridiculous) down. The great thing I discovered after completing this task was that by allowing myself to not censor my thoughts by compiling a writing masterpiece, I was indeed “free” to express everything. …. … I understand that this may not have been the original intended goal of Free Writing – but it is something I would highly recommend external students to try and see if it works for you (Student 'A', week 5, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). I found our discussion about crowdfunding particularly interesting. ... I intend to look at this model for future exhibitions. I think it could be a great way for me to look into developing an exhibition of paintings alongside some more commercial collateral such as prints and cards (Student 'B', week 6, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). In class I specifically enjoyed the black out activity and found the online videos exceptional, inspiring and innovating. I really enjoyed this activity and it was something that I can take away and use within the classroom when educating (Student 'C', week 8, term 1 2015, Moodle reflection point). The application of Gardner’s principles and strategies dovetailed with our framework for assessing learning outcomes, where we were guided by Boud’s seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education, which aim to “set directions for change, designed to enhance learning achievements for all students and improve the quality of their experience” (26). Boud asserts that assessment has most effect when: it is used to engage students in productive learning; feedback is used to improve student learning; students and teachers become partners in learning and assessment; students are inducted into the assessment practices of higher education; assessment and learning are placed at the centre of subject and program design; assessment and learning is a focus for staff and institutional development; and, assessment provides inclusive and trustworthy representation of student achievement. These propositions were integral to the design of learning outcomes for the exhibition. Teachers worked with students, individually and as a group, to build their capacity to curate the exhibition, and this included such things as the design and administration of invitations, and also the physical placement of works within the exhibition space. In this way, teachers and students became partners in the process of assessment. The final exhibition, as a learning outcome, meant that students were engaged in productive learning that placed both assessment and knowledge at the centre of subject and project design. It is a collation of creative pieces that embodies the class, as a whole; however, each piece also represents the skills and creativity of individual students and, in this way, are is a trustworthy representations of student achievement. While we aimed to employ all seven recommendations, our main focus was on ensuring that the exhibition, as an authentic learning experience, was productive and that the students were engaged as responsible and accountable co-facilitators of it. These factors are particularly relevant as almost all the students were either currently working, or planning to work, in their chosen creative field, where the work would necessarily involve both publication, performance, and/or exhibition of their artwork plus collaborative practice across disciplinary boundaries to make this happen (Brien). For this reason, we provided exhibition-related coursework tasks that we hoped were engaging and that also represented an authentic learning outcome for the students. Student Curatorship In this context, the opportunity to exhibit their own works-in-progress provided an authentic reason, with a deadline, for students to both work, and reflect, on their creative projects. The documentation of each student’s creative process was showcased as a stand-alone exhibition piece within the display. These exhibits not only served not only to highlight the different learning styles of each student, but also proved to inspire creativity and skill development. They also provided a working model whereby students (and potential enrollees) could view other students’ work and creative processes from inception to fully-realised project outcomes. The sample online reflections quoted above not only highlight the effectiveness of the online content delivery, but this engagement with the online forum also allowed remote students to comment on each other’s projects as well as to and respond to issues they were encountering in their project planning and development and creative practice. It was essential that this level of peer engagement was fostered for the curatorial project to be viable, as both internal and external students are involved in designing the invitation, catalogue, labels, and design of the space, while on-campus students hang and label work according to the group’s directions. Distance students send in items. This is a key point of this experiment: the process of curating an exhibition of work from diverse creative fields, and from students located thousands of kilometres apart, as a way of bringing cohesion to a diverse cohort of students. That cohesiveness provided an opportunity for authentic learning to occur because it was in relation to a task that each student apparently understood as personally, academically, and professionally relevant. This was supported by the anonymous course evaluation comments, which were overwhelmingly positive about the exhibition process – there were no negative comments regarding this aspect of the program, and over 60 per cent of the class supplied these evaluations. This also met a considerable point of anxiety in the current university environment whereby actively engaging students in online learning interactions is a continuing issue (Dixon, Dixon, and Axmann). A key question is: what relevance does this curatorial process have for a student whose field is not visual art, but, for instance, music, film, or writing? By displaying documentation of work in progress, this process connects students of all disciplines with an audience. For example, one student in 2014 who was a singer/songwriter, had her song available to be played on a laptop, alongside photographs of the studio when she was recording her song with her band. In conjunction with this, the cover artwork for her CD, together with the actual CD and CD cover, were framed and exhibited. Another student, who was also a musician but who was completing a music history project, sent in pages of the music transcriptions he had been working on during the course. This manuscript was bound and exhibited in a way that prompted some audience members to commented that it was like an artist’s book as well as a collection of data. Both of these students lived over 1,000 kilometres from the campus where the exhibition was held, but they were able to share with us as teaching staff, as well as with other students who were involved in the physical setting up of the exhibition, exactly how they envisaged their work being displayed. The feedback from both of these students was that this experience gave them a strong connection to the program. They described how, despite the issue of distance, they had had the opportunity to participate in a professional event that they were very keen to include on their curricula vitae. Another aspect of students actively participating in the curation of an exhibition which features work from diverse disciplines is that these students get a true sense of the collaborative interconnectedness of the disciplines of the creative industries (Brien). By way of example, the exhibit of the singer/songwriter referred to above involved not only the student and her band, but also the photographer who took the photographs, and the artist who designed the CD cover. Students collaboratively decided how this material was handled in the exhibition catalogue – all these names were included and their roles described. Breaking Ground exhibition, CQUniversity Noosa Exhibition Space, 2014. Photo by Ulrike Sturm. Outcomes and Conclusion We believe that the curation of an exhibition and the delivery of its constituent components raises student awareness that they are, as creatives, part of a network of industries, developing in them a genuine understanding of the way the creating industries works as a profession outside the academic setting. It is in this sense that this curatorial task is an authentic learning experience. In fact, what was initially perceived as a significant challenge—, that is, exhibiting work in progress from diverse creative fields—, has become a strength of the curatorial project. In reflecting on the experiences and outcomes that have occurred through the implementation of this example of curatorial practice, both as a learning tool and as a creative outcome in its own right, a key positive indicator for this approach is the high level of student satisfaction with the course, as recorded in the formal, anonymous university student evaluations (with 60–100 per cent of these completed for each term, when the university benchmark is 50 per cent completion), and the high level of professional outcomes achieved post-completion. The university evaluation scores have been in the top (4.5–5/.5) range for satisfaction over the program’s eight terms of delivery since 2012. Particularly in relation to subsequent professional outcomes, anecdotal feedback has been that the curatorial process served as an authentic and engaged learning experience because it equipped the students, now graduates, of the program with not only knowledge about how exhibitions work, but also a genuine understanding of the web of connections between the diverse creative arts and industries. Indeed, a number of students have submitted proposals to exhibit professionally in the space after graduation, again providing anecdotal feedback that the experience they gained through our model has had a sustaining impact on their creative practice. While the focus of this activity has been on creative learning for the students, it has also provided an interesting and engaging teaching experience for us as the program’s staff. We will continue to gather evidence relating to our model, and, with the next iteration of the exhibition project, a more detailed comparative analysis will be attempted. At this stage, with ethics approval, we plan to run an anonymous survey with all students involved in this activity, to develop questions for a focus group discussion with graduates. We are also in the process of contacting alumni of the program regarding professional outcomes to map these one, two, and five years after graduation. We will also keep a record of what percentage of students apply to exhibit in the space after graduation, as this will also be an additional marker of how professional and useful they perceive the experience to be. In conclusion, it can be stated that the 100 per cent pass rate and 0 per cent attrition rate from the program since its inception, coupled with a high level (over 60 per cent) of student progression to further post-graduate study in the creative industries, has not been detrimentally affected by this curatorial experiment, and has encouraged staff to continue with this approach. References Al-Amri, Mohammed. “Assessment Techniques Practiced in Teaching Art at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.” International Journal of Education through Art 7.3 (2011): 267–282. AQF Levels. Australian Qualifications Framework website. 18 June 2015 ‹http://www.aqf.edu.au/aqf/in-detail/aqf-levels/›. Boud, D. Student Assessment for Learning in and after Courses: Final Report for Senior Fellowship. Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2010. 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Imagining Sydney’s Sexual Geography through the Gay/Lesbian Media As a cultural geographer I am interested in how the identities of places are imagined in popular culture. Places do not exist a priori, but are constructed through social and cultural processes (Anderson and Gale). This does not simply refer to how built environments are materialized through planning and building, but rather elicits the way places are represented through maps, film, literature, art, and, of crucial importance in contemporary society, a range of media sources, including newspapers, websites and television (Cosgrove and Daniels; Duncan and Ley; May). These representations are what give different localities their identities, and consequently places cannot be experienced and interpreted apart from their circulated images (Shurmer-Smith; da Costa). In this brief paper I explore how Sydney’s King Street precinct is imagined as a gay/lesbian place in the gay/lesbian media – an approach which follows the examples of Forest and Miller, who respectively examine how West Hollywood, Los Angeles, and Davie Street, Vancouver, are defined and constructed in the gay/lesbian media as ‘gay places’. At the same time, I also seek to I extend this approach by exploring how different ostensibly gay/lesbian places are infused with different gay/lesbian identities by the gay/lesbian media. Sydney makes an interesting case study here. The city possesses two notable gay/lesbian precincts: the iconic Oxford Street precinct, located in the ‘inner east’, comprising Darlinghurst, Paddington and Surry Hills; and the King Street precinct, located in the ‘inner west’, encompassing Newtown, Erskineville and Enmore. While there is some research on Oxford Street as gay/lesbian space (Wotherspoon; Faro and Wotherspoon; Murphy and Watson), academic literature is silent on the particular position of King Street in Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography. McInnes, Hodge, and Costello and Hodge, for instance, bypass King Street, and instead examine the binary between ‘inner Sydney’ and the ‘western suburbs’ generated by the gay/lesbian media. While this work is important in demonstrating how Sydney’s gay/lesbian media imagines the city’s sexual geography – a ‘queer’ inner-city and ‘straight’ suburbia – these authors omit any consideration of differences within the inner-city, and instead focus on the similarities between the various gay/lesbian spaces of inner Sydney. For example, McInnes simply states: Sydney’s two gay spaces are considered to be the area[s] centred on Oxford Street Darlinghurst … and … King Street Newtown. These two places are gay spaces largely because of the presence of gay business … and because a large number of gay men and lesbians live in these two areas. (167) However, it is also possible to examine the differences between how these two discrete spaces are imagined in the gay/lesbian media. This is one of my aims in this paper. Through examining media representations of King Street specifically, rather than the inner-city generally, I seek to advance present understandings of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography. Interpreting Media Images of King Street The commentaries analysed are taken from several gay/lesbian media sources widely circulated in Sydney – Sydney Star Observer (SSO), SX, Gay Australia Guide (GAG) and lesbian.com.au. They have been drawn from between 2003 and 2005. 2003 was selected as a suitable start date because of the closure of several gay/lesbian venues on and around Oxford Street during that year, prompting the publication of a number of articles in SSO (12 Dec. 2002, 20 Mar. 2003, 6 Nov. 2003) and SX (16 Oct. 2003, 15 July 2004) raising fears over the ‘de-gaying’ of Oxford Street. These reports signify heightened concern for the integrity of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography by the gay/lesbian media and a concomitant anxiety over the place-identities of gay/lesbian precincts. These commentaries were then subject to various textual analyses (Hannam; Shurmer-Smith). Manifest and latent content analyses were used to extract key themes about the media constructions of King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity. Here, I looked for the descriptors applied to King Street to elicit particular representations. Diverse words, like ‘alternative’ and ‘centre’, recurred over and over again. Since there seemed to be multiple – and somewhat competing – images of King Street in these media commentaries, I then turned to discourse analysis to try to understand how such divergent representations might arise, and what they signify about King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity and the precinct’s place in the gay/lesbian media’s imaginative sexual geography of Sydney (Waitt; Miller). Here I paid close attention to the interpretive context of commentaries concerned with King Street, and the places (and identities) with which King Street was juxtaposed. This closer discursive analysis suggested that where King Street is considered in the gay/lesbian media, it is often juxtaposed with Oxford Street. In other words, the gay/lesbian media seems to have constructed a binary relationship between Oxford and King Streets, so that King Street is typically identified, defined and imagined in relation to Oxford Street. However, the contours of this binary relationship are unstable and shifting, differing across the commentaries. Sometimes Oxford Street is seen as the ‘hub’ of Sydney’s gay/lesbian geography, the symbolic ‘heart’ of the gay/lesbian spatial imaginary, while King Street is perceived as its ‘alternative’. But at other times, Oxford Street is described as ‘old’, and King Street is presented as its ‘successor’, the ‘new centre’ of gay/lesbian Sydney. Either way, what is significant is the way King Street is often made to rely on the image of Oxford Street for its own definition and identity. In the following discussion, I examine each of these imagined place-identities in turn, citing selected examples from the gay/lesbian media. Only the most explicit examples are presented and discussed, but the gay/lesbian media includes various other references juxtaposing and comparing the two street-precincts. King Street as the ‘Alternative’ A number of commentaries represent Oxford Street as the ‘centre’ or ‘heart’ of gay/lesbian Sydney, while King Street is presented as its ‘alternative’ (eg. SX 29 Jan. 2004). Take, for instance, the way they are juxtaposed in the following: Darlinghurst. Welcome to the hub of Sydney’s gay and lesbian community. Darlinghurst is home for some of Sydney’s hottest gay and lesbian clubs, cafes, and bars, and it’s where many community groups are based. The main strip, Oxford Street, is queer central. … Newtown. The edgier alternative to Darlinghurst. … The buzz here is on King Street, home to Sydney’s alternative and grunge crowd. (GAG’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Visitors’ Guide, 2005, 6, 15) The heart of gay Sydney is Oxford Street. … It’s loud, proud and colourful. … Want something a little more edgier and cosmopolitan? Rock into Newtown. Sydney’s most colourful characters gather around King Street and Enmore Road. (http://www.lesbian.com.au/lesbiansydney.htm) In both commentaries, King Street is imagined in relation to Oxford Street. Oxford Street is presented first: the precinct can stand alone as ‘queer central’, ‘the heart of gay Sydney’, drawing on no other places for its definition as the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney. Oxford Street simply is gay/lesbian Sydney. Meanwhile, King Street is ‘second choice’ it seems. In both reports, descriptions of King Street appear immediately after Oxford Street, and are drawn in comparison, with King Street identified as Oxford Street’s ‘edger alternative’. Since it is depicted as the ‘hub’ of gay/lesbian Sydney, Oxford Street is also imagined as Sydney’s ‘gay ghetto’, a uniformly gay/lesbian residential-and-commercial space. This is another representation against which King Street is defined in the gay/lesbian media: Since moving from Taylor Square [Oxford Street] to the Newtown/St.Peters border [King Street] … I’ve celebrated being part of a mixed community. … Don’t get me wrong. I love living gay. … But a couple of years spent drowning in the ghetto has made me appreciate the simple things about not being a part of it. (SSO 20 Jan. 2005) Newtown is a culturally diverse suburb and fortunately it is gay-friendly, not a gay ghetto. People can be themselves in Newtown without fear of persecution. (SSO 27 Jan. 2005) I do not believe that Newtown [King Street] is a ‘gay ghetto’ … Granted, it is one of the few places where I can walk hand in and with my (male) partner and feel relatively safe. However, there is a wide diversity of people here, and the LGBT community is only a part of it. (SSO 21 Jan. 2005) Although these commentators are clearly happy to represent King Street as a ‘gay-friendly’ locality rather than a ‘gay ghetto’, this identity is only attained in contrast with Oxford Street, the gay ghetto. Again King Street is depicted as Oxford Street’s alternative, its particular ‘gay-friendly’ place-identity bound to a comparative relationship with Oxford Street. King Street as the ‘New Centre’ But this centre/alternative binary is unstable. In other commentaries, King Street is not presented as the ‘alternative’, but as the ‘successor’ to Oxford Street, the ‘new centre’ of gay/lesbian Sydney. Take the following commentary from GAG (Summer 2003), which now promotes King Street the ‘best gay street in Australia’: King Street, Newtown, is now the best GLBTI street in Sydney and, inevitably, in Oz – no argument. It’s book-ended by Victoria Park at its city end – site of the annual Mardi Gras fair day and poolside pashing all year round – and Sydney Park at its southern end – queer dog off-leash heaven. Without any of Oxford Street’s tackiness, here you’ll find the kissingest, handholdingest fags and dykes, along with hets who aren’t out to hoon or hurt. … Why? Because 24/7 it’s a lived-in street, not an after-hours entertainment strip for the desperate and dateless. King Street’s claim to be the ‘best gay street in Australia’, however, is tellingly made in direct comparison with Oxford Street (and interestingly, not with ‘gay streets’ in other Australian cities): while Oxford Street is a ‘tacky entertainment strip’, King Street is ‘lived-in’. Oxford Street continues to haunt the place-identity of King Street: even in being imagined as the ‘top’ gay precinct, King Street is defined against and through Oxford Street. In a similar vein, another article from SSO (21 Oct. 2004) asserts that ‘Newtown’s King Street is set to overtake Darlinghurst’s Oxford Street as the epicentre of gay Sydney’. The report outlines evidence for the elevation of King Street to the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney, in terms of residential visibility and the number of gay/lesbian organisations moving to the area, which include the New Mardi Gras, Twenty10 (a gay/lesbian youth service), the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service, the Gender Centre and the Metropolitan Community Church. Yet even as King Street succeeds Oxford Street as the ‘epicentre of gay Sydney’, the precinct is imagined through Oxford Street: the article is entitled ‘King Street the new Darlo’. Here, King Street is not acknowledged as the centre of gay/lesbian Sydney in its own terms, by virtue of its own identity as a gay/lesbian place, but through replacing Oxford Street. Literally re-placing: King Street is not the ‘new centre’: it is the ‘new Darlo’. It is as if Oxford Street is inherently and synonymously ‘central’, and King Street can only be seen as central through being imagined as Oxford Street. In doing this, rather than asserting King Street’s gay/lesbian place-identity, Oxford Street’s identity as the symbolic ‘heart’ of Sydney’s gay/lesbian spatial imaginary is confirmed. It is not Oxford Street that has been dis-placed by King Street’s growing gay/lesbian community and identity. Rather, King Street’s identity has been dis-placed by the continued representation of Oxford Street as ‘queer central’. Conclusion The identities of different places are not ‘natural’, but constructed through social and cultural representations. In contemporary western society, the media – print, television, web-based – is a key producer and disseminator of place images and identities. This paper has sought to add to our understanding of this phenomenon. Specifically, I have sought to explore how the gay/lesbian media can influence the gay/lesbian identities of certain places. Moreover, by exploring how King Street has been represented in and through the gay/lesbian media vis-à-vis Oxford Street, I have attempted to understand how different gay/lesbian places are imbued with different and multiple gay/lesbian identities in the gay/lesbian media. Consequently, this discussion also augments our understanding of Sydney’s particular gay/lesbian geography, providing a more nuanced understanding of the imaginative sexual identities of different places collectively imagined as gay/lesbian. Several specific conclusions can be drawn here. First, King and Oxford Streets are imagined differently by the gay/lesbian media. Second, King Street is imagined in relation to Oxford Street. Third, these relational depictions shift between alternative to, and a successor of, Oxford Street. Finally, either way, King Street is often made to rely upon Oxford Street for its place-identity, infrequently imagined apart from Oxford Street. Yet, since place-identities are fluid and unstable, this may change in the future, especially as King Street continues to develop as a locality of gay/lesbian community and identity. And in looking to the future, I hope the claims made here stimulate further enquiry into the nuanced relationship between Sydney’s gay/lesbian precincts. More work remains to be done – not just of media representations – but in-depth interviews and participant observations to understand the experiences of King Street’s residents, and what this particular place means to them and their identities. References Anderson, Kay, and Fay Gale, eds. Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography. Melbourne: Longman Chesire, 1992. Anon. “Oxford Hotel in Receivership.” Sydney Star Observer 6 Nov. 2003. Benzie, Tim. “Bye Bye Beresford.” Sydney Star Observer 12 Dec. 2002. ———. “Barracks Down.” Sydney Star Observer 20 Mar. 2003. Cosgrove, Daniel and Stephen Daniels. Eds. The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Costello, Lauren, and Stephen Hodge. “Queer/Clear/Here: Destabilising Sexualities and Space.” Australian Cultural Geographies. Ed. Elaine Stratford. South Melbourne: Oxford, 1999. 131-152. Da Costa, Maria Helena. “Cinematic Cities: Researching Films as Geographical Texts.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 191-201. Duncan, James, and David Ley, eds. Place/Culture/Representation. London: Routledge, 1993. Farrar, Stacy. “I See Gay People.” Sydney Star Observer 21 Jan. 2005. Faro, Clive, with Garry Wotherspoon. Street Seen: A History of Oxford Street. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000. Fishlock, Gary. “And Then There Were Nine.” SX 16 Oct. 2003. ———. “Oxford Street, Darlinghurst.” SX 29 Jan. 2004. ———. “A Call to Arms.” SX 15 July 2004. Forest, Benjamin. “West Hollywood as Symbol: The Significance of Place in the Construction of a Gay Identity.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13.2 (1995): 133-157. Hannam, Kevin. “Coping with Archival and Textual Data.” Doing Cultural Geography. Ed. Pamela Shurmer-Smith. London: Sage, 2002. 189-197. Hodge, Stephen. “No Fags Out There: Gay Men, Identity and Suburbia.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 1.1 (1995): 41-48. Lesbian Sydney. 28 Nov. 2005 http://www.lesbian.com.au/lesbiansydney.htm>. May, Jon. “The View from the Streets: Geographies of Homelessness in the British Newspaper Press.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 23-36. McInnes, David. “Inside the Outside: Politics and Gay and Lesbian Spaces in Sydney.” Queer City: Gay and Lesbian Politics in Sydney. Eds. Craig Johnston and Paul van Reyk. Pluto Press: Annandale, 2001. 164-178. Miller, Vincent. “Intertextuality, the Referential Illusion and the Production of a Gay Ghetto.” Social and Cultural Geography 6.1 (2005): 61-80. Murphy, Peter and Sophie Watson. “Gay Sites and the Pink Dollar.” Written with Iain Bruce. Chapter 4 of Surface City: Sydney at the Millenium. Pluto: Annandale, 1997. O’Grady, Dominic, ed. Gay Australia Guide’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Visitors’ Guide. Blackheath: Gay Travel Guides, 2005. Reader views. Sydney Star Observer 27 Jan. 2005. Shurmer-Smith, Pamela. “Reading Texts.” Doing Cultural Geography. Ed. Pamela Shurmer-Smith. London: Sage, 2002. 123-136. Van Reyk, Paul. “Best Gay Street – King Street Newtown, Sydney.” Gay Australia Guide 9 (Summer 2003): 11. Waitt, Gordon. “Doing Discourse Analysis.” Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography. Ed. Iain Hay. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005. 163-191. Wearring, Myles. “King Street the New Darlo.” Sydney Star Observer 21 Oct. 2004. Wotherspoon, Garry. City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-Culture. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gorman-Murray, Andrew. "Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/04-gorman-murray.php>. APA Style Gorman-Murray, A. (Jul. 2006) "Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/04-gorman-murray.php>.

