Journal articles on the topic 'Child mental health services Victoria Melbourne'

In April 1995 the Royal Children's Hospital Mental Health Service in Melbourne piloted the use of videoconferencing in providing access for rural service providers and their clients to specialist child and adolescent psychiatric input. What began as a pilot project has in two years become integrated into the service-delivery system for rural Victoria. The experience of the service in piloting and integrating the use of videoconferencing to rural Victoria has been an important development for child and adolescent mental health services in Australia.

In 1995, the Royal Children's Hospital Mental Health Service in Melbourne developed the first telepsychiatry programme in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in Australia. A survey of 25 CAMHS clinicians in five rural regions who had used videoconferencing showed that 64% had used the technology for more than 18 months, and 20% had used it for 7–12 months. Also, 60% had used the technology on over 30 occasions, and 24% had used it on 20–29 occasions. Respondents clearly recognized its benefits in terms of their increased knowledge and skills (96%), strengthening of relationships with colleagues (92%) and decreased sense of isolation (92%). To build on the success of telepsychiatry there are a number of challenges that health service managers will need to address. Telepsychiatry works most effectively as a tool to complement face-to-face contact. It cannot be promoted as the total solution to the issue of isolation from mainstream services.

The reproductive years are a critical period where women experience greater risk of intimate-partner violence (IPV). Most studies investigating the association between IPV and reproductive health have been completed in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to examine the relationship between IPV and women’s reproductive decision-making in Victoria, Australia. We analysed secondary data from a cluster-randomised trial of IPV screening that surveyed new mothers attending Maternal- and Child-Health centres in Melbourne. Survey measures included the experience of partner abuse in the past 12 months using the Composite Abuse Scale and four reproductive decision-making indicators. Results showed that IPV affects reproductive decision-making among postpartum women. Women who reported abuse were less likely to plan for a baby (adjusted Odds Ratio 0.48, 95% CI: 0.31–0.75) than were non-abused women, significantly more likely to have partners make decisions for them about contraception (Risk ratio (RR) 4.09, 95% CI: 1.31–12.75), and whether and when to have a baby (RR 12.35, 95% CI: 4.46–34.16), than they were to make decisions jointly. Pregnant and postpartum women need to be screened for partner violence that compromises women’s decision-making power regarding their reproductive rights.

The Families First Pilot Program in the then Outer East metropolitan region of Melbourne began in mid-1991 as an intensive family preservation and reunification service for children on the verge of state care. The service offered was brief (4-6 week), intensive (up to 20 hours per week), home-based and flexible (24 hour a day, 7 day a week availability) and all members of the household or family were the focus of service even though the goals were clearly grounded in the protection of the child. This paper begins with some of the apprehension expressed both in the field and in Children Australia in 1993, and reports upon the now completed evaluation of the pilot, which covered the first 18 months of operation. The evaluation examined implementation and program development issues and considered the client population of the service against comparative data about those children at risk who were not included. The paper concludes that there is room for Families First in the Victorian system of protective and family services and points to several developmental issues.

This study aimed to describe regional variations in service use and distance travelled to post-discharge health services in the first three years following hospital discharge for people with transport-related orthopaedic, brain, and spinal cord injuries. Using linked data from the Victorian State Trauma Registry (VSTR) and Transport Accident Commission (TAC), we identified 1597 people who had sustained transport-related orthopaedic, brain, or spinal cord injuries between 2006 and 2016 that met the study inclusion criteria. The adjusted odds of GP service use for regional participants were 76% higher than for metropolitan participants in the orthopaedic and traumatic brain injury (TBI) groups. People with spinal cord injury (SCI) living in regional areas had 72% lower adjusted odds of accessing mental health, 76% lower adjusted odds of accessing OT services, and 82% lower adjusted odds of accessing physical therapies compared with people living in major cities. People with a TBI living in regional areas on average travelled significantly further to access all post-discharge health services compared with people with TBI in major cities. For visits to medical services, the median trip distance for regional participants was 76.61 km (95%CI: 16.01–132.21) for orthopaedic injuries, 104.05 km (95% CI: 51.55–182.78) for TBI, and 68.70 km (95%CI: 8.34–139.84) for SCI. Disparities in service use and distance travelled to health services exist between metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria following serious injury.

This address was given at a forum in November J999 for practitioners in the juvenile justice, alcohol and drug, mental health and child protection services in Victoria as part of the Department of Human Services’ Working Together Strategy’ (WTS). The WTS is a quality improvement initiative of the DHS in partnership with adolescent mental health and drug treatment service providers.WTS provides an organisational framework for the Community Care Division, the Aged, Community and Mental Health Division and the Public Health Division (specifically in reference to the mental health, child protection and care, juvenile justice and drug treatment services programs) to achieve better outcomes for shared clients. WTS is a response to perceived deficits in cross-program collaboration and communication in cases involving high need adolescent clients.

IntroductionThe ambulance clinical triage-for acute stroke treatment (ACT-FAST) algorithm is a severity based 3-step paramedic triage tool for pre-hospital recognition of large vessel occlusion (LVO), designed to improve specificity and paramedic assessment reliability compared to existing triage scales. ACT-FAST sequentially assesses 1. Unilateral arm fall to stretcher <10 s; 2a. Severe language disturbance (right arm weak), or 2b. Severe gaze deviation/hemi-neglect assessed by shoulder tap (left arm weak); 3. Clinical eligibility questions. We present the results of the ongoing Ambulance Victoria paramedic validation study.MethodsAmbulance Victoria paramedics assessed ACT-FAST in all suspected stroke patients pre-hospital in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, and in the Royal Melbourne Hospital Emergency Department since July 2017. Algorithm results were validated against a comparator of ICA/M1 occlusion on CT-angiography with NIHSS ≥6 (Class 1 indications for endovascular thrombectomy).ResultsData were available from n=119 assessments (ED n=68, pre-hospital n=51). Patient diagnoses were LVO n=20 (15.6%), non-LVO infarcts n=45 (38.5%), ICH n=10 (8.3%) and no stroke on imaging n=44 (37.6%). ACT-FAST showed 85% sensitivity, 88.9% specificity, 60.7% (72% excluding ICH) positive predictive value and 96.7% negative predictive value for LVO. Of 10 false-positives, 4 received thrombectomy for non-Class 1 indications (basilar/M2 occlusions/cervical dissection), 3 were ICH, and 1 was tumour. Three false-negatives were LVO with milder syndromes.DiscussionThe ongoing ACT-FAST algorithm validation study shows high accuracy for clinical recognition of LVO. The streamlined algorithmic approach with just two examination items provides a more practical option for implementation in large emergency service networks. Accurate pre-hospital recognition of LVO will allow bypass to endovascular centres and early activation of neuro-intervention services to expedite endovascular thrombectomy.

Recently arrived older refugees in resettlement countries are a particularly vulnerable population who face many risks to their health and well‐being, and many challenges in accessing services. This paper reports on a project undertaken in Victoria, Australia to explore the needs of older people from 14 recently arrived refugee communities, and the barriers to their receiving health and aged care. Findings from consultations with community workers and service providers highlight the key issues of isolation, family conflict and mental illness affecting older refugees, and point to ways in which policy‐makers and service providers can better respond to these small but deserving communities.

ABSTRACTBackground: This paper describes the evaluation of the Memory Lane Café service in Victoria, Australia. The Alzheimer's Australia Vic Memory Lane Café model aims to provide a social and educational service to people living with dementia and their carers, family members or friends. Dementia is a serious health issue in Australia, with prevalence estimated at 6.5% of people over 65 years of age. Living with dementia has significant social and psychological ramifications, often negatively affecting quality of life. Social support groups can improve quality of life for people living with dementia.Methods: The evaluation included focus groups and surveys of people with dementia and their carers, staff consultation, service provider interviews, and researcher observation. The Melbourne Health Mental Health Human Research Ethics Committee approved the project. Participants included people with dementia (aged 60 to 93 years, previously enrolled in the Alzheimer's Australia Vic's six-week Living With Memory Loss Program), their carers, friends and/or family members, staff working in the Cafés, and service providers with links to the Cafés.Results: This evaluation found that Memory Lane Cafés promote social inclusion, prevent isolation, and improve the social and emotional well-being of attendees. However, Cafés did not meet the needs of all potential attendees.Conclusions: The evaluation recommended that existing Café services be continued and possibilities for extending the Cafés be explored. Based on evaluation outcomes, the Department of Health Victoria is funding four additional pilot programs in café style support services.

