Academic literature on the topic 'Broken Hill Domain'

Xiuyan Jade, produced in Xiuyan County, Liaoning Province, China is one of the four famous jade in China. King Jade, which is deemed the largest jade body of the world, was broken out from a hill. The local government planned to build a tourism site based on the jade culture there. The purpose of the investigation was to evaluate the stability of subsurface foundation, and the possible positions of mined-out zones to prevent the further rolling of the jade body. Cross-hole radar tomography is the key technique in the investigation. Conventional travel time and attenuation tomography based on ray tracing theory cannot provide high-resolution images because only a fraction of the measured information is used in the inversion. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) can provide high-resolution permittivity and conductivity images because it utilizes all the information provided by the radar signals. We deduce the gradient expression of the time-domain FWI with respect to the permittivity and conductivity using a method that is different from that of the previous work and realize the FWI algorithm that can simultaneously update the permittivity and conductivity by using the conjugate gradient method. Inverted results from synthetic data show that time-domain FWI can significantly improve the resolution compared with the ray-based tomogram methods. FWI can distinguish targets that are as small as one-half to one-third wavelength and the inverted physical values are closer to the real ones than those provided by the ray tracing method. We use the FWI algorithm to the field data measured at Xiuyan jade mine. Both the inverted permittivity and conductivity can comparably delineate four mined-out zones, which exhibit low-permittivity and low-conductivity characteristics. Furthermore, the locations of the interpreted mined-out zones are in good agreement with the existing mining channels recorded by geological data.

India collided with mainland Asia at 65 Ma. The pressure rose to 9-11 kbar in the collision zone. As the Indian lithosphere bent down and its upper crust buckled up as an upwarp in the period 35-45 Ma, the southern margin of Asia became the water-divide of the Himalayan rivers. A variety of Eurasian fauna migrated to the Indian landmass. The southern margin of the Himalayan province synchronously sagged to give rise to the foreland basin that was linked with the Indian sea. In this Paleocene foreland basin 48-49 Ma ago, the whales from one of the species of the immigrant terrestrial mammals evolved. The sea retreated from the Himalayan province by the early Miocene, even as the crust broke up along faults 20-22 million years ago. The basement rocks, which had attained high-grade metamorphism at 600-800°C and 6-10 kbar, were thrust up to give rise to what later became the Himādri or Great Himalaya. Differential melting of the high-grade metamorphic rocks of the Himadri extensively produced 21 ± 1 Maold granites. Rivers carried detritus generated by the denudation of the fast emerging Himalaya and deposited it in the foreland basin which turned fluvial around 23 Ma. Another fluvial foreland basin, the Siwalik, was formed at ~18 Ma in front of the rapidly rising orogen and was filled by river-borne sediments at the rate of 20-30 cm year-1 in the early stage and at 50-55 cm year-1 later when the Himadri was uplifted and briskly exhumed in the Late Miocene (9-7.5 Ma). The Himadri then became high enough to cause disruption of wind circulation, culminating in the onset of monsoon. The climate change that followed caused migration of a variety of quadrupeds from Africa and Eurasia, bringing about considerable faunal turnovers in the Siwalik life. Spasmodic uplift of the outer ranges of the Lesser Himalaya and tectonic convulsion in the Siwalik domain at 1.6 Ma resulted in widespread landslides with debris flows and emplacement of the Upper Siwalik Boulder Conglomerate. Strong tectonic movements at 0.8 Ma caused the partitioning of the foreland basin into the rising Siwalik Hills and the subsiding IndoGangetic Plains, and also the initiation of glaciation in the uplifted domain of the Great Himalaya. After the end of the Pleistocene ice age around 0.2 Ma, there was oscillation of dry-cold and wet-warm climates. This climatic vicissitude is recorded in the sediments of the lakes that had formed because of reactivation of faults crossing rivers and streams. Activeness of faults, continuing uplift and current seismicity imply ongoing strain-buildup in the Himalayan domain.