IntroductionMusicians and critics regard Australian jazz as vibrant and creative (Shand; Chessher; Rechniewski). From its tentative beginnings in the early twentieth century (Whiteoak), jazz has become a major aspect of Australia’s music and performance. Due to the large distances separating cities and towns, its development has been influenced by geographical isolation (Nikolsky; Chessher; Clare; Johnson; Stevens; McGuiness). While major cities have been the central hubs, it is increasingly acknowledged that regional centres also provide avenues for jazz performance (Curtis).This article discusses findings relating to transient musical populations shaped by geographical conditions, venue issues that are peculiar to the Northern region, and finally the challenges of cultural and parochial mindsets that North Queensland jazz musicians encounter in performance.Cairns and MackayCairns and Mackay are regional centres on the coast of Queensland, Australia. Cairns – population 156,901 in 2016 (ABS) – is a world famous tourist destination situated on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef (Thorp). Mackay – population 114,969 in 2016 (ABS) – is a lesser-known community with an economy largely underpinned by the sugar cane and coal mining industries (Rolfe et al. 138). Both communities lie North of the capital city Brisbane – Mackay in the heart of Central Queensland, and Cairns as the unofficial capital of Far North Queensland. Mackay and Cairns were selected for this study, not on representational grounds, but because they provide an opportunity to learn through case studies. Stake notes that “potential for learning is a different and sometimes superior criterion to representativeness,” adding, “that may mean taking the one most accessible or the one we can spend the most time with (451).”Musically, both regional centres have a number of venues that promote live music, however, only Cairns has a dedicated jazz club, the Cairns Jazz Club (CJC). Each has a community convention centre that brings high-calibre touring musicians to the region, including jazz musicians.Mackay is home to the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music (CQCM) a part of the Central Queensland University that has offered conservatoire-style degree programs in jazz, contemporary music and theatre for over twenty-five years. Cairns does not have any providers of tertiary jazz qualifications.MethodologySemi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-two significant individuals associated with the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns over a twelve-month period from 2015 to 2016. Twelve of the interviewees were living in Cairns at the time, and ten were living in Mackay. The selection of interviewees was influenced by personal knowledge of key individuals, historical records located at the CQCM, and from a study by (Mitchell), who identified important figures in the Cairns jazz scene. The study participants included members of professional jazz ensembles, dedicated jazz audience members and jazz educators. None of the participants who were interviewed relied solely on the performance of jazz as their main occupation. All of the musicians combined teaching duties with music-making in several genres including rock, jazz, Latin and funk, as well as work in the recording and producing of recorded music. Combining the performance of jazz and commercial musical styles is a common and often crucial part of being a musician in a regional centre due to the low demand for any one specific genre (Luckman et al. 630). The interview data that was gathered during the study’s data collection phase was analysed for themes using the grounded theory research method (Charmaz). The following sections will discuss three areas of findings relating to some of the unique North Queensland influences that have impacted the development and sustainability of the two regional jazz communities.Transient Musical PopulationsThe prospect of living in North Queensland is an alluring proposition for many people. According to the participants in this study, the combination of work and a tropical lifestyle attracts people from all over the country to Cairns and Mackay, but this influx is matched by a high population turnover. Many musicians who move into the region soon move away again. High population turnover is a characteristic of several Northern regional centres such as the city of Darwin (Luckman, Gibson and Lea 12). The high growth and high population turnover in Cairns, in particular, was one of the highest in the country between 2006 and 2011 (ABS). The study participants in both regions believed that the transient nature of the local population is detrimental to the development and sustainability of the jazz communities. One participant described the situation in Cairns this way: “The tropics sort of lure them up there, tease them with all of the beauty and nature, and then spit them out when they realise it’s not what they imagined (interviewee 1, 24 Aug. 2016).” Looking more broadly to other coastal regional areas of Australia, there is evidence of the counter-urban flow of professionals and artists seeking out a region’s “natural and cultural environment” (Gibson 339). On the far North coast of New South Wales, Gibson examined how the climate, natural surroundings and cultural charms attracted city dwellers to that region (337). Similarly, most of the participants in this study mentioned lifestyle choices such as raising a family and living in the tropics as reasons to move to Cairns or Mackay. The prospect of working in the tourism and hospitality industry was found to be another common reason for musicians to move to Cairns in particular. In contrast to some studies (Salazar; Conradson and Latham) where it was found that the middle- to upper-classes formed the majority of lifestyle migrants, the migrating musicians identified by this study were mostly low-income earners seeking a combination of music work and other types of employment outside the music industry. There have been studies that have explored and critically reviewed the theoretical frameworks behind lifestyle migration (Benson and Osbaldiston) including the examination of issues and the motivation to ‘lifestyle migrate’. What is interesting in this current study is the focus of discussion on the post-migration effects. Study participants believe that most of the musicians who move into their region leave soon afterwards because of their disillusionment with the local music industry. Despite the lure of musical jobs through the tourism and hospitality industry, local musicians in Cairns tend to believe there is less work than imagined. Pub rock duos and DJs have taken most of the performance opportunities, which makes it hard for new musicians to compete.The study also reveals that Cairns jazz musicians consider it more difficult to find and collaborate with quality newcomers. This may be attributed to the smaller jazz communities’ demand for players of specific instruments. One participant explained, “There’s another bass player that just moved here, but he only plays by ear, so when people want to play charts and new songs, he can’t do it so it's hard finding the right guys up here at times (interviewee 2, 23 Aug. 2016).” Cairns and Mackay participants agreed that the difficulty of finding and retaining quality musicians in the region impacted on the ability of certain groups to be sustainable. One participant added, “It’s such a small pool of musicians, at the moment, I've got a new project ready to go and I've got two percussionists, but I need a bass player, but there is no bass player that I'm willing to work with (interviewee 3, 24 Aug. 2016).” The same participant has been fortunate over the years, performing with a different local group whose members have permanently stayed in the Cairns region, however, forging new musical pathways and new groups seemed challenging due to the lack of musical skills in some of the potential musicians.In Mackay, the study revealed a smaller influx of new musicians to the region, and study participants experienced the same difficulties forming groups and retaining members as their Cairns counterparts. One participant, who found it difficult to run a Big Band as well as a smaller jazz ensemble because of the transient population, claimed that many local musicians were lured to metropolitan centres for university or work.Study participants in both Northern centres appeared to have developed a tolerance and adaptability for their regional challenges. While this article does not aim to suggest a solution to the issues they described, one interesting finding that emerged in both Cairns and Mackay was the musicians’ ability to minimise some of the effects of the transient population. Some musicians found that it was more manageable to sustain a band by forming smaller groups such as duos, trios and quartets. An example was observed in Mackay, where one participant’s Big Band was a standard seventeen-piece group. The loss of players was a constant source of anxiety for the performers. Changing to a smaller ensemble produced a sense of sustainability that satisfied the group. In Cairns, one participant found that if the core musicians in the group (bass, drums and vocals) were permanent local residents, they could manage to use musicians passing through the region, which had minimal impact on the running of the group. For example, the Latin band will have different horn players sit in from time to time. When those performers leave, the impact on the group is minimal because the rhythm section is comprised of long-term Cairns residents.Venue Conditions Heat UpAt the Cape York Hotel in Cairns, musicians and audience members claimed that it was uncomfortable to perform or attend Sunday afternoon jazz gigs during the Cairns summer due to the high temperatures and non air-conditioned venues. This impact of the physical environment on the service process in a venue was first modelled and coined the ‘Servicescape’ by Bitner (57). The framework, which includes physical dimensions like temperature, noise, space/function and signage, has also been further investigated in other literature (Minor et al.; Kubacki; Turley and Fugate). This model is relevant to this study because it clearly affects the musician’s ability to perform music in the Northern climate and attract audiences. One of the regular musicians at the Cape York Hotel commented: So you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’m starting to create something here, people are starting to show up’, but then you see it just dwindling away and then you get two or three weeks of hideously hot weather, and then like last Sunday, by the time I went on in the first set, my shirt was sticking to me like tissue paper… I set up a gig, a three-hour gig with my trio, and if it’s air conditioned you’re likely to get people but if it’s like the Cape York, which is not air conditioned, and you’re out in the beer garden with a tin roof over the top with big fans, it’s hideous‘. (Interviewee 4, 24 Aug. 2016)The availability of venues that offer live jazz is limited in both regions. The issue was twofold: firstly, the limited availability of a larger venue to cater for the ensembles was deemed problematic; and secondly, the venue manager needed to pay for the services of the club, which contributed to its running costs. In Cairns, the Cape York Hotel has provided the local CJC with an outdoor beer garden as a venue for their regular Sunday performances since 2015. The president of the CJC commented on the struggle for the club to find a suitable venue for their musicians and patrons. The club has had residencies in multiple venues over the last thirty years with varying success. It appears that the club has had to endure these conditions in order to provide their musicians and audiences an outlet for jazz performance. This dedication to their art form and sense of resilience appears to be a regular theme for these Northern jazz musicians.Minor et al. (7) recommended that live music organisers needed to consider offering different physical environments for different events (7). For example, a venue that caters for a swing band might include a dance floor for potential dancers or if a venue catered for a sit down jazz show, the venue might like to choose the best acoustic environment to best support the sound of the ensemble. The research showed that customers have different reasons for attending events, and in relation to the Cape York Hotel, the majority of the customers were the CJC members who simply wanted to enjoy their jazz club performances in an air conditioned environment with optimal acoustics as the priority. Although not ideal, the majority of the CJC members still attended during the summer months and endured the high temperatures due to a lack of venue suitability.Parochial MindsetsOne of the challenging issues faced by many of the participants in both regions was the perceived cultural divide between jazz aficionados and general patrons at many venues. While larger centres in Australia have enjoyed an international reputation as creative hubs for jazz such as Melbourne and Sydney (Shand), the majority of participants in this study believed that a significant portion of the general public is quite parochial in their views on various musical styles including jazz. Coined the ‘bogan factor’, one participant explained, “I call it the bogan factor. Do you think that's an academic term? It is now” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). They also commented on dominant cultural choices of residents in these regions: “It's North Queensland, it's a sport orientated, 4WD dominated place. Culturally they are the main things that people are attracted to” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). These cultural preferences appear to affect the performance opportunities for the participants in Cairns and Mackay.Waitt and Gibson explored how the Wollongong region was chosen as an area for investigation to see if city size mattered for creativity and creativity-led regeneration (1224). With the ‘Creative Class’ framework in mind (Florida), the researchers found that Wollongong’s primarily blue-collar industrial identity was a complex mixture of cultural pursuits including the arts, sport and working class ideals (Waitt and Gibson 1241). This finding is consistent with the comments of study participants from Cairns and Mackay who believed that the identities of their regions were strongly influenced by sport and industries like mining and farming. One Mackay participant added, “I think our culture, in itself, would need to change to turn more people to jazz. I can’t see that happening. That’s Australia. You’re fighting against 200 years of sport” (interviewee 6, 12 Feb. 2016). Performing in Mackay or Cairns in venues that attract various demographics can make it difficult for musicians playing jazz. A Cairns participant added, “As Ingrid James once told me, ‘It's North Queensland, you’ve got an audience of tradesman, they don't get it’. It's silly to think it's going to ever change” (interviewee 7, 26 Aug. 2016). One Mackay participant believed that the lack of appreciation for jazz in regional areas was largely due to a lack of exposure to the art form. Most people grow up listening to other styles of music in their households.Another participant made the point that regardless of the region’s cultural and leisure-time preferences, if a jazz band is playing in a football club, you must expect it to be unpopular. Many of the research participants emphasised that playing in a suitable venue is paramount for developing a consistent and attentive audience. Choosing a venue that values and promotes the style of jazz music that the musicians are performing could help to attract more jazz fans and therefore build a sustainable jazz community.Refreshingly, this study revealed that musicians in both regions showed considerable resilience in dealing with the issue of parochial mindsets, and they have implemented methods to help educate their audiences. The audience plays a significant part in the development and future of a jazz community (Becker; Martin). For the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Mackay, part of the ethos of the institution is to provide music performance and educational opportunities to the region. One of the lecturers who made a significant contribution to the design of the ensemble program had a clear vision to combine jazz and popular music styles in order to connect with a regional audience. He explained, “The popular music strand of the jazz program and what we called the commercial ensembles was very much birthed out of that concept of creating a connection with the community and making us more accessible in the shortest amount of time, which then enabled us to expose people to jazz” (interviewee 8, 20 Mar. 2016).In a similar vein, several Cairns musicians commented on how they engaged with their audiences through education. Some musicians attempted to converse with the patrons on the comparative elements of jazz and non-jazz styles, which helped to instil some appreciation in patrons with little jazz knowledge. One participant cited that although not all patrons were interested in an education at a pub, some became regular attendees and showed greater appreciation for the different jazz styles. These findings align with other studies (Radbourne and Arthurs; Kubacki; Kubacki et al.), who found that audiences tend to return to arts organizations or events more regularly if they feel connected to the experience (Kubacki et al. 409).ConclusionThe Cairns and Mackay jazz musicians who were interviewed in this study revealed some innovative approaches for sustaining their art form in North Queensland. The participants discussed creative solutions for minimising the influence of a transient musician population as well as overcoming some of the parochial mindsets in the community through education. The North Queensland summer months proved to be a struggle for musicians and audience members alike in Cairns in particular, but resilience and commitment to the music and the social network of jazz performers seemed to override this obstacle. Although this article presents just a subset of the findings from a study of the development and sustainability of the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns, it opens the way for further investigation into the unique issues faced. Deeper understanding of these issues could contribute to the ongoing development and sustainability of jazz communities in regional Australia.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. "Mackay (Statistical Area 2), Cairns (R) (Statistical Local Area), Census 2016." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.———. "Perspectives on Regional Australia: Population Growth and Turnover in Local Government Areas (Lgas), 2006-2011." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.Becker, H. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982.Benson, Michaela, and Nick Osbaldiston. "Toward a Critical Sociology of Lifestyle Migration: Reconceptualizing Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life." The Sociological Review 64.3 (2016): 407-23.Bitner, Mary Jo. 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Gibson, Chris. "Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast." Transformations 2 (2002): 1-15. ———. "Rural Transformation and Cultural Industries: Popular Music on the New South Wales Far North Coast." Australian Geographical Studies 40.3 (2002): 337-56. Johnson, Bruce. The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press, 2000. Kubacki, Krzysztof. "Jazz Musicians: Creating Service Experience in Live Performance." International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 20.4 (2008): 401- 13. ———, et al. "Comparing Nightclub Customers’ Preferences in Existing and Emerging Markets." International Journal of Hospitality Management 26.4 (2007): 957-73. Luckman, S., et al. "Life in a Northern (Australian) Town: Darwin's Mercurial Music Scene." Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22.5 (2008): 623-37. ———, Chris Gibson, and Tess Lea. "Mosquitoes in the Mix: How Transferable Is Creative City Thinking?" Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 30.1 (2009): 70-85. Martin, Peter J. "The Jazz Community as an Art World: A Sociological Perspective." Jazz Research Journal 2.1 (2005): 5-13. McGuiness, Lucian. "A Case for Ethnographic Enquiry in Australian Jazz." Sydney: University of Sydney, 2010.Minor, Michael S., et al. "Rock On! An Elementary Model of Customer Satisfaction with Musical Performances." Journal of Services Marketing 18.1 (2004): 7-18. Mitchell, A. "Jazz on the Far North Queensland Resort Circuit: A Musician's Perspective." Proceedings of the History & Future of Jazz in the Asia-Pacific Region. Eds. P. Hayward and G. Hodges. Vol. 1. Hamilton Island, Australia: Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music, 2004. Nikolsky, T. "The Development of the Australian Jazz Real Book." Melbourne: RMIT University, 2012. Radbourne, Jennifer, and Andy Arthurs. "Adapting Musicology for Commercial Outcomes." 9th International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC 2007), 2007.Rechniewski, Peter. The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz in the New Millennium. Platform Papers 16. Redfern, NSW: Currency House, 2008. Rolfe, John, et al. "Lessons from the Social and Economic Impacts of the Mining Boom in the Bowen Basin 2004-2006." Australasian Journal of Regional Studies 13.2 (2007): 134-53. Salazar, Noel B. "Migrating Imaginaries of a Better Life … until Paradise Finds You." Understanding Lifestyle Migration. Springer, 2014. 119-38. Shand, J. Jazz: The Australian Accent. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.Stake, Robert E. "Qualitative Case Studies." The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. 443-66. Stevens, Timothy. "The Red Onion Jazz Band at the 1963 Australian Jazz Convention." Musicology Australia 24.1 (2001): 35-61. Thorp, Justine. "Tourism in Cairns: Image and Product." Journal of Australian Studies 31.91 (2007): 107-13. Turley, L., and D. Fugate. "The Multidimensional Nature of Service Facilities." Journal of Services Marketing 6.3 (1992): 37-45. Waitt, G., and C. Gibson. "Creative Small Cities: Rethinking the Creative Economy in Place." Urban Studies 46.5-6 (2009): 1223-46. Whiteoak, J. "'Jazzing’ and Australia's First Jazz Band." Popular Music 13.3 (1994): 279-95.

The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. 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Special Care NoticeThis article discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the processes of colonisation. Content within this article may be distressing to some readers. IntroductionThis article looks briefly at the collection, consultation, and digital sharing of stories essential to the histories of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Focusing on materials held in Sydney, New South Wales two case studies—the object known as the Proclamation Board and the George Augustus Robinson Papers—explore how materials can be shared with Aboriginal peoples of the region now known as Tasmania. Specifically, the authors of this article (a Palawa man and an Australian woman of European descent) ask how can the idea of the privileging of Indigenous voices, within Eurocentric cultural collections, be transformed from rhetoric to reality? Moreover, how can we navigate this complex work, that is made even more problematic by distance, through the utilisation of knowledge networks which are geographically isolated from the collections holding stories crucial to Indigenous communities? In seeking to answer these important questions, this article looks at how cultural, emotional, and intellectual ownership can be divested from the physical ownership of a collection in a way that repatriates—appropriately and sensitively—stories of Aboriginal Australia and of colonisation. Holding Stories, Not Always Our OwnCultural institutions, including libraries, have, in recent years, been drawn into discussions centred on the notion of digital disruption and “that transformative shift which has seen the ongoing realignment of business resources, relationships, knowledge, and value both facilitating the entry of previously impossible ideas and accelerating the competitive impact of those same impossible ideas” (Franks and Ensor n.p.). As Molly Brown has noted, librarians “are faced, on a daily basis, with rapidly changing technology and the ways in which our patrons access and use information. Thus, we need to look at disruptive technologies as opportunities” (n.p.). Some innovations, including the transition from card catalogues to online catalogues and the provision of a wide range of electronic resources, are now considered to be business as usual for most institutions. So, too, the digitisation of great swathes of materials to facilitate access to collections onsite and online, with digitising primary sources seen as an intermediary between the pillars of preserving these materials and facilitating access for those who cannot, for a variety of logistical and personal reasons, travel to a particular repository where a collection is held.The result has been the development of hybrid collections: that is, collections that can be accessed in both physical and digital formats. Yet, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions is often selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale digitisation projects usually only realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents that are considered high use and at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from the larger full body of records while other lesser-known components are often omitted. Digitisation projects therefore tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable or famous documents online only. Documents can be profiled as an exhibition separate from their complete collection and, critically, their wider context. Libraries of course are not neutral spaces and this practice of (re)enforcing the canon through digitisation is a challenge that cultural institutions, in partnerships, need to address (Franks and Ensor n.p.). Indeed, our digital collections are as affected by power relationships and the ongoing impacts of colonisation as our physical collections. These power relationships can be seen through an organisation’s “processes that support acquisitions, as purchases and as the acceptance of artefacts offered as donations. Throughout such processes decisions are continually made (consciously and unconsciously) that affect what is presented and actively promoted as the official history” (Thorpe et al. 8). While it is important to acknowledge what we do collect, it is equally important to look, too, at what we do not collect and to consider how we continually privilege and exclude stories. Especially when these stories are not always our own, but are held, often as accidents of collecting. For example, an item comes in as part of a larger suite of materials while older, city-based institutions often pre-date regional repositories. An essential point here is that cultural institutions can often become comfortable in what they collect, building on existing holdings. This, in turn, can lead to comfortable digitisation. If we are to be truly disruptive, we need to embrace feeling uncomfortable in what we do, and we need to view digitisation as an intervention opportunity; a chance to challenge what we ‘know’ about our collections. This is especially relevant in any attempts to decolonise collections.Case Study One: The Proclamation BoardThe first case study looks at an example of re-digitisation. One of the seven Proclamation Boards known to survive in a public collection is held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, having been purchased from Tasmanian collector and photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930) in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86). Why, with so much material to digitise—working in a program of limited funds and time—would the Library return to an object that has already been privileged? Unanswered questions and advances in digitisation technologies, created a unique opportunity. For the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania), colonisation by the British in 1803 was “an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters” (Franks n.p.). Violent incidents became routine and were followed by a full-scale conflict, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), or more recently as the Tasmanian War, fought from the 1820s until 1832. Image 1: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Behind the British combatants were various support staff, including administrators and propagandists. One of the efforts by the belligerents, behind the front line, to win the war and bring about peace was the production of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards. These four-strip pictograms were the result of a scheme introduced by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur (1784–1854), on the advice of Surveyor General George Frankland (1800–38), to communicate that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 to suggest these Proclamation Boards could be produced and nailed to trees (Morris 84), as a Eurocentric adaptation of a traditional method of communication used by Indigenous peoples who left images on the trunks of trees. The overtly stated purpose of the Boards was, like the printed proclamations exhorting peace, to assert, all people—black and white—were equal. That “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). The first strip on each of these pictogram Boards presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second strip shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth strips depict the repercussions for committing murder (or, indeed, any significant crime), with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man hanged for shooting an Aboriginal man. Both men executed in the presence of the Lieutenant Governor. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73).The Board at the State Library of New South Wales was digitised quite early on in the Library’s digitisation program, it has been routinely exhibited (including for the Library’s centenary in 2010) and is written about regularly. Yet, many questions about this small piece of timber remain unanswered. For example, some Boards were outlined with sketches and some were outlined with pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75–76). Could such a sketch or example of pouncing be seen beneath the surface layers of paint on this particular Board? What might be revealed by examining the Board more closely and looking at this object in different ways?An important, but unexpected, discovery was that while most of the pigments in the painting correlate with those commonly available to artists in the early nineteenth century there is one outstanding anomaly. X-ray analysis revealed cadmium yellow present in several places across the painting, including the dresses of the little girls in strip one, uniform details in strip two, and the trousers worn by the settler men in strips three and four (Kahabka 2). This is an extraordinary discovery, as cadmium yellows were available “commercially as an artist pigment in England by 1846” and were shown by “Winsor & Newton at the 1851 Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace, London” (Fiedler and Bayard 68). The availability of this particular type of yellow in the early 1850s could set a new marker for the earliest possible date for the manufacture of this Board, long-assumed to be 1828–30. Further, the early manufacture of cadmium yellow saw the pigment in short supply and a very expensive option when compared with other pigments such as chrome yellow (the darker yellow, seen in the grid lines that separate the scenes in the painting). This presents a clearly uncomfortable truth in relation to an object so heavily researched and so significant to a well-regarded collection that aims to document much of Australia’s colonial history. Is it possible, for example, the Board has been subjected to overpainting at a later date? Or, was this premium paint used to produce a display Board that was sent, by the Tasmanian Government, to the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne? In seeking to see the finer details of the painting through re-digitisation, the results were much richer than anticipated. The sketch outlines are clearly visible in the new high-resolution files. There are, too, details unable to be seen clearly with the naked eye, including this warrior’s headdress and ceremonial scarring on his stomach, scars that tell stories “of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow or grief” (Australian Museum n.p.). The image of this man has been duplicated and distributed since the 1830s, an anonymous figure deployed to tell a settler-centric story of the Black, or Tasmanian, War. This man can now be seen, for the first time nine decades later, to wear his own story. We do not know his name, but he is no longer completely anonymous. This image is now, in some ways, a portrait. The State Library of New South Wales acknowledges this object is part of an important chapter in the Tasmanian story and, though two Boards are in collections in Tasmania (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston), each Board is different. The Library holds an important piece of a large and complex puzzle and has a moral obligation to make this information available beyond its metropolitan location. Digitisation, in this case re-digitisation, is allowing for the disruption of this story in sparking new questions around provenance and for the relocating of a Palawa warrior to a more prominent, perhaps even equal role, within a colonial narrative. Image 2: Detail, Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Call No.: SAFE / R 247.Case Study Two: The George Augustus Robinson PapersThe second case study focuses on the work being led by the Indigenous Engagement Branch at the State Library of New South Wales on the George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866) Papers. In 1829, Robinson was granted a government post in Van Diemen’s Land to ‘conciliate’ with the Palawa peoples. More accurately, Robinson’s core task was dispossession and the systematic disconnection of the Palawa peoples from their Country, community, and culture. Robinson was a habitual diarist and notetaker documenting much of his own life as well as the lives of those around him, including First Nations peoples. His extensive suite of papers represents a familiar and peculiar kind of discomfort for Aboriginal Australians, one in which they are forced to learn about themselves through the eyes and words of their oppressors. For many First Nations peoples of Tasmania, Robinson remains a violent and terrible figure, but his observations of Palawa culture and language are as vital as they are problematic. Importantly, his papers include vibrant and utterly unique descriptions of people, place, flora and fauna, and language, as well as illustrations revealing insights into the routines of daily life (even as those routines were being systematically dismantled by colonial authorities). “Robinson’s records have informed much of the revitalisation of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture in the twentieth century and continue to provide the basis for investigations of identity and deep relationships to land by Aboriginal scholars” (Lehman n.p.). These observations and snippets of lived culture are of immense value to Palawa peoples today but the act of reading between Robinson’s assumptions and beyond his entrenched colonial views is difficult work.Image 3: George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.The canonical reference for Robinson’s archive is Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, edited by N.J.B. Plomley. The volume of over 1,000 pages was first published in 1966. This large-scale project is recognised “as a monumental work of Tasmanian history” (Crane ix). Yet, this standard text (relied upon by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers) has clearly not reproduced a significant percentage of Robinson’s Tasmanian manuscripts. Through his presumptuous truncations Plomley has not simply edited Robinson’s work but has, quite literally, written many Palawa stories out of this colonial narrative. It is this lack of agency in determining what should be left out that is most troubling, and reflects an all-too-familiar approach which libraries, including the State Library of New South Wales, are now urgently trying to rectify. Plomley’s preface and introduction does not indicate large tranches of information are missing. Indeed, Plomley specifies “that in extenso [in full] reproduction was necessary” (4) and omissions “have been kept to a minimum” (8). A 32-page supplement was published in 1971. A new edition, including the supplement, some corrections made by Plomley, and some extra material was released in 2008. But much continues to be unknown outside of academic circles, and far too few Palawa Elders and language revival workers have had access to Robinson’s original unfiltered observations. Indeed, Plomley’s text is linear and neat when compared to the often-chaotic writings of Robinson. Digitisation cannot address matters of the materiality of the archive, but such projects do offer opportunities for access to information in its original form, unedited, and unmediated.Extensive consultation with communities in Tasmania is underpinning the digitisation and re-description of a collection which has long been assumed—through partial digitisation, microfilming, and Plomley’s text—to be readily available and wholly understood. Central to this project is not just challenging the canonical status of Plomley’s work but directly challenging the idea non-Aboriginal experts can truly understand the cultural or linguistic context of the information recorded in Robinson’s journals. One of the more exciting outcomes, so far, has been working with Palawa peoples to explore the possibility of Palawa-led transcriptions and translation, and not breaking up the tasks of this work and distributing them to consultants or to non-Indigenous student groups. In this way, people are being meaningfully reunited with their own histories and, crucially, given first right to contextualise and understand these histories. Again, digitisation and disruption can be seen here as allies with the facilitation of accessibility to an archive in ways that re-distribute the traditional power relations around interpreting and telling stories held within colonial-rich collections.Image 4: Detail, George Augustus Robinson Papers, 1829–34. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, A 7023–A 7031.As has been so brilliantly illustrated by Bruce Pascoe’s recent work Dark Emu (2014), when Aboriginal peoples are given the opportunity to interpret their own culture from the colonial records without interference, they are able to see strength and sophistication rather than victimhood. For, to “understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today” (4). Far from decrying these early colonial records Aboriginal peoples understand their vital importance in connecting to a culture which was dismantled and destroyed, but importantly it is known that far too much is lost in translation when Aboriginal Australians are not the ones undertaking the translating. ConclusionFor Aboriginal Australians, culture and knowledge is no longer always anchored to Country. These histories, once so firmly connected to communities through their ancestral lands and languages, have been dispersed across the continent and around the world. Many important stories—of family history, language, and ways of life—are held in cultural institutions and understanding the role of responsibly disseminating these collections through digitisation is paramount. In transitioning from physical collections to hybrid collections of the physical and digital, the digitisation processes conducted by memory institutions can be—and due to the size of some collections is inevitably—selective. Limited resources, even for large-scale and well-resourced digitisation projects usually realise outcomes that focus on making visually rich, key, or canonical documents, or those documents considered high use or at risk, available online. Such materials are extracted from a full body of records. Digitisation projects, as noted, tend to be devised for a broader audience where contextual questions are less central to the methodology in favour of presenting notable documents online, separate from their complete collection and, critically, their context. Our institutions carry the weight of past collecting strategies and, today, the pressure of digitisation strategies as well. Contemporary librarians should not be gatekeepers, but rather key holders. In collaborating across sectors and with communities we open doors for education, research, and the repatriation of culture and knowledge. We must, always, remember to open these doors wide: the call of Aboriginal Australians of ‘nothing about us without us’ is not an invitation to collaboration but an imperative. Libraries—as well as galleries, archives, and museums—cannot tell these stories alone. Also, these two case studies highlight what we believe to be one of the biggest mistakes that not just libraries but all cultural institutions are vulnerable to making, the assumption that just because a collection is open access it is also accessible. Digitisation projects are more valuable when communicated, contextualised and—essentially—the result of community consultation. Such work can, for some, be uncomfortable while for others it offers opportunities to embrace disruption and, by extension, opportunities to decolonise collections. For First Nations peoples this work can be more powerful than any simple measurement tool can record. Through examining our past collecting, deliberate efforts to consult, and through digital sharing projects across metropolitan and regional Australia, we can make meaningful differences to the ways in which Aboriginal Australians can, again, own their histories.Acknowledgements The authors acknowledge the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The authors acknowledge, too, the Gadigal people upon whose lands this article was researched and written. We are indebted to Dana Kahabka (Conservator), Joy Lai (Imaging Specialist), Richard Neville (Mitchell Librarian), and Marika Duczynski (Project Officer) at the State Library of New South Wales. Sincere thanks are also given to Jason Ensor of Western Sydney University.ReferencesArthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Proclamation to the Aborigines. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SAFE R / 247, ca. 1828–1830.Australian Museum. “Aboriginal Scarification.” 2018. 11 Jan. 2019 <https://australianmuseum.net.au/about/history/exhibitions/body-art/aboriginal-scarification/>.Brown, Molly. “Disruptive Technology: A Good Thing for Our Libraries?” International Librarians Network (2016). 26 Aug. 2018 <https://interlibnet.org/2016/11/25/disruptive-technology-a-good-thing-for-our-libraries/>.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, U of Queensland P, 2014.Crane, Ralph. “Introduction.” Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834. 2nd ed. Launceston and Hobart: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and Quintus Publishing, 2008. ix.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14.Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.Fiedler, Inge, and Michael A. Bayard. Artist Pigments, a Handbook of Their History and Characteristics. Ed. Robert L. Feller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 65–108. Franks, Rachel. “A True Crime Tale: Re-Imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines.” M/C Journal 18.6 (2015). 1 Feb. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1036>.Franks, Rachel, and Jason Ensor. “Challenging the Canon: Collaboration, Digitisation and Education.” ALIA Online: A Conference of the Australian Library and Information Association, 11–15 Feb. 2019, Sydney.Kahabka, Dana. Condition Assessment [Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, ca. 1828–1830, SAFE / R247]. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2017.Lehman, Greg. “Pleading Robinson: Reviews of Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson (2008) and Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission (2008).” Australian Humanities Review 49 (2010). 1 May 2019 <http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p41961/html/review-12.xhtml?referer=1294&page=15>. 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Introduction Fashion has long been associated with resistance movements across Asia and Australia, from the hand-spun cotton Khadi of Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom struggle to the traditional ankle length robe worn by Tibetans in the ‘White Wednesday Movement’ (Singh et al.; Yangzom). There are many reasons why fashion and activism have been interlinked. Fashion can serve as a form of nonverbal communication (Crane), which can convey activists’ grievances and concerns while symbolising solidarity (Doerr). It can provide an avenue to enact individual agency against repressive, authoritarian regimes (Yangzom; Doerr et al.). Fashion can codify a degree of uniformity within groups and thereby signal social identity (Craik), while also providing a means of building community (Barry and Drak). Fashion, therefore, offers activists the opportunity to develop the three characteristics which unite a social or environmental movement: a shared concern about an issue, a sense of social identity, and connections between individuals and groups. But while these fashion functions map onto movement characteristics, it remains unclear whether activists across the world deliberately include fashion into their protest action repertoires. This uncertainty exists partly because of a research and media focus on large scale, mass protests (Lester and Hutchins), where fashion characteristics are immediately visible and amenable to retrospective interpretation. This focus helps explain the rich volume of research examining the manifestation of fashion in past protests, such as the black, red, and yellow colours worn during the 1988 Aboriginal Long March of Freedom, Justice, and Hope (Maynard Dress; Coghlan), and the pink anti-Trump ‘pussyhats’ (Thompson). However, the protest events used to identify these fashion characteristics are a relatively small proportion of actions used by environmental activists (Dalton et al.; Gulliver et al.), which include not only rallies and marches, but also information evenings, letter writing sessions, and eco-activities such as tree plantings. This article aims to respond to Barnard’s (Looking) call for more empirical work on what contemporary cultural groups visually do with what they wear (see also Gerbaudo and Treré) via a content analysis of 36,676 events promoted on Facebook by 728 Australian environmental groups between 2010 and 2019. The article firstly reports findings from an analysis of this dataset to identify how fashion manifests in environmental activism, building on research demonstrating the role of protest-related nonverbal communications, such as protest signage (Bloomfield and Doolin), images (Kim), and icons, slogans, and logos (Goodnow). The article then considers what activists may seek to achieve through incorporating fashion into their action repertoire, and whether this suggests solidarity with activists seeking to effect environmental change across the wider Asian region. Fashion Activism Fashion is created through a particular assemblage of clothes, accessories, and hairstyles (Barry and Drak), which in turn forms a prevailing custom or style of dress (Craik). It is a cultural practice, providing ‘real estate’ (Benda 7) for an individual to express their social roles (Craik) and political identity (Behnke). Some scholars argue that fashion became overtly political during the 1960s and 70s, as social movements politicised appearance (Edwards). This has only increased in relevance with the rise of far right, populist, and authoritarian regimes, whose sub-cultures enact politicised identities through their distinct fashion characteristics (Gaugele and Titton; Gaugele). Fashion can therefore play an important role in protest movements, as “political subjectivities, political authority, political power and discipline are rendered visible, and thereby real, by the way fashion co-establishes them” (Behnke 3). Across the literature scholars have identified two primary avenues by which fashion and activism are connected. The first of these relates to activism targeting the fashion industry. This type of activism is found in both Asia and Australia, and promotes sustainable consumption choices such as buying used goods and transforming existing items (Chung and Yim), as well as highlighting garment worker exploitation within the fashion industry (Khan and Richards). The second avenue is called ‘fashion activism’: the use of fashion to intentionally signal a message seeking to evoke social and/or political change (Thompson). In this conceptualisation, clothing is used to signify a particular message (Crane). An example of this type of fashion activism is the ‘SlutWalk’, a protest where participants deliberately wore outfits described as slutty or revealing as a response to victim-blaming of women who had experienced sexual assault (Thompson). A key element of fashion activism thus appears to be its message intentionality. Clothes are specifically utilised to convey a message, such as a grievance about victim-blaming, which can then be incorporated into design features displayed on t-shirts, pins, and signs both on the runway and in protest events (Titton). However, while this ‘sender/receiver’ model of fashion communication (Barnard, Fashion as) can be compelling for activists, it is complex in practice. A message receiver can never have full knowledge of what message the sender seeks to signify through a particular clothing item, nor can the message sender predict how a receiver will interpret that message. Particular arrangements of clothing only hold communicative power when they are easily interpreted and related to the movement and its message, usually only intelligible to a specific culture or subculture (Goodnow). Even within that subculture it remains problematic to infer a message from a particular style of dress, as demonstrated in examples where dress is used to imply sexual consent; for example, in rape and assault cases (Lennon et al.). Given the challenges of interpreting fashion, do activists appear to use the ‘real estate’ (Benda 7) afforded by it as a protest tool? To investigate this question a pre-existing dataset of 36,676 events was analysed to ascertain if, and how, environmental activism engages with fashion (a detailed methodology is available on the OSF). Across this dataset, event categories, titles, and descriptions were reviewed to collate events connecting environmental activism to fashion. Three categories of events were found and are discussed in the next section: street theatre, sustainable fashion practices, and disruptive protest. Street Theatre Street theatre is a form of entertainment which uses public performance to raise awareness of injustices and build support for collective action (Houston and Pulido). It uses costumes as a vehicle for conveying messages about political issues and for making demands visible, and has been utilised by protesters across Australia and Asia (Roces). Many examples of street theatre were found in the dataset. For example, Extinction Rebellion (XR) consistently promoted street theatre events via sub-groups such as the ‘Red Rebels’ – a dedicated team of volunteers specialising in costumed street theatre – as well as by inviting supporters to participate in open street theatre events, such as in the ‘Halloween Dead Things Disco’. Dressed as spooky skeletons (doot, doot) and ghosts, we'll slide and shimmy down Sydney's streets in a supernatural style, as we bring attention to all the species claimed by the Sixth Mass Extinction. These street theatre events appeared to prioritise spectacle rather than disruption as a means to attract attention to their message. The Cairns and Far North Environment Centre ‘Climate Action Float’, for example, requested that attendees: Wear blue and gold or dress as your favourite reef animal, solar panel, maybe even the sun itself!? Reef & Solar // Blue & Gold is the guiding theme but we want your creativity take it from there. Most groups used street theatre as one of a range of different actions organised across a period of time. However, Climacts, a performance collective which uses ‘spectacle and satire to communicate the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crisis’ (Climacts), utilised this tactic exclusively. Their Climate Guardians collective used distinctive angel costumes to perform at the Climate Conference of Parties 26, and in various places around Australia (see images on their Website). Fig. 1: Costumed protest against Downer EDI's proposed work on the Adani coalmine; Image by John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0). Sustainable Fashion Practices The second most common type of event which connected fashion with activism were those promoting sustainable fashion practices. While much research has highlighted the role of activism in raising awareness of problems related to the fashion industry (e.g. Hirscher), groups in the dataset were primarily focussed on organising activities where supporters communally created their own fashion items. The most common of these was the ‘crafternoon’, with over 260 separate crafternoon events identified in the dataset. These events brought activists together to create protest-related kit such as banners, signs, and costumes from recycled or repurposed materials, as demonstrated by Hume Climate Action Now’s ‘Crafternoon for Climate’ event: Come along on Sunday arvo for a relaxed arvo making posters and banners for upcoming Hume Climate Action Now events… Bring: Paints, textas, cardboard, fabric – whatever you’ve got lying around. Don’t have anything? That’s cool, just bring yourself. Events highlighting fashion industry problems were less frequent and tended to prioritise sharing of information about the fashion industry rather than promoting protests. For example, Transition Town Vincent held a ‘Slowing Down Fast Fashion – Transition Town Vincent Movie Night’ while the Green Embassy promoted the ‘Eco Fashion Week’. This event, held in 2017, was described as Australia’s only eco-fashion week, and included runway shows, music, and public talks. Other events also focussed on public talks, such as a Conservation Council of ACT event called ‘Green Drinks Canberra October 2017: Summer Edwards on the fashion industry’ and a panel discussion organised by a group called SEE-Change entitled ‘The Sustainable Wardrobe’. Disruptive Protest and T-Shirts Few events in the dataset mentioned elements of fashion outside of street theatre or sustainable fashion practices, with only one organisation explicitly connecting fashion with activism in its event details. This group – Australian Youth Climate Coalition – organised an event called ‘Activism in Fashion: Tote Bags, T-shirts and Poster Painting!’, which asked: How can we consistently be involved in campaigning while life can be so busy? Can we still be loud and get a message across without saying a word? The iconic 21st century activist "t-shirt and tote-bag" combination is hard to miss these days! Unlike street theatre and sustainable fashion practices, fashion appeared to be a consideration for only a small number of disruptive protests promoted by environmental groups in Australia. XR Brisbane sought to organise a fashion parade during the 2019 Rebellion Week, while XR protesters in Melbourne stripped down to underwear for a march through Melbourne city arcades (see also Turbet). Few common fashion elements appeared consistently on individual activists participating in events, and these were limited to accessories, such as ‘Stop Adani’ earrings, or t-shirts sold for fundraising and promotional purposes. Indeed, t-shirts appeared to be the most promoted clothing item in the dataset, continuing a long tradition of their use in protests (e.g. Maynard, Blankets). Easy to create, suitable for displaying both text and imagery, t-shirts sharing anti-coal messages featured predominantly in the Stop Adani campaign, while yellow t-shirts were a common item in Knitting Nanna’s anti-coal seam gas mining protests. Fig. 2: Stop Adani earrings and t-shirts; Image by John Englart (CC BY-SA 2.0). The Role of Fashion in Environmental Activism As these findings demonstrate, fashion appears to be deliberately utilised in environmental activism primarily through street theatre and the promotion of sustainable fashion practices. While fewer examples of fashion in disruptive protest were found and no consistent fashion assemblage was identified, accessories and t-shirts were utilised by many groups. What may activists be seeking to achieve through incorporating fashion via street theatre and sustainable fashion practices? Some scholars have argued that incorporating fashion into protest allows activists to signal political dissent against authoritarian control. For example, Yanzoom noted that by utilising fashion as a means of communication, Tibetan activists were able to embody their political goals despite repression of speech and movement by political powerholders. However, a consistent fashion repertoire across protests in this Australian dataset was not found. The opportunities afforded by protected protest rights in Australia and absence of violent police repression of disruptive protests may be one explanation why distinctive dress such as the masks and black attire of Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters did not manifest in the dataset. Other scholars have observed that fashion sub-cultures also developed partly to express anti-establishment politics, such as the punk movement in the 1970s. Radical clothing accessorised by symbols, bright hair colours, body piercings, and heavy-duty books signalled opposition to the dominant political ideology (Craik). However, none of these purposes appeared to play a role in Australian environmental activism either. Instead, it appears that Maynard’s contention that Australian protest fashion barely deviates from everyday dress remains true today. Fashion within the events promoted in this large empirical dataset retained the ‘prevalence of everyday clothing’ (Maynard, Dress 111). The lack of a clearly discernible single protest fashion style within the dataset may be related to the shortcomings of the sender/receiver model of fashion communication. As Barnard (Fashion Statements) argued, fashion is not always used as a vehicle for conveying messages, but also as a platform for constructing and reproducing identity. Indeed, a multiplicity of researchers have noted how fashion acts as a signal of what social groups individuals belong to (see Roach-Higgins and Eicher). Activist groups have a variety of goals, which not only include promoting environmental change but also mobilising more people to join their cause (Gulliver et al., Understanding). Stereotyping can hinder achievement of these goals. It has been demonstrated, for example, that individuals who hold negative stereotypes of ‘typical’ activists are less likely to want to associate with them, and less likely to adopt their behaviours (Bashir et al.). Accordingly, some activist groups have been shown to actively promote dress associated with other identity groups, specifically to challenge cultural constructions of environmental activist stereotypes (see also Roces). For example, Bloomfield and Doolins’s study of the NZ anti-GE group MAdGE (Mothers against Genetic Engineering in Food and the Environment) demonstrated how visual protest artifacts conveyed the protesters’ social identity as mothers and customers rather than environmental activists, claiming an alternative cultural mandate for challenging the authority of science (see also Einwohner et al.). The data suggest that Australian activists are seeking to avoid this stereotype as well. The absence of a consistent fashion promoted within the dataset may reflect awareness of problematic stereotypes that activists may be then deliberately seeking to avoid. Maynard (Dress), for example, has noted how the everyday dress of Australian protesters serves to deflect stereotypical labelling of participants. This strategy is also mirrored by the changing nature of groups within the Australian environmental movement. The event database demonstrates that an increasing number of environmental groups are emerging with names highlighting non-stereotypical environmental identities: groups such as ‘Engineers Declare’ and ‘Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action’. Beyond these identity processes, the frequent use of costumed street theatre protest suggests that activists recognise the value of using fashion as a vehicle for communicating messages, despite the challenges of interpretation described above. Much of the language used to promote street theatre in the Facebook event listings suggests that these costumes were deliberately designed to signify a particular meaning, with individuals encouraged to dress up to be ‘a vehicle for myth and symbol’ (Lavender 11). It may be that costumes are also utilised in protest due to their suitability as an image event, convenient for dissemination by mass media seeking colourful and engaging imagery (Delicath and Deluca; Doerr). Furthermore, costumes, as with text or colours presented on t-shirts, may offer activists an avenue to clearly convey a visual message which is more resistant to stereotyping. This is especially relevant given that fashion can be re-interpreted and misinterpreted by audiences, as well as reframed and reinterpreted by the media (Maynard, Dress). While the prevalence of costumed performance and infrequent mentions of fashion in the dataset may be explained by stereotype avoidance and messaging clarity, sustainable fashion practices were more straightforward in intent. Groups used multiple approaches to educate audiences about sustainable fashion, whether through fostering sustainable fashion practices or raising awareness of fashion industry problems. In this regard, fashion in protest in Australia closely resembles Asian sustainable fashion activism (see e.g. Chon et al. regarding the Singaporean context). In particular, the large number of ‘crafternoons’ suggests their importance as sites of activism and community building. Craftivism – acts such as quilting banners, yarn bombing, and cross stitching feminist slogans – are used by many groups to draw attention to social, political and environmental issues (McGovern and Barnes). This type of ‘creative activism’ (Filippello) has been used to challenge aesthetic and political norms across a variety of contested socio-political landscapes. These activities not only develop activism skills, but also foster community (Barry and Drak). For environmental groups, these community building events can play a critical role in sustaining and supporting ongoing environmental activism (Gulliver et al., Understanding) as well as demonstrating solidarity with workers across Asia experiencing labour injustices linked to the fashion industry (Chung and Yim). Conclusion Studies examining protest fashion demonstrate that clothing provides a canvas for sharing protest messages and identities in both Asia and Australia (Benda; Yangzom; Craik). However, despite the fashion’s utility as communication tool for social and environmental movements, empirical studies of how fashion is used by activists in these contexts remain rare. This analysis demonstrates that Australian environmental activists use fashion in their action repertoire primarily through costumed street theatre performances and promoting sustainable fashion practices. By doing so they may be seeking to use fashion as a means of conveying messages, while avoiding stereotypes that can demobilise supporters and reduce support for their cause. Furthermore, sustainable fashion activism offers opportunities for activists to achieve multiple goals: to subvert the fast fashion industry, to provide participation avenues for new activists, to help build activist communities, and to express solidarity with those experiencing fast fashion-related labour injustices. These findings suggest that the use of fashion in protest actions can move beyond identity messaging to also enact sustainable practices while co-opting and resisting hegemonic ideas of consumerism. By integrating fashion into the vibrant and diverse actions promoted by environmental movements across Australia and Asia, activists can construct and perform identities while fostering the community bonds and networks from which movements demanding environmental change derive their strength. Ethics Approval Statement This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Queensland (2018000963). 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There’s always this never-ending discussion about the curator who imposes meaning or imposes the concept of art, of what art is. I think this is the wrong opposition. Every artwork produces its concept, or a concept of what art is. And the role of the curator is not to produce a concept of art but to invent, to fabricate, elaborate reading grids or coexistence grids between them.(Nicolas Bourriaud quoted in Bourriaud, Lunghi, O’Neill, and Ruf 91–92)In 2010 at a conference in Rotterdam, Nicolas Bourriaud, Enrico Lunghi, Paul O’Neill, and Beatrix Ruf discussed the question, “Is the curator per definition a political animal?” This paper draws on their discussion when posing the reverse scenario—is the political animal per definition a curator in the context of the development of large-scale public policy? In exploring this question, I suggest that recent conceptual discussions centring on “the curatorial turn” in the arena of the creative arts provide a useful framework for understanding and managing opportunities and pitfalls in policymaking that is influenced by news media. Such a conceptual understanding is important. My empirical research has identified a transport policy arena that is changing due to news media scrutiny in Sydney, Australia. My findings are that the discourses arising and circulating in the public and the news media wield considerable influence. I posit in this paper the view that recent academic discussion of curatorial practices could identify more effective and successful approaches to policy development and implementation. I also question whether some of the key problems highlighted by commentary on the curatorial turn, such as the silencing of the voice of the artist, find parallels in policy as the influence of the bureaucrat or technical expert is diminished by the rise of the politician as curator in mediatised policy. The Political AnimalPaul O’Neill defines a political animal: “to be a passionate and human visionary—someone who bridges gaps, negotiates the impossible in order to generate change, even slight change, movements, a shivering” (Bourriaud et al. 90). O’Neill’s definition is a different definition from Aristotle’s famous assertion that humans (collectively) are the “political animal” because they are the only animals to possess speech (Danta and Vardoulakis 3). The essence of O’Neill’s definition shifts from the Aristotelian view that all humans are political, towards what Chris Danta and Dimitris Vardoulakis (4) refer to as “the consumption of the political by politics,” where the domain of the political is the realm of the elite few rather than innately human as Aristotle suggests. Moreover, there is a suggestion in O’Neill’s definition that the “political animal” is the consummate politician, creating change against great opposition. I suggest that this idea of struggle and adversity in O’Neill’s definition echoes policy development’s own “turn” of the early 1990s, “the argumentative turn in policy analysis and planning” (Fischer and Forester 43). The Argumentative Turn The argumentative turn in policy analysis and planning is premised on the assertion that “policy is made of language” (Majone 1). It represents a seismic shift in previously championed academic conceptions of policy analysis—decisionism, rationality, the economic model of choice, and other models that advocate measured, rational, and objective policy development processes. The argumentative turn highlights the importance of communication in policy development. Prior to this turn, policy analysts considered formal communication to be something that happened after policy elites had completed the scientific, objective, analytical, and rational work. Communication was perceived as being the process of “seducing” or the “‘mere words’ that add gloss to the important stuff” (Throgmorton 117–19). Communication had meant selling or “spinning” the policy—a task often left to the devices of the public relations industry by the “less scrupulous” policymaker (Dryzek 227).The new line of inquiry posits the alternative view that, far from communication being peripheral, “the policy process is constituted by and mediated through communicative practices” (Fischer and Gottweis 2). Thanks largely to the work of Deborah Stone and Giandomenico Majone, academics began to ask, “What if our language does not simply mirror or picture the world but instead profoundly shapes our view of it in the first place?” (Fischer and Forester 1). The importance of this turn to the argument, I posit in this paper, is illustrated by Stone when she contends that the communication of conflicting views and interests create a world where paradoxical positions on policy are inevitable. Stone states, “Ask a politician to define a problem and he will probably draw a battlefield and tell you who stands on which side. The analytical language of politics includes ‘for and against,’ ‘supporters and enemies,’ ‘our side and their side’” (166). Stone describes a policymaking process that is inherently difficult. Her ideas echo O’Neill’s intonation that in order for movement or even infinitesimal change it is the negotiation of the impossible that makes a political animal. The Mediatisation of Sydney Transport Stone and Majone speak only cursorily of the media in policy development. However, in recent years academics have increasingly contended that “mediatisation” be recognised as referring to the increasing influence of media in social, cultural, and political spheres (Deacon and Stanyer; Strömbäck and Esser; Shehata and Strömbäck). My own research into the influence of mediatisation on transport policy and projects in Sydney has centred more specifically on the influence of news media. My focus has been a trend towards news media influence in Australian politics and policy that has been observed by academics for more than a decade (Craig; Young; Ward, PR State; Ward, Public Affair; Ward, Power). My research entailed two case study projects, the failed Sydney CBD Metro (SCM) rail line and a North West Rail Link (NWR) currently under construction. Data-gathering included a news media study of 180 relevant print articles; 30 expert interviews with respondents from politics, the bureaucracy, transport planning, news media, and public relations, whose work related to transport (with a number working on the case study projects); and surveys, interviews, and focus groups with 149 public respondents. The research identified projects whose contrasting fortunes tell a significant story in relation to the influence of news media. The SCM, despite being a project deemed to be of considerable merit by the majority of expert respondents, was, as stated by a transport planner who worked on the project, “poorly sold,” which “turned it into a project that was very easy to ridicule.” Following a resulting period of intense news media criticism, the SCM was abandoned. As a transport reporter for a daily newspaper asserts in an interview, the prevailing view in the news media is that the project “was done on the back of an envelope.” According to experts with knowledge of the SCM, that years of planning had been undertaken was not properly presented to the public. Conversely, the experts I interviewed deem the NWR to be a low-priority project for Sydney. As a former chief of staff within both federal and state government departments including transport states, “if you are going to put money into anything in Sydney it would not be the NWR.” However, in the project’s favour is an overwhelming dominant public and media discourse that I label The north-west of Sydney is overdue rail transport. A communications respondent contends in an interview that because the NWR has “been talked about for so long” it holds “the right sighting, if you like, in people’s minds,” in other words, the media and the public have become used to the idea of the project.Ultimately, my findings, dealt with in more detail elsewhere (Richardson), suggest that powerful news media and public discourses, if not managed effectively, can be highly problematic for policymaking. This was found to be the case for the failure of the SCM. It is with this finding that I assert that the concept of curating the discourses surrounding a policy arena could hold considerable merit as a conceptual framework for discourse management. The Curatorial Turn in Policy Development? I was alerted to the idea of curating mediatised policy development during an expert interview for my empirical research. The respondent, chief editor of a Sydney newspaper, stated that, with an overwhelming mountain of information, news, views, and commentary being generated daily through the likes of the Internet and social media, the public needs curators to sift and sort the most important themes and arguments. The expert suggested this is now part of a journalist’s role. The idea of journalists as curators is far from new (Bakker 596). Nor is it the purpose of this paper. However, what struck me in this notion of curating was the critical role of sifting, sorting and ultimately selecting which themes, ideas, or pieces of information are privileged in myriad choices. My own empirical research was indicating that the management of highly influential news media and public discourses surrounding transport infrastructure also involved a considerable level of selection. Therefore, I hypothesised that the concept of curating might aid the managing of discourses when it comes to communicating for successful policy and project development that is subject to news media scrutiny. Research into scholarship has indicated that the concept of “the curatorial turn” is significant to this hypothesis. Since the 1960s the role of curator in art exhibition has shifted from that of “caretaker” for a collection to the shaper of an exhibition (O’Neill, “Turn”; O’Neill, Culture). Central to this shift is “the changing perception of the curator as carer to a curator who has a more creative and active part to play within the production of art itself” (O’Neill, Turn 243). Some commentators go so far as to suggest that curators have become cultural agents that “participate in the production of cultural value” (244). The curator’s role in exhibition design has also been equated to that of an author or auteur that drives an exhibition’s meaning (251–52). Why is this important for policy development? It is my view that there is certainly merit to viewing a significant part of the role of the political animal in policymaking as the curator of public and media discourse. As Beatrix Ruf suggests, the role of the curator is to create a “freedom for things to happen” within “a societal context” that not only takes into account the needs of the “artist” but also the “audience” (Bourriaud et al. 91). If we were to substitute bureaucrat for artist and media/public for audience then Ruf’s suggestion seems particularly relevant for the communication of policy. To return to Bourriaud’s quote that began this paper, perhaps the role of the curator/policymaker is not solely to produce a policy “but to invent, to fabricate, elaborate reading grids or coexistence grids,” to manage the discourses that influence the policy arena (Bourriaud et al. 92). Furthermore, the answer to why the concept of the curatorial turn seems relevant to policy development requires consideration not only of the rise of the voice and influence of the curator/policymaker but also of those at whose expense this shift has occurred. Through the rise of the curator the voice of the artist has dimmed. As the exhibition is elevated to “the status of quasi-artwork,” individual artworks themselves become simply “a useful fragment” (O’Neill, “Turn” 253). One of the underlying tensions of the curatorial turn is the rise of actors that are not practicing artists themselves. In other words, the producers of art, the artists, have less influence over their own practice. In New South Wales (NSW), we have witnessed a similar scenario with the steady rise of the voice and influence of the politician (and political adviser), at the expense of the public service. This loss of bureaucratic power was embedded structurally in the mid-1970s when Premier Neville Wran established the Ministerial Advisory Unit (MAU) to oversee NSW state government decisions. A respondent for my research states that when he began his career as a public servant: politicians didn’t really have a lot of ideas about things … the public service really ran the place … [Premier Wran] said, ‘this isn’t good enough. I’m being manipulated by the government departments. I’m going to set up something called the MAU which is politically appointed as a countervailing force to the bureaucracy to get the advice that I want.’The respondent infers a power grab by political actors to stymie the influence of the bureaucracy. This view is shared by several expert respondents for my research, as well as being substantiated by historian John Gunn (503). One of the clear results of the structural change has been that a politically driven media focus is now embedded in the structure of government policy and project decision-making. Instead of taking its lead from priorities emanating from the community, the bureaucracy is instead left with little choice but to look to the minister for guidance. As a project management consultant to government states in an interview:I think today the bureaucrat who makes the hard administrative decisions, the management decisions, is basically outweighed by communications, public relations, media relations director … the politicians are poll driven not policy driven. The respondent makes a point with which former politician Lindsay Tanner (Tanner) and academic Ian Ward (Ward, Power) agree—Australian politicians are increasingly structuring their operations around news media. The bureaucracy has become less relevant to policymaking as a result. My empirical research indicates this. The SCM and the NWR were highly publicised projects where the views of transport experts were largely ignored. They represent cases where the voice of the experts/artists had been completely suppressed by the voice of the politician/curator. I contend that this is where key questions of the role of the politician and the curator converge. Experts interviewed for my research express concerns that policymaking has been altered by structural changes to the bureaucracy. Similarly, some academics concerned with the rise of the curator question whether the shift will change the very nature of art (O’Neill, Cultures). A shared concern of the art world and those witnessing the policy arena in NSW is that the thoughts and ideas of those that do are being overshadowed by the views of those who talk. In terms of curatorial practice, O’Neill (Cultures) cites the views of Mick Wilson, who speaks of the rise of the “Foucauldian moment” and the “ubiquitous appeal of the term ‘discourse’ as a word to conjure and perform power,” where “even talking is doing something.” As O’Neill contends, “at this extreme, the discursive stands in the place of ‘doing’ within discourses on curatorial practice” (43). O’Neill submits Wilson’s point as an extreme view within the curatorial turn. However, the concern for the art world should be similar to the one experienced in the policy arena. Technical advice from the bureaucracy (doers) to ministers (talkers) has changed. In an interview with me, a partner in one of Australia’s leading architectural and planning practices contends that the technical advice of the bureaucracy to ministers is not as “fearless and robust” as it once was. Furthermore, he is concerned that planners have lost their influence as ministers now look to political advisers rather than technical advisers for direction. He states, “now what happens is most advisors to ministers are political advisers and they will give political advice … the planning advice hasn’t come from the planners.” The ultimate concern is that, through a silencing of the technical expert, policymaking is losing a vital layer of experience and knowledge that can only be to the detriment of the practice and its beneficiaries, the public. The closer one looks, the more evident the similarities between curating and policy development become. Acute budgetary limitations exist. There is an increased reliance on public funding. Large-scale curating, like policy development, involves “a negotiation of the relationship between public and private interests” (Ruf in Bourriaud et al. 90). There is also a tension between short- and long-term outlooks as well as local and global perspectives (Lunghi in Bourriaud et al. 97). And, significantly for my argument for the privileging of the concept of curating of discourse in policy, curating has also been called “a battlefield of ideas in which the public (or audience) has become ‘the big Other’” in that “everything that cannot find its audience, its public, is highly suspicious or very problematic” (Bourriaud in Bourriaud et al. 96–97). The closer the inspection, the starker the similarities of each pursuit. Lessons, Ramifications and Conclusions What can policymakers learn from the curatorial turn? For policymaking, it seems that the argumentative turn, the rise of news mediatisation, the strengthening of power and influence of the politician, and the “Foucauldian moment” have seen the rise of the discursive in place of doing that some quarters identify as being the case with the curatorial turn (O’Neill, Cultures). Therefore, it would be pertinent for policymakers to heed Bourriaud’s statement that began this paper: “the role of the curator is not to produce a concept of art (or policy) but to invent, to fabricate, elaborate reading grids or coexistence grids between them” (Bourriaud et al. 92). Is such a method of curating discourse the way forward for the political animal that seeks to achieve the politically “impossible” in policymaking? Perhaps for policymaking the importance of the concept of curating holds both opportunity and a warning. The opportunity, exemplified by the success of the NWR and the failure of the SCM projects in Sydney, is in accepting the role of media and public discourses in policy development so that they may be more thoroughly investigated and understood before being more effectively folded into the policymaking process. The warning lies in the concerns the curatorial turn has raised over the demise of the artist in light of the rise of discourse. The voice of the technical expert appears to be fading. How do we effectively curate discourses as well as restore the bureaucrat to former levels of robust fearlessness? I dare say it will take a political animal to do either. ReferencesBakker, Piet. “Mr Gates Returns.” Journalism Studies 15.5 (2014): 596–606.Bourriaud, Nicolas, Enrico Lunghi, Paul O’Neill, and Beatrix Ruf. “Is the Curator per Definition a Political Animal?” Rotterdam Dialogues: The Critics, the Curators, the Artists. Eds. Zoe Gray, Miriam Kathrein, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Monika Szewczyk, and Ariadne Urlus. Rotterdam: Witte de With Publishers, 2010. 87–99. Craig, Geoffrey. The Media, Politics and Public Life. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2004.Danta, Chris, and Dimitris Vardoulakis. “The Political Animal.” SubStance 37.3 (2008): 3–6. Dryzek, John S. “Policy Analysis and Planning: From Science to Argument.” The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Eds. Frank Fischer and John Forester. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 213–32.Fischer, Frank, and John Forester. “Editors’ Introduction.” The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Eds. Frank Fischer and John Forester. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 1–17.Fischer, Frank, and Herbert Gottweis. Argumentative Turn Revisited: Public Policy as Communicative Practice. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012.Gunn, John. Along Parallel Lines: A History of the Railways of New South Wales. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1989.Majone, Giandomenico. Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.O’Neill, Paul. “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse.” The Biennial Reader. Eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solvig Øvstebø. Bergen, Norway: Bergen Kunsthall, 2007. 240–59.———. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 2012.Richardson, Nicholas. “Political Upheaval in Australia: Media, Foucault and Shocking Policy.” Media International Australia. Forthcoming.Shehata, Adam, and Jesper Strömbäck. “Mediation of Political Realities: Media as Crucial Sources of Information.” Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Eds. Frank Esser and Jesper Strömbäck. Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 93–112. Stone, Deborah. Policy Paradox and Political Reason. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1988.Strömbäck, Jesper, and Frank Esser. “Mediatization of Politics: Towards a Theoretical Framework.” Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Eds. Frank Esser and Jesper Strömbäck. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 3–28.Tanner, Lindsay. Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy. Carlton North, Victoria: Scribe, 2011.Throgmorton, James A. “Survey Research as Rhetorical Trope: Electric Power Planning in Chicago.” The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Eds. Frank Fischer and John Forester. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 117–44.Ward, Ian. “An Australian PR State?” Australian Journal of Communication 30.1 (2003): 25–42. ———. “Lobbying as a Public Affair: PR and Politics in Australia.” Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship. ANZCA: Brisbane, 2009. 1039–56. ‹http://www.anzca.net/documents/anzca-09-1/refereed-proceedings-2009-1/79-lobbying-as-a-public-affair-pr-and-politics-in-australia-1/file.html›.———. “The New and Old Media, Power and Politics.” Government, Politics, Power and Policy in Australia. Eds. Dennis Woodward, Andrew Parkin, and John Summers. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson, 2010. 374–93.Young, Sally. “Killing Competition: Restricting Access to Political Communication Channels in Australia.” AQ: Journal of Contemporary Analysis 75.3 (2003): 9–15.