ABSTRACTBackground: In the next decades of the twenty-first century, the global aging of populations will challenge every nation's ability to provide leadership by qualified health professionals to reshape and improve health care delivery systems. The challenge for educators is to design and deliver courses that will give students the knowledge and skills they need to fill that leadership role confidently in dementia care services. This paper explores the ways in which a curriculum can develop graduates who are ready to become leaders in shaping their industry.Method: The Master of Health Science – Aged Services (MHSAS) program at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia is applied as a case study to describe the process by which the concept of leadership is applied as the key driver in curriculum development, teaching practices and learning outcomes.Results: Evaluation instruments employed in a variety of purposes including teaching, curriculum planning and unit appraisal are discussed. Challenges for the future are proposed including the need for postgraduate programs in dementia to seek stronger national and international benchmarks and associations with other educational institutions to promote leadership and a vision of what is possible and desirable in dementia care provision.Conclusions: In the twenty-first century, effective service provision in the aged health care sector will require postgraduate curricula that equip students for dementia care leadership. The MHSAS program provides an established template for such curricula.

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic may cause a major mental health impact. We aimed to identify demographic or clinical factors associated with psychiatric admissions where COVID-19 was attributed to contribute to mental state, compared to admissions which did not. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was undertaken of inpatients admitted to Northern Psychiatric Unit 1, Northern Hospital in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia during 27/02/2020 to 08/07/2020. Data were extracted for participants who identified COVID-19 as a stressor compared to participants who did not. Fisher’s exact test and Mann-Whitley rank sum test were used. Results: Thirty six of 242 inpatients reported the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to mental ill health and subsequent admission. Reasons given included social isolation, generalized distress about the pandemic, barriers to support services, disruption to daily routine, impact on employment, media coverage, re-traumatization, cancelled ECT sessions, loss of loved ones, and increased drug use during the lockdown. Chronic medical conditions or psychiatric multimorbidity were positively associated and smoking status was negatively associated with reporting the COVID-19 pandemic as a contributor to mental ill health. Conclusion: Screening and identifying vulnerable populations during and after the global disaster is vital for timely and appropriate interventions to reduce the impact of the pandemic worldwide.

IntroductionAttention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which affects 5% of children globally. In Australia, it is estimated that 4.1% of children and adolescents have ADHD. While research has examined the treatment and outcomes of children with ADHD attending public mental health services during their time in the public system in Australia, it is not known what treatment they received before and after these treatment episodes, which will provide a more complete understanding of these children’s treatment journey.Methods and analysisWe will link clinical data from cohorts of children and adolescents treated in the public child and youth mental health and/or child development services in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney to the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS), Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and National Death Index. MBS data will demonstrate the treatment journey with respect to clinicians seen, and treatment episodes from the public health service data sets will be examined to assess if the type and intensity of treatment are related to treatment outcomes. PBS data will reveal all psychotropic medications prescribed, allowing an examination of not just ADHD medications, but also other psychotropics which may indicate co-occurring conditions (eg, anxiety and mood disorders). Statistical analyses will include descriptive statistics to describe the rates of specific medications and clinician specialties seen. Linear and logistic regression will be used to model how treatment and sociodemographic variables relate to routinely collected outcome measures in the public health system while controlling for covarying factors.Ethics and disseminationThis study has been approved by the following institutional ethics committees: (1) Children’s Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service (HREC/21/QCHQ/76260), (2) The University of Queensland (2021/HE002143) and (3) The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (EO2021/4/1300). Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed journals, conferences, professional associations and to public mental health services that treat ADHD.

Objectives: Despite substantial investment by governments, the prevalence of mental health disorders in developed countries remains unchanged over the past 20 years. As 50% of mental health conditions present before 14 years of age, access to high-quality mental health care for children is crucial. Barriers to access identified by parents include high costs and long wait times, difficulty navigating the health system, and a lack of recognition of the existence and/or severity of the child’s mental health disorder. Often neglected, but equally important, are clinician views about the barriers to and enablers of access to high-quality mental health care. We aimed to determine perspectives of Australian clinicians including child and adolescent psychiatrists, paediatricians, psychologists and general practitioners, on barriers and enablers within the current system and components of an optimal system. Methods: A total of 143 clinicians (approximately 35 each of child and adolescent psychiatrists, paediatricians, child psychologists and general practitioners) from Victoria and South Australia participated in semi-structured phone interviews between March 2018 and February 2019. Inductive content analysis was applied to address the broad study aims. Findings: Clinician-identified barriers included multi-dimensional family factors, service fragmentation, long wait times and inadequate training for paediatricians and general practitioners. Rural and regional locations provided additional challenges but a greater sense of collaboration resulting from the proximity of clinicians in rural areas, creating an opportunity to develop support networks. Suggestions for an optimal system included novel ways to improve access to child psychiatry expertise, training for paediatricians and general practitioners, and co-located multidisciplinary services. Conclusion: Within the current mental health system for children, structural, training and workforce barriers prevent optimal access to care. Clinicians identified many practical and systemic ideas to improve the system. Implementation and evaluation of effectiveness and cost effectiveness of these ideas is the next challenge for Australia’s children’s mental health.

Objectives Policy makers in developed countries have long considered the education system an avenue for supporting mental health care for children. Whilst educators have identified many challenges to providing this support (e.g. non-core role, stigma, overcrowded curriculum), understanding clinicians’ views on the role of educators and schools and how clinicians and schools could work together to achieve good mental health outcomes are important questions. However, clinician voices in how schools and health should work together for children’s mental health care are frequently missing from the debate. We aimed to report clinicians’ views about how the education system could support student’s mental health and improve access to mental health care for children and adolescents. Methods 143 clinicians (approximately 35 each of child and adolescent psychiatrists, pediatricians, child psychologists and general practitioners (GPs)) from the states of Victoria and South Australia participated in semi-structured phone interviews between March 2018 and February 2019. Inductive content analysis was applied to address the broad study aims. Findings Key themes emerged: (1) The role of schools in supporting individual children; (2) School based programs to support children and families; and (3) Challenges of implementing these suggestions. Clinicians across all professional groups suggested the education system could play an important role in improving access to mental health services through harnessing existing staff or co-locating mental health clinicians. They also suggested schools could identify at risk children and implement coping and social skills programs. Conclusions Schools and educators could play a key role in prevention and early intervention of children’s mental health problems. However, before recommending exactly how to do this, key evidence gaps need to be addressed.

Objective: To determine whether a population-delivered parenting programme assists in preventing internalising problems at school entry for preschool children at-risk with temperamental inhibition. Methods: Design: a randomised controlled trial was used. Setting: the setting was 307 preschool services across eight socioeconomically diverse government areas in Melbourne, Australia. Participants: a total of 545 parents of inhibited 4-year-old children: 498 retained at 1-year follow up. Early intervention: Cool Little Kids parenting group programme was implemented. Primary outcomes: the primary outcomes were child DSM-IV anxiety disorders (assessor blind) and internalising problems. Secondary outcomes: the secondary outcomes were parenting practices and parent mental health. Results: At 1-year follow up (mean (standard deviation) age = 5.8 (0.4) years), there was little difference in anxiety disorders between the intervention and control arms (44.2% vs 50.2%; adjusted odds ratio = 0.86, 95% confidence interval = [0.60, 1.25], p = 0.427). Internalising problems were reduced in the intervention arm (Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire: abnormal – 24.2% vs 33.0%; adjusted odds ratio = 0.56, 95% confidence interval = [0.35, 0.89], p = 0.014; symptoms – mean (standard deviation) = 2.5 (2.0) vs 2.9 (2.2); adjusted mean difference = –0.47, 95% confidence interval = [–0.81, –0.13], p = 0.006). Parents’ participation in the intervention was modest (29.4% attended most groups, 20.5% used skills most of the time during the year). A priori interaction tests suggested that for children with anxious parents, the intervention reduced anxiety disorders and internalising symptoms after 1 year. Conclusion: Offering Cool Little Kids across the population for inhibited preschoolers does not impact population outcomes after 1 year. Effects may be emerging for inhibited children at highest risk with parent anxiety. Trial outcomes will continue into mid-childhood.