AbstractAfter a short historical account, and a discussion of Hill and Meyerhof’s theory of the energetics of muscular exercise, we analyse steady-state rest and exercise as the condition wherein coupling of respiration to metabolism is most perfect. The quantitative relationships show that the homeostatic equilibrium, centred around arterial pH of 7.4 and arterial carbon dioxide partial pressure of 40 mmHg, is attained when the ratio of alveolar ventilation to carbon dioxide flow ($${\dot{V}}_{A}/{\dot{V}}_{R}{CO}_{2}$$ V ˙ A / V ˙ R CO 2 ) is − 21.6. Several combinations, exploited during exercise, of pertinent respiratory variables are compatible with this equilibrium, allowing adjustment of oxygen flow to oxygen demand without its alteration. During exercise transients, the balance is broken, but the coupling of respiration to metabolism is preserved when, as during moderate exercise, the respiratory system responds faster than the metabolic pathways. At higher exercise intensities, early blood lactate accumulation suggests that the coupling of respiration to metabolism is transiently broken, to be re-established when, at steady state, blood lactate stabilizes at higher levels than resting. In the severe exercise domain, coupling cannot be re-established, so that anaerobic lactic metabolism also contributes to sustain energy demand, lactate concentration goes up and arterial pH falls continuously. The $${\dot{V}}_{A}/{\dot{V}}_{R}{CO}_{2}$$ V ˙ A / V ˙ R CO 2 decreases below − 21.6, because of ensuing hyperventilation, while lactate keeps being accumulated, so that exercise is rapidly interrupted. The most extreme rupture of the homeostatic equilibrium occurs during breath-holding, because oxygen flow from ambient air to mitochondria is interrupted. No coupling at all is possible between respiration and metabolism in this case.

In this article I discuss a story told by the South Australian Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Aunty Hilda Wilson (nee Varcoe), about the time when, at not quite sixteen, she was sent from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station to work in the Adelaide Hills, some 500 kilometres away, as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”. Her secondment was part of a widespread practice in early and mid-twentieth century Australia of placing young Aboriginal women “of marriageable age” from missions and government reserves into domestic service. Consciously deploying Indigenous storytelling practices as pedagogy, Hilda Wilson recounted this episode in a number of distinct ways during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across these iterations, each building on the other, she exhibited a personal resilience in her subjectivity, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work, which informed her agency and determination in a challenging situation in which she was both caring for a white socially-privileged family of five, while simultaneously grappling with the injustices of a state system of segregated indentured labour. Kirmayer and colleagues propose that “notions of resilience emerging from developmental psychology and psychiatry in recent years address the distinctive cultures, geographic and social settings, and histories of adversity of indigenous peoples”. Resilience is understood here as an ability to actively engage with traumatic change, involving the capacity to absorb stress and to transform in order to cope with it (Luthar et al.). Further to this, in an Indigenous context, Marion Kickett has found the capacity for resilience to be supported by three key factors: family connections, culture and belonging as well as notions of identity and history. In exploring the layers of this autobiographical story, I employ this extended psychological notion of resilience in both a domestic ambit as well as the broader social context for Indigenous people surviving a system of external domination. Additionally I consider the resilience Aunty Hilda demonstrates at a pivotal interlude between girlhood and womanhood within the trajectory of her overall long and productive life, and within an intergenerational history of resistance and accommodation. What is especially important about her storytelling is its refusal to be contained by the imaginary of the settler nation and its generic Aboriginal-female subject. She refuses victimhood while at the same time illuminating the mechanisms of injustice, hinting also at possibilities for alternative and more equitable relationships of family and work across cultural divides. Considered through this prism, resilience is, I suggest, also a quality firmly connected to ideas of Aboriginal cultural-sovereignty and standpoint and to, what Victoria Grieves has identified as, the Aboriginal knowledge value of sharing (25, 28, 45). Storytelling as Pedagogy The story I discuss was verbally recounted in a manner that Westphalen describes as “a continuation of Dreaming Stories”, functioning to educate and connect people and country (13-14). As MacGill et al. note, “the critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller.” Hilda told me that as a child she was taught not to ask questions when listening to the stories of an Elder, and her own children were raised in this manner. Hilda's oldest daughter described this as a process involving patience, intrigue and surprise (Elva Wanganeen). Narratives unfold through nuance and repetition in a complexity of layers that can generate multiple levels of meaning over time. Circularity and recursivity underlie this pedagogy through which mnemonic devices are built so that stories become re-membered and inscribed on the body of the listener. When a perceived level of knowledge-transference has occurred, a narrator may elect to elaborate further, adding another detail that will often transform the story’s social, cultural, moral or political context. Such carefully chosen additional detail, however, might re-contextualise all that has gone before. As