Aunty Mary Graham, Kombu-merri elder and philosopher, writes, “you are not alone in the world.” We have a responsibility to each other, as well as to the land, and violence is the refusal of this relationship that binds us (Rose). Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas, a French-Lithuanian Jewish teacher and philosopher who lived through the Holocaust, writes that, “my freedom does not have the last word; I am not alone” (Levinas, Totality 101). For both writers, the recognition that one is not alone in the world creates an imperative to act ethically. For non-Indigenous educators working in the Indigenous Studies space—as arguably all school teachers are, given the Australian Curriculum—their relationship with Indigenous Australia creates an imperative to consider ethics and responsibility in their work. In this article, I use Emmanuel Levinas’s thinking and writing on epistemological violence and ethics as a first philosophy to consider how pre-service teachers engage with the ethical responsibilities inherent in teaching and learning Indigenous Studies.To begin, I will introduce Emmanuel Levinas and his writing on violence, followed by outlining the ways that Indigenous perspectives are incorporated into the Australian Curriculum. I will finish by sharing some of the reflective writing undertaken by pre-service teachers in a compulsory Indigenous education subject at an Australian university. These data show pre-service teachers’ responses to being called into responsibility and relationality, as well as some of the complexities in avoiding what I term here epistemological violence, a grasping of the other by trying to make the other infinitely knowable. The data present a problematic paradox—when pre-service teachers write about their future praxis, they necessarily defer responsibility to the future. This deferral constructs an image of the future which transcends the present, without requiring change in the here and now.Of note, some of this writing speaks to the violence enacted upon Indigenous peoples through the colonisation of Australia. I have tried to write respectfully about these topics. Yet the violence continues, in part via the traumatic nature of such accounts. As a non-Indigenous educator and researcher, I also acknowledge that such histories of violence have predominantly benefited people like myself and that the Countries on which this article was written (Countries of the sovereign Bindal and Wulgurukaba peoples) have never been ceded.Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics as First PhilosophyEmmanuel Levinas was a French-Lithuanian Jewish teacher and philosopher for whom surviving the Holocaust—where most of his family perished—fundamentally changed his philosophy. Following World War II, Levinas critiqued Heidegger’s philosophy, writing that freedom—an unencumbered being in the world—could no longer be considered the first condition of being human (Levinas, Existence). Instead, the presence of others in the world—an intersubjectivity between oneself and another—means that we are always already responsible for the others we encounter. Seeing the other’s face calls us to be accountable for our own actions, to responsibility. If we do not respect that the other is different to one’s self, and instead try to understand them through our own frames of reference, we commit the epistemological violence of reducing the other to the same (Levinas, Totality 46), bringing their infinity into our own totality.The history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations both in Australia and globally has been marked by attempts to bring Indigenous peoples into non-Indigenous orders of knowledge (Nakata, “Cultural Interface”). The word “Aboriginal”, derived from the Latin “of the original”, refers to both Indigenous peoples’ position as original inhabitants of lands, but also to the anthropological idea that Indigenous peoples were early and unevolved prototypes of human beings (Peterson). This early idea of what it means to be Indigenous is linked to the now well-known histories of ontological violence. Aboriginal reserves were set up as places for Aboriginal people to perish, a consequence not just of colonisation, but of the perception that Indigenous people were unfit to exist in a modern society. Whilst such racist ideologies linger today, most discourses have morphed in how they grasp Indigenous people into a non-Indigenous totality. In a context where government-funded special measures are used to assist disadvantaged groups, categories such as the Indigenous/non-Indigenous binary can become violent. The Closing the Gap campaign, for example, is based on this categorical binary, where “sickness=Indigenous” and “whiteness=health”. This creates a “moral imperative upon Indigenous Australians to transform themselves” (Pholi et al. 10), to become the dominant category, to be brought into the totality.Levinas’s philosophical writings provide a way to think through the ethical challenges of a predominantly non-Indigenous teaching workforce being tasked to not just approach the teaching of Indigenous students with more care than previous generations, but to also embed Indigenous perspectives and knowledges into their teaching work. Levinas’s warning of a “disinterested acquisition of knowledge” (Reader 78), seemingly unrestrained by memory or relationships, is useful in two ways. First, for pre-service teachers learning about Indigenous education, Levinas’s work provides a reminder of the ethical responsibilities that all members of a community have to each other. However, this responsibility cannot be predicated on unwittingly approaching Indigenous topics through Western knowledge lenses. Instead, Levinas’s work also reminds us about the ethics of knowledge production which shape how others—in this case Indigenous peoples—come to be known; teachers and pre-service teachers must engage with the politics of knowledge that shape how Indigenous peoples come to be known in educational settings.You Are Not Alone in the World: Indigenous Perspectives in the Australian CurriculumIn 2010, the Australian Curriculum was launched by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) with the goal of unifying state-driven curricula into a common approach. Developed from the 2008 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs [MCEECDYA]), the Curriculum has occupied a prominent position in the Australian educational policy space. As well as preparing a future workforce, contemporary Australian education is essentially aspirational, “governed by the promise of something better” (Harrison et al. 234), with the Australian Curriculum appearing to promise the same: there is a concerted effort to ensure that all Australians have access to equitable and excellent educational opportunities, and that all students are represented within the Curriculum. Part of this aspiration included the development of three Cross-Curriculum Priorities (CCPs), focus areas that “give students the tools and language to engage with and better understand their world at a range of levels” (ACARA, “Cross-Curriculum Priorities” para. 1). The first of these CCPs is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures and is organised into three key concepts: connection to Country/Place; diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures; and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders societies. In the curriculum more broadly, content descriptions govern what is taught across subject areas from Prep to Year 10. Content elaborations—possible approaches to teaching the standards—detail ways that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures can be incorporated. For example, Year 7 Science students learn that “predictable phenomena on Earth, including seasons and eclipses, are caused by the relative positions of the sun, Earth and the moon”. This can be taught by “researching knowledges held by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples regarding the phases of the moon and the connection between the lunar cycle and ocean tides” (ACARA, “Science” ACSSU115). This curriculum priority mandates that teachers and learners across Australia engage in representations of Indigenous peoples through teaching and learning activities. However, questions about what constitutes the most appropriate activities, when and where they are incorporated into schooling, and how to best support educators to do this work must continue to be asked.As Indigenous knowledges and perspectives are brought into the classroom where this curriculum is played out, they are shaped by the discourses of the space (Nakata, “Cultural Interface”): what is normalised in a classroom, the teachers’ and students’ prior understandings, and the curriculum and assessment expectations of teaching and learning. Nakata refers to this space as the cultural interface, the contested space between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems where disciplinary discourses, practices and histories translate what is known about Indigenous peoples. This creates complexities and anxieties for teachers tasked with this role (Nakata, “Pathways”). Yet to ignore the presence of Indigenous histories, lifeworlds, and experiences would be to act as if non-Indigenous Australia was alone in the world. The curriculum, as a socio-political document, is full of representations of people. As such, care must be given to how teachers are prepared to engage in the complex process of negotiating these representations.The Classroom as a Location of PossibilityThe introduction of the Australian Curriculum has been accompanied by the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) which govern the requirements for graduating teachers. Two particular standards—1.4 and 2.4—refer to the teaching of Indigenous students and histories, cultures and language. Many initial teacher education programs in Australian universities have responded to the curriculum requirements and the APSTs by developing a specific subject dedicated to Indigenous education. It is difficult to ascertain the success of this work. Many in-service teachers suggest that more knowledge about Indigenous cultures is required to meet the APST, risking an essentialised view of the Indigenous learner (Moodie and Patrick). Further, there is little empirical research on what improves Indigenous students’ educational outcomes, with the research instead focusing on engaging Indigenous students (Burgess et al.). Similarly, there is yet to be a broadscale research program exploring how teacher educators can best educate pre-service teachers to improve educational outcomes for Indigenous students. Instead, much of the research focuses on engaging (predominantly non-Indigenous) becoming-teachers through a variety of theoretical and pedagogical approaches (Moreton-Robinson et al.) A handful of researchers (e.g. Moodie; Nakata et al.; Page) are considering how to use curriculum design to structure tertiary level Indigenous Studies programs—for pre-service teachers and more generally—to best prepare students to work within complex uncertainties.Levinas’s philosophy reminds us that we need to push beyond thinking about the engagement of Indigenous peoples within the curriculum to the relationship between educator-researchers and their students. Further, Levinas prompts us to question how we can research in this space in a way that is more than just about “disinterested acquisition of knowledge” (Reader 78), instead utilising critical analysis to consider a praxis which ultimately benefits Indigenous students, families and communities. The encounter with Levinas’s writing challenges us to consider how teacher educators can engage with pre-service teachers in a way that does not suggest that they are inherently racist. Rather, we must teach pre-service teachers to not impress the same type of epistemological violence onto Indigenous students, knowledges and cultures. Such questions prompt an engagement with teaching/research which is respectful of the responsibilities to all involved. As hooks reminds us, education can be a practice of freedom: classrooms are locations of possibilities where students can think critically and question taken-for-granted assumptions about the world. To engage with praxis is to consider teaching not just as a practice, but as a theoretically and justice-driven approach. It is with this backdrop that I move now to consider some of the writings of non-Indigenous pre-service teachers.The Research ProjectThe data presented here is from a recent research project exploring pre-service teachers’ experiences of a compulsory Indigenous education subject as part of a four-year initial teacher education degree in an Australian metropolitan university (see McDowall). The subject prepares pre-service teachers to both embed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures CCP in their praxis and to teach Indigenous students. This second element engages both an understanding of Indigenous students as inhabiting an intercultural space with particular tensions (Nakata, “Pathways”), and the social-political-historical discourses that impact Indigenous students’ experiences. This includes the history of Indigenous education, the social construction of race, and a critical awareness of deficit approaches to working with Indigenous students. The subject was designed to promote a critical engagement with Indigenous education, to give pre-service teachers theoretical tools to make sense of both how Indigenous students and Indigenous content are positioned in classrooms and develop pedagogical frameworks to enable future teaching work. Pre-service teachers wrote weekly reflective learning journals as an assessment task (weighted at 30% of their total grade). In the final weeks of semester, I asked students in the final weeks of semester for permission to use their journals for a research project, to which 93 students consented.Reading the students’ reflective writing presents a particular ethical paradox, one intricately linked with the act of knowing. Throughout the semester, a desire to gain more knowledge about Indigenous peoples and cultures shifted to a desire to be present as teacher(s) in the Indigenous education landscape. Yet for pre-service teachers with no classroom of their own, this being present is always deferred to the future, mitigating the need for action in the present. This change in the pre-service teachers’ writing demonstrates that the relationship between violence and responsibility is exceedingly complex within the intersection of Indigenous and teacher education. These themes are explored in the following sections.Epistemological ViolenceOne of the shifts which occurred throughout the semester was a subtle difference in the types of knowledges students sought. In the first few weeks of the subject, many of the pre-service teachers wrote of a strong desire to know about Indigenous people and culture as a way of becoming a better educator. Their expectations were around wanting to address their “limited understandings”, wanting to “heighten”, “develop”, and “broaden” “understanding” and “knowledge”; to know “more about them, their culture”. At the end, knowing and understanding is presented in a different type of way. For some students, the knowledge they now want is about their own histories and culture: “as a teacher I need the bravery to acknowledge what happened in the past”, wrote one student in her final entry.For other students, the idea of knowing was shaped by not-knowing. Moving away from a desire to know, and thereby possess, the students wrote about the need to know no longer being present: “I owe my current sense of confidence to that Nakata article. The education system can’t expect all teachers to know exactly how to embed Indigenous pedagogy into their classrooms, can they?” writes one student in her final entry, following on to say, “the main strategy I got from the readings … still stands true: ‘We don’t know everything’ and I will not act like I do”. Another writes, “I am not an expert and I am now aware of the multitude of resources available, particularly the community”.For the students to claim knowledge of Indigenous peoples would be to enact epistemological violence, denying the alterity—difference—of the other and drawing them into our totalities. In the final weeks of the semester, some students wrote that they would use hands-on, outdoor activities in order to enact a culturally responsive pedagogy. Such a claim shows the tenacity of Western knowledge about Indigenous students. In this case, the students’ sentiment can be traced back to Aboriginal Learning Styles (Harris), the idea that Aboriginal students inherently learn via informal hands-on (as opposed to abstract) group approaches. The type of difference promoted in Aboriginal learning styles is biological, suggesting that on account of their Indigeneity, Aboriginal students inherently learn differently. Through its biological function, this difference essentialises Indigenous learners across the nation, claiming a sameness. But perhaps even more violently, it denies the presence of an Indigenous knowledge system in the place where the research took place. Such an Indigenous knowledge system begins from the land, from Country, and entails a rich set of understandings around how knowledge is produced, shared, learnt and, enacted through place and people-based knowledge practices (Verran). Aboriginal learning styles reduces richness to a more graspable concept: informal learning. To summarise, students’ early claims to knowledge shifted to an understanding that it is okay to ‘not know’—to recognise that as beginning teachers, they are entering a complex field and must continue learning. This change is complicated by the tenacity of knowledge claims which define Indigenous students into a Western order of knowledge. Such claims continue to present themselves in the students writing. Nonetheless, as students progressed through the semester and engaged with some of the difficult knowledges and understandings presented, a new form of knowing emerged. Ethical ResponsibilitiesAs pre-service teachers learned about the complex cultural interface of classrooms, they began to reconsider their own claims to be able to ‘know’ Indigenous students and cultures. This is not to say that pre-service teachers do not feel responsibility for Indigenous students: in many journals, pre-service teachers’ wanted-ness in the classroom—their understanding of their importance of presence as teachers—is evident. To write for themselves a need to be present demonstrates responsibility. This took place as students imagined future praxis. With words woven together from several journals, the students’ final entries indicate a wanting-to-be-present-as-becoming-ethical-teachers: I willremember forever, reactionsshocked, sad, guilty. A difference isI don’t feel guilt.I feelI’m not alone.I feelmore aware ofhow I teachhow my opinionscan affect people. I guesswe are the oneswho must makethe change. I feelsomewhat relieved bywhat today’s lecturer said.“If you’re willingto step outfrom behind fencesto engage meaningfullywith Indigenous communitiesit will not be difficult.” I believethe 8-ways frameworkthe unit of workprovide authentic experiencesare perfect avenuesshape pedagogical practicesI believemy job isto embrace remembrancemake this happenmake sure it stays. I willtake away frameworkssupport Indigenous studentsalongside Indigenous teacherslearn from themconsult with communityimprove my teaching. In these students’ words is an assumed responsibility to incorporate Indigenous knowledges and perspectives into their work as teachers. To wish representations of Indigenous peoples and knowledges present in the classroom is one way in which the becoming-teachers are making themselves present. Even a student who had written that she still didn’t feel completely equipped with pedagogical tools still felt “motivated” to introduce “political issues into Australia’s current system”.Not all students wrote of such presence. One student wrote of feeling left “disappointed”, “out of pocket”, “judged” – that the subject had “just ‘ticked the box’” (a phrase used by a second student as well). Another student wrote a short reflection that scratched the surface of the Apology¹, noting that “sorry is something so easy to say”. It is the mixture of these responses which reminds us as researchers and educators that it is easy to write a sense of presence as a projection into the future into an assessment task for a university subject. Time is another other, and the future can never be grasped, can never truly be known (Levinas, Reader). It is always what is coming, for we can only ever experience the present. These final entries by the students claim a future that they cannot know. This is not to suggest that the words written—the I wills and I believes which roll so quickly off the pen—are not meaningful or meant. Rather, responsibility is deferred to the future. This is not just a responsibility for their future teaching. Deferral to the future can also be a way to ease one’s self of the burden of feeling bad about the social injustices which students observe. As Rose (17) writes,The vision of a future which will transcend the past, a future in which current contradictions and current suffering will be left behind enables us to understand ourselves in an imaginary state of future achievement … enables us to turn our backs on current social facts of pain, damage, destruction and despair which exist in the present, but which we will only acknowledge as our past.The pre-service teachers’ reflective writing presents us with a paradox. As they shift away from the epistemological violence of claiming to know Indigenous others from outside positions, another type of violence manifests: claiming a future which can transcend the past just as they defer responsibility within the present. The deferral is in itself an act of violence. What types, then, of presence—a sense of responsibility—can students-as-becoming-professionals demonstrate?ConclusionRose’s words ask us as researchers and educators to consider what it might mean to “do” ethical practice in the “here and now”. When teachers claim that more knowledge about Indigenous peoples will lead to better practice, they negate the epistemological violence of bringing Indigeneity into a Western order of knowledge. Yet even as pre-service teachers’ frameworks shift toward a sense of responsibility for working with Indigenous students, families, and communities—a sense of presence—they are caught in a necessary but problematic moment of deferral to future praxis. A future orientation enables the deflection of responsibility, focusing on what the pre-service teachers might do in the future when they have their own classrooms, but turning their backs on a lack of action in the present. Such a complexity reveals the paradox of assessing learnings for both researchers and university educators. Pre-service teachers—visitors in placement classrooms and students in universities—are always writing and projecting skill towards the future. As educators, we continually ask for students to demonstrate how they will change their future work in a time yet to come. Yet when pre-service teachers undertake placements, their agency to enact difference as becoming-teachers is limited by the totality of the current school programs in which they find themselves. A reflective learning journal, as assessment directed at projecting their future work as teachers, does not enable or ask for a change in the here and now. We must continue to engage in such complexities in considering the potential of epistemological violence as both researchers and educators. Engaging with philosophy is one way to think about what we do (Kameniar et al.) in Indigenous education, a complex field underpinned by violent historical legacies and decades of discursive policy and one where the majority of the workforce is non-Indigenous and working with ideas outside of their own experiences of being. To remember that we are not alone in the world is to stay present with this complexity.ReferencesAustralian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority. “Cross-Curriculum Priorities.” Australian Curriculum. Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority, n.d. 23 Apr. 2020 <https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/cross-curriculum-priorities/­>.———. “Science.” Australian Curriculum. 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Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics of Decolonisation. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2004.Verran, Helen. “Knowledge Systems of Aboriginal Australians: Questions and Answers Arising in a Databasing Project.” Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Ed. Helaine Selin. New York: Springer, 2008. 1171-1177.Note1. The Apology refers to a motion moved in the Federal Parliament by the 2008 Prime Minister. The motion, seconded by the Leader of the Opposition, was an official apology to members of the Stolen Generations, Indigenous peoples who had been removed from their families by the state. A bill to establish a compensation fund as reparations was not passed (Burns).