Background Australia has maintained low rates of SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) infection, due to geographic location and strict public health restrictions. However, the financial and social impacts of these restrictions can negatively affect parents’ and children’s mental health. In an existing cohort of mothers recruited for their experience of adversity, this study examined: 1) families’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and public health restrictions in terms of clinical exposure, financial hardship family stress, and family resilience (termed ‘COVID-19 impacts’); and 2) associations between COVID-19 impacts and maternal and child mental health. Methods Participants were mothers recruited during pregnancy (2013–14) across two Australian states (Victoria and Tasmania) for the ‘right@home’ trial. A COVID-19 survey was conducted from May-December 2020, when children were 5.9–7.2 years old. Mothers reported COVID-19 impacts, their own mental health (Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scales short-form) and their child’s mental health (CoRonavIruS Health and Impact Survey subscale). Associations between COVID-19 impacts and mental health were examined using regression models controlling for pre-COVID-19 characteristics. Results 319/406 (79%) mothers completed the COVID-19 survey. Only one reported having had COVID-19. Rates of self-quarantine (20%), job or income loss (27%) and family stress (e.g., difficulty managing children’s at-home learning (40%)) were high. Many mothers also reported family resilience (e.g., family found good ways of coping (49%)). COVID-19 impacts associated with poorer mental health (standardised coefficients) included self-quarantine (mother: β = 0.46, child: β = 0.46), financial hardship (mother: β = 0.27, child: β = 0.37) and family stress (mother: β = 0.49, child: β = 0.74). Family resilience was associated with better mental health (mother: β = -0.40, child: β = -0.46). Conclusions The financial and social impacts of Australia’s public health restrictions have substantially affected families experiencing adversity, and their mental health. These impacts are likely to exacerbate inequities arising from adversity. To recover from COVID-19, policy investment should include income support and universal access to family health services.

General practitioners and maternal, child and family health nurses have a central role in postpartum primary health care for women and their infants. Positive client-provider relationships are particularly important for women experiencing mental health problems or unsettled infant behaviour. However, little is known about their experiences of postnatal primary health care. The study aimed to describe views of postnatal primary health care among women completing a residential early parenting programme and to identify potential strategies to enhance provider-patient interactions. Participants (n = 138) were women admitted with their infants to a private or a public early parenting service in Melbourne, Australia. Women completed a detailed self-report survey, including open-ended questions about experiences of primary health-care services, and a structured psychiatric interview to diagnose anxiety and depression. Survey responses were analysed thematically. Womens’ experiences of primary health care were influenced by their perceptions of provider competence and the quality of interactions. While similar positive characteristics of doctor and nurse care were valued, medical and nursing practices were judged in different ways. Women described GPs who listened, understood and were thorough as providing good care, and maternal, child and family health nurses were valued for providing support, advice and encouragement. Threats to therapeutic relationships with doctors included feeling rushed during consultations, believing that GPs were not mental health-care providers and the clinician not being ‘good’ with the infant; with nurses, problems included feeling judged or given advice that was inconsistent or lacked an evidence-base. Postpartum primary health care will be improved by unhurried consultations, empathic recognition, encouragement, evidence-informed guidance and absence of criticism.

ObjectiveTo investigate mental and physical health of mothers exposed to recent and early postpartum intimate partner violence (IPV) in the 10 years after having their first child.DesignProspective pregnancy cohort study.SettingWomen were recruited at six metropolitan public maternity hospitals in Melbourne, Australia and followed up at 1, 4 and 10 years post partum.Study measuresExposure to physical and/or emotional IPV was measured using the Composite Abuse Scale at 1, 4 and 10 years. At 10-year follow-up, mothers reported on physical and mental health, and functional health status.Participants1507 first-time mothers enrolled at mean of 15 weeks’ gestation.ResultsOne in three women experienced IPV during the 10 years after having their first child. Women experiencing recent IPV (19.1%) reported worse physical and mental health than women not reporting IPV. Compared with women not reporting IPV, women experiencing recent IPV had higher odds of poor functional health status (Adj OR=4.5, 95% CI 3.2 to 6.3), back pain (Adj OR=2.0, 95% CI 1.4 to 2.9), incontinence (Adj OR=1.8, 95% CI 1.2 to 2.6), depressive symptoms (Adj OR=4.9, 95% CI 3.2 to 7.5), anxiety (Adj OR=5.1, 95% CI 3.0 to 8.6) and post-traumatic stress symptoms (Adj OR=7.2, 95% CI 4.6 to 11.1) at 10 years. Women with past IPV at 1 and/or 4 years (15.7% of the cohort) also had higher odds of physical and mental health problems. There was evidence of a gradient in health outcomes by recency of exposure to IPV.ConclusionsBoth recent and past exposure to IPV are associated with poor maternal physical and mental health 10 years after a first birth. Health services and advocacy organisations providing support to women need to be aware of the consistent relationship between IPV and a range of physical and mental health conditions, which may persist even after IPV appears to have ceased.

IntroductionChildren entering out-of-home care have high rates of health needs across all domains of health. To identify these needs early and optimise long-term outcomes, routine health assessment on entry to care is recommended by child health experts and included in policy in many jurisdictions. If effective, this ought to lead to high rates of health service use as needs are addressed. Victoria (Australia) has no state-wide approach to deliver routine health assessments and no data to describe the timing and use of health service visits for children in out-of-home care. This retrospective cohort data linkage study aims to describe the extent and timeliness of health service use by Victorian children (aged 0–12 years) who entered out-of-home care for the first time between 1 April 2010 and 31 December 2015, in the first 12 months of care.Methods and analysisThe sample will be identified in the Victorian Child Protection database. Child and placement variables will be extracted. Linked health databases will provide additional data: six state databases that collate data about hospital admissions, emergency department presentations and attendances at dental, mental and community health services and public hospital outpatients. The federal Medicare Benefits Schedule claims dataset will provide information on visits to general practitioners, specialist physicians (including paediatricians), optometrists, audiologists and dentists. The number, type and timing of visits to different health services will be determined and benchmarked to national standards. Multivariable logistic regression will examine the effects of child and system variables on the odds of timely health visits, and proportional-hazards regression will explore the effects on time to first health visits.Ethics and disseminationEthical and data custodian approval has been obtained for this study. Dissemination will include presentation of findings to policy and service stakeholders in addition to scientific papers.

Background Digital technology and social media use are common among young people in Australia and worldwide. Research suggests that young people have both positive and negative experiences online, but we know little about the experiences of Muslim communities. Objective This study aims to explore the positive and negative experiences of digital technology and social media use among young people and parents from Muslim backgrounds in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Methods This study involved a partnership between researchers and a not-for-profit organization that work with culturally and linguistically diverse communities. We adopted a participatory and qualitative approach and designed the research in consultation with young people from Muslim backgrounds. Data were collected through in-person and online focus groups with 33 young people aged 16-22 years and 15 parents aged 40-57 years. Data were thematically analyzed. Results We generated 3 themes: (1) maintaining local and global connections, (2) a paradoxical space: identity, belonging and discrimination, and (3) the digital divide between young Muslims and parents. Results highlighted that social media was an important extension of social and cultural connections, particularly during COVID-19, when people were unable to connect through school or places of worship. Young participants perceived social media as a space where they could establish their identity and feel a sense of belonging. However, participants were also at risk of being exposed to discrimination and unrealistic standards of beauty and success. Although parents and young people shared some similar concerns, there was a large digital divide in online experiences. Both groups implemented strategies to reduce social media use, with young people believing that having short technology-free breaks during prayer and quality family time was beneficial for their mental well-being. Conclusions Programs that address technology-related harms must acknowledge the benefits of social media for young Muslims across identity, belonging, representation, and social connection. Further research is required to understand how parents and young people can create environments that foster technology-free breaks to support mental well-being.

Objectives Nurse home visiting (NHV) is widely implemented to address inequities in child and maternal health. However, few studies have examined longer-term effectiveness or delivery within universal healthcare systems. We evaluated the benefits of an Australian NHV program (“right@home”) in promoting children’s language and learning, general and mental health, maternal mental health and wellbeing, parenting and family relationships, at child ages 4 and 5 years. Setting and participants Randomised controlled trial of NHV delivered via universal, child and family health services (the comparator). Pregnant women experiencing adversity (≥2 of 10 risk factors) were recruited from 10 antenatal clinics across 2 states (Victoria, Tasmania) in Australia. Intervention Mothers in the intervention arm were offered 25 nurse home visits (mean 23·2 home visits [SD 7·4, range 1–43] received) of 60–90 minutes, commencing antenatally and continuing until children’s second birthdays. Primary and secondary outcomes measured At 4 and 5 years, outcomes were assessed via parent interview and direct assessment of children’s language and learning (receptive and expressive language, phonological awareness, attention, and executive function). Outcomes were compared between intervention and usual care arms (intention to treat) using adjusted regression with robust estimation to account for nurse/site. Missing data were addressed using multiple imputation and inverse probability weighting. Results Of 722 women enrolled in the trial, 225 of 363 (62%) intervention and 201 of 359 (56%) usual care women provided data at 5 years. Estimated group differences showed an overall pattern favouring the intervention. Statistical evidence of benefits was found across child and maternal mental health and wellbeing, parenting and family relationships with effect sizes ranging 0·01–0·27. Conclusion An Australian NHV program promoted longer-term family functioning and wellbeing for women experiencing adversity. NHV can offer an important component of a proportionate universal system that delivers support and intervention relative to need. Trial registration 2013–2016, registration ISRCTN89962120