well as being embodied, stories are also emplaced, and thus most appropriately told in the Country where events occurred. (Here I use the Aboriginal English term “Country” which encompasses home, clan estate, and the powerful complex of spiritual, animate and inanimate forces that bind people and place.) Hilda Wilson’s following account of her first job as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”, Dr Frank Swann, provides an illustration of how she expertly uses traditional narrative forms of incrementally structured knowledge transmission within a cross-cultural setting to tell a story that expresses practices of resilience as resistance and transformation at its core. A “White Doctor” Story: The First Layer Aunty Hilda first told me this story when we were winding along the South Eastern Freeway through the Adelaide hills between Murray Bridge and Mount Barker, in 1997, on our way home to Adelaide from a trip to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri cultural education centre co-founded by her granddaughter. She was then 86 years old. Ahead of us, the profile of Mt Lofty rose out of the plains and into view. The highest peak in the Mount Lofty ranges, Yurrebilla, as it is known to Kaurna Aboriginal people, or Mt Lofty, has been an affluent enclave of white settlement for Adelaide’s moneyed elite since early colonial times. Being in place, or in view of place, provided the appropriate opportunity for her to tell me the story. It belongs to a group of stories that during our initial period of working together changed little over time until one day two years later she an added contextual detail which turned it inside out. Hilda described the doctor’s spacious hill-top residence, and her responsibilities of caring for Dr Swann’s invalid wife (“an hysteric who couldn't do anything for herself”), their twin teenage boys (who attended private college in the city) along with another son and younger daughter living at home (pers. com. Hilda Wilson). Recalling the exhilaration of looking down over the sparkling lights of Adelaide at night from this position of apparent “privilege” on the summit, she related this undeniably as a success story, justifiably taking great pride in her achievements as a teenager, capable of stepping into the place of the non-Indigenous doctor's wife in running the large and demanding household. Successfully undertaking a wide range of duties employed in the care of a family, including the disabled mother, she is an active participant crucial to the lives of all in the household, including to the work of the doctor and the twin boys in private education. Hilda recalled that Mrs Swann was unable to eat without her assistance. As the oldest daughter of a large family Hilda had previously assisted in caring for her younger siblings. Told in this way, her account collapses social distinctions, delineating a shared social and physical space, drawing its analytic frame from an Indigenous ethos of subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity and care. Moreover Hilda’s narrative of domestic service demonstrates an assertion of agency that resists colonial and patriarchal hegemony and inverts the master/mistress-servant relationship, one she firmly eschews in favour of the self-affirming role of the lady of the house. (It stands in contrast to the abuse found in other accounts for example Read, Tucker, Kartinyeri. Often the key difference was a continuity of family connections and ongoing family support.) Indeed the home transformed into a largely feminised and cross-culturalised space in which she had considerable agency and responsibility when the doctor was absent. Hilda told me this story several times in much the same way during our frequent encounters over the next two years. Each telling revealed further details that fleshed a perspective gained from what Patricia Hill Collins terms an “epistemic privilege” via her “outsider-within status” of working within a white household, lending an understanding of its social mechanisms (12-15). She also stressed the extent of her duty of care in upholding the family’s well-being, despite the work at times being too burdensome. The Second Version: Coming to Terms with Intersecting Oppressions Later, as our relationship developed and deepened, when I began to record her life-narrative as part of my doctoral work, she added an unexpected detail that altered its context completely: It was all right except I slept outside in a tin shed and it was very cold at night. Mount Lofty, by far the coldest part of Adelaide, frequently experiences winter maximum temperatures of two or three degrees and often light snowfalls. This skilful reframing draws on Indigenous storytelling pedagogy and is expressly used to invite reflexivity, opening questions that move the listener from the personal to the public realm in which domestic service and the hegemony of the home are pivotal in coming to terms with the overlapping historical oppressions of class, gender, race and nation. Suddenly we witness her subjectivity starkly shift from one self-defined and allied with an equal power relationship – or even of dependency reversal cast as “de-facto doctor's wife” – to one diminished by inequity and power imbalance in the outsider-defined role of “mistreated servant”. The latter was signalled by the dramatic addition of a single signifying detail as a decoding device to a deeper layer of meaning. In this parallel stratum of the story, Hilda purposefully brings into relief the politics in which “the private domain of women's housework intersected with the public domain of governmental social engineering policies” (Haskins 4). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, what for White Australia was cheap labour and a civilising mission, for Indigenous women constituted stolen children and slavery. Protection and then assimilation were government policies under which Indigenous women grew up. (96) Hilda was sent away from her family to work in 1927 by the universally-feared Sister Pearl McKenzie, a nurse who too-zealously (Katinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Calling, 23) oversaw the Chief Protector’s policies of “training” Aboriginal children from the South Australian missions in white homes once they reached fourteen (Haebich, 316—20). Indeed many prominent Adelaide hills’ families benefited from Aboriginal labour under this arrangement. Hilda explained her struggle with the immense cultural dislocation that removal into domestic service entailed, a removal her grandfather William Rankine had travelled from Raukkan to Government House to protest against less than a decade earlier (The Register December 21, 1923). This additional layer of story also illuminates Hilda’s capacity for resilience and persistence in finding a way forward through the challenge of her circumstances (Luthar et al.), drawing on her family networks and sense of personhood (Kickett). Hilda related that her father visited her at Mount Lofty twice, though briefly, on his way to shearing jobs in the south-east of the state. “He said it was no good me living like this,” she stated. Through his active intervention, reinforcement was requested and another teenager from Point Pearce, Hilda’s future husband’s cousin, Annie Sansbury, soon arrived to share the workload. But, Hilda explained, the onerous expectations coupled with the cultural segregation of retiring to the tin shed quickly became too much for Annie, who stayed only three months, leaving Hilda coping again alone, until her father applied additional pressure for a more suitable placement to be found for his daughter. In her next position, working for the family of a racehorse trainer, Hilda contentedly shared the bedroom with the small boy for whom she cared, and not long after returned to Point Pearce where she married Robert Wilson and began a family of her own. Gendered Resilience across Cultural Divides Hilda explicitly speaks into these spaces to educate me, because all but a few white women involved have remained silent about their complicity with state sanctioned practices which exploited Indigenous labour and removed children from their families through the policies of protection and assimilation. For Indigenous women, speaking out was often fraught with the danger of a deeper removal from family and Country, even of disappearance. Victoria Haskins writes extensively of two cases in New South Wales where young Aboriginal women whose protests concerning their brutal treatment at the hands of white employers, resulted in their wrongful and prolonged committal to mental health and other institutions (147-52, 228-39). In the indentured service of Indigenous women it is possible to see oppression operating through Eurocentric ideologies of race, class and gender, in which Indigenous women were assumed to take on, through displacement, the more oppressed role of white women in pre-second world war non-Aboriginal Australian society. The troubling silent shadow-figure of the “doctor’s wife” indeed provides a haunting symbol of - and also a forceful rebellion against – the docile upper middle-class white femininity of the inter-war era. Susan Bordo has argued that that “the hysteric” is archetypal of a discourse of ‘pathology as embodied protest’ in which the body may […] be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view in extreme or hyperliteral form. (20) Mrs Swann’s vulnerability contrasts markedly with the strength Hilda expresses in coping with a large family, emanating from a history of equitable gender relations characteristic of Ngarrindjeri society (Bell). The intersection of race and gender, as Marcia Langton contends “continues to require deconstruction to allow us to decolonise our consciousness” (54). From Hilda’s brief description one grasps a relationship resonant with that between the protagonists in Tracy Moffat's Night Cries, (a response to the overt maternalism in the film Jedda) in which the white mother finds herself utterly reliant on her “adopted” Aboriginal daughter at the end of her life (46-7). Resilience and Survival The different versions of story Hilda deploys, provide a pedagogical basis to understanding the broader socio-political framework of her overall life narrative in which an ability to draw on the cultural continuity of the past to transform the future forms an underlying dynamic. This demonstrated capacity to meet the challenging conditions thrown up by the settler-colonial state has its foundations in the connectivity and cultural strength sustained generationally in her family. Resilience moves from being individually to socially determined, as in Kickett’s model. During the onslaught of dispossession, following South Australia’s 1836 colonial invasion, Ngarrindjeri were left near-starving and decimated from introduced diseases. Pullume (c1808-1888), the rupuli (elected leader of the Ngarrindjeri Tendi, or parliament), Hilda’s third generation great-grandfather, decisively steered his people through the traumatic changes, eventually negotiating a middle-path after the Point McLeay Mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 (Jenkin, 59). Pullume’s granddaughter, the accomplished, independent-thinking Ellen Sumner (1842—1925), played an influential educative role during Hilda’s youth. Like other Ngarrindjeri women in her lineage, Ellen Sumner was skilled in putari practice (female doctor) and midwifery culture that extended to a duty of care concerning women and children (teaching her “what to do and what not to do”), which I suggest is something Hilda herself drew from when working with the Swann family. Hilda’s mother and aunties continued aspects of the putari tradition, attending births and giving instruction to women in the community (Bell, 171, Hughes Grandmother, 52-4). As mentioned earlier, when the South Australian government moved to introduce The Training of Children Act (SA) Hilda’s maternal grandfather William Rankine campaigned vigorously