In this paper we explore the rise of anti-gambling apps in the context of the massive expansion of gambling in new spheres of life (online and offline) and an acceleration in strategies of anticipatory and individualised management of harm caused by gambling. These apps, and the techniques and forms of labour they demand, are examples of and a mechanism through which a mode of governance premised on ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ is articulated and put into practice. To support this argument, we explore two government initiatives in the Australian context. Quit Pokies, a mobile app project between the Moreland City Council, North East Primary Care Partnership and the Victorian Local Governance Association, is an example of an emerging service paradigm of ‘self-care’ that uses online and mobile platforms with geo-location to deliver real time health and support interventions. A similar mobile app, Gambling Terminator, was launched by the NSW government in late 2012. Both apps work on the premise that interrupting a gaming session through a trigger, described by Quit Pokies’ creator as a “tap on the shoulder” provides gamblers the opportunity to take a reflexive stance and cut short their gambling practice in the course of play. We critically examine these apps as self-disciplining techniques of contemporary neo-liberalism directed towards anticipating and reducing the personal harm and social risk associated with gambling. We analyse the material and discursive elements, and new forms of user labour, through which this consumable media is framed and assembled. We argue that understanding the role of these apps, and mobile media more generally, in generating new techniques and technologies of the self, is important for identifying emerging modes of governance and their implications at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of cultural normalisation in online and offline environments. The Australian context is particularly germane for the way gambling permeates everyday spaces of sociality and leisure, and the potential of gambling interventions to interrupt and re-configure these spaces and institute a new kind of subject-state relation. Gambling in Australia Though a global phenomenon, the growth and expansion of gambling manifests distinctly in Australia because of its long cultural and historical attachment to games of chance. Australians are among the biggest betters and losers in the world (Ziolkowski), mainly on Electronic Gaming Machines (EGM) or pokies. As of 2013, according to The World Count of Gaming Machine (Ziolkowski), there were 198,150 EGMs in the country, of which 197,274 were slot machines, with the rest being electronic table games of roulette, blackjack and poker. There are 118 persons per machine in Australia. New South Wales is the jurisdiction with most EGMs (95,799), followed by Queensland (46,680) and Victoria (28,758) (Ziolkowski). Gambling is significant in Australian cultural history and average Australian households spend at least some money on different forms of gambling, from pokies to scratch cards, every year (Worthington et al.). In 1985, long-time gambling researcher Geoffrey Caldwell stated thatAustralians seem to take a pride in the belief that we are a nation of gamblers. Thus we do not appear to be ashamed of our gambling instincts, habits and practices. Gambling is regarded by most Australians as a normal, everyday practice in contrast to the view that gambling is a sinful activity which weakens the moral fibre of the individual and the community. (Caldwell 18) The omnipresence of gambling opportunities in most Australian states has been further facilitated by the availability of online and mobile gambling and gambling-like spaces. Social casino apps, for instance, are widely popular in Australia. The slots social casino app Slotomania was the most downloaded product in the iTunes store in 2012 (Metherell). In response to the high rate of different forms of gambling in Australia, a range of disparate interest groups have identified the expansion of gambling as a concerning trend. Health researchers have pointed out that online gamblers have a higher risk of experiencing problems with gambling (at 30%) compared to 15% in offline bettors (Hastings). The incidence of gambling problems is also disproportionately high in specific vulnerable demographics, including university students (Cervini), young adults prone to substance abuse problems (Hayatbakhsh et al.), migrants (Tanasornnarong et al.; Scull & Woolcock; Ohtsuka & Ohtsuka), pensioners (Hing & Breen), female players (Lee), Aboriginal communities (Young et al.; McMillen & Donnelly) and individuals experiencing homelessness (Holsworth et al.). While there is general recognition of the personal and public health impacts of gambling in Australia, there is a contradiction in the approach to gambling at a governance level. On one hand, its expansion is promoted and even encouraged by the federal and state governments, as gambling is an enormous source of revenue, as evidenced, for example, by the construction of the new Crown casino in Barangaroo in Sydney (Markham & Young). Campaigns trying to limit the use of poker machines, which are associated with concerns over problem gambling and addiction, are deemed by the gambling lobby as un-Australian. Paradoxically, efforts to restrict gambling or control gambling winnings have also been described as un-Australian, such as in the Australian Taxation Office’s campaign against MONA’s founder, David Walsh, whose immense art collection was acquired with the funds from a gambling scheme (Global Mail). On the other hand, people experiencing problems with gambling are often categorised as addicts and the ultimate blame (and responsibility) is attributed to the individual. In Australia, attitudes towards people who are arguably addicted to gambling are different than those towards individuals afflicted by alcohol or drug abuse (Jean). While “Australians tend to be sympathetic towards people with alcohol and other drug addictions who seek help,” unless it is seen as one of the more socially acceptable forms of occasional, controlled gambling (such as sports betting, gambling on the Melbourne Cup or celebrating ANZAC Day with Two-Up), gambling is framed as an individual “problem” and “moral failing” (Jean). The expansion of gambling is the backdrop to another development in health care and public health discourse, which have for some time now been devoted to the ideal of what Lupton has called the “digitally engaged patient” (Lupton). Technologies are central to the delivery of this model of health service provision that puts the patient at the centre of, and responsible for, their own health and medical care. Lupton has pointed out how this discourse, while appearing new, is in fact the latest version of the 1970s emphasis on the ‘patient as consumer’, an idea given an extra injection by the massive development and availability of digital and interactive web-based and mobile platforms, many of these directed towards the provision of health and health-related information and services. What this means for patients is that, rather than relying solely on professional medical expertise and care, the patient is encouraged to take on some of this medical/health work to conduct practices of ‘self-care’ (Lupton). The Discourse of ‘Self-Management’ and ‘Self-Care’ The model of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’ by ‘empowering’ digital technology has now become a dominant discourse within health and medicine, and is increasingly deployed across a range of related sectors such as welfare services. In recent research conducted on homelessness and mobile media, for example, government department staff involved in the reform of welfare services referred to ‘self-management’ as the new service paradigm that underpins their digital reform strategy. Echoing ideas and language similar to the “digitally engaged patient”, customers of Centrelink, Medicare and other ‘human services’ are being encouraged (through planned strategic initiatives aimed at shifting targeted customer groups online) to transact with government services digitally and manage their own personal profiles and health information. One departmental staff member described this in terms of an “opportunity cost”, the savings in time otherwise spent standing in long queues in service centres (Humphry). Rather than view these examples as isolated incidents taking place within or across sectors or disciplines, these are better understood as features of an emerging ‘discursive formation’ , a term Foucault used to describe the way in which particular institutions and/or the state establish a regime of truth, or an accepted social reality and which gives definition to a new historical episteme and subject: in this case that of the self-disciplined and “digitally engaged medical/health patient”. As Foucault explained, once this subject has become fully integrated into and across the social field, it is no longer easy to excavate, since it lies below the surface of articulation and is held together through everyday actions, habits and institutional routines and techniques that appear to be universal, necessary and/normal. The way in which this citizen subject becomes a universal model and norm, however, is not a straightforward or linear story and since we are in the midst of its rise, is not a story with a foretold conclusion. Nevertheless, across a range of different fields of governance: medicine; health and welfare, we can see signs of this emerging figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged patient” constituted from a range of different techniques and practices of self-governance. In Australia, this figure is at the centre of a concerted strategy of service digitisation involving a number of cross sector initiatives such as Australia’s National EHealth Strategy (2008), the National Digital Economy Strategy (2011) and the Australian Public Service Mobile Roadmap (2013). This figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged” patient, aligns well and is entirely compatible with neo-liberal formulations of the individual and the reduced role of the state as a provider of welfare and care. Berry refers to Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as outlined in his lectures to the College de France as a “particular form of post-welfare state politics in which the state essentially outsources the responsibility of the ‘well-being' of the population” (65). In the case of gambling, the neoliberal defined state enables the wedding of two seemingly contradictory stances: promoting gambling as a major source of revenue and capitalisation on the one hand, and identifying and treating gambling addiction as an individual pursuit and potential risk on the other. Risk avoidance strategies are focused on particular groups of people who are targeted for self-treatment to avoid the harm of gambling addiction, which is similarly framed as individual rather than socially and systematically produced. What unites and makes possible this alignment of neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” is first and foremost, the construction of a subject in a chronic state of ill health. This figure is positioned as terminal from the start. They are ‘sick’, a ‘patient’, an ‘addict’: in need of immediate and continuous treatment. Secondly, this neoliberal patient/addict is enabled (we could even go so far as to say ‘empowered’) by digital technology, especially smartphones and the apps available through these devices in the form of a myriad of applications for intervening and treating ones afflictions. These apps range fromself-tracking programs such as mood regulators through to social media interventions. Anti-Pokie Apps and the Neoliberal Gambler We now turn to two examples which illustrate this alignment between neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” in relation to gambling. Anti-gambling apps function to both replace or ‘take the place’ of institutions and individuals actively involved in the treatment of problem gambling and re-engineer this service through the logics of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’. Here, we depart somewhat from Foucault’s model of disciplinary power summed up in the institution (with the prison exemplifying this disciplinary logic) and move towards Deleuze’s understanding of power as exerted by the State not through enclosures but through diffuse and rhizomatic information flows and technologies (Deleuze). At the same time, we retain Foucault’s attention to the role and agency of the user in this power-dynamic, identifiable in the technics of self-regulation and in his ideas on governmentality. We now turn to analyse these apps more closely, and explore the way in which these articulate and perform these disciplinary logics. The app Quit Pokies was a joint venture of the North East Primary Care Partnership, the Victorian Local Governance Association and the Moreland City Council, launched in early 2014. The idea of the rational, self-reflexive and agentic user is evident in the description of the app by app developer Susan Rennie who described it this way: What they need is for someone to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to get out of there… I thought the phone could be that tap on the shoulder. The “tap on the shoulder” feature uses geolocation and works by emitting a sound alert when the user enters a gaming venue. It also provides information about each user’s losses at that venue. This “tap on the shoulder” is both an alert and a reprimand from past gambling sessions. Through the Responsible Gambling Fund, the NSW government also launched an anti-pokie app in 2013, Gambling Terminator, including a similar feature. The app runs on Apple and Android smartphone platforms, and when a person is inside a gambling venue in New South Wales it: sends reminder messages that interrupt gaming-machine play and gives you a chance to re-think your choices. It also provides instant access to live phone and online counselling services which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Google Play Store) Yet an approach that tries to prevent harm by anticipating the harm that will come from gambling at the point of entering a venue, also eliminates the chance of potential negotiations and encounters a user might have during a visit to the pub and how this experience will unfold. It reduces the “tap on the shoulder”, which may involve a far wider set of interactions and affects, to a software operation and it frames the pub or the club (which under some conditions functions as hubs for socialization and community building) as dangerous places that should be avoided. This has the potential to lead to further stigmatisation of gamblers, their isolation and their exclusion from everyday spaces. Moreland Mayor, Councillor Tapinos captures the implicit framing of self-care as a private act in his explanation of the app as a method for problem gamblers to avoid being stigmatised by, for example, publicly attending group meetings. Yet, curiously, the app has the potential to create a new kind of public stigmatisation through potentially drawing other peoples’ attention to users’ gambling play (as the alarm is triggered) generating embarrassment and humiliation at being “caught out” in an act framed as aberrant and literally, “alarming”. Both Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator require their users to perform ‘acts’ of physical and affective labour aimed at behaviour change and developing the skills of self-control. After downloading Quit Pokies on the iPhone and launching the app, the user is presented an initial request: “Before you set up this app. please write a list of the pokies venues that you regularly use because the app will ask you to identify these venues so it can send you alerts if you spend time in these locations. It will also use your set up location to identify other venues you might use so we recommend that you set up the App in the location where you spend most time. Congratulation on choosing Quit Pokies.”Self-performed processes include installation, setting up, updating the app software, programming in gambling venues to be detected by the smartphone’s inbuilt GPS, monitoring and responding to the program’s alerts and engaging in alternate “legitimate” forms of leisure such as going to the movies or the library, having coffee with a friend or browsing Facebook. These self-performed labours can be understood as ‘technologies of the self’, a term used by Foucault to describe the way in which social members are obliged to regulate and police their ‘selves’ through a range of different techniques. While Foucault traces the origins of ‘technologies of the self’ to the Greco-Roman texts with their emphasis on “care of oneself” as one of the duties of citizenry, he notes the shift to “self-knowledge” under Christianity around the 8th century, where it became bound up in ideals of self-renunciation and truth. Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator may signal a recuperation of the ideal of self-care, over confession and disclosure. These apps institute a set of bodily activities and obligations directed to the user’s health and wellbeing, aided through activities of self-examination such as charting your recovery through a Recovery Diary and implementing a number of suggested “Strategies for Change” such as “writing a list” and “learning about ways to manage your money better”. Writing is central to the acts of self-examination. As Jeremy Prangnell, gambling counsellor from Mission Australia for Wollongong and Shellharbour regions explained the app is “like an electronic diary, which is a really common tool for people who are trying to change their behaviour” (Thompson). The labours required by users are also implicated in the functionality and performance of the platform itself suggesting the way in which ‘technologies of the self’ simultaneously function as a form of platform work: user labour that supports and sustains the operation of digital systems and is central to the performance and continuation of digital capitalism in general (Humphry, Demanding Media). In addition to the acts of labour performed on the self and platform, bodies are themselves potentially mobilised (and put into new circuits of consumption and production), as a result of triggers to nudge users away from gambling venues, towards a range of other cultural practices in alternative social spaces considered to be more legitimate.Conclusion Whether or not these technological interventions are effective or successful is yet to be tested. Indeed, the lack of recent activity in the community forums and preponderance of issues reported on installation and use suggests otherwise, pointing to a need for more empirical research into these developments. Regardless, what we’ve tried to identify is the way in which apps such as these embody a new kind of subject-state relation that emphasises self-control of gambling harm and hastens the divestment of institutional and social responsibility at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of expansion in many respects backed by and sanctioned by the state. Patterns of smartphone take up in the mainstream population and the rise of the so called ‘mobile only population’ (ACMA) provide support for this new subject and service paradigm and are often cited as the rationale for digital service reform (APSMR). Media convergence feeds into these dynamics: service delivery becomes the new frontier for the merging of previously separate media distribution systems (Dwyer). Letters, customer service centres, face-to-face meetings and web sites, are combined and in some instances replaced, with online and mobile media platforms, accessible from multiple and mobile devices. These changes are not, however, simply the migration of services to a digital medium with little effective change to the service itself. Health and medical services are re-invented through their technological re-assemblage, bringing into play new meanings, practices and negotiations among the state, industry and neoliberal subjects (in the case of problem gambling apps, a new subjectivity, the ‘neoliberal addict’). These new assemblages are as much about bringing forth a new kind of subject and mode of governance, as they are a solution to problem gambling. This figure of the self-treating “gambler addict” can be seen to be a template for, and prototype of, a more generalised and universalised self-governing citizen: one that no longer needs or makes demands on the state but who can help themselves and manage their own harm. Paradoxically, there is the potential for new risks and harms to the very same users that accompanies this shift: their outright exclusion as a result of deprivation from basic and assumed digital access and literacy, the further stigmatisation of gamblers, the elimination of opportunities for proximal support and their exclusion from everyday spaces. References Albarrán-Torres, César. “Gambling-Machines and the Automation of Desire.” Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 5.1 (2013). Australian Communications and Media Authority. “Australians Cut the Cord.” Research Snapshots. Sydney: ACMA (2013) Berry, David. Critical Theory and the Digital. Broadway, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 Berry, David. Stunlaw: A Critical Review of Politics, Arts and Technology. 2012. ‹http://stunlaw.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/code-foucault-and-neoliberal.html›. Caldwell, G. “Some Historical and Sociological Characteristics of Australian Gambling.” Gambling in Australia. Eds. G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson, and L. Sylan. Sydney: Croom Helm Australia, 1985. 18-27. Cervini, E. “High Stakes for Gambling Students.” The Age 8 Nov. 2013. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/high-stakes-for-gambling-students-20131108-2x5cl.html›. Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October (1992): 3-7. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988 Hastings, E. “Online Gamblers More at Risk of Addiction.” Herald Sun 13 Oct. 2013. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/online-gamblers-more-at-risk-of-addiction/story-fni0fiyv-1226739184629#!›.Hayatbakhsh, Mohammad R., et al. "Young Adults' Gambling and Its Association with Mental Health and Substance Use Problems." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 36.2 (2012): 160-166. Hing, Nerilee, and Helen Breen. "A Profile of Gaming Machine Players in Clubs in Sydney, Australia." Journal of Gambling Studies 18.2 (2002): 185-205. Holdsworth, Louise, Margaret Tiyce, and Nerilee Hing. "Exploring the Relationship between Problem Gambling and Homelessness: Becoming and Being Homeless." Gambling Research 23.2 (2012): 39. Humphry, Justine. “Demanding Media: Platform Work and the Shaping of Work and Play.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 10.2 (2013): 1-13. Humphry, Justine. “Homeless and Connected: Mobile Phones and the Internet in the Lives of Homeless Australians.” Australian Communications Consumer Action Network. Sep. 2014. ‹https://www.accan.org.au/grants/completed-grants/619-homeless-and-connected›.Lee, Timothy Jeonglyeol. "Distinctive Features of the Australian Gambling Industry and Problems Faced by Australian Women Gamblers." Tourism Analysis 14.6 (2009): 867-876. Lupton, D. “The Digitally Engaged Patient: Self-Monitoring and Self-Care in the Digital Health Era.” Social Theory & Health 11.3 (2013): 256-70. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Packer’s Barangaroo Casino and the Inevitability of Pokies.” The Conversation 9 July 2013. ‹http://theconversation.com/packers-barangaroo-casino-and-the-inevitability-of-pokies-15892›. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Who Wins from ‘Big Gambling’ in Australia?” The Conversation 6 Mar. 2014. ‹http://theconversation.com/who-wins-from-big-gambling-in-australia-22930›.McMillen, Jan, and Katie Donnelly. "Gambling in Australian Indigenous Communities: The State of Play." The Australian Journal of Social Issues 43.3 (2008): 397. Ohtsuka, Keis, and Thai Ohtsuka. “Vietnamese Australian Gamblers’ Views on Luck and Winning: Universal versus Culture-Specific Schemas.” Asian Journal of Gambling Issues and Public Health 1.1 (2010): 34-46. Scull, Sue, Geoffrey Woolcock. “Problem Gambling in Non-English Speaking Background Communities in Queensland, Australia: A Qualitative Exploration.” International Gambling Studies 5.1 (2005): 29-44. Tanasornnarong, Nattaporn, Alun Jackson, and Shane Thomas. “Gambling among Young Thai People in Melbourne, Australia: An Exploratory Study.” International Gambling Studies 4.2 (2004): 189-203. Thompson, Angela, “Live Gambling Odds Tipped for the Chop.” Illawarra Mercury 22 May 2013: 6. Metherell, Mark. “Virtual Pokie App a Hit - But ‘Not Gambling.’” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2013. ‹http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/virtual-pokie-app-a-hit--but-not-gambling-20130112-2cmev.html#ixzz2QVlsCJs1›. Worthington, Andrew, et al. "Gambling Participation in Australia: Findings from the National Household Expenditure Survey." Review of Economics of the Household 5.2 (2007): 209-221. Young, Martin, et al. "The Changing Landscape of Indigenous Gambling in Northern Australia: Current Knowledge and Future Directions." International Gambling Studies 7.3 (2007): 327-343. Ziolkowski, S. “The World Count of Gaming Machines 2013.” Gaming Technologies Association, 2014. ‹http://www.gamingta.com/pdf/World_Count_2014.pdf›.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

One of the first challenges faced by new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was what to do with the former government’s controversial citizenship test. While a quick evaluation of the test shows that 93 percent of those who have sat it ‘passed’ (Hoare), most media controversy has focussed less on the validity of such a test than whether questions relating to Australian cricketing legend, Don Bradman, are appropriate (Hawley). While the citizenship test seems nothing more that a crude and populist measure imposed by the former Howard government in its ongoing nationalistic agenda, which included paying schools to raise the Australian flag (“PM Unfurls Flag”), its imposition seems a timely reminder of the challenge of understanding citizenship today. For as the demographic structures around us continue to change, so must our understandings of ‘citizenship’. More importantly, this fluid understanding of citizenship is not limited to academics, and policy-makers, but new technologies, the processes of globalisation including a globalised media, changing demographic patterns including migration, as well as environmental challenges that place pressure on limited resources is altering the citizens understanding of their own role as well as those around them. This paper aims to sketch out a proposed new research agenda that seeks to investigate this fluid and heterogenous nature of citizenship. The focus of the research has so far been Sydney and is enveloped by a broader aim of promoting an increased level of citizen engagement both within formal and informal political structures. I begin by sketching the complex nature of Sydney before presenting some initial research findings. Sydney – A Complex City The so-called ‘emerald city’ of Sydney has been described in many ways: from a ‘global’ city (Fagan, Dowling and Longdale 1) to an ‘angry’ city (Price 16). Sarah Price’s investigative article included research from the University of Western Sydney’s Centre of Culture Research, the Bureau of Crime Statistics and interviews with Tony Grabs, the director of trauma at St Vincent’s Hospital in inner city Darlinghurst. Price found that both injuries from alcohol and drug-related violence had risen dramatically over the last few years and seemed to be driven by increasing frustrations of a city that is perceived to be lacking appropriate infrastructure and rising levels of personal and household debt. Sydney’s famous harbour and postcard landmarks are surrounded by places of controversy and poverty, with residents of very backgrounds living in close proximity: often harmoniously and sometimes less so. According to recent research by Griffith University’s Urban Research Program, the city is becoming increasingly polarised, with the wealthiest enjoying high levels of access to amenities while other sections of the population experiencing increasing deprivation (Frew 7). Sydney is often segmented into different regions: the growth corridors of the western suburbs which include the ‘Aspirational class’; the affluent eastern suburb; the southern beachside suburbs surrounding Cronulla affectionately known by local residents as ‘the Shire’, and so on. This, however, hides that fact that these areas are themselves complex and heterogenous in character (Frew 7). As a result, the many clichés associated with such segments lead to an over simplification of regional characteristics. The ‘growth corridors’ of Western Sydney, for example, have, in recent times, become a focal point of political and social commentary. From the rise of the ‘Aspirational’ voter (Anderson), seen to be a key ‘powerbroker’ in federal and state politics, to growing levels of disenfranchised young people, this region is multifaceted and should not be simplified. These areas often see large-scale, private housing estates; what Brendan Gleeson describes as ‘privatopias’, situated next to rising levels of homelessness (“What’s Driving”): a powerful and concerning image that should not escape our attention. (Chamberlain and Mackenzie pay due attention to the issue in Homeless Careers.) It is also home to a growing immigrant population who often arrive as business migrants and as well as a rising refugee population traumatised by war and displacement (Collins 1). These growth corridors then, seem to simultaneously capture both the ambitions and the fears of Sydney. That is, they are seen as both areas of potential economic boom as well as social stress and potential conflict (Gleeson 89). One way to comprehend the complexity associated with such diversity and change is to reflect on the proximity of the twin suburbs of Macquarie Links and Macquarie Fields situated in Sydney’s south-western suburbs. Separated by the clichéd ‘railway tracks’, one is home to the growing Aspirational class while the other continues to be plagued by the stigma of being, what David Burchell describes as, a ‘dysfunctional dumping ground’ whose plight became national headlines during the riots in 2005. The riots were sparked after a police chase involving a stolen car led to a crash and the death of a 17 year-old and 19 year-old passengers. Residents blamed police for the deaths and the subsequent riots lasted for four nights – involving 150 teenagers clashing with New South Wales Police. The dysfunction, Burchell notes is seen in crime statistics that include 114 stolen cars, 227 burglaries, 457 cases of property damage and 279 assaults – all in 2005 alone. Interestingly, both these populations are surrounded by exclusionary boundaries: one because of the financial demands to enter the ‘Links’ estate, and the other because of the self-imposed exclusion. Such disparities not only provide challenges for policy makers generally, but also have important implications on the attitudes that citizens’ experience towards their relationship with each other as well as the civic institutions that are meant to represent them. This is particular the case if civic institutions are seen to either neglect or favour certain groups. This, in part, has given rise to what I describe here as a ‘citizenship surplus’ as well as a ‘citizenship deficit’. Research Agenda: Investigating Citizenship Surpluses and Deficits This changing city has meant that there has also been a change in the way that different groups interact with, and perceive, civic bodies. As noted, my initial research shows that this has led to the emergence of both citizenship surpluses and deficits. Though the concept of a ‘citizen deficits and surpluses’ have not emerged within the broader literature, there is a wide range of literature that discusses how some sections of the population lack of access to democratic processes. There are three broad areas of research that have emerged relevant here: citizenship and young people (see Arvanitakis; Dee); citizenship and globalisation (see Della Porta; Pusey); and citizenship and immigration (see Baldassar et al.; Gow). While a discussion of each of these research areas is beyond the scope of this paper, a regular theme is the emergence of a ‘democratic deficit’ (Chari et al. 422). Dee, for example, looks at how there exist unequal relationships between local and central governments, young people, communities and property developers in relation to space. Dee argues that this shapes social policy in a range of settings and contexts including their relationship with broader civic institutions and understandings of citizenship. Dee finds that claims for land use that involve young people rarely succeed and there is limited, if any, recourse to civic institutions. As such, we see a democratic deficit emerge because the various civic institutions involved fail in meeting their obligations to citizens. In addition, a great deal of work has emerged that investigates attempts to re-engage citizens through mechanisms to promote citizenship education and a more active citizenship which has also been accompanied by government programs with the same goals (See for example the Western Australian government’s ‘Citizenscape’ program ). For example Hahn (231) undertakes a comparative study of civic education in six countries (including Australia) and the policies and practices with respect to citizenship education and how to promote citizen activism. The results are positive, though the research was undertaken before the tumultuous events of the terrorist attacks in New York, the emergence of the ‘war on terror’ and the rise of ‘Muslim-phobia’. A gap rises, however, within the Australian literature when we consider both the fluid and heterogenous nature of citizenship. That is, how do we understand the relationship between these diverse groups living within such proximity to each other overlayed by changing migration patterns, ongoing globalised processes and changing political environments as well as their relations to civic institutions? Further, how does this influence the way individuals perceive their rights, expectations and responsibilities to the state? Given this, I believe that there is a need to understand citizenship as a fluid and heterogenous phenomenon that can be in surplus, deficit, progressive and reactionary. When discussing citizenship I am interested in how people perceive both their rights and responsibilities to civic institutions as well as to the residents around them. A second, obviously related, area of interest is ‘civic engagement’: that is, “the activities of people in the various organisations and associations that make up what scholars call ‘civil society’” (Portney and Leary 4). Before describing these categories in more detail, I would like to briefly outline the methodological processes employed thus far. Much of the research to this point is based on a combination of established literature, my informal discussions with citizen groups and my observations as ‘an activist.’ That is, over the last few years I have worked with a broad cross section of community-based organisations as well as specific individuals that have attempted to confront perceived injustices. I have undertaken this work as both an activist – with organisations such as Aid/Watch and Oxfam Australia – as well as an academic invited to share my research. This work has involved designing and implementing policy and advocacy strategies including media and public education programs. All interactions begin with a detailed discussion of the aims, resources, abilities and knowledge of the groups involved, followed by workshopping campaigning strategies. This has led to the publication of an ‘activist handbook’ titled ‘From Sitting on the Couch to Changing the World’, which is used to both draft the campaign aims as well as design a systematic strategy. (The booklet, which is currently being re-drafted, is published by Oxfam Australia and registered under a creative commons licence. For those interested, copies are available by emailing j.arvanitakis (at) uws.edu.au.) Much research is also sourced from direct feedback given by participants in reviewing the workshops and strategies The aim of tis paper then, is to sketch out the initial findings as well as an agenda for more formalised research. The initial findings have identified the heterogenous nature of citizenship that I have separated into four ‘citizenship spaces.’ The term space is used because these are not stable groupings as many quickly move between the areas identified as both the structures and personal situations change. 1. Marginalisation and Citizenship Deficit The first category is a citizenship deficit brought on by a sense of marginalisation. This is determined by a belief that it is pointless to interact with civic institutions, as the result is always the same: people’s opinions and needs will be ignored. Or in the case of residents from areas such as Macquarie Fields, the relationship with civic institutions, including police, is antagonistic and best avoided (White par. 21). This means that there is no connection between the population and the civic institutions around them – there is no loyalty or belief that efforts to be involved in political and civic processes will be rewarded. Here groups sense that they do not have access to political avenues to be heard, represented or demand change. This is leading to an experience of disconnection from political processes. The result is both a sense of disengagement and disempowerment. One example here emerged in discussions with protesters around the proposed development of the former Australian Defence Industry (ADI) site in St Marys, an outer-western suburb of Sydney. The development, which was largely approved, was for a large-scale housing estate proposed on sensitive bushlands in a locality that resident’s note is under-serviced in terms of public space. (For details of these discussions, see http://www.adisite.org/.) Residents often took the attitude that whatever the desire of the local community, the development would go ahead regardless. Those who worked at information booths during the resident protests informed me that the attitude was one best summarised by: “Why bother, we always get stuffed around any way.” This was confirmed by my own discussions with local residents – even those who joined the resident action group. 