IntroductionIntegrated community healthcare Hubs may offer a ‘one stop shop’ for service users with complex health and social needs, and more efficiently use service resources. Various policy imperatives exist to implement Hub models of care, however, there is a dearth of research specifically evaluating Hubs targeted at families experiencing adversity. To contribute to building this evidence, we propose to co-design, test and evaluate integrated Hub models of care in two Australian community health services in low socioeconomic areas that serve families experiencing adversity: Wyndham Vale in Victoria and Marrickville in New South Wales.Methods and analysisThis multisite convergent mixed-methods study will run over three phases to (1) develop the initial Hub programme theory through formative research; (2) test and, then, (3) refine the Hub theory using empirical data. Phase 1 involves co-design of each Hub with caregivers, community members and practitioners. Phase 2 uses caregiver and Hub practitioner surveys at baseline, and 6 and 12 months after Hub implementation, and in-depth interviews at 12 months. Two stakeholder groups will be recruited: caregivers (n=100–200 per site) and Hub practitioners (n=20–30 per site). The intervention is a co-located Hub providing health, social, legal and community services with no comparator. The primary outcomes are caregiver-reported: (i) identification of, (ii) interventions received and/or (iii) referrals received for adversity from Hub practitioners. The study also assesses child, caregiver, practitioner and system outcomes including mental health, parenting, quality of life, care experience and service linkages. Primary and secondary outcomes will be assessed by examining change in proportions/means from baseline to 6 months, from 6 to 12 months and from baseline to 12 months. Service linkages will be analysed using social network analysis. Costs of Hub implementation and a health economics analysis of unmet need will be conducted. Thematic analysis will be employed to analyse qualitative data.Ethics and disseminationRoyal Children’s Hospital and Sydney Local Health District ethics committees have approved the study (HREC/62866/RCHM-2020). Participants and stakeholders will receive results through meetings, presentations and publications.Trial registration numberISRCTN55495932.

The objectives of this study were to perform an economic evaluation of a targeted school-based dental checkup program in northern metropolitan Melbourne, Victoria. A 12-mo retrospective case-control cohort analysis using the decision tree method evaluated the incremental cost-utility and cost-effectiveness ratio (ICUR/ICER) for passive standard care dental services and an outreach pilot intervention completed in 2013. A societal perspective was adopted. A total of 273 children ( n = 273) aged between 3 and 12 y met the inclusion/exclusion criteria: 128 in the standard care group and 145 in the intervention group. The total society costs included health sector costs, patient/family costs, and productivity losses in 2014 Australian dollars. Outcome measures were evaluated using quality-adjusted tooth years (QATY) and the combined deciduous and permanent decayed, missing, and filled teeth prevented (DMFT-prevented). A generic outcome variable was created to determine the impact of the intervention to reach underserved populations based on government concession eligibility (cardholder status). Uncertainties were incorporated using 95% confidence intervals. The mean total society cost per child is $463 and $291 ( P = 0.002), QATY utility difference is 0.283 and 0.293 ( P = 0.937), effectiveness difference is 0.16 and 0.10 ( P = 0.756), and cardholder status is 50.0% and 66.2% ( P = 0.007), respectively, for the standard care and intervention groups. On average per child, there was a cost saving of $172 and improvement of 0.01 QATY, with an additional proportion of 16.2% of cardholder children reached. The calculated ICER was $3,252 per DMFT-prevented. The intervention dominates standard care for QATY and per 1% cardholder reached outcome measures. Our study found the pilot checkup program was largely less costly and more effective compared with the current standard care. Further research is needed to quantify the value of outreach interventions to prevent dental caries development and progression in populations from low socioeconomic status. Knowledge Transfer Statement: The findings of this research demonstrated that an outreach dental program can be less costly and more effective than standard models of dental care. It showed that a school-based dental checkup program is beneficial despite other opinions that dental screening is ineffective as a method to improve public dental health. There is fiscal economic evidence to support broader expansion of similar programs locally and internationally to reduce dental caries for children from low-income families.

IntroductionStillbirth continues to be a public health concern in high-income countries, and with mixed results from several stillbirth prevention interventions worldwide the need for an effective prevention method is ever present. The Safer Baby Bundle (SBB) proposes five evidence-based care packages shown to reduce stillbirth when implemented individually, and therefore are anticipated to produce significantly better outcomes if grouped together. This protocol describes the planned economic evaluation of the SBB quality improvement initiative in Australia.Methods and analysisThe implementation of the SBB will occur over three state-based health jurisdictions in Australia—New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, from July 2019 onwards. The intervention is being applied at the state level, with sites opting to participate or not, and no individual woman recruitment. The economic evaluation will be based on a whole-of-population linked administrative dataset, which will include the data of all mothers, and their resultant children, who gave birth between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2023 in these states, covering the preimplementation and postimplementation time period. The primary health outcome for this economic evaluation is late gestation stillbirths, with the secondary outcomes including but not limited to neonatal death, gestation at birth, mode of birth, admission to special care nursery and neonatal intensive care unit, and physical and mental health conditions for mother and child. Costs associated with all healthcare use from birth to 5 years post partum will be included for all women and children. A cost-effectiveness analysis will be undertaken using a difference-in-difference analysis approach to compare the primary outcome (late gestation stillbirth) and total costs for women before and after the implementation of the bundle.Ethics and disseminationEthics approval for the SBB project was provided by the Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number: HREC/2019/QRBW/47709). Approval for the extraction of data to be used for the economic evaluation was granted by the New South Wales Population and Health Services Research Ethics Committee (approval number: 2020/ETH00684/2020.11), Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number: EO2020/4/1167), and Public Health Approval (approval number: PHA 20.00684) was also granted. Dissemination will occur via publication in peer reviewed journals, presentation at clinical and policy-focused conferences and meetings, and through the authors’ clinical and policy networks.This study will provide evidence around the cost effectiveness of a quality improvement initiative to prevent stillbirth, identifying the impact on health service use during pregnancy and long-term health service use of children.

Objectives: This narrative paper describes the influences behind the development of, and key components of a specialist younger-onset dementia service located in metropolitan Victoria, Australia. Conclusion: The Melbourne Young-Onset Dementia Service was established in 2013 and provides diagnosis and ongoing care for people with younger-onset dementia and their families, through collaboration with other medical units, allied health and community services. It is potentially a model for other younger-onset dementia services nationally and internationally.

Abstract Background Certain migrant groups are at an increased risk of psychotic disorders compared to the native-born population; however, research to date has mainly been conducted in Europe. Less is known about whether migrants to other countries, with different histories and patterns of migration, such as Australia, are at an increased risk for developing a psychotic disorder. We tested this for first-generation migrants in Melbourne, Victoria. Methods This study included all young people aged 15–24 years, residing in a geographically-defined catchment area of north western Melbourne who presented with a first episode of psychosis (FEP) to the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC) between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2016. Data pertaining to the at-risk population were obtained from the Australian 2011 Census and incidence rate ratios were calculated and adjusted for age, sex and social deprivation. Results In total, 1220 young people presented with an FEP during the 6-year study period, of whom 24.5% were first-generation migrants. We found an increased risk for developing psychotic disorder in migrants from the following regions: Central and West Africa (adjusted incidence rate ratio [aIRR] = 3.53, 95% CI 1.58–7.92), Southern and Eastern Africa (aIRR = 3.06, 95% CI 1.99–4.70) and North Africa (aIRR = 5.03, 95% CI 3.26–7.76). Migrants from maritime South East Asia (aIRR = 0.39, 95% CI 0.23–0.65), China (aIRR = 0.25, 95% CI 0.13–0.48) and Southern Asia (aIRR = 0.44, 95% CI 0.26–0.76) had a decreased risk for developing a psychotic disorder. Conclusion This clear health inequality needs to be addressed by sufficient funding and accessible mental health services for more vulnerable groups. Further research is needed to determine why migrants have an increased risk for developing psychotic disorders.