against this, taking a petition to the SA Governor in December 1923 (Haebich, 315-19). As with Aunty Hilda, William Rankine used storytelling as a method to draw public attention to the inequities of his times in an interview with The Register which drew on his life-narrative (Hughes, My Grandmother, 61). Hilda’s father Wilfred Varcoe, a Barngarrla-Wirrungu man, almost a thousand kilometres away from his Poonindie birthplace, resisted assimilation by actively pursuing traditional knowledge networks using his mobility as a highly sought after shearer to link up with related Elders in the shearing camps, (and as we saw to inspect the conditions his daughter was working under at Mt Lofty). The period Hilda spent as a servant to white families to be trained in white ways was in fact only a brief interlude in a long life in which family connections, culture and belonging (Kickett) served as the backbone of her resilience and resistance. On returning to the Point Pearce Mission, Hilda successfully raised a large family and activated a range of community initiatives that fostered well-being. In the 1960s she moved to Adelaide, initially as the sole provider of her family (her husband later followed), to give her younger children better educational opportunities. Working with Aunty Gladys Elphick OBE through the Council of Aboriginal Women, she played a foundational role in assisting other Aboriginal women establish their families in the city (Mattingly et al., 154, Fisher). In Adelaide, Aunty Hilda became an influential, much loved Elder, living in good health to the age of ninety-six years. The ability to survive changing circumstances, to extend care over and over to her children and Elders along with qualities of leadership, determination, agency and resilience have passed down through her family, several of whom have become successful in public life. These include her great-grandson and former AFL football player, Michael O’Loughlin, her great-nephew Adam Goodes and her-grand-daughter, the cultural weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Arguably, resilience contributes to physical as well as cultural longevity, through caring for the self and others. Conclusion This story demonstrates how sociocultural dimensions of resilience are contextualised in practices of everyday lives. We see this in the way that Aunty Hilda Wilson’s self-narrated story resolutely defies attempts to know, subjugate and categorise, operating instead in accord with distinctively Aboriginal expressions of gender and kinship relations that constitute an Aboriginal sovereignty. Her storytelling activates a revision of collective history in ways that valorise Indigenous identity (Kirmayer et al.). Her narrative of agency and personal achievement, one that has sustained her through life, interacts with the larger narrative of state-endorsed exploitation, diffusing its power and exposing it to wider moral scrutiny. Resilience in this context is inextricably entwined with practices of cultural survival and resistance developed in response to the introduction of government policies and the encroachment of settlers and their world. We see resilience too operating across Hilda Wilson’s family history, and throughout her long life. The agency and strategies displayed suggest alternative realities and imagine other, usually more equitable, possible worlds. References Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was and Will Be. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 90-110. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fisher, Elizabeth M. "Elphick, Gladys (1904–1988)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 29 Sep. 2013. ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/elphick-gladys-12460/text22411>. Grieves, Victoria. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing, Melbourne University: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009. Haebich, Anna. Broken Circles: The Fragmenting of Indigenous Families. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 2000. Haskins, Victoria. My One Bright Spot. London: Palgrave, 2005. Hughes, Karen. "My Grandmother on the Other Side of the Lake." PhD thesis, Department of Australian Studies and Department of History, Flinders University. Adelaide, 2009. ———. “Microhistories and Things That Matter.” Australian Feminist Studies 27.73 (2012): 269-278. ———. “I’d Grown Up as a Child amongst Natives.” Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge 28 (2013). 29 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/karen-hughes>. Jenkin, Graham. Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979. Kartinyeri, Doris. Kick the Tin. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000. Kartinyeri, Doreen. My Ngarrindjeri Calling, Adelaide: Wakefield, 2007. Kickett, Marion. “Examination of How a Culturally Appropriate Definition of Resilience Affects the Physical and Mental Health of Aboriginal People.” PhD thesis, Curtin University, 2012. Kirmayer, L.J., S. Dandeneau, E. Marshall, M.K. Phillips, K. Jenssen Williamson. “Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56.2 (2011): 84-91. Luthar, S., D. Cicchetti, and B. Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543-62. MacGill, Bindi, Julie Mathews, Ellen Trevorrow, Alice Abdulla, and Deb Rankine. “Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” M/C Journal 15.3 (2012). Mattingly, Christobel, and Ken Hampton. Survival in Our Own Land, Adelaide: Wakefield, 1988. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. St Lucia: UQP, 2000. Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy. Dir. Tracy Moffatt. Chili Films, 1990. Read, Peter. A Rape of the Soul So Profound. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977. Wanganeen, Elva. Personal Communication, 2000. Westphalen, Linda. An Anthropological and Literary Study of Two Aboriginal Women's Life Histories: The Impacts of Enforced Child Removal and Policies of Assimilation. New York: Mellen Press, 2011.