2. Privatisation and Citizenship Deficit This citizenship deficit not only applies to the marginalised, however, for there are also much wealthier populations who also appear to experience a deficit that results from a lack of access to civic institutions. This tends to leads to a privatisation of decision-making and withdrawal from the public arena as well as democratic processes. Consequently, the residents in the pockets of wealth may not be acting as citizens but more like consumers – asserting themselves in terms of Castells’s ‘collective consumption’ (par. 25). This citizenship deficit is brought on by ongoing privatisation. That is, there is a belief that civic institutions (including government bodies) are unable or at least unwilling to service the local community. As a result there is a tendency to turn to private suppliers and believe that individualisation is the best way to manage the community. The result is that citizens feel no connection to the civic institutions around them, not because there is no desire, but there are no services. This group of citizens has often been described as the ‘Aspirationals’ and are most often found in the growth corridors of Sydney. There is no reason to believe that this group is this way because of choice – but rather a failure by government authorities to service their needs. This is confirmed by research undertaken as early as 1990 which found that the residents now labelled Aspirational, were demanding access to public infrastructure services including public schools, but have been neglected by different levels of government. (This was clearly stated by NSW Labor MP for Liverpool, Paul Lynch, who argued for such services as a way to ensure a functioning community particularly for Western Sydney; NSWPD 2001.) As a result there is a reliance on private schools, neighbourhoods, transport and so on. Any ‘why bother’ attitude is thus driven by a lack of evidence that civic institutions can or are not willing to meet their needs. There is a strong sense of local community – but this localisation limited to others in the same geographical location and similar lifestyle. 3. Citizenship Surplus – Empowered Not Engaged The third space of citizenship is based on a ‘surplus’ even if there is limited or no political engagement. This group has quite a lot in common with the ‘Aspirationals’ but may come from areas that are higher serviced by civic institutions: the choice not to engage is therefore voluntary. There is a strong push for self-sufficiency – believing that their social capital, wealth and status mean that they do not require the services of civic institutions. While not antagonistic towards such institutions, there is often a belief is that the services provided by the private sector are ultimately superior to public ones. Consequently, they feel empowered through their social background but are not engaged with civic institutions or the political process. Despite this, my initial research findings show that this group has a strong connection to decision-makers – both politicians and bureaucrats. This lack of engagement changes if there is a perceived injustice to their quality of life or their values system – and hence should not be dismissed as NIMBYs (not in my backyard). They believe they have the resources to mobilise and demand change. I believe that we see this group materialise in mobilisations around proposed developments that threaten the perceived quality of life of the local environment. One example brought to my attention was the rapid response of local residents to the proposed White City development near Sydney’s eastern suburbs that was to see tennis courts and public space replaced by residential and commercial buildings (Nicholls). As one resident informed me, she had never seen any political engagement by local residents previously – an engagement that was accompanied by a belief that the development would be stopped as well as a mobilisation of some impressive resources. Such mobilisations also occur when there is a perceived injustice. Examples of this group can be found in what Hugh Mackay (13) describes as ‘doctor’s wives’ (a term that I am not wholly comfortable with). Here we see the emergence of ‘Chilout’: Children out of Detention. This was an organisation whose membership was described to me as ‘north shore professionals’, drew heavily on those who believed the forced incarceration of young refugee children was an affront to their values system. 4. Insurgent Citizenship – Empowered and Engaged The final space is the insurgent citizen: that is, the citizen who is both engaged and empowered. This is a term borrowed from South Africa and the USA (Holston 1) – and it should be seen as having two, almost diametrically opposed, sides: progressive and reactionary. This group may not have access to a great deal of financial resources, but has high social capital and both a willingness and ability to engage in political processes. Consequently, there is a sense of empowerment and engagement with civic institutions. There is also a strong push for self-sufficiency – but this is encased in a belief that civic institutions have a responsibility to provide services to the public, and that some services are naturally better provided by the public sector. Despite this, there is often an antagonistic relationship with such institutions. From the progressive perspective, we see ‘activists’ promoting social justice issues (including students, academics, unionists and so on). Organisations such as A Just Australia are strongly supported by various student organisations, unions and other social justice and activist groups. From a reactionary perspective, we see the emergence of groups that take an anti-immigration stance (such as ‘anti-immigration’ groups including Australia First that draw both activists and have an established political party). (Information regarding ‘anti-refugee activists’ can be found at http://ausfirst.alphalink.com.au/ while the official website for the Australia First political part is at http://www.australiafirstparty.com.au/cms/.) One way to understand the relationship between these groups is through the engagement/empowered typology below. While a detailed discussion of the limitations of typologies is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to acknowledge that any typology is a simplification and generalisation of the arguments presented. Likewise, it is unlikely that any typology has the ability to cover all cases and situations. This typology can, however, be used to underscore the relational nature of citizenship. The purpose here is to highlight that there are relationships between the different citizenship spaces and individuals can move between groups and each cluster has significant internal variation. Key here is that this can frame future studies. Conclusion and Next Steps There is little doubt there is a relationship between attitudes to citizenship and the health of a democracy. In Australia, democracy is robust in some ways, but many feel disempowered, disengaged and some feel both – often believing they are remote from the workings of civic institutions. It would appear that for many, interest in the process of (formal) government is at an all-time low as reflected in declining membership of political parties (Jaensch et al. 58). Democracy is not a ‘once for ever’ achievement – it needs to be protected and promoted. To do this, we must ensure that there are avenues for representation for all. This point also highlights one of the fundamental flaws of the aforementioned citizenship test. According to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the test is designed to: help migrants integrate and maximise the opportunities available to them in Australia, and enable their full participation in the Australian community as citizens. (par. 4) Those designing the test have assumed that citizenship is both stable and, once achieved, automatically ensures representation. This paper directly challenges these assumptions and offers an alternative research agenda with the ultimate aim of promoting high levels of engagement and empowerment. References Anderson, A. “The Liberals Have Not Betrayed the Menzies Legacy.” Online Opinion 25 Oct. 2004. < http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2679 >. Arvanitakis, J. “Highly Affected, Rarely Considered: The International Youth Parliament Commission’s Report on the Impacts of Globalisation on Young People.” Sydney: Oxfam Australia, 2003. Baldassar, L., Z. Kamalkhani, and C. Lange. “Afghan Hazara Refugees in Australia: Constructing Australian Citizens.” Social Identities 13.1 (2007): 31-50. Burchell, D. “Dysfunctional Dumping Grounds.” The Australian 10 Feb. 2007. < http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21199266-28737,00.html >. Burnley, I.H. The Impact of Immigration in Australia: A Demographic Approach. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Castells, M. “European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy.” New Left Review I/204 (March-April 1994): 46-57. Chamberlain, C., and D. Mackenzie. Homeless Careers: Pathways in and out of Homelessness. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2002. Chari, R., J. Hogan, and G. Murphy. “Regulating Lobbyists: A Comparative Analysis of the United States, Canada, Germany and the European Union.” The Political Quarterly 78.3 (2007): 423-438. Collins, J. “Chinese Entrepreneurs: The Chinese Diaspora in Australia.” International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research 8.1/2 (2002): 113-133. Dee, M. “Young People, Citizenship and Public Space.” International Sociological Association Conference Paper, Brisbane, 2002. Della Porta, D. “Globalisations and Democracy.” Democratizations 12.5 (2005): 668-685. Fagan, B., R. Dowling, and J. Longdale. “Suburbs in the ‘Global City’: Sydney since the Mid 1990s.” State of Australian cities conference. Parramatta, 2003. Frew, W. “And the Most Polarised City Is…” Sydney Morning Herald 16-17 Feb. 2008: 7. Gleeson, B. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2006. Gleeson, B. “What’s Driving Suburban Australia?” Australian Policy Online 15 Jan. 2004. < http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=00558 >. Gow, G. “Rubbing Shoulders in the Global City: Refugees, Citizenship and Multicultural Alliances in Fairfield, Sydney.” Ethnicities 5.3 (2005): 386-405. Hahn, C. L. “Citizenship Education: An Empirical Study of Policy, Practices and Outcomes.” Oxford Review of Education 25.1/2 (1999): 231-250. Hawley, S. “Sir Donald Bradman Likely to Be Dumped from Citizenship Test.” ABC Local Radio Online. 29 Jan. 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2148383.htm >. Hoare, D. “Bradman’s Spot in Citizenship Test under Scrutiny.” ABC Local Radio online. 29 Jan. 2008. < http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2149325.htm >. Holston, J. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. California: Cloth, 2007. Jaensch, D., P. Brent, and B. Bowden. “Australian Political Parties in the Spotlight.” Democratic Audit of Australia Report 4. Australian National University, 2004. Mackay, H. “Sleepers Awoke from Slumber of Indifference.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Nov. 2007: 13. NSWPD – New South Wales Parliamentary Debates. “South Western Sydney Banking Services.” Legislative Assembly Hansard, 52nd NSW Parliament, 19 Sep. 2001. Portney, K.E., and L. O’Leary. Civic and Political Engagement of America’s Youth: National Survey of Civic and Political Engagement of Young People. Medford, MA: Tisch College, Tufts University, 2007. Price, S. “Stress and Debt Make Sydney a Violent City.” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2008: 16. Pusey, M. The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. White, R. “Swarming and the Social Dynamics of Group Violence.” Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 326 (Oct. 2006). < http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi2/tandi326t.html >. Wolfe, P. “Race and Citizenship.” Magazine of History 18.5 (2004): 66-72.

Introduction One of the first challenges faced by new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was what to do with the former government’s controversial citizenship test. While a quick evaluation of the test shows that 93 percent of those who have sat it ‘passed’ (Hoare), most media controversy has focussed less on the validity of such a test than whether questions relating to Australian cricketing legend, Don Bradman, are appropriate (Hawley). While the citizenship test seems nothing more that a crude and populist measure imposed by the former Howard government in its ongoing nationalistic agenda, which included paying schools to raise the Australian flag (“PM Unfurls Flag”), its imposition seems a timely reminder of the challenge of understanding citizenship today. For as the demographic structures around us continue to change, so must our understandings of ‘citizenship’. More importantly, this fluid understanding of citizenship is not limited to academics, and policy-makers, but new technologies, the processes of globalisation including a globalised media, changing demographic patterns including migration, as well as environmental challenges that place pressure on limited resources is altering the citizens understanding of their own role as well as those around them. This paper aims to sketch out a proposed new research agenda that seeks to investigate this fluid and heterogenous nature of citizenship. The focus of the research has so far been Sydney and is enveloped by a broader aim of promoting an increased level of citizen engagement both within formal and informal political structures. I begin by sketching the complex nature of Sydney before presenting some initial research findings. Sydney – A Complex City The so-called ‘emerald city’ of Sydney has been described in many ways: from a ‘global’ city (Fagan, Dowling and Longdale 1) to an ‘angry’ city (Price 16). Sarah Price’s investigative article included research from the University of Western Sydney’s Centre of Culture Research, the Bureau of Crime Statistics and interviews with Tony Grabs, the director of trauma at St Vincent’s Hospital in inner city Darlinghurst. Price found that both injuries from alcohol and drug-related violence had risen dramatically over the last few years and seemed to be driven by increasing frustrations of a city that is perceived to be lacking appropriate infrastructure and rising levels of personal and household debt. Sydney’s famous harbour and postcard landmarks are surrounded by places of controversy and poverty, with residents of very backgrounds living in close proximity: often harmoniously and sometimes less so. According to recent research by Griffith University’s Urban Research Program, the city is becoming increasingly polarised, with the wealthiest enjoying high levels of access to amenities while other sections of the population experiencing increasing deprivation (Frew 7). Sydney, is often segmented into different regions: the growth corridors of the western suburbs which include the ‘Aspirational class’; the affluent eastern suburb; the southern beachside suburbs surrounding Cronulla affectionately known by local residents as ‘the Shire’, and so on. This, however, hides that fact that these areas are themselves complex and heterogenous in character (Frew 7). As a result, the many clichés associated with such segments lead to an over simplification of regional characteristics. The ‘growth corridors’ of Western Sydney, for example, have, in recent times, become a focal point of political and social commentary. From the rise of the ‘Aspirational’ voter (Anderson), seen to be a key ‘powerbroker’ in federal and state politics, to growing levels of disenfranchised young people, this region is multifaceted and should not be simplified. These areas often see large-scale, private housing estates; what Brendan Gleeson describes as ‘privatopias’, situated next to rising levels of homelessness (“What’s Driving”): a powerful and concerning image that should not escape our attention. (Chamberlain and Mackenzie pay due attention to the issue in Homeless Careers.) It is also home to a growing immigrant population who often arrive as business migrants and as well as a rising refugee population traumatised by war and displacement (Collins 1). These growth corridors then, seem to simultaneously capture both the ambitions and the fears of Sydney. That is, they are seen as both areas of potential economic boom as well as social stress and potential conflict (Gleeson 89). One way to comprehend the complexity associated with such diversity and change is to reflect on the proximity of the twin suburbs of Macquarie Links and Macquarie Fields situated in Sydney’s south-western suburbs. Separated by the clichéd ‘railway tracks’, one is home to the growing Aspirational class while the other continues to be plagued by the stigma of being, what David Burchell describes as, a ‘dysfunctional dumping ground’ whose plight became national headlines during the riots in 2005. The riots were sparked after a police chase involving a stolen car led to a crash and the death of a 17 year-old and 19 year-old passengers. Residents blamed police for the deaths and the subsequent riots lasted for four nights – involving 150 teenagers clashing with New South Wales Police. The dysfunction, Burchell notes is seen in crime statistics that include 114 stolen cars, 227 burglaries, 457 cases of property damage and 279 assaults – all in 2005 alone. Interestingly, both these populations are surrounded by exclusionary boundaries: one because of the financial demands to enter the ‘Links’ estate, and the other because of the self-imposed exclusion. Such disparities not only provide challenges for policy makers generally, but also have important implications on the attitudes that citizens’ experience towards their relationship with each other as well as the civic institutions that are meant to represent them. This is particular the case if civic institutions are seen to either neglect or favour certain groups. This, in part, has given rise to what I describe here as a ‘citizenship surplus’ as well as a ‘citizenship deficit’. Research Agenda: Investigating Citizenship Surpluses and Deficits This changing city has meant that there has also been a change in the way that different groups interact with, and perceive, civic bodies. As noted, my initial research shows that this has led to the emergence of both citizenship surpluses and deficits. Though the concept of a ‘citizen deficits and surpluses’ have not emerged within the broader literature, there is a wide range of literature that discusses how some sections of the population lack of access to democratic processes. There are three broad areas of research that have emerged relevant here: citizenship and young people (see Arvanitakis; Dee); citizenship and globalisation (see Della Porta; Pusey); and citizenship and immigration (see Baldassar et al.; Gow). While a discussion of each of these research areas is beyond the scope of this paper, a regular theme is the emergence of a ‘democratic deficit’ (Chari et al. 422). Dee, for example, looks at how there exist unequal relationships between local and central governments, young people, communities and property developers in relation to space. Dee argues that this shapes social policy in a range of settings and contexts including their relationship with broader civic institutions and understandings of citizenship. Dee finds that claims for land use that involve young people rarely succeed and there is limited, if any, recourse to civic institutions. As such, we see a democratic deficit emerge because the various civic institutions involved fail in meeting their obligations to citizens. In addition, a great deal of work has emerged that investigates attempts to re-engage citizens through mechanisms to promote citizenship education and a more active citizenship which has also been accompanied by government programs with the same goals (See for example the Western Australian government’s ‘Citizenscape’ program ). For example Hahn (231) undertakes a comparative study of civic education in six countries (including Australia) and the policies and practices with respect to citizenship education and how to promote citizen activism. The results are positive, though the research was undertaken before the tumultuous events of the terrorist attacks in New York, the emergence of the ‘war on terror’ and the rise of ‘Muslim-phobia’. A gap rises, however, within the Australian literature when we consider both the fluid and heterogenous nature of citizenship. That is, how do we understand the relationship between these diverse groups living within such proximity to each other overlayed by changing migration patterns, ongoing globalised processes and changing political environments as well as their relations to civic institutions? Further, how does this influence the way individuals perceive their rights, expectations and responsibilities to the state? Given this, I believe that there is a need to understand citizenship as a fluid and heterogenous phenomenon that can be in surplus, deficit, progressive and reactionary. When discussing citizenship I am interested in how people perceive both their rights and responsibilities to civic institutions as well as to the residents around them. A second, obviously related, area of interest is ‘civic engagement’: that is, “the activities of people in the various organisations and associations that make up what scholars call ‘civil society’” (Portney and Leary 4). Before describing these categories in more detail, I would like to briefly outline the methodological processes employed thus far. Much of the research to this point is based on a combination of established literature, my informal discussions with citizen groups and my observations as ‘an activist.’ That is, over the last few years I have worked with a broad cross section of community-based organisations as well as specific individuals that have attempted to confront perceived injustices. I have undertaken this work as both an activist – with organisations such as Aid/Watch and Oxfam Australia – as well as an academic invited to share my research. This work has involved designing and implementing policy and advocacy strategies including media and public education programs. All interactions begin with a detailed discussion of the aims, resources, abilities and knowledge of the groups involved, followed by workshopping campaigning strategies. This has led to the publication of an ‘activist handbook’ titled ‘From Sitting on the Couch to Changing the World’, which is used to both draft the campaign aims as well as design a systematic strategy. (The booklet, which is currently being re-drafted, is published by Oxfam Australia and registered under a creative commons licence. For those interested, copies are available by emailing j.arvanitakis (at) uws.edu.au.) Much research is also sourced from direct feedback given by participants in reviewing the workshops and strategies The aim of tis paper then, is to sketch out the initial findings as well as an agenda for more formalised research. The initial findings have identified the heterogenous nature of citizenship that I have separated into four ‘citizenship spaces.’ The term space is used because these are not stable groupings as many quickly move between the areas identified as both the structures and personal situations change. 1. Marginalisation and Citizenship Deficit The first category is a citizenship deficit brought on by a sense of marginalisation. This is determined by a belief that it is pointless to interact with civic institutions, as the result is always the same: people’s opinions and needs will be ignored. Or in the case of residents from areas such as Macquarie Fields, the relationship with civic institutions, including police, is antagonistic and best avoided (White par. 21). This means that there is no connection between the population and the civic institutions around them – there is no loyalty or belief that efforts to be involved in political and civic processes will be rewarded. Here groups sense that they do not have access to political avenues to be heard, represented or demand change. This is leading to an experience of disconnection from political processes. The result is both a sense of disengagement and disempowerment. One example here emerged in discussions with protesters around the proposed development of the former Australian Defence Industry (ADI) site in St Marys, an outer-western suburb of Sydney. The development, which was largely approved, was for a large-scale housing estate proposed on sensitive bushlands in a locality that resident’s note is under-serviced in terms of public space. (For details of these discussions, see http://www.adisite.org/.) Residents often took the attitude that whatever the desire of the local community, the development would go ahead regardless. Those who worked at information booths during the resident protests informed me that the attitude was one best summarised by: “Why bother, we always get stuffed around any way.” This was confirmed by my own discussions with local residents – even those who joined the resident action group. 2. Privatisation and Citizenship Deficit This citizenship deficit not only applies to the marginalised, however, for there are also much wealthier populations who also appear to experience a deficit that results from a lack of access to civic institutions. This tends to leads to a privatisation of decision-making and withdrawal from the public arena as well as democratic processes. Consequently, the residents in the pockets of wealth may not be acting as citizens but more like consumers – asserting themselves in terms of Castells’s ‘collective consumption’ (par. 25). This citizenship deficit is brought on by ongoing privatisation. That is, there is a belief that civic institutions (including government bodies) are unable or at least unwilling to service the local community. As a result there is a tendency to turn to private suppliers and believe that individualisation is the best way to manage the community. The result is that citizens feel no connection to the civic institutions around them, not because there is no desire, but there are no services. This group of citizens has often been described as the ‘Aspirationals’ and are most often found in the growth corridors of Sydney. There is no reason to believe that this group is this way because of choice – but rather a failure by government authorities to service their needs. This is confirmed by research undertaken as early as 1990 which found that the residents now labelled Aspirational, were demanding access to public infrastructure services including public schools, but have been neglected by different levels of government. (This was clearly stated by NSW Labor MP for Liverpool, Paul Lynch, who argued for such services as a way to ensure a functioning community particularly for Western Sydney; NSWPD 2001.) As a result there is a reliance on private schools, neighbourhoods, transport and so on. Any ‘why bother’ attitude is thus driven by a lack of evidence that civic institutions can or are not willing to meet their needs. There is a strong sense of local community – but this localisation limited to others in the same geographical location and similar lifestyle. 3. Citizenship Surplus – Empowered Not Engaged The third space of citizenship is based on a ‘surplus’ even if there is limited or no political engagement. This group has quite a lot in common with the ‘Aspirationals’ but may come from areas that are higher serviced by civic institutions: the choice not to engage is therefore voluntary. There is a strong push for self-sufficiency – believing that their social capital, wealth and status mean that they do not require the services of civic institutions. While not antagonistic towards such institutions, there is often a belief is that the services provided by the private sector are ultimately superior to public ones. Consequently, they feel empowered through their social background but are not engaged with civic institutions or the political process. Despite this, my initial research findings show that this group has a strong connection to decision-makers – both politicians and bureaucrats. This lack of engagement changes if there is a perceived injustice to their quality of life or their values system – and hence should not be dismissed as NIMBYs (not in my backyard). They believe they have the resources to mobilise and demand change. I believe that we see this group materialise in mobilisations around proposed developments that threaten the perceived quality of life of the local environment. One example brought to my attention was the rapid response of local residents to the proposed White City development near Sydney’s eastern suburbs that was to see tennis courts and public space replaced by residential and commercial buildings (Nicholls). As one resident informed me, she had never seen any political engagement by local residents previously – an engagement that was accompanied by a belief that the development would be stopped as well as a mobilisation of some impressive resources. Such mobilisations also occur when there is a perceived injustice. Examples of this group can be found in what Hugh Mackay (13) describes as ‘doctor’s wives’ (a term that I am not wholly comfortable with). Here we see the emergence of ‘Chilout’: Children out of Detention. This was an organisation whose membership was described to me as ‘north shore professionals’, drew heavily on those who believed the forced incarceration of young refugee children was an affront to their values system. 4. Insurgent Citizenship – Empowered and Engaged The final space is the insurgent citizen: that is, the citizen who is both engaged and empowered. This is a term borrowed from South Africa and the USA (Holston 1) – and it should be seen as having two, almost diametrically opposed, sides: progressive and reactionary. This group may not have access to a great deal of financial resources, but has high social capital and both a willingness and ability to engage in political processes. Consequently, there is a sense of empowerment and engagement with civic institutions. There is also a strong push for self-sufficiency – but this is encased in a belief that civic institutions have a responsibility to provide services to the public, and that some services are naturally better provided by the public sector. Despite this, there is often an antagonistic relationship with such institutions. From the progressive perspective, we see ‘activists’ promoting social justice issues (including students, academics, unionists and so on). Organisations such as A Just Australia are strongly supported by various student organisations, unions and other social justice and activist groups. From a reactionary perspective, we see the emergence of groups that take an anti-immigration stance (such as ‘anti-immigration’ groups including Australia First that draw both activists and have an established political party). (Information regarding ‘anti-refugee activists’ can be found at http://ausfirst.alphalink.com.au/ while the official website for the Australia First political part is at http://www.australiafirstparty.com.au/cms/.) One way to understand the relationship between these groups is through the engagement/empowered typology below. While a detailed discussion of the limitations of typologies is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to acknowledge that any typology is a simplification and generalisation of the arguments presented. Likewise, it is unlikely that any typology has the ability to cover all cases and situations. This typology can, however, be used to underscore the relational nature of citizenship. The purpose here is to highlight that there are relationships between the different citizenship spaces and individuals can move between groups and each cluster has significant internal variation. Key here is that this can frame future studies. Conclusion and Next Steps There is little doubt there is a relationship between attitudes to citizenship and the health of a democracy. In Australia, democracy is robust in some ways, but many feel disempowered, disengaged and some feel both – often believing they are remote from the workings of civic institutions. It would appear that for many, interest in the process of (formal) government is at an all-time low as reflected in declining membership of political parties (Jaensch et al. 58). Democracy is not a ‘once for ever’ achievement – it needs to be protected and promoted. To do this, we must ensure that there are avenues for representation for all. This point also highlights one of the fundamental flaws of the aforementioned citizenship test. According to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the test is designed to: help migrants integrate and maximise the opportunities available to them in Australia, and enable their full participation in the Australian community as citizens. (par. 4) Those designing the test have assumed that citizenship is both stable and, once achieved, automatically ensures representation. This paper directly challenges these assumptions and offers an alternative research agenda with the ultimate aim of promoting high levels of engagement and empowerment. References Anderson, A. “The Liberals Have Not Betrayed the Menzies Legacy.” Online Opinion 25 Oct. 2004. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2679>. Arvanitakis, J. “Highly Affected, Rarely Considered: The International Youth Parliament Commission’s Report on the Impacts of Globalisation on Young People.” Sydney: Oxfam Australia, 2003. Baldassar, L., Z. Kamalkhani, and C. Lange. “Afghan Hazara Refugees in Australia: Constructing Australian Citizens.” Social Identities 13.1 (2007): 31-50. Burchell, D. “Dysfunctional Dumping Grounds.” The Australian 10 Feb. 2007. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21199266-28737,00.html>. Burnley, I.H. The Impact of Immigration in Australia: A Demographic Approach. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2001. Castells, M. “European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy.” New Left Review I/204 (March-April 1994): 46-57. Chamberlain, C., and D. Mackenzie. Homeless Careers: Pathways in and out of Homelessness. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2002. Chari, R., J. Hogan, and G. Murphy. “Regulating Lobbyists: A Comparative Analysis of the United States, Canada, Germany and the European Union.” The Political Quarterly 78.3 (2007): 423-438. Collins, J. “Chinese Entrepreneurs: The Chinese Diaspora in Australia.” International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research 8.1/2 (2002): 113-133. Dee, M. “Young People, Citizenship and Public Space.” International Sociological Association Conference Paper, Brisbane, 2002. Della Porta, D. “Globalisations and Democracy.” Democratizations 12.5 (2005): 668-685. Fagan, B., R. Dowling, and J. Longdale. “Suburbs in the ‘Global City’: Sydney since the Mid 1990s.” State of Australian cities conference. Parramatta, 2003. Frew, W. “And the Most Polarised City Is…” Sydney Morning Herald 16-17 Feb. 2008: 7. Gleeson, B. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2006. Gleeson, B. “What’s Driving Suburban Australia?” Australian Policy Online 15 Jan. 2004. http://www.apo.org.au/webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=00558>. Gow, G. “Rubbing Shoulders in the Global City: Refugees, Citizenship and Multicultural Alliances in Fairfield, Sydney.” Ethnicities 5.3 (2005): 386-405. Hahn, C. L. “Citizenship Education: An Empirical Study of Policy, Practices and Outcomes.” Oxford Review of Education 25.1/2 (1999): 231-250. Hawley, S. “Sir Donald Bradman Likely to Be Dumped from Citizenship Test.” ABC Local Radio Online. 29 Jan. 2008. http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2148383.htm>. Hoare, D. “Bradman’s Spot in Citizenship Test under Scrutiny.” ABC Local Radio online. 29 Jan. 2008. http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2149325.htm>. Holston, J. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. California: Cloth, 2007. Jaensch, D., P. Brent, and B. Bowden. “Australian Political Parties in the Spotlight.” Democratic Audit of Australia Report 4. Australian National University, 2004. Mackay, H. “Sleepers Awoke from Slumber of Indifference.” Sydney Morning Herald 27 Nov. 2007: 13. NSWPD – New South Wales Parliamentary Debates. “South Western Sydney Banking Services.” Legislative Assembly Hansard, 52nd NSW Parliament, 19 Sep. 2001. Portney, K.E., and L. O’Leary. Civic and Political Engagement of America’s Youth: National Survey of Civic and Political Engagement of Young People. Medford, MA: Tisch College, Tufts University, 2007. Price, S. “Stress and Debt Make Sydney a Violent City.” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2008: 16. Pusey, M. The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. White, R. “Swarming and the Social Dynamics of Group Violence.” Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 326 (Oct. 2006). http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi2/tandi326t.html>. Wolfe, P. “Race and Citizenship.” Magazine of History 18.5 (2004): 66-72. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Arvanitakis, James. "The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/07-arvanitakis.php>. APA Style Arvanitakis, J. (Apr. 2008) "The Heterogenous Citizen: How Many of Us Care about Don Bradman’s Average?," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/07-arvanitakis.php>.