Abstract Background Half of mental health disorders begin before the age of 14, highlighting the importance of prevention and early-intervention in childhood. Schools have been identified globally by policymakers as a platform to support good child mental health; however, the majority of the research is focused on secondary schools, with primary schools receiving very little attention by comparison. The limited available evidence on mental health initiatives in primary schools is hindered by a lack of rigorous evaluation. This quasi-experimental cluster study aims to examine the implementation and effectiveness of a Mental Health and Wellbeing Co-ordinator role designed to build mental health capacity within primary schools. Methods This is a primary (ages 5–12) school-based cluster quasi-experimental study in Victoria, Australia. Before baseline data collection, 16 schools selected by the state education department will be allocated to intervention, and another 16 matched schools will continue as ‘Business as Usual’. In intervention schools, a mental health and well-being coordinator will be recruited and trained, and three additional school staff will also be selected to receive components of the mental health training. Surveys will be completed by consenting staff (at 2-, 5-, 10- and 17-months post allocation) and by consenting parents/carers (at 3-, 10- and 17-months post allocation) in both intervention and business as usual schools. The primary objective is to assess the change in teacher’s confidence to support student mental health and wellbeing using the School Mental Health Self-Efficacy Teacher Survey. Secondary objectives are to assess the indirect impact on systemic factors (level of support, prioritisation of child mental health), parent and teachers’ mental health literacy (stigma, knowledge), care access (school engagement with community-based services), and student mental health outcomes. Implementation outcomes (feasibility, acceptability, and fidelity) and costs will also be evaluated. Discussion The current study will examine the implementation and effectiveness of having a trained Mental Health and Wellbeing Coordinator within primary schools. If the intervention increases teachers’ confidence to support student mental health and wellbeing and builds the capacity of primary schools it will improve student mental health provision and inform large-scale mental health service reform. Trial registration The trial was retrospectively registered in the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR) on July 6, 2021. The registration number is ACTRN12621000873820.

Findings from longitudinal research, globally, repeatedly emphasise the importance of a taking an early life course approach to mental health promotion; one that invests in the formative years of development, from early childhood to young adulthood, just prior to the transition to parenthood for most. While population monitoring systems have been developed for this period, they are typically designed for use within discrete stages (i.e., childhood or adolescent or young adulthood). No system has yet captured development across all ages and stages (i.e., from infancy through to young adulthood). Here we describe the development, and pilot implementation, of a new Australian Comprehensive Monitoring System (CMS) designed to address this gap by measuring social and emotional development (strengths and difficulties) across eight census surveys, separated by three yearly intervals (infancy, 3-, 6-, 9- 12-, 15-, 18 and 21 years). The systems also measures the family, school, peer, digital and community social climates in which children and young people live and grow. Data collection is community-led and built into existing, government funded, universal services (Maternal Child Health, Schools and Local Learning and Employment Networks) to maximise response rates and ensure sustainability. The first system test will be completed and evaluated in rural Victoria, Australia, in 2022. CMS will then be adapted for larger, more socio-economically diverse regional and metropolitan communities, including Australian First Nations communities. The aim of CMS is to guide community-led investments in mental health promotion from early childhood to young adulthood, setting secure foundations for the next generation.

Abstract Focus and outcomes for participants “Children are our future” - the wellbeing of our future adults will influence the future of the world. However, this generation of children and mid-life adults face increasing rates of complex health and development problems, and many of them are preventable. Traditional research approaches are not keeping pace with need. Discovery and testing of solutions is blocked by the lack of fast, cheap, large-scale, low burden and effective ways to conduct research for the population and its many subgroups. Innovation in epidemiological methods is required to deliver large scale studies of unprecedented scale and scope. These will support research that enables better prevention, prediction and treatment – all of which are needed to solve today’s pressing child and adult health problems. This 90-minute symposium will draw on the forthcoming Generation Victoria (GenV) to illustrate innovative epidemiological methods established in its foundation phase to enable large-scale studies. GenV is designed to address physical, mental and social issues experienced during childhood and mid-adulthood, as well as the antecedents of a wide range of diseases of ageing. Parents of all newborns (estimated. 170,000) in the state of Victoria (population 6.5 million), Australia, will be approached from 2021 for two full years. Following consent, GenV proposes to bank biosamples collected during routine care, link to administrative and clinical data, and directly collect parent and child data using interactive electronic interfaces with the potential for face-to-face assessment during the school years. Encompassing clinical trials, registries, health services and geospatial as well as discovery research, GenV’s initial focus will be on pregnancy and newborns, reaching into regional and rural communities and traditionally hard-to-reach groups in sizeable numbers. Permission will be sought to link trials, registries, and health services research with existing pre- and post-birth administrative and electronic health record datasets, and also to bank biospecimens collected during routine care. We will discuss why innovation is essential to the next wave of large-scale studies such as GenV, and share practical examples of method innovations being developed within GenV. We will forecast the opportunities and challenges of large-scale studies for improving wellbeing and reducing the disease burden with children and adults. Focus: Outcomes: Rationale for the symposium, including for its inclusion in the Congress The future wellbeing and productivity of our societies depend on wellbeing and good health of our children and adults. However, today’s children and mid-life adults are facing both old and new challenges. Traditional research approaches have largely failed to deliver progress towards solving these challenges. For example, most existing cohorts only allow for observational follow up, and children are greatly under-represented in gold-standard clinical trials, which leads to less evidence to children’s treatment and prevention. Multi-purpose, low burden, high up-take innovative large studies are required to address these gaps. GenV seeks to generate translatable evidence (prediction, prevention, treatments, and services) to improve future wellbeing and reduce the future disease burden of children and adults. It will allow researchers, clinicians and policy makers to better understand the issues affecting Victorian children and their families with greater speed and precision, and therefore outcomes be translated more quickly into practice. Also it will help facilitate an environment where researchers, clinicians, policy makers, and other organisations can come together to enact change for future generations’ wellbeing. With this symposium, we intend to share our reflections on how the scale of cohort studies is changing, and showcase new trends in research design. The GenV team will then show how we practically achieve innovation in large-study methodology and design, with the aim of encouraging others to think ambitiously at large-scale. We will share our intentions and rationale for these innovations as well as the challenges. The symposium is designed to spark a discussion with the audience, seeking their reflections and suggestions on shaping our innovations. Finally, we aim to encourage researchers (especially early career researchers) to exchange their vision and views on innovations and methods for cohort studies. Presentation program (90 minutes) Names of presenters Prof Melissa Wake, Dr Susan Clifford, Dr Yanhong Jessika Hu, A/Prof Jo Said, Dr Joan Leong, Dr Suzanne Mavoa.