IntroductionBushfires have taken numerous lives and destroyed communities throughout Australia over many years. Catastrophic fire weather alerts have occurred during the Australian summer of 2012–13, and long-term forecasts predict increased bushfire events throughout several areas of Australia. This article highlights how organisational and individual responses to bushfire in Australia often entail creative responses—either improvised responses at the time of bushfire emergencies or innovative (organisational, strategic, or technological) changes which help protect the community from, or mitigate against, future bushfire catastrophes. These improvised or innovative responses include emergency communications systems, practices, and devices. This article reports on findings from a research project funded by the Australian Research Council titled Using Community Engagement and Enhanced Visual Information to Promote FireWatch Satellite Communications as a Support for Collaborative Decision-making. FireWatch is a Web-based public information product based on near real time satellite data produced by the West Australian (WA) Government entity, Landgate. The project researches ways in which remote and regional publics can be engaged and mobilised through the development of a more user-friendly FireWatch site to make fire information accessible and usable, allowing a community-focused response to risk.The significance of the research project is evident both in how it addresses the important and life-threatening challenge of bushfires; and also in how Australia’s increasingly hot, dry, long summers are adding to historically-established risks. This innovative project uses an iterative, participatory design process incorporating action-research practices. This will ensure that the new Firewatch interface is redesigned, tested, observed, and reflected upon multiple times—and will incorporate the collective creativity of users, designers, and researchers.The qualitative findings reported on in this article are based on 19 interviews with community members in the town of Kununurra in the remote Kimberley region of WA. The findings are positioned within a reconceptualised framework in which creativity is viewed as an essential component of successful emergency responses. This includes, we argue, two critical aspects of creativity: improvisation during a catastrophic event; and ongoing innovation to improve future responses to catastrophes—including communication practices and technologies. This shifts the discourse within the literature in relation to the effective management and community responses to the changing phenomenon of fire catastrophes. Findings from the first round of interviews, and results of enquiries into previous bushfires in Australia, are used to highlight how these elements of creativity often entail a collective creativity on the part of emergency responders or the community in general. An additional focus is on the importance of the critical use of communication during a bushfire event.ImprovisationThe notion of "improvisation" is often associated with artistic performance. Nonetheless, improvisation is also integral to making effectual responses during natural catastrophes. “Extreme events present unforeseen conditions and problems, requiring a need for adaptation, creativity, and improvisation while demanding efficient and rapid delivery of services under extreme conditions” (Harrald 257).Catastrophes present us with unexpected scenarios and require rapid, on the spot problem solving and “even if you plan for a bushfire it is not going to go to plan. When the wind changes direction there has to be a new plan” (Jeff. Personal Interview. 2012). Jazz musicians or improvisational actors “work to build their knowledge across a range of fields, and this knowledge provides the elements for each improvisational outcome” (Kendra and Wachendorf 2). Similarly, emergency responders’ knowledge and preparation can be drawn “upon in the ambiguous and dynamic conditions of a disaster where not every need has been anticipated or accounted for” (Kendra and Wachtendorf 2). Individuals and community organisations not associated with emergency services also improvise in a creative and intuitive manner in the way they respond to catastrophes (Webb and Chevreau). For example, during the 9/11 terrorism catastrophe in the USA an assorted group of boat owners rapidly self-organised to evacuate Lower Manhattan. On their return trips, they carried emergency personnel and supplies to the area (Kendra and Wachendorf 5). An interviewee in our study also recalls bush fire incidents where creative problem solving and intuitive decision-making are called for. “It’s like in a fire, you have to be thinking fast. You need to be semi self-sufficient until help arrives. But without doing anything stupid and creating a worse situation” (Kelly. Personal Interview. 2012). Kelly then describes the rapid community response she witnessed during a recent fire on the outskirts of Kununurra, WA.Everyone had to be accounted for, moving cars, getting the tractors out, protecting the bores because you need the water. It happens really fast and it is a matter of rustling everyone up with the machinery. (2012)In this sense, the strength of communities in responding to catastrophes or disasters “results largely from the abilities of [both] individuals and organisations to adapt and improvise under conditions of uncertainty” (Webb and Chevreau 67). These improvised responses frequently involve a collective creativity—where groups of neighbours or emergency workers act in response to the unforseen, often in a unified and self-organising manner. InnovationCatastrophes also stimulate change and innovation for the future. Disasters create a new environment that must be explored, assessed, and comprehended. Disasters change the physical and social landscape, and thereby require a period of exploration, learning, and the development of new approaches. (Kendra and Wachtendorf 6)These new approaches can include organisational change, new response strategies, and technologies and communication improvements. Celebrated inventor Benjamin Franklin, for instance, facilitated the formation of the first Volunteer Fire department in the 1850s as a response to previous urban fire catastrophes in the USA (Mumford 258). This organisational innovation continues to play an instrumental part in modern fire fighting practices. Indeed, people living in rural and remote areas of Australia are heavily reliant on volunteer groups, due to the sparse population and vast distances that need to be covered.As with most inventions and innovations, new endeavours aimed at improving responses to catastrophes do not occur in a vacuum. They “are not just accidents, nor