Kangatarianism is the rather inelegant word coined in the first decade of the twenty-first century to describe an omnivorous diet in which the only meat consumed is that of the kangaroo. First published in the media in 2010 (Barone; Zukerman), the term circulated in Australian environmental and academic circles including the Global Animal conference at the University of Wollongong in July 2011 where I first heard it from members of the Think Tank for Kangaroos (THINKK) group. By June 2017, it had gained enough attention to be named the Oxford English Dictionary’s Australian word of the month (following on from May’s “smashed avo,” another Australian food innovation), but it took the Nine Network reality television series Love Island Australia to raise kangatarian to trending status on social media (Oxford UP). During the first episode, aired in late May 2018, Justin, a concreter and fashion model from Melbourne, declared himself to have previously been a kangatarian as he chatted with fellow contestant, Millie. Vet nurse and animal lover Millie appeared to be shocked by his revelation but was tentatively accepting when Justin explained what kangatarian meant, and justified his choice on the grounds that kangaroo are not farmed. In the social media response, it was clear that eating only the meat of kangaroos as an ethical choice was an entirely new concept to many viewers, with one tweet stating “Kangatarian isn’t a thing”, while others variously labelled the diet brutal, intriguing, or quintessentially Australian (see #kangatarian on Twitter).There is a well developed literature around the arguments for and against eating kangaroo, and why settler Australians tend to be so reluctant to do so (see for example, Probyn; Cawthorn and Hoffman). Here, I will concentrate on the role that ethics play in this food choice by examining how the adoption of kangatarianism can be understood as a bargain struck to help to manage grief in the Anthropocene, and the limitations of that bargain. As Lesley Head has argued, we are living in a time of loss and of grieving, when much that has been taken for granted is becoming unstable, and “we must imagine that drastic changes to everyday life are in the offing” (313). Applying the classic (and contested) model of five stages of grief, first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying in 1969, much of the population of the western world seems to be now experiencing denial, her first stage of loss, while those in the most vulnerable environments have moved on to anger with developed countries for destructive actions in the past and inaction in the present. The next stages (or states) of grieving—bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are likely to be manifested, although not in any predictable sequence, as the grief over current and future losses continues (Haslam).The great expansion of food restrictive diets in the Anthropocene can be interpreted as part of this bargaining state of grieving as individuals attempt to respond to the imperative to reduce their environmental impact but also to limit the degree of change to their own diet required to do so. Meat has long been identified as a key component of an individual’s environmental footprint. From Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 Diet for a Small Planet through the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation’s 2006 report Livestock’s Long Shadow to the 2019 report of the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, the advice has been consistent: meat consumption should be minimised in, if not eradicated from, the human diet. The EAT–Lancet Commission Report quantified this to less than 28 grams (just under one ounce) of beef, lamb or pork per day (12, 25). For many this would be keenly felt, in terms of how meals are constructed, the sensory experiences associated with eating meat and perceptions of well-being but meat is offered up as a sacrifice to bring about the return of the beloved healthy planet.Rather than accept the advice to cut out meat entirely, those seeking to bargain with the Anthropocene also find other options. This has given rise to a suite of foodways based around restricting meat intake in volume or type. Reducing the amount of commercially produced beef, lamb and pork eaten is one approach, while substituting a meat the production of which has a smaller environmental footprint, most commonly chicken or fish, is another. For those willing to make deeper changes, the meat of free living animals, especially those which are killed accidentally on the roads or for deliberately for environmental management purposes, is another option. Further along this spectrum are the novel protein sources suggested in the Lancet report, including insects, blue-green algae and laboratory-cultured meats.Kangatarianism is another form of this bargain, and is backed by at least half a century of advocacy. The Australian Conservation Foundation made calls to reduce the numbers of other livestock and begin a sustainable harvest of kangaroo for food in 1970 when the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption was still illegal across the country (Conservation of Kangaroos). The idea was repeated by biologist Gordon Grigg in the late 1980s (Jackson and Vernes 173), and again in the Garnaut Climate Change Review in 2008 (547–48). Kangaroo meat is high in protein and iron, low in fat, and high in healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, and, as these authors showed, has a smaller environmental footprint than beef, lamb, or pork. Kangaroo require less water than cattle, sheep or pigs, and no land is cleared to grow feed for them or give them space to graze. Their paws cause less erosion and compaction of soil than do the hooves of common livestock. They eat less fodder than ruminants and their digestive processes result in lower emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane and less solid waste.As Justin of Love Island was aware, kangaroo are not farmed in the sense of being deliberately bred, fed, confined, or treated with hormones, drugs or chemicals, which also adds to their lighter impact on the environment. However, some pastoralists argue that because they cannot prevent kangaroos from accessing the food, water, shelter, and protection from predators they provide for their livestock, they do effectively farm them, although they receive no income from sales of kangaroo meat. This type of light touch farming of kangaroos has a very long history in Australia going back to the continent’s first peopling some 60,000 years ago. Kangaroos were so important to Aboriginal people that a wide range of environments were manipulated to produce their favoured habitats of open grasslands edged by sheltering trees. As Bill Gammage demonstrated, fire was used as a tool to preserve and extend grassy areas, to encourage regrowth which would attract kangaroos and to drive the animals from one patch to another or towards hunters waiting with spears (passim, for example, 58, 72, 76, 93). Gammage and Bruce Pascoe agree that this was a form of animal husbandry in which the kangaroos were drawn to the areas prepared for them for the young grass or, more forcefully, physically directed using nets, brush fences or stone walls. Burnt ground served to contain the animals in place of fencing, and regular harvesting kept numbers from rising to levels which would place pressure on other species (Gammage 79, 281–86; Pascoe 42–43). Contemporary advocates of eating kangaroo have promoted the idea that they should be deliberately co-produced with other livestock instead of being killed to preserve feed and water for sheep and cattle (Ellicott; Wilson 39). Substituting kangaroo for the meat of more environmentally damaging animals would facilitate a reduction in the numbers of cattle and sheep, lessening the harm they do.Most proponents have assumed that their audience is current meat eaters who would substitute kangaroo for the meat of other more environmentally costly animals, but kangatarianism can also emerge from vegetarianism. Wendy Zukerman, who wrote about kangaroo hunting for New Scientist in 2010, was motivated to conduct the research because she was considering becoming an early adopter of kangatarianism as the least environmentally taxing way to counter the longterm anaemia she had developed as a vegetarian. In 2018, George Wilson, honorary professor in the Australian National University’s Fenner School of Environment and Society called for vegetarians to become kangatarians as a means of boosting overall consumption of kangaroo for environmental and economic benefits to rural Australia (39).Given these persuasive environmental arguments, it might be expected that many people would have perceived eating kangaroo instead of other meat as a favourable bargain and taken up the call to become kangatarian. Certainly, there has been widespread interest in trying kangaroo meat. In 1997, only five years after the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption had been legalised in most states (South Australia did so in 1980), 51% of 500 people surveyed in five capital cities said they had tried kangaroo. However, it had not become a meat of choice with very few found to eat it more than three times a year (Des Purtell and Associates iv). Just over a decade later, a study by Ampt and Owen found an increase to 58% of 1599 Australians surveyed across the country who had tried kangaroo but just 4.7% eating it at least monthly (14). Bryce Appleby, in his study of kangaroo consumption in the home based on interviews with 28 residents of Wollongong in 2010, specifically noted the absence of kangatarians—then a very new concept. A study of 261 Sydney university students in 2014 found that half had tried kangaroo meat and 10% continued to eat it with any regularity. Only two respondents identified themselves as kangatarian (Grant 14–15). Kangaroo meat advocate Michael Archer declared in 2017 that “there’s an awful lot of very, very smart vegetarians [who] have opted for semi vegetarianism and they’re calling themselves ‘kangatarians’, as they’re quite happy to eat kangaroo meat”, but unless there had been a significant change in a few years, the surveys did not bear out his assertion (154).The ethical calculations around eating kangaroo are complicated by factors beyond the strictly environmental. One Tweeter advised Justin: “‘I’m a kangatarian’ isn’t a pickup line, mate”, and certainly the reception of his declaration could have been very cool, especially as it was delivered to a self declared animal warrior (N’Tash Aha). All of the studies of beliefs and practices around the eating of kangaroo have noted a significant minority of Australians who would not consider eating kangaroo based on issues of animal welfare and animal rights. The 1997 study found that 11% were opposed to the idea of eating kangaroo, while in Grant’s 2014 study, 15% were ethically opposed to eating kangaroo meat (Des Purtell and Associates iv; Grant 14–15). Animal ethics complicate the bargains calculated principally on environmental grounds.These ethical concerns work across several registers. One is around the flesh and blood kangaroo as a charismatic native animal unique to Australia and which Australians have an obligation to respect and nurture. Sheep, cattle and pigs have been subject to longterm propaganda campaigns which entrench the idea that they are unattractive and unintelligent, and veil their transition to meat behind euphemistic language and abattoir walls, making it easier to eat them. Kangaroos are still seen as resourceful and graceful animals, and no linguistic tricks shield consumers from the knowledge that it is a roo on their plate. A proposal in 2009 to market a “coat of arms” emu and kangaroo-flavoured potato chip brought complaints to the Advertising Standards Bureau that this was disrespectful to these native animals, although the flavours were to be simulated and the product vegetarian (Black). Coexisting with this high regard to kangaroos is its antithesis. That is, a valuation of them informed by their designation as a pest in the pastoral industry, and the use of the carcasses of those killed to feed dogs and other companion animals. Appleby identified a visceral, disgust response to the idea of eating kangaroo in many of his informants, including both vegetarians who would not consider eating kangaroo because of their commitment to a plant-based diet, and at least one omnivore who would prefer to give up all meat rather than eat kangaroo. While diametrically opposed, the end point of both positions is that kangaroo meat should not be eaten.A second animal ethics stance relates to the imagined kangaroo, a cultural construct which for most urban Australians is much more present in their lives and likely to shape their actions than the living animals. It is behind the rejection of eating an animal which holds such an iconic place in Australian culture: to the dexter on the 1912 national coat of arms; hopping through the Hundred Acre Wood as Kanga and Roo in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh children’s books from the 1920s and the Disney movies later made from them; as a boy’s best friend as Skippy the Bush Kangaroo in a fondly remembered 1970s television series; and high in the sky on QANTAS planes. The anthropomorphising of kangaroos permitted the spectacle of the boxing kangaroo from the late nineteenth century. By framing natural kangaroo behaviours as boxing, these exhibitions encouraged an ambiguous understanding of kangaroos as human-like, moving them further from the category of food (Golder and Kirkby). Australian government bodies used this idea of the kangaroo to support food exports to Britain, with kangaroos as cooks or diners rather than ingredients. The Kangaroo Kookery Book of 1932 (see fig. 1 below) portrayed kangaroos as a nuclear family in a suburban kitchen and another official campaign supporting sales of Australian produce in Britain in the 1950s featured a Disney-inspired kangaroo eating apples and chops washed down with wine (“Kangaroo to Be ‘Food Salesman’”). This imagining of kangaroos as human-like has persisted, leading to the opinion expressed in a 2008 focus group, that consuming kangaroo amounted to “‘eating an icon’ … Although they are pests they are still human nature … these are native animals, people and I believe that is a form of cannibalism!” (Ampt and Owen 26). Figure 1: Rather than promoting the eating of kangaroos, the portrayal of kangaroos as a modern suburban family in the Kangaroo Kookery Book (1932) made it unthinkable. (Source: Kangaroo Kookery Book, Director of Australian Trade Publicity, Australia House, London, 1932.)The third layer of ethical objection on the ground of animal welfare is more specific, being directed to the method of killing the kangaroos which become food. Kangaroos are perhaps the only native animals for which state governments set quotas for commercial harvest, on the grounds that they compete with livestock for pasturage and water. In most jurisdictions, commercially harvested kangaroo carcasses can be processed for human consumption, and they are the ones which ultimately appear in supermarket display cases.Kangaroos are killed by professional shooters at night using swivelling spotlights mounted on their vehicles to locate and daze the animals. While clean head shots are the ideal and regulations state that animals should be killed when at rest and without causing “undue agonal struggle”, this is not always achieved and some animals do suffer prolonged deaths (NSW Code of Practice for Kangaroo Meat for Human Consumption). By regulation, the young of any female kangaroo must be killed along with her. While averting a slow death by neglect, this is considered cruel and wasteful. The hunt has drawn international criticism, including from Greenpeace which organised campaigns against the sale of kangaroo meat in Europe in the 1980s, and Viva! which was successful in securing the withdrawal of kangaroo from sale in British supermarkets (“Kangaroo Meat Sales Criticised”). These arguments circulate and influence opinion within Australia.A final animal ethics issue is that what is actually behind the push for greater use of kangaroo meat is not concern for the environment or animal welfare but the quest to turn a profit from these animals. The Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia, formed in 1970 to represent those who dealt in the marsupials’ meat, fur and skins, has been a vocal advocate of eating kangaroo and a sponsor of market research into how it can be made more appealing to the market. The Association argued in 1971 that commercial harvest was part of the intelligent conservation of the kangaroo. They sought minimum size regulations to prevent overharvesting and protect their livelihoods (“Assn. Backs Kangaroo Conservation”). The Association’s current website makes the claim that wild harvested “Australian kangaroo meat is among the healthiest, tastiest and most sustainable red meats in the world” (Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia). That this is intended to initiate a new and less controlled branch of the meat industry for the benefit of hunters and processors, rather than foster a shift from sheep or cattle to kangaroos which might serve farmers and the environment, is the opinion of Dr. Louise Boronyak, of the Centre for Compassionate Conservation at the University of Technology Sydney (Boyle 19).Concerns such as these have meant that kangaroo is most consumed where it is least familiar, with most of the meat for human consumption recovered from culled animals being exported to Europe and Asia. Russia has been the largest export market. There, kangaroo meat is made less strange by blending it with other meats and traditional spices to make processed meats, avoiding objections to its appearance and uncertainty around preparation. With only a low profile as a novelty animal in Russia, there are fewer sentimental concerns about consuming kangaroo, although the additional food miles undermine its environmental credentials. The variable acceptability of kangaroo in more distant markets speaks to the role of culture in determining how patterns of eating are formed and can be shifted, or, as Elspeth Probyn phrased it “how natural entities are transformed into commodities within a context of globalisation and local communities”, underlining the impossibility of any straightforward ethics of eating kangaroo (33, 35).Kangatarianism is a neologism which makes the eating of kangaroo meat something it has not been in the past, a voluntary restriction based on environmental ethics. These environmental benefits are well founded and eating kangaroo can be understood as an Anthropocenic bargain struck to allow the continuation of the consumption of red meat while reducing one’s environmental footprint. Although superficially attractive, the numbers entering into this bargain remain small because environmental ethics cannot be disentangled from animal ethics. The anthropomorphising of the kangaroo and its use as a national symbol coexist with its categorisation as a pest and use of its meat as food for companion animals. Both understandings of kangaroos made their meat uneatable for many Australians. Paired with concerns over how kangaroos are killed and the commercialisation of a native species, kangaroo meat has a very mixed reception despite decades of advocacy for eating its meat in favour of that of more harmed and more harmful introduced species. Given these constraints, kangatarianism is unlikely to become widespread and indeed it should be viewed as at best a temporary exigency. As the climate warms and rainfall becomes more erratic, even animals which have evolved to suit Australian conditions will come under increasing pressure, and humans will need to reach Kübler-Ross’ final state of grief: acceptance. In this case, this would mean acceptance that our needs cannot be placed ahead of those of other animals.ReferencesAmpt, Peter, and Kate Owen. Consumer Attitudes to Kangaroo Meat Products. Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, 2008.Appleby, Bryce. “Skippy the ‘Green’ Kangaroo: Identifying Resistances to Eating Kangaroo in the Home in a Context of Climate Change.” BSc Hons, U of Wollongong, 2010 <http://ro.uow.edu.au/thsci/103>.Archer, Michael. “Zoology on the Table: Plenary Session 4.” Australian Zoologist 39, 1 (2017): 154–60.“Assn. Backs Kangaroo Conservation.” The Beverley Times 26 Feb. 1971: 3. 22 Feb. 2019 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article202738733>.Barone, Tayissa. “Kangatarians Jump the Divide.” Sydney Morning Herald 9 Feb. 2010. 13 Apr. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/kangatarians-jump-the-divide-20100209-gdtvd8.html>.Black, Rosemary. “Some Australians Angry over Idea for Kangaroo and Emu-Flavored Potato Chips.” New York Daily News 4 Dec. 2009. 5 Feb. 2019 <https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/australians-angry-idea-kangaroo-emu-flavored-potato-chips-article-1.431865>.Boyle, Rhianna. “Eating Skippy.” Big Issue Australia 578 11-24 Jan. 2019: 16–19.Cawthorn, Donna-Mareè, and Louwrens C. Hoffman. “Controversial Cuisine: A Global Account of the Demand, Supply and Acceptance of ‘Unconventional’ and ‘Exotic’ Meats.” Meat Science 120 (2016): 26–7.Conservation of Kangaroos. Melbourne: Australian Conservation Foundation, 1970.Des Purtell and Associates. Improving Consumer Perceptions of Kangaroo Products: A Survey and Report. Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, 1997.Ellicott, John. “Little Pay Incentive for Shooters to Join Kangaroo Meat Industry.” The Land 15 Mar. 2018. 28 Mar. 2019 <https://www.theland.com.au/story/5285265/top-roo-shooter-says-harvesting-is-a-low-paid-job/>.Garnaut, Ross. Garnaut Climate Change Review. 2008. 26 Feb. 2019 <http://www.garnautreview.org.au/index.htm>.Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012.Golder, Hilary, and Diane Kirkby. “Mrs. Mayne and Her Boxing Kangaroo: A Married Woman Tests Her Property Rights in Colonial New South Wales.” Law and History Review 21.3 (2003): 585–605.Grant, Elisabeth. “Sustainable Kangaroo Harvesting: Perceptions and Consumption of Kangaroo Meat among University Students in New South Wales.” Independent Study Project (ISP). U of NSW, 2014. <https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/1755>.Haslam, Nick. “The Five Stages of Grief Don’t Come in Fixed Steps – Everyone Feels Differently.” The Conversation 22 Oct. 2018. 28 Mar. 2019 <https://theconversation.com/the-five-stages-of-grief-dont-come-in-fixed-steps-everyone-feels-differently-96111>.Head, Lesley. “The Anthropoceans.” Geographical Research 53.3 (2015): 313–20.Kangaroo Industries Association of Australia. Kangaroo Meat. 26 Feb. 2019 <http://www.kangarooindustry.com/products/meat/>.“Kangaroo Meat Sales Criticised.” The Canberra Times 13 Sep. 1984: 14. 22 Feb 2019 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article136915919>.“Kangaroo to Be Food ‘Salesman.’” Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 2 Dec. 1954. 22 Feb 2019 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article134089767>.Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and their own Families. New York: Touchstone, 1997.Jackson, Stephen, and Karl Vernes. Kangaroo: Portrait of an Extraordinary Marsupial. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010.Lappé, Frances Moore. Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971.N’Tash Aha (@Nsvasey). “‘I’m a Kangatarian’ isn’t a Pickup Line, Mate. #LoveIslandAU.” Twitter post. 27 May 2018. 5 Apr. 2019 <https://twitter.com/Nsvasey/status/1000697124122644480>.“NSW Code of Practice for Kangaroo Meat for Human Consumption.” Government Gazette of the State of New South Wales 24 Mar. 1993. 22 Feb. 2019 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page14638033>.Oxford University Press, Australia and New Zealand. Word of the Month. June 2017. <https://www.oup.com.au/dictionaries/word-of-the-month>.Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome: Magabala Books, 2014.Probyn, Elspeth. “Eating Roo: Of Things That Become Food.” New Formations 74.1 (2011): 33–45.Steinfeld, Henning, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vicent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, and Cees d Haan. 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IntroductionAccounts of mentoring relationships inevitably draw attention to hierarchies of expertise, knowledge and learning. While public concerns about both the risks and benefits for young people of social media, little attention has been given to the nature of the mentoring role that parents and families play alongside of schools. This conceptual paper explores models of mentorship in the context of family dynamics as they are affected by social media use. This is a context that explicitly disrupts hierarchical structures of mentoring in that new media, and particularly social media use, tends to be driven by youth cultural practices, identity formation, experimentation and autonomy-seeking practices (see for example: Robards; boyd; Campos-Holland et al.; Hodkinson). A growing body of research supports the notion that young people are more skilled in navigating social media platforms than their parents (FOSI; Campos-Holland et al.). This research establishes that uncertainty and tension derived from parents’ impression that their children know more about social media they do (FOSI; Sorbring) has brought about a market for advice and educational programs. In the content of this paper it is notable that when family dynamics and young people’s social media use are addressed through notions of digital citizenship or cyber safety programs, a hierarchical mentorship is assumed, but also problematised; thus the expertise hierarchy is inverted. This paper argues that use of social media platforms, networks, and digital devices challenges traditional hierarchies of expertise in family environments. Family members, parents and children in particular, are involved in ongoing, complex conversations and negotiations about expertise in relation to technology and social media use. These negotiations open up an alternative space for mentorship, challenging traditional roles and suggesting the need for cooperative processes. And this, in turn, can inspire new ways of relating with and through social media and mobile technologies within the family.Inverting Expertise: Social Media, Family and MentoringSocial media are deeply embedded in everyday routines for the vast majority of the population. The emergence of the ‘networked society’, characterised by increasing and pervasive digital and social connectivity, has the potential to create new forms of social interactions within and across networks (Rainie and Wellman), but also to reconfigure intergenerational and family relations. In this way, social media introduces new power asymmetries that affect family dynamics and in particular relationships between young people and their parents. This relatively new mediated environment, by default, exposes young people to social contexts well beyond family and immediate peers making their lived experiences individual, situational and contextual (Swist et al.). The perceived risks this introduces can provoke tensions within families looking to manage those uncertain social contexts, in the process problematising traditional structures of mentorship. Mentoring is a practice predominantly understood within educational and professional workplace settings (Ambrosetti and Dekkers). Although different definitions can be found across disciplines, most models position a mentor as a more experienced knowledge holder, implying a hierarchical relationship between a mentor and mentee (Ambrosetti and Dekkers). Stereotypically, a mentor is understood to be older, wiser and more experienced, while a mentee is, in turn, younger and in need of guidance – a protégé. Alternative models of mentorship see mentoring as a reciprocal process (Eby, Rhodes and Allen; Naweed and Ambrosetti).This “reciprocal” perspective on mentorship recognises the opportunity both sides in the process have to contribute and benefit from the relationship. However, in situations where one party in the relationship does not have the expected knowledge, skills or confidence, this reciprocity becomes more difficult. Thus, as an alternative, asymmetrical or cooperative mentorship lies between the hierarchical and reciprocal (Naweed and Ambrosetti). It suggests that the more experienced side (whichever it is) takes a lead while mentoring is negotiated in a way that meets both sides’ needs. The parent-child relationship is generally understood in hierarchical terms. Traditionally, parents are considered to be mentors for their children, particularly in acquiring new skills and facilitating transitions towards adult life. Such perspectives on parent-child relationships are based on a “deficit” approach to youth, “whereby young people are situated as citizens-in-the-making” (Collin). Social media further problematises the hierarchical dynamic with the role of knowledge holder varying between and within the family members. In many contemporary mediated households, across developed and wealthy nations, technologically savvy children are actively tailoring their own childhoods. This is a context that requires a reconceptualisation of traditional mentoring models within the family context and recognition of each stakeholder’s expertise, knowledge and agency – a position that is markedly at odds with traditional deficit models. Negotiating Social Media Use within the FamilyIn the early stages of the internet and social media research, a generational gap was often at the centre of debates. Although highly contested, Prensky’s metaphor of digital natives and digital immigrants persists in both the popular media and academic literature. This paradigm portrays young people as tech savvy in contrast with their parents. However, such assumptions are rarely grounded in empirical evidence (Hargittai). Nonetheless, while parents are active users of social media, they find it difficult to negotiate social media use with their children (Sorbring). Some studies suggest that parental concerns arise from impressions that their children know more about social media than they do (FOSI; Wang, Bianchi and Raley). Additionally, parental concern with a child’s social media use is positively correlated with the child’s age; parents of older children are less confident in their skills and believe that their child is more digitally skillful (FOSI). However, it may be more productive to understand social media expertise within the family as shared: intermittently fluctuating between parents and children. In developed and wealthy countries, children are already using digital media by the age of five and throughout their pre-teen years predominantly for play and learning, and as teenagers they are almost universally avid social media users (Nansen; Nansen et al.; Swist et al.). Smartphone ownership has increased significantly among young people in Australia, reaching almost 80% in 2015, a proportion nearly identical to the adult population (Australian Communications and Media Authority). In addition, most young people are using multiple devices switching between them according to where, when and with whom they connect (Australian Communications and Media Authority). The locations of internet use have also diversified. While the home remains the most common site, young people make use of mobile devices to access the internet at school, friend’s homes, and via public Wi-Fi hotspots (Australian Communications and Media Authority). As a result, social media access and engagement has become more frequent and personalised and tied to processes of socialisation and well-being (Sorbring; Swist et al.). These developments have been rapid, introducing asymmetry into the parent-child mentoring dynamic along with family tensions about rules, norms and behaviours of media use. Negotiating an appropriate balance between emerging autonomy and parental oversight has always featured as a primary parenting challenge and social media seem to have introduced a new dimension in this context. A 2016 Pew report on parents, teens, and digital monitoring reveals that social media use has become central to the establishment of family rules and disciplinary practices, with over two thirds of parents reporting the use of “digital grounding” as punishment (Pew). As well as restricting social media use, the majority of parents report limiting the amount of time and times of day their children can be online. Interestingly, while parents engage in a variety of hands-on approaches to monitoring and regulating children’s social media use, they are less likely to use monitoring software, blocking/filtering online content, tracking locations and the like (Pew). These findings suggest that parents may lack confidence in technology-based restrictions or prefer pro-active, family based approaches involving discussion about appropriate social media use. This presents an opportunity to explore how social media produces new forms of parent-child relationships that might be best understood through the lens of cooperative models of mentorship. Digital Parenting: Technological and Pedagogical Interventions Parents along with educators and policy makers are looking for technological solutions to the knowledge gap, whether perceived or real, associated with concerns regarding young people’s social media use. Likewise, technology and social media companies are rushing to develop and sell advice, safety filters and resources of all kinds to meet such parental needs (Clark; McCosker). This relatively under-researched field requires further exploration and dissociation from the discourse of risk and fear (Livingstone). Furthermore, in order to develop opportunities modelled on concepts of cooperative mentoring, such programs and interventions need to move away from hierarchical assumptions about the nature of expertise within family contexts. As Collin and Swist point out, online campaigns aimed at addressing young people and children’s safety and