Introduction As social-distancing mandates in response to COVID-19 restricted in-person data collection methods such as participant observation and interviews, researchers turned to socially distant methods such as interviewing via video-conferencing technology (Lobe et al.). These were not new tools nor methods, but the pandemic muted any bias towards face-to-face data collection methods. Exemplified in crowd-sourced documents such as Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic, researchers were encouraged to pivot to digital methods as a means of fulfilling research objectives, “specifically, ideas for avoiding in-person interactions by using mediated forms that will achieve similar ends” (Lupton). The benefits of digital methods for expanding participant cohorts and scope of research have been touted long before 2020 and COVID-19, and, as noted by Murthy, are “compelling” (“Emergent” 172). Research conducted by digital methods can expect to reap benefits such as “global datasets/respondents” and “new modalities for involving respondents” (Murthy, “Emergent” 172). The pivot to digital methods is not in and of itself an issue. What concerns us is that in the dialogues about shifting to digital methods during COVID-19, there does not yet appear to have been a critical consideration of how participant samples and collected data will be impacted upon or skewed towards recording the experiences of advantaged cohorts. Existing literature focusses on the time-saving benefits for the researcher, reduction of travel costs (Fujii), the minimal costs for users of specific platforms – e.g. Skype –, and presumes ubiquity of device access for participants (Cater). We found no discussion on data costs of accessing such services being potential barriers to participation in research, although Deakin and Wakefield did share our concern that: Online interviews may ... mean that some participants are excluded due to the need to have technological competence required to participate, obtain software and to maintain Internet connection for the duration of the discussion. In this sense, access to certain groups may be a problem and may lead to issues of representativeness. (605) We write this as a provocation to our colleagues conducting research at this time to consider the cultural and material capital of their participants and how that capital enables them to participate in digitally-mediated data gathering practices, or not, and to what extent. Despite highlighting the potential benefits of digital methods within a methodological tool kit, Murthy previously cautioned against the implications posed by digital exclusion, noting that “the drawback of these research options is that membership of these communities is inherently restricted to the digital ‘haves’ ... rather than the ‘have nots’” (“Digital” 845). In this article, we argue that while tools such as Zoom have indeed enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID disruptions, this shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In making this argument, we draw on examples from the Connected Students project, a study of digital inclusion that commenced just as COVID-19 restrictions came into effect in the Australian state of Victoria at the start of 2020. We draw on the experiences of these households to illustrate the barriers that such cohorts face when participating in online research. We begin by providing details about the Connected Students project and then contextualising it through a discussion of research on digital inclusion. We then outline three areas in which households would have experienced (or still do experience) difficulties participating in online research: data, devices, and skills. We use these findings to highlight the barriers that disadvantaged groups may face when engaging in data collection activities over Zoom and question how this is impacting on who is and is not being included in research during COVID-19. The Connected Students Program The Connected Students program was conducted in Shepparton, a regional city located 180km north of Melbourne. The town itself has a population of around 30,000, while the Greater Shepparton region comprises around 64,000 residents. Shepparton was chosen as the program’s site because it is characterised by a unique combination of low-income and low levels of digital inclusion. First, Shepparton ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) and the Index of Relative Socioeconomic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD), as reported in 2016 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Census”; Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Index”). Although Shepparton has a strong agricultural and horticultural industry with a number of food-based manufacturing companies in the area, including fruit canneries, dairies, and food processing plants, the town has high levels of long-term and intergenerational unemployment and jobless families. Second, Shepparton is in a regional area that ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (Thomas et al.), which measures digital inclusion across dimensions of access, ability, and affordability. Funded by Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, and delivered in partnership with Greater Shepparton Secondary College (GSSC), the Connected Students program provided low-income households with a laptop and an unlimited broadband Internet connection for up to two years. Households were recruited to the project via GSSC. To be eligible, households needed to hold a health care card and have at least one child attending the school in year 10, 11, or 12. Both the student and a caregiver were required to participate in the project to be eligible. Additional household members were invited to take part in the research, but were not required to. (See Kennedy & Holcombe-James; and Kennedy et al., "Connected Students", for further details regarding household demographics.) The Australian Digital Inclusion Index identifies that affordability is a significant barrier to digital inclusion in Australia (Thomas et al.). The project’s objective was to measure how removing affordability barriers to accessing connectivity for households impacts on digital inclusion. By providing participating households with a free unlimited broadband internet connection for the duration of the research, the project removed the costs associated with digital access. Access alone is not enough to resolve the digital exclusion confronted by these low-income households. Digital exclusion in these instances is not derived simply from the cost of Internet access, but from the cost of digital devices. As a result, these households typically lacked sufficient digital devices. Each household was therefore provided both a high speed Internet connection, and a brand new laptop with built-in camera, microphone, and speakers (a standard tool kit for video conferencing). Data collection for the Connected Students project was intended to be conducted face-to-face. We had planned in-person observations including semi-structured interviews with household members conducted at three intervals throughout the project’s duration (beginning, middle, and end), and technology tours of each home to spatially and socially map device locations and uses (Kennedy et al., Digital Domesticity). As we readied to make our first research trip to commence the study, COVID-19 was wreaking havoc. It quickly became apparent we would not be travelling to work, much less travelling around the state. We thus pivoted to digital methods, with all our data collection shifting online to interviews conducted via digital platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. While the pivot to digital methods saved travel hours, allowing us to scale up the number of households we planned to interview, it also demonstrated unexpected aspects of our participants’ lived experiences of digital exclusion. In this article, we draw on our first round of interviews which were conducted with 35 households over Zoom or Microsoft Teams during lockdown. The practice of conducting these interviews reveals insights into the barriers that households faced to digital research participation. In describing these experiences, we use pseudonyms for individual participants and refer to households using the pseudonym for the student participant from that household. Why Does Digital Inclusion Matter? Digital inclusion is broadly defined as universal access to the technologies necessary to participate in social and civic life (Helsper; Livingstone and Helsper). Although recent years have seen an increase in the number of connected households and devices (Thomas et al., “2020”), digital inclusion remains uneven. As elsewhere, digital disadvantage in the Australian context falls along geographic and socioeconomic lines (Alam and Imran; Atkinson et al.; Blanchard et al.; Rennie et al.). Digitally excluded population groups typically experience some combination of education, employment, income, social, and mental health hardship; their predicament is compounded by a myriad of important services moving online, from utility payments, to social services, to job seeking platforms (Australian Council of Social Service; Chen; Commonwealth Ombudsman). In addition to challenges in using essential services, digitally excluded Australians also miss out on the social and cultural benefits of Internet use (Ragnedda and Ruiu). Digital inclusion – and the affordability of digital access – should thus be a key concern for researchers looking to apply online methods. Households in the lowest income quintile spend 6.2% of their disposable income on telecommunications services, almost three times more than wealthier households (Ogle). Those in the lowest income quintile pay a “poverty premium” for their data, almost five times more per unit of data than those in the highest income quintile (Ogle and Musolino). As evidenced by the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, this is driven in part by a higher reliance on mobile-only access (Thomas et al., “2020”). Low-income households are more likely to access critical education, business, and government services through mobile data rather than fixed broadband data (Thomas et al., “2020”). For low-income households, digital participation is the top expense after housing, food, and transport, and is higher than domestic energy costs (Ogle). In the pursuit of responsible and ethical research, we caution against assuming research participants are able to bear the brunt of access costs in terms of having a suitable device, expending their own data resources, and having adequate skills to be able to complete the activity without undue stress. We draw examples from the Connected Students project to support this argument below. Findings: Barriers to Research Participation for Digitally Excluded Households If the Connected Students program had not provided participating households with a technology kit, their preexisting conditions of digital exclusion would have limited their research participation in three key ways. First, households with limited Internet access (particularly those reliant on mobile-only connectivity, and who have a few gigabytes of data per month) would have struggled to provide the data needed for video conferencing. Second, households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate devices. Third, and critically, although the Connected Students technology kit provided households with the data and devices required to participate in the digital ethnography, this did not necessarily resolve the skills gaps that our households confronted. Data Prior to receiving the Connected Students technology kit, many households in our sample had limited modes of connectivity and access to data. For households with comparatively less or lower quality access to data, digital participation – whether for the research discussed here, or in contemporary life – came with very real costs. This was especially the case for households that did not have a home Internet connection and instead relied solely on mobile data. For these households, who carefully managed their data to avoid running out, participating in research through extended video conferences would have been impossible unless adequate financial reimbursement was offered. Households with very limited Internet access used a range of practices to manage and extend their data access by shifting internet costs away from the household budget. This often involved making use of free public Wi-Fi or library internet services. Ellie’s household, for instance, spent their weekends at the public library so that she and her sister could complete their homework. While laborious, these strategies worked well for the families in everyday life. However, they would have been highly unsuitable for participating in research, particularly during the pandemic. On the most obvious level, the expectations of library use – if not silent, then certainly quiet – would have prohibited a successful interview. Further, during COVID-19 lockdowns, public libraries (and other places that provide public Internet) became inaccessible for significant periods of time. Lastly, for some research designs, the location of participants is important even when participation is occurring online. In the case of our own project, the house itself as the site of the interview was critical as our research sought to understand how the layout and materiality of the home impacts on experiences of digital inclusion. We asked participants to guide us around their home, showing where technologies and social activities are colocated. In using the data provided by the Connected Students technology kit, households with limited Internet were able to conduct interviews within their households. For these families, participating in online research would have been near impossible without the Connected Students Internet. Devices Even with adequate Internet connections, many households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of suitable devices. Laptops, which generally provide the best video conferencing experience, were seen as prohibitively expensive for many families. As a result, many families did not have a laptop or were making do with a laptop that was excessively slow, unreliable, and/or had very limited functions. Desktop computers were rare and generally outdated to the extent that they were not able to support video conferencing. One parent, Melissa, described their barely-functioning desktop as “like part of the furniture more than a computer”. Had the Connected Students program not provided a new laptop with video and audio capabilities, participation in video interviews would have been difficult. This is highlighted by the challenges students in these households faced in completing online schooling prior to receiving the Connected Students kit. A participating student, Mallory, for example, explained she had previously not had a laptop, reliant only on her phone and an old iPad: Interviewer: Were you able to do all your homework on those, or was it sometimes tricky?Mallory: Sometimes it was tricky, especially if they wanted to do a call or something ... . Then it got a bit hard because then I would use up all my data, and then didn’t have much left.Interviewer: Yeah. Right.Julia (Parent): ... But as far as schoolwork, it’s hard to do everything on an iPad. A laptop or a computer is obviously easier to manoeuvre around for different things. This example raises several common issues that would likely present barriers to research participation. First, Mallory’s household did not have a laptop before being provided with one through the Connected Students program. Second, while her household did prioritise purchasing tablets and smartphones, which could be used for video conferencing, these were more difficult to navigate for certain tasks and used up mobile data which, as noted above, was often a limited resource. Lastly, it is worth noting that in households which did already own a functioning laptop, it was often shared between several household members. As one parent, Vanessa, noted, “yeah, until we got the [Connected Students] devices, we had one laptop between the four of us that are here. And Noel had the majority use of that because that was his school work took priority”. This lack of individuated access to a device would make participation in some research designs difficult, particularly those that rely on regular access to a suitable device. Skills Despite the Connected Students program’s provision of data and device access, this did not ensure successful research participation. Many households struggled to engage with video research interviews due to insufficient digital skills. While a household with Internet connectivity might be considered on the “right” side of the digital divide, connectivity alone does not ensure participation. People also need to have the knowledge and skills required to use online resources. Brianna’s household, for example, had downloaded Microsoft Teams to their desktop computer in readiness for the interview, but had neglected to consider whether that device had video or audio capabilities. To work around this restriction, the household decided to complete the interview via the Connected Students laptop, but this too proved difficult. Neither Brianna nor her parents were confident in transferring the link to the interview between devices, whether by email or otherwise, requiring the researchers to talk them through the steps required to log on, find, and send the link via email. While Brianna’s household faced digital skills challenges that affected both parent and student participants, in others such as Ariel’s, these challenges were focussed at the parental level. In these instances, the student participant provided a vital resource, helping adults navigate platforms and participate in the research. As Celeste, Ariel’s parent, explained, it's just new things that I get a bit – like, even on here, because your email had come through to me and I said to Ariel "We're going to use your computer with Teams. How do we do this?" So, yeah, worked it out. I just had to look up my email address, but I [initially thought] oh, my god; what am I supposed to do here? Although helpful in our own research given its focus on school-aged young people, this dynamic of parents being helped by their dependents illustrates that the adults in our sample were often unfamiliar with the digital skills required for video conferencing. Research focussing only on adults, or on households in which students have not developed these skills through extended periods of online education such as occurred during the COVID-19 lockdowns, may find participants lacking the digital skills to participate in video interviews. Participation was also impacted upon by participants' lack of more subtle digital skills around the norms and conventions of video conferencing. Several households, for example, conducted their interviews in less ideal situations, such as from both moving and parked cars. A portion of the household interview with Piper’s household was completed as they drove the 30 minutes from their home into Shepperton. Due to living out of town, this household often experienced poor reception. The interview was thus regularly disrupted as they dropped in and out of range, with the interview transcript peppered with interjections such as “we’re going through a bit of an Internet light spot ... we’re back ... sorry ...” (Karina, parent). Finally, Piper switched the device on which they were taking the interview to gain a better connection: “my iPad that we were meeting on has worse Internet than my phone Internet, so we kind of changed it around” (Karina). Choosing to participate in the research from locations other than the home provides evidence of the limited time available to these families, and the onerousness of research participation. These choices also indicate unfamiliarity with video conferencing norms. As digitally excluded households, these participants were likely not the target of popular discussions throughout the pandemic about optimising video conferences through careful consideration of lighting, background, make-up and positioning (e.g. Lasky; Niven-Phillips). This was often identified by how participants positioned themselves in front of the camera, often choosing not to sit squarely within the camera lens. Sometimes this was because several household members were participating and struggled to all sit within view of the single device, but awkward camera positioning also occurred with only one or two people present. A number of interviews were initially conducted with shoulders, or foreheads, or ceilings rather than “whole” participants until we asked them to reposition the device so that the camera was pointing towards their faces. In noting this unfamiliarity we do not seek to criticise or apportion responsibility for accruing such skills to participating households, but rather to highlight the impact this had on the type of conversation between researcher and participant. Such practices offer valuable insight into how digital exclusion impacts on individual’s everyday lives as well as on their research participation. Conclusion Throughout the pandemic, digital methods such as video conferencing have been invaluable for researchers. However, while these methods have enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID-19 disruptions, the shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In this article, we have drawn on our research with low-income households to demonstrate the barriers that such cohorts experience when participating in online research. Without the technology kits provided as part of our research design, these households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate data and devices. Further, even with the kits provided, households faced additional barriers due to a lack of digital literacy. These experiences raise a number of questions that we encourage researchers to consider when designing methods that avoid in person interactions, and when reviewing studies that use similar approaches: who doesn’t have the technological access needed to participate in digital and online research? What are the implications of this for who and what is most visible in research conducted during the pandemic? Beyond questions of access, to what extent will disadvantaged populations not volunteer to participate in online research because of discomfort or unfamiliarity with digital tools and norms? When low-income participants are included, how can researchers ensure that participation does not unduly burden them by using up precious data resources? And, how can researchers facilitate positive and meaningful participation among those who might be less comfortable interacting through mediums like video conferencing? In raising these questions we acknowledge that not all research will or should be focussed on engaging with disadvantaged cohorts. Rather, our point is that through asking questions such as this, we will be better able to reflect on how data and participant samples are being impacted upon by shifts to digital methods during COVID-19 and beyond. As researchers, we may not always be able to adapt Zoom-based methods to be fully inclusive, but we can acknowledge this as a limitation and keep it in mind when reporting our findings, and later when engaging with the research that was largely conducted online during the pandemic. Lastly, while the Connected Students project focusses on impacts of affordability on digital inclusion, digital disadvantage intersects with many other forms of disadvantage. Thus, while our study focussed specifically on financial disadvantage, our call to be aware of who is and is not able to participate in Zoom-based research applies to digital exclusion more broadly, whatever its cause. Acknowledgements The Connected Students project was funded by Telstra. This research was also supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researchers Award funding scheme (project number DE200100540). References Alam, Khorshed, and Sophia Imran. “The Digital Divide and Social Inclusion among Refugee Migrants: A Case in Regional Australia.” Information Technology & People 28.2 (2015): 344–65. Atkinson, John, Rosemary Black, and Allan Curtis. “Exploring the Digital Divide in an Australian Regional City: A Case Study of Albury”. Australian Geographer 39.4 (2008): 479–493. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Census of Population and Housing: Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), Australia, 2016.” 2016. <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2033.0.55.001~2016~Main%20Features~SOCIO-ECONOMIC%20INDEXES%20FOR%20AREAS%20(SEIFA)%202016~1>. ———. “Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD).” 2016. <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2033.0.55.001~2016~Main%20Features~IRSAD~20>. Australian Council of Social Service. “The Future of Parents Next: Submission to Senate Community Affairs Committee.” 8 Feb. 2019. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612014954/https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ACOSS-submission-into-Parents-Next_FINAL.pdf>. Beer, David. “The Social Power of Algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20.1 (2017): 1–13. Blanchard, Michelle, et al. “Rethinking the Digital Divide: Findings from a Study of Marginalised Young People’s Information Communication Technology (ICT) Use.” Youth Studies Australia 27.4 (2008): 35–42. Cater, Janet. “Skype: A Cost Effective Method for Qualitative Research.” Rehabilitation Counselors and Educators Journal 4.2 (2011): 10-17. Chen, Jesse. “Breaking Down Barriers to Digital Government: How Can We Enable Vulnerable Consumers to Have Equal Participation in Digital Government?” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2017. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612015130/https://accan.org.au/Breaking%20Down%20Barriers%20to%20Digital%20Government.pdf>. Commonwealth Ombudsman. “Centrelink’s Automated Debt Raising and Recovery System: Implementation Report, Report No. 012019.” Commonwealth Ombudsman, 2019. <http://web.archive.org/web/20200612015307/https://www.ombudsman.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/98314/April-2019-Centrelinks-Automated-Debt-Raising-and-Recovery-System.pdf>. Deakin Hannah, and Kelly Wakefield. “Skype Interviewing: Reflections of Two PhD Researchers.” Qualitative Research 14.5 (2014): 603-616. Fujii, LeeAnn. Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach. Routledge, 2018. Helsper, Ellen. “Digital Inclusion: An Analysis of Social Disadvantage and the Information Society.” London: Department for Communities and Local Government, 2008. Kennedy, Jenny, and Indigo Holcombe-James. “Connected Students Milestone Report 1: Project Commencement". Melbourne: RMIT, 2021. <https://apo.org.au/node/312817>. Kennedy, Jenny, et al. “Connected Students Milestone Report 2: Findings from First Round of Interviews". Melbourne: RMIT, 2021. <https://apo.org.au/node/312818>. Kennedy, Jenny, et al. Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life. Oxford UP, 2020. Lasky, Julie. “How to Look Your Best on a Webcam.” New York Times, 25 Mar. 2020 <http://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/realestate/coronavirus-webcam-appearance.html>. Livingstone, Sonia, and Ellen Helsper. “Gradations in Digital Inclusion: Children, Young People and the Digital Divide.” New Media & Society 9.4 (2007): 671–696. Lobe, Bojana, David L. Morgan, and Kim A. Hoffman. “Qualitative Data Collection in an Era of Social Distancing.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 19 (2020): 1–8. Lupton, Deborah. “Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic (Crowd-Sourced Document).” 2020. <http://docs.google.com/document/d/1clGjGABB2h2qbduTgfqribHmog9B6P0NvMgVuiHZCl8/edit?ts=5e88ae0a#>. Murthy, Dhiraj. “Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research”. Sociology 42.2 (2008): 837–855. ———. “Emergent Digital Ethnographic Methods for Social Research.” Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research. Ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Oxford UP, 2011. 158–179. Niven-Phillips, Lisa. “‘Virtual Meetings Aren’t Going Anywhere Soon’: How to Put Your Best Zoom Face Forward.” The Guardian, 27 Mar. 2021. <http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2021/mar/27/virtual-meetings-arent-going-anywhere-soon-how-to-put-your-best-zoom-face-forward>. Ogle, Greg. “Telecommunications Expenditure in Australia: Fact Sheet.” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2017. <https://web.archive.org/web/20200612043803/https://accan.org.au/files/Reports/ACCAN_SACOSS%20Telecommunications%20Expenditure_web_v2.pdf>. Ogle, Greg, and Vanessa Musolino. “Connectivity Costs: Telecommunications Affordability for Low Income Australians.” Sydney: Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2016. <https://web.archive.org/web/20200612043944/https://accan.org.au/files/Reports/161011_Connectivity%20Costs_accessible-web.pdf>. Ragnedda, Massimo, and Maria Laura Ruiu. “Social Capital and the Three Levels of Digital Divide.” Theorizing Digital Divides. Eds. Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn Muschert. Routledge, 2017. 21–34. Rennie, Ellie, et al. “At Home on the Outstation: Barriers to Home Internet in Remote Indigenous Communities.” Telecommunications Policy 37.6 (2013): 583–93. Taylor, Linnet. “What Is Data Justice? The Case for Connecting Digital Rights and Freedoms Globally. Big Data & Society 4.2 (2017): 1–14. Thomas, Julian, et al. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2018. Melbourne: RMIT University, for Telstra, 2018. ———. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2019. Melbourne: RMIT University and Swinburne University of Technology, for Telstra, 2019. ———. Measuring Australia’s Digital Divide: The Australian Digital Inclusion Index 2020. Melbourne: RMIT University and Swinburne University of Technology, for Telstra, 2020. Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75–89.