the inscrutable products of sporadic genius, but have abundant and clear causes in prior scientific and technological development” (Gifillian 61). Likewise, the development of our user-friendly and publically available FireWatch site relies on the accumulation of preceding inventions and innovations. This includes the many years spent developing the existing FireWatch site, a site dense in information of significant value to scientists, foresters, land managers, and fire experts.CommunicationsOften overlooked in discussions regarding emergency communications is the microgeographical exchanges that occur in response to the threat of natural disasters. This is where neighbours fill the critical period before emergency service responders can appear on site. In this situation, it is often local knowledge that underpins improvised grassroots communication networks that inform and organise the neighbourhood. During a recent bushfire on peri-rural blocks on the outskirts of Kununurra, neighbours went into action before emergency services volunteers could respond.We phoned around and someone would phone and call in. Instead of 000 being rung ten times, make sure that one person rang it in. 40 channel [CB Radio] was handy – two-way communication, four wheelers – knocking on doors making sure everyone is out of the house, just in case. (Jane. Personal Interview. 2012) Similarly, individuals and community groups have been able to inform and assist each other on a larger scale via social network technologies (SNTs). This creative application of SNTs began after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 when individuals created wikis in order to find missing persons (Palen and Lui). Twitter has experienced considerable growth and was used freely during the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia. Studies of tweeting activity during these fires indicate that “tweets made during Black Saturday are laden with actionable factual information which contrasts with earlier claims that tweets are of no value made of mere random personal notes” (Sinnappan et al. n.p.).Traditionally, official alerts and warnings have been provided to the public via television and radio. However, several inquiries into the recent bushfires within Australia show concern “with the way in which fire agencies deliver information to community members during a bushfire...[and in order to] improve community safety from bushfire, systems need to be implemented that enable community members to communicate information to fire agencies, making use of local knowledge” (Elsworth et al. 8).Technological and social developments over the last decade mean the public no longer relies on a single source of official information (Sorensen and Sorensen). Therefore, SNTs such as Twitter and Facebook are being used by the media and emergency authorities to make information available to the public. These SNTs are dynamic, in that there can be a two-way flow of information between the public and emergency organisations. Nonetheless, there has been limited use of SNTs by emergency agencies to source information posted by in situ residents, in order to help in decision-making (Freeman). Organisational use of multiple communication channels and platforms to inform citizens about bushfire emergencies ensures a greater degree of coverage—in case of communication systems breakdowns or difficulties—as in the telephone alert system breakdown in Kelmscott-Roleystone, WA or a recent fire in Warrnambool, Victoria which took out the regional telephone exchange making telephone calls, mobiles, landlines, and the Internet non-operational (Johnson). The new FireWatch site will provide an additional information option for rural and remote Australians who, often rely on visual sightings and on word-of-mouth to be informed about fires in their region. “The neighbour came over and said - there is a fire, we’d better get our act together because it is going to hit us. No sooner than I turned around, I thought shit, here it comes” (Richard. Personal Interview. 2012). The FireWatch ProjectThe FireWatch project involves the redevelopment of an existing FireWatch website to extend the usability of the product from experts to ordinary users in order to facilitate community-based decision-making and action both before and during bushfire emergencies. To this purpose, the project has been broken down to two distinct, yet interdependent, strands. The community strand involves collaboration within a community (in this case the Kununurra community) in order to carry out a community-centred approach to further development of the site. The design strand involves the development of an intuitive and accessible Web presentation of complex information in clear, unambiguous ways to inform action in stressful circumstances. At this stage, a first round of 19 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders has been conducted in Kununurra to determine fire-related information-seeking behaviours, attitudes to mediated information services in the region, as well as user feedback on a prototype website developed in the design strand of the project. Stakeholders included emergency services personnel (payed and volunteer), shire representatives, tourism operators, small business operators (including tourism operators), a forest manager, a mango farmer, an Indigenous ranger team manager as well as general community members. Interviewees reported dissatisfaction with current information systems. They gave positive feedback about the website prototype. “It’s very much, very easy to follow” (David. Personal Interview. 2012). “It looks so much better than [the old site]. You couldn’t get in that close on [the other site]. It is fantastic” (Lance. Personal Interview. 2012). They also added thought-provoking contributions to the design of the website (to be discussed later).Residents of Kununurra who were interviewed for this research project found bushfire warning communications unsatisfactory, especially during a recent fire on the outskirts of town. People who called 000 had difficulties passing the information on, having to explain exactly where Kununurra was and the location of fires to operators not familiar with the area. When asked how the Kununurra community gets their fire information a Shire representative explained: That is not very good at the moment. The only other way we can think about it is perhaps more updates on things like Facebook, perhaps on a website, but with this current fire there really wasn’t a lot of information and a lot of people didn’t know what was going on. We [the shire] knew because we were talking to the [fire] brigades and to FESA [Fire and Emergency Services Authority] but most residents didn’t have any idea and it looks pretty bad. (Ginny. Personal Interview. 