wellbeing “are often still designed by adult ‘experts’” (Collin and Swist). A cooperative mentoring approach within family contexts would align with recent use of co-design or participatory design within social and health research and policy (Collin and Swist). In order to think through the potential of cooperative mentorship approaches in relation to social media use within the family, we examine some of the digital resources available to parents.Prominent US cyber safety and digital citizenship program Cyberwise is a commercial website founded by Diana Graber and Cynthia Lieberman, with connections to Verizon Wireless, Google and iKeepSafe among many other partnerships. In addition to learning resources around topics like “Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World”, Cyberwise offers online and face to face workshops on “cyber civics” in California, emphasising critical thinking, ethical discussion and decision making about digital media issues. The organisation aims to educate and support parents and teachers in their endeavor to guide young people in civil and safe social media use. CyberWise’s slogan “No grown up left behind!”, and its program of support and education is underpinned by and maintains the notion of adults as lacking expertise and lagging behind young people in digital literacy and social media skills. In the process, it introduces an additional level of expertise in the cyber safety expert and software-based interventions. Through a number of software partners, CyberWise provides a suite of tools that offer parents some control in preventing cyberbullying and establishing norms for cyber safety. For example, Frienedy is a dedicated social media platform that fosters a more private mode of networking for closed groups of mutually known people. It enables users to control completely what they share and with whom they share it. The tool does not introduce any explicit parental monitoring mechanisms, but seeks to impose an exclusive online environment divested of broader social influences and risks – an environment in which parents can “introduce kids to social media on their terms when they are ready”. Although Frienedy does not explicitly present itself as a monitoring tool, it does perpetuate hierarchical forms of mentorship and control for parents. On the other hand, PocketGuardian is a parental monitoring service for tracking children’s social media use, with an explicit emphasis on parental control: “Parents receive notification when cyberbullying or sexting is detected, plus resources to start a conversation with their child without intruding child’s privacy” (the software notifies parents when it detects an issue but without disclosing the content). The tool promotes its ability to step in on behalf of parents, removing “the task of manually inspecting your child's device and accounts”. The software claims that it analyses the content rather than merely catching “keywords” in its detection algorithms. Obviously, tools such as PocketGuardian reflect a hierarchical mentorship model (and recognise the expertise asymmetry) by imposing technological controls. The software, in a way, fosters a fear of expertise deficiency, while enabling technological controls to reassert the parent-child hierarchy. A different approach is exemplified by the Australian based Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre, a “living lab” experiment – this is an overt attempt to reverse deliberate asymmetry. This pedagogical intervention, initially taking the form of an research project, involved four young people designing and delivering a three-hour workshop on social networking and cyber safety for adult participants (Third et al.). The central aim was to disrupt the traditional way adults and young people relate to each other in relation to social media and technology use and attempted to support learning by reversing traditional roles of adult teacher and young student. In this way ‘a non-hierarchical space of intergenerational learning’ was created (Third et al.). The result was to create a setting where intergenerational conversation helped to demystify social media and technology, generate familiarity with sites, improve adult’s understanding of when they should assist young people, and deliver agency and self-efficacy for the young people involved (7-8). In this way, young people’s expertise was acknowledged as a reflection of a cooperative or asymmetrical mentoring relationship in which adult’s guidance and support could also play a part. These lessons have been applied and developed further through a participatory design approach to producing apps and tools such as Appreciate-a-mate (Collin and Swist). In that project “the inclusion of young people’s contexts became a way of activating and sustaining attachments in regard to the campaign’s future use”(313).In stark contrast to the CyberWise tools, the cooperative mentoring (or participatory design) approach, exemplified in this second example, has multiple positive outcomes: first it demystifies social media use and increases understanding of the role it plays in young people’s (and adults’) lives. Second, it increases adults’ familiarity and comfort in navigating their children’s social media use. Finally, for the young people involved, it supports a sense of achievement and acknowledges their expertise and agency. To build sustainability into these processes, we would argue that it is important to look at the family context and cooperative mentorship as an additional point of intervention. Understood in this sense, cooperative and asymmetrical mentoring between a parent and child echoes an authoritative parenting style which is proven to have the best outcome for children (Baumrind), but in a way that accommodates young people’s technology expertise.Both programs analysed target adults (parents) as less skilful than young people (their children) in relation to social media use. However, while first case study, the technology based interventions endorses hierarchical model, the Living Lab example (a pedagogical intervention) attempts to create an environment without hierarchical obstacles to learning and knowledge exchange. Although the parent-child relationship is indubitably characterised by the hierarchy to some extent, it also assumes continuous negotiation and role fluctuation. A continuous process, negotiation intensifies as children age and transition to more independent media use. In the current digital environment, this negotiation is often facilitated (or even led) by social media platforms as additional agents in the process. Unarguably, digital parenting might implicate both technological and pedagogical interventions; however, there should be a dialogue between the two. Without presumed expertise roles, non-hierarchical, cooperative environment for negotiating social media use can be developed. Cooperative mentorship, as a concept, offers an opportunity to connect research and practice through participatory design and it deserves further consideration.ConclusionsPrevailing approaches to cyber safety education tend to focus on risk management and in doing so, they maintain hierarchical forms of parental control. Adhering to such methods fails to acknowledge young people’s expertise and further deepens generational misunderstanding over social media use. Rather than insisting on hierarchical and traditional roles, there is a need to recognise and leverage asymmetrical expertise within the family in regards to social media.Cooperative and asymmetrical mentorship happens naturally in the family and can be facilitated by and through social media. The inverted hierarchy of expertise we have described here puts both parents and children, in a position of constant negotiation over social media use. This negotiation is complex, relational, unpredictable, open toward emergent possibilities and often intensive. Unquestionably, it is clear that social media provides opportunities for negotiation over, and inversion of, traditional family roles. Whether this inversion of expertise is real or only perceived, however, deserves further investigation. This article formulates some of the conceptual groundwork for an empirical study of family dynamics in relation to social media use and rulemaking. The study aims to continue to probe the positive potential of cooperative and asymmetrical mentorship and participatory design concepts and practices. The idea of cooperative mentorship does not necessarily provide a universal solution to how families negotiate social media use, but it does provide a new lens through which this dynamic can be observed. Clearly family dynamics, and the parent-child relationship, in particular, can play a vital part in supporting effective digital citizenship and wellbeing processes. Learning about this spontaneous and natural process of family negotiations might equip us with tools to inform policy and practices that can help parents and children to collaboratively create ‘a networked world in which they all want to live’ (boyd). ReferencesAmbrosetti, Angelina, and John Dekkers. "The Interconnectedness of the Roles of Mentors and Mentees in Pre-Service Teacher Education Mentoring Relationships." 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Introduction The highly contagious COVID-19 virus has presented particularly difficult public policy challenges. The relatively late emergence of an effective treatments and vaccines, the structural stresses on health care systems, the lockdowns and the economic dislocations, the evident structural inequalities in effected societies, as well as the difficulty of prevention have tested social and political cohesion. Moreover, the intrusive nature of many prophylactic measures have led to individual liberty and human rights concerns. As noted by the Victorian (Australia) Ombudsman Report on the COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne, we may be tempted, during a crisis, to view human rights as expendable in the pursuit of saving human lives. This thinking can lead to dangerous territory. It is not unlawful to curtail fundamental rights and freedoms when there are compelling reasons for doing so; human rights are inherently and inseparably a consideration of human lives. (5) These difficulties have raised issues about the importance of social or community capital in fighting the pandemic. This article discusses the impacts of social and community capital and other factors on the governmental efforts to combat the spread of infectious disease through the maintenance of social distancing and household ‘bubbles’. It argues that the beneficial effects of social and community capital towards fighting the pandemic, such as mutual respect and empathy, which underpins such public health measures as social distancing, the use of personal protective equipment, and lockdowns in the USA, have been undermined as preventive measures because they have been transmogrified to become a salient aspect of the “culture wars” (Peters). In contrast, states that have relatively lower social capital such a China have been able to more effectively arrest transmission of the disease because the government was been able to generate and personify a nationalist response to the virus and thus generate a more robust social consensus regarding the efforts to combat the disease. Social Capital and Culture Wars The response to COVID-19 required individuals, families, communities, and other types of groups to refrain from extensive interaction – to stay in their bubble. In these situations, especially given the asymptomatic nature of many COVID-19 infections and the serious imposition lockdowns and social distancing and isolation, the temptation for individuals to breach public health rules in high. From the perspective of policymakers, the response to fighting COVID-19 is a collective action problem. In studying collective action problems, scholars have paid much attention on the role of social and community capital (Ostrom and Ahn 17-35). Ostrom and Ahn comment that social capital “provides a synthesizing approach to how cultural, social, and institutional aspects of communities of various sizes jointly affect their capacity of dealing with collective-action problems” (24). Social capital is regarded as an evolving social type of cultural trait (Fukuyama; Guiso et al.). Adger argues that social capital “captures the nature of social relations” and “provides an explanation for how individuals use their relationships to other actors in societies for their own and for the collective good” (387). The most frequently used definition of social capital is the one proffered by Putnam who regards it as “features of social organization, such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam, “Bowling Alone” 65). All these studies suggest that social and community capital has at least two elements: “objective associations” and subjective ties among individuals. Objective associations, or social networks, refer to both formal and informal associations that are formed and engaged in on a voluntary basis by individuals and social groups. Subjective ties or norms, on the other hand, primarily stand for trust and reciprocity (Paxton). High levels of social capital have generally been associated with democratic politics and civil societies whose institutional performance benefits from the coordinated actions and civic culture that has been facilitated by high levels of social capital (Putnam, Democracy 167-9). Alternatively, a “good and fair” state and impartial institutions are important factors in generating and preserving high levels of social capital (Offe 42-87). Yet social capital is not limited to democratic civil societies and research is mixed on whether rising social capital manifests itself in a more vigorous civil society that in turn leads to democratising impulses. Castillo argues that various trust levels for institutions that reinforce submission, hierarchy, and cultural conservatism can be high in authoritarian governments, indicating that high levels of social capital do not necessarily lead to democratic civic societies (Castillo et al.). Roßteutscher concludes after a survey of social capita indicators in authoritarian states that social capital has little effect of democratisation and may in fact reinforce authoritarian rule: in nondemocratic contexts, however, it appears to throw a spanner in the works of democratization. Trust increases the stability of nondemocratic leaderships by generating popular support, by suppressing regime threatening forms of protest activity, and by nourishing undemocratic ideals concerning governance (752). In China, there has been ongoing debate concerning the presence of civil society and the level of social capital found across Chinese society. If one defines civil society as an intermediate associational realm between the state and the family, populated by autonomous organisations which are separate from the state that are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests or values, it is arguable that the PRC had a significant civil society or social capital in the first few decades after its establishment (White). However, most scholars agree that nascent civil society as well as a more salient social and community capital has emerged in China’s reform era. This was evident after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, where the government welcomed community organising and community-driven donation campaigns for a limited period of time, giving the NGO sector and bottom-up social activism a boost, as evidenced in various policy areas such as disaster relief and rural community development (F. Wu 126; Xu 9). Nevertheless, the CCP and the Chinese state have been effective in maintaining significant control over civil society and autonomous groups without attempting to completely eliminate their autonomy or existence. The dramatic economic and social changes that have occurred since the 1978 Opening have unsurprisingly engendered numerous conflicts across the society. In response, the CCP and State have adjusted political economic policies to meet the changing demands of workers, migrants, the unemployed, minorities, farmers, local artisans, entrepreneurs, and the growing middle class. Often the demands arising from these groups have resulted in policy changes, including compensation. In other circumstances, where these groups remain dissatisfied, the government will tolerate them (ignore them but allow them to continue in the advocacy), or, when the need arises, supress the disaffected groups (F. Wu 2). At the same time, social organisations and other groups in civil society have often “refrained from open and broad contestation against the regime”, thereby gaining the space and autonomy to achieve the objectives (F. Wu 2). Studies of Chinese social or community capital suggest that a form of modern social capital has gradually emerged as Chinese society has become increasingly modernised and liberalised (despite being non-democratic), and that this social capital has begun to play an important role in shaping social and economic lives at the local level. However, this more modern form of social capital, arising from developmental and social changes, competes with traditional social values and social capital, which stresses parochial and particularistic feelings among known individuals while modern social capital emphasises general trust and reciprocal feelings among both known and unknown individuals. The objective element of these traditional values are those government-sanctioned, formal mass organisations such as Communist Youth and the All-China Federation of Women's Associations, where members are obliged to obey the organisation leadership. The predominant subjective values are parochial and particularistic feelings among individuals who know one another, such as guanxi and zongzu (Chen and Lu, 426). The concept of social capital emphasises that the underlying cooperative values found in individuals and groups within a culture are an important factor in solving collective problems. In contrast, the notion of “culture war” focusses on those values and differences that divide social and cultural groups. Barry defines culture wars as increases in volatility, expansion of polarisation, and conflict between those who are passionate about religiously motivated politics, traditional morality, and anti-intellectualism, and…those who embrace progressive politics, cultural openness, and scientific and modernist orientations. (90) The contemporary culture wars across the world manifest opposition by various groups in society who hold divergent worldviews and ideological positions. Proponents of culture war understand various issues as part of a broader set of religious, political, and moral/normative positions invoked in opposition to “elite”, “liberal”, or “left” ideologies. Within this Manichean universe opposition to such issues as climate change, Black Lives Matter, same sex rights, prison reform, gun control, and immigration becomes framed in binary terms, and infused with a moral sensibility (Chapman 8-10). In many disputes, the culture war often devolves into an epistemological dispute about the efficacy of scientific knowledge and authority, or a dispute between “practical” and theoretical knowledge. In this environment, even facts can become partisan narratives. For these “cultural” disputes are often how electoral prospects (generally right-wing) are advanced; “not through policies or promises of a better life, but by fostering a sense of threat, a fantasy that something profoundly pure … is constantly at risk of extinction” (Malik). This “zero-sum” social and policy environment that makes it difficult to compromise and has serious consequences for social stability or government policy, especially in a liberal democratic society. Of course, from the perspective of cultural materialism such a reductionist approach to culture and political and social values is not unexpected. “Culture” is one of the many arenas in which dominant social groups seek to express and reproduce their interests and preferences. “Culture” from this sense is “material” and is ultimately connected to the distribution of power, wealth, and resources in society. As such, the various policy areas that are understood as part of the “culture wars” are another domain where various dominant and subordinate groups and interests engaged in conflict express their values and goals. Yet it is unexpected that despite the pervasiveness of information available to individuals the pool of information consumed by individuals who view the “culture wars” as a touchstone for political behaviour and a narrative to categorise events and facts is relatively closed. This lack of balance has been magnified by social media algorithms, conspiracy-laced talk radio, and a media ecosystem that frames and discusses issues in a manner that elides into an easily understood “culture war” narrative. From this perspective, the groups (generally right-wing or traditionalist) exist within an information bubble that reinforces political, social, and cultural predilections. American and Chinese Reponses to COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic first broke out in Wuhan in December 2019. Initially unprepared and unwilling to accept the seriousness of the infection, the Chinese government regrouped from early mistakes and essentially controlled transmission in about three months. This positive outcome has been messaged as an exposition of the superiority of the Chinese governmental system and society both domestically and internationally; a positive, even heroic performance that evidences the populist credentials of the Chinese political leadership and demonstrates national excellence. The recently published White Paper entitled “Fighting COVID-19: China in Action” also summarises China’s “strategic achievement” in the simple language of numbers: in a month, the rising spread was contained; in two months, the daily case increase fell to single digits; and in three months, a “decisive victory” was secured in Wuhan City and Hubei Province (Xinhua). This clear articulation of the positive results has rallied political support. Indeed, a recent survey shows that 89 percent of citizens are satisfied with the government’s information dissemination during the pandemic (C Wu). As part of the effort, the government extensively promoted the provision of “political goods”, such as law and order, national unity and pride, and shared values. For example, severe publishments were introduced for violence against medical professionals and police, producing and selling counterfeit medications, raising commodity prices, spreading ‘rumours’, and being uncooperative with quarantine measures (Xu). Additionally, as an extension the popular anti-corruption campaign, many local political leaders were disciplined or received criminal charges for inappropriate behaviour, abuse of power, and corruption during the pandemic (People.cn, 2 Feb. 2020). Chinese state media also described fighting the virus as a global “competition”. In this competition a nation’s “material power” as well as “mental strength”, that calls for the highest level of nation unity and patriotism, is put to the test. This discourse recalled the global competition in light of the national mythology related to the formation of Chinese nation, the historical “hardship”, and the “heroic Chinese people” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). Moreover, as the threat of infection receded, it was emphasised that China “won this competition” and the Chinese people have demonstrated the “great spirit of China” to the world: a result built upon the “heroism of the whole Party, Army, and Chinese people from all ethnic groups” (People.cn, 7 Apr. 2020). In contrast to the Chinese approach of emphasising national public goods as a justification for fighting the virus, the U.S. Trump Administration used nationalism, deflection, and “culture war” discourse to undermine health responses — an unprecedented response in American public health policy. The seriousness of the disease as well as the statistical evidence of its course through the American population was disputed. The President and various supporters raged against the COVID-19 “hoax”, social distancing, and lockdowns, disparaged public health institutions and advice, and encouraged protesters to “liberate” locked-down states (Russonello). “Our federal overlords say ‘no singing’ and ‘no shouting’ on Thanksgiving”, Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican of Arizona, wrote as he retweeted a Centers for Disease Control list of Thanksgiving safety tips (Weiner). People were encouraged, by way of the White House and Republican leadership, to ignore health regulations and not to comply with social distancing measures and the wearing of masks (Tracy). This encouragement led to threats against proponents of face masks such as Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s foremost experts on infectious diseases, who required bodyguards because of the many threats on his life. Fauci’s critics — including President Trump — countered Fauci’s promotion of mask wearing by stating accusingly that he once said mask-wearing was not necessary for ordinary people (Kelly). Conspiracy theories as to the safety of vaccinations also grew across the course of the year. As the 2020 election approached, the Administration ramped up efforts to downplay the serious of the virus by identifying it with “the media” and illegitimate “partisan” efforts to undermine the Trump presidency. It also ramped up its criticism of China as the source of the infection. This political self-centeredness undermined state and federal efforts to slow transmission (Shear et al.). At the same time, Trump chided health officials for moving too slowly on vaccine approvals, repeated charges that high infection rates were due to increased testing, and argued that COVID-19 deaths were exaggerated by medical providers for political and financial reasons. These claims were amplified by various conservative media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham of Fox News. The result of this “COVID-19 Denialism” and the alternative narrative of COVID-19 policy told through the lens of culture war has resulted in the United States having the highest number of COVID-19 cases, and the highest number of COVID-19 deaths. At the same time, the underlying social consensus and social capital that have historically assisted in generating positive public health outcomes has been significantly eroded. According to the Pew Research Center, the share of U.S. adults who say public health officials such as those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are doing an excellent or good job responding to the outbreak decreased from 79% in March to 63% in August, with an especially sharp decrease among Republicans (Pew Research Center 2020). Social Capital and COVID-19 From the perspective of social or community capital, it could be expected that the American response to the Pandemic would be more effective than the Chinese response. Historically, the United States has had high levels of social capital, a highly developed public health system, and strong governmental capacity. In contrast, China has a relatively high level of governmental and public health capacity, but the level of social capital has been lower and there is a significant presence of traditional values which emphasise parochial and particularistic values. Moreover, the antecedent institutions of social capital, such as weak and inefficient formal institutions (Batjargal et al.), environmental turbulence and resource scarcity along with the transactional nature of guanxi (gift-giving and information exchange and relationship dependence) militate against finding a more effective social and community response to the public health emergency. Yet China’s response has been significantly more successful than the Unites States’. Paradoxically, the American response under the Trump Administration and the Chinese response both relied on an externalisation of the both the threat and the justifications for their particular response. In the American case, President Trump, while downplaying the seriousness of the virus, consistently called it the “China virus” in an effort to deflect responsibly as well as a means to avert attention away from the public health impacts. As recently as 3 January 2021, Trump tweeted that the number of “China Virus” cases and deaths in the U.S. were “far exaggerated”, while critically citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's methodology: “When in doubt, call it COVID-19. Fake News!” (Bacon). The Chinese Government, meanwhile, has pursued a more aggressive foreign policy across the South China Sea, on the frontier in the Indian sub-continent, and against states such as Australia who have criticised the initial Chinese response to COVID-19. To this international criticism, the government reiterated its sovereign rights and emphasised its “victimhood” in the face of “anti-China” foreign forces. Chinese state media also highlighted China as “victim” of the coronavirus, but also as a target of Western “political manoeuvres” when investigating the beginning stages of the pandemic. The major difference, however, is that public health policy in the United States was superimposed on other more fundamental political and cultural cleavages, and part of this externalisation process included the assignation of “otherness” and demonisation of internal political opponents or characterising political opponents as bent on destroying the United States. This assignation of “otherness” to various internal groups is a crucial element in the culture wars. While this may have been inevitable given the increasingly frayed nature of American society post-2008, such a characterisation has been activity pushed by local, state, and national leadership in the Republican Party and the Trump Administration (Vogel et al.). In such circumstances, minimising health risks and highlighting civil rights concerns due to public health measures, along with assigning blame to the democratic opposition and foreign states such as China, can have a major impact of public health responses. The result has been that social trust beyond the bubble of one’s immediate circle or those who share similar beliefs is seriously compromised — and the collective action problem presented by COVID-19 remains unsolved. Daniel Aldrich’s study of disasters in Japan, India, and US demonstrates that pre-existing high levels of social capital would lead to stronger resilience and better recovery (Aldrich). Social capital helps coordinate resources and facilitate the reconstruction collectively and therefore would lead to better recovery (Alesch et al.). Yet there has not been much research on how the pool of social capital first came about and how a disaster may affect the creation and store of social capital. Rebecca Solnit has examined five major disasters and describes that after these events, survivors would reach out and work together to confront the challenges they face, therefore increasing the social capital in the community (Solnit). However, there are studies that have concluded that major disasters can damage the social fabric in local communities (Peacock et al.). The COVID-19 epidemic does not have the intensity and suddenness of other disasters but has had significant knock-on effects in increasing or decreasing social capital, depending on the institutional and social responses to the pandemic. In China, it appears that the positive social capital effects have been partially subsumed into a more generalised patriotic or nationalist affirmation of the government’s policy response. Unlike civil society responses to earlier crises, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, there is less evidence of widespread community organisation and response to combat the epidemic at its initial stages. This suggests better institutional responses to the crisis by the government, but also a high degree of porosity between civil society and a national “imagined community” represented by the national state. The result has been an increased legitimacy for the Chinese government. Alternatively, in the United States the transformation of COVID-19 public health policy into a culture war issue has seriously impeded efforts to combat the epidemic in the short term by undermining the social consensus and social capital necessary to fight such a pandemic. Trust in American institutions is historically low, and President Trump’s untrue contention that President Biden’s election was due to “fraud” has further undermined the legitimacy of the American government, as evidenced by the attacks directed at Congress in the U.S. capital on 6 January 2021. As such, the lingering effects the pandemic will have on social, economic, and political institutions will likely reinforce the deep cultural and political cleavages and weaken interpersonal networks in American society. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated global public health and impacted deeply on the world economy. Unsurprisingly, given the serious economic, social, and political consequences, different government responses have been highly politicised. Various quarantine and infection case tracking methods have caused concern over state power intruding into private spheres. The usage of face masks, social distancing rules, and intra-state travel restrictions have aroused passionate debate over public health restrictions, individual liberty, and human rights. Yet underlying public health responses grounded in higher levels of social capital enhance the effectiveness of public health measures. In China, a country that has generally been associated with lower social capital, it is likely that the relatively strong policy response to COVID-19 will both enhance feelings of nationalism and Chinese exceptionalism and help create and increase the store of social capital. 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Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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