This special issue of the International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership (IJEPL), Research in the Canadian Context, marks a significant milestone for the journal. Throughout our twelve-year history, we have sought to publish the best research in leadership, policy, and research use, allowing authors to decide the topics by dint of their research. While this model still serves as the foundation for IJEPL content, we decided to give researchers a chance to engage in deeper conversations by introducing special issues. In our first special issue, researchers discuss their work within the scope of education policy, leadership, and research use within the Canadian context. While many aspects of leadership, teaching, and learning can be seen as similar across contexts, there are also issues of particular concern within national, regional, provincial, or local spheres, particularly when looking at policy and system changes. The researchers featured in this issue provide an important look into education in Canada.PolicyIn the policy realm, Sue Winton and Lauren Jervis examine a 22-year campaign to change special education assessment policy in Ontario, examining how discourses dominant in the province enabled the government to leave the issue unresolved for decades. Issues of access and equity play out within a neoliberal context focused on individualism, meritocracy, and the reduced funding of public services. While Winton and Jervis highlight the tension between policy goals and ideological contexts, Jean-Vianney Auclair considers the place of policy dialogues within governmental frames, and the challenge of engaging in broadly applicable work within vertically structured governmental agencies. One often-touted way to move beyondResearch useWithin the scope of research use, Sarah L. Patten examines how socioeconomic status (SES) is defined and measured in Canada, the challenges in defining SES, and potential solutions specific to the Canadian context. In looking at knowledge mobilization, Joelle Rodway considers how formal coaches and informal social networks nserve to connect research, policy, and practice in Ontario’s Child and Youth Mental Health program.LeadershipTurning to leadership, contributing researchers explored the challenges involved in staff development, administrator preparation, and student outcomes. Keith Walker and Benjamin Kutsyuruba explore how educational administrators can support early career teachers to increase retention, and the somewhat haphazard policies and supports in place across Canada to bring administrators and new teachers together. Gregory Rodney MacKinnon, David Young, Sophie Paish, and Sue LeBel look at how one program in Nova Scotia conceptualizes professional growth, instructional leadership, and administrative effectiveness and the emerging needs of administrators to respond to issues of poverty, socioemotional health, and mental health, while also building community. This complex environment may mean expanding leadership preparation to include a broader consideration of well-being and community. Finally, Victoria Handford and Kenneth Leithwood look at the role school leaders play in improving student achievement in British Columbia, and the school district characteristics associated with improving student achievement.Taken together, the research in this special issue touches on many of the challenges in policy development, application, and leadership practice, and the myriad ways that research can be used to address these challenges. We hope you enjoy this first special issue of IJEPL!