2012) All being well, the new user-friendly FireWatch site will add another platform through which fire information messages are transmitted. Community members will be offered continuously streamed bushfire location information, which is independent of any emergency services communication systems. In particular, rural and remote areas of Australia will have fire information at the ready.The participatory methodology used in the design of the new FireWatch website makes use of collaborative creativity, whereby users’ vision of the website and context are incorporated. This iterative process “creates an equal evolving participatory process between user and designer towards sharing values and knowledge and creating new domains of collective creativity” (Park 2012). The rich and sometimes contradictory suggestions made by interviewees in this project often reflected individual visions of the tasks and information required, and individual preferences regarding the delivery of this information. “I have been thinking about how could this really work for me? I can give you feedback on what has happened in the past but how could it work for me in the future?” (Keith. Personal Interview. 2012). Keith and other community members interviewed in Kununurra indicated a variety of extra functions on the site not expected by the product designers. Some of these unexpected functions were common to most interviewees such as the great importance placed on the inclusion of a satellite view option on the site map (example shown in Figure 1). Jeremy, a member of an Indigenous ranger unit in the Kununurra area, was very keen to incorporate the satellite view options on the site. He explained that some of the older rangers:can’t use GPSs and don’t know time zones or what zones to put in, so they’ll use a satellite-style view. We’ll have Google Earth up on one [screen], and also our [own] imagery up on another [screen] and go that way. Be scrolling in and see – we’ve got a huge fire scar for 2011 around here; another guy will be on another computer zoning in and say, I think it is here. It’s quite simplistic but it works. (Personal Interview. 2012) In the case above, where rangers are already switching between computer screens to incorporate a satellite view into their planning, the importance of a satellite view layer on the FireWatch website makes user context an essential part of the design process. Incorporating many layers on one screen, as recommended by participants also ensures a more elegant solution to an existing problem.Figure 1: Satellite view in the Kununurra area showing features such as gorges, rivers, escarpments and dry riverbedsThis research project will involve further consultation with participants (both online and offline) regarding bushfire safety communications in their region, as well as the further design of the site. The website will be available over multiple devices (for example desktops, smart phones, and hand held tablet devices) and will be launched late this year. Further work will also be carried out to determine if social media is appropriate for this community of users in order to build awareness and share information regarding the site.Conclusion Community members improvise and self-organise when communicating fire information and organising help for each other. This can happen at a microgeographical (neighbourhood) level or on a wider level via social networking sites. Organisations also develop innovative communication systems or devices as a response to the threat of bushfires. Communication innovations, such as the use of Twitter and Facebook by fire emergency services, have been appropriated and fine-tuned by these organisations. Other innovations such as the user-friendly Firewatch site rely on previous technological developments in satellite-delivered imagery—as well as community input regarding the design and use of the site.Our early research into community members’ fire-related information-seeking behaviours and attitudes to mediated information services in the region of Kununurra has found unexpectedly creative responses, which range from collective creativity on the part of emergency responders or the community in general during events to creative use of existing information and communication networks. We intend to utilise this creativity in re-purposing FireWatch alongside the creative work of the designers in the project.Although it is commonplace to think of graphic design and new technology as incorporating creativity, it is rarely acknowledged how frequently these innovations harness everyday perspectives from non-professionals. In the case of the FireWatch developments, the creativity of designers and technologists has been informed by the creative responses of members of the public who are best placed to understand the challenges posed by restricted information flows on the ground in times of crisis. In these situations, people respond not only with new ideas for the future but with innovative responses in the present as they communicate with each other to deal with the challenge of a fast-moving and unpredictable situation. Such improvisation, honed through close awareness of the contours and parameters of both community and communication, are one of the ways through which people help keep themselves and each other safe in the face of dramatic developments.ReferencesElsworth, G., and K. Stevens, J. Gilbert, H. Goodman, A Rhodes. "Evaluating the Community Safety Approach to Bushfires in Australia: Towards an Assessment of What Works and How." 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Seventeen magnetotelluric survey sites were occupied across the Olary and Broken Hill Domains in the Curnamona Province, Australia. Two dimensional modelling along the magnetotelluric profile identifies the Broken Hill Domain as a zone of high electrical resistivity to a depth of 15km. Gravity modelling along a coincident profile has also shown the Broken Hill Domain to be significantly more dense than its surrounds. Seismic data have provided evidence of numerous faults and shear zones within the Pre-cambrian Broken Hill Domain basement, and is indicative of compression during the Delamarian Orogeny. It is proposed that the majority of crustal fluids were removed from these rocks by granulite facies metamorphism and tectonic compression. The boundary of the Olary Domain appears to be delineated by the Mundi Mundi Fault with an order of magnitude increase in resistivity on the Broken Hill side. The location of the Flinders Conductivity Anomaly was also observed and a number of conducting mechanisms considered, including crustal fluids and graphite films.
Thesis (B.Sc.(Hons)) -- University of Adelaide, School of Physical Sciences, 2002