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. Hence, the gender and class inequalities exacerbated by Covid-19, and the precarious and pressured lives of elite athletes, were obscured. We contend that, in the final analysis, the sporting bubble mainly serves those inside, floating tantalisingly out of reach of most of those outside who try to grasp its elusive power. Yet, it is a small group beyond who wield that power, having created bubbles as armoured vehicles to salvage any available profit in the midst of a global pandemic. References AAP. “NRL Makes Desperate Plea to Government as It Announces Season Will Go Ahead.” 7News.com.au 15 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://7news.com.au/sport/rugby-league/nrl-makes-desperate-plea-to-government-as-it-announces-season-will-go-ahead-c-745711>. Al Jazeera English. “Sports TV: Faking Spectators and Spectacles.” The Listening Post 26 Sep. 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. Barron, Jackson, Kylie Stevens, and Zoe Zaczek. “WAG Who Broke into COVID-19 Bubble for an Eight-Hour Rendezvous with Her AFL Star Boyfriend Opens Up on ‘How Easy It Was’—and Apologises for ‘Really Big Mistake’ That Cost Club $50,000.” The Daily Mail 19 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8638959/WAG-AFL-star-sacked-season-coronavirus-breach-reveals-easy-sneak-in.html>. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992. Benedict, Jeff. Public Heroes, Private Felons: Athletes and Crimes against Women. Boston: Northeastern Uni. Press, 1999. Benfante, Agata, Marialaura di Tella, Annunziata Romeo, and Lorys Castelli. “Traumatic Stress in Healthcare Workers during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of the Immediate Impact.” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (23 Oct. 2020). Blaine, Lech. “The Art of Class War.” The Monthly. 17 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2020/august/1596204000/lech-blaine/art-class-war#mtr>. Brooks, Samantha K., Rebecca K. Webster, Louise E. Smith, Lisa Woodland, Simon Wessely, Neil Greenberg, and Gideon J. Rubin. “The Psychological Impact of Quarantine and How to Reduce It: Rapid Review of the Evidence.” The Lancet 26 Feb. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30460-8/fulltext>. Caust, Jo. “Coronavirus: 3 in 4 Australians Employed in the Creative and Performing Arts Could Lose Their Jobs.” The Conversation 20 Apr. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-3-in-4-australians-employed-in-the-creative-and-performing-arts-could-lose-their-jobs-136505>. Connor, James. “The Athlete as Widget: How Exploitation Explains Elite Sport.” Sport in Society 12.10 (2009): 1369–77. Courage, Cara. “Women in the Arts: Some Questions.” The Guardian 5 Mar. 2012. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2012/mar/05/women-in-the-arts-introduction>. Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. and ed. S. Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Dennien, Matt, and Lydia Lynch. “Footage Shows Relaxed Scenes from AFL Hub amid Calls for Exception Overhaul.” Brisbane Times 3 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/footage-shows-relaxed-scenes-from-afl-hub-amid-calls-for-exemption-overhaul-20200903-p55s74.html>. Dobeson, Shanee. “Bailey Defends Qld Border Rules after Grieving Mother Denied Entry to Bury Son.” MyGC.com.au 12 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.mygc.com.au/bailey-defends-qld-border-rules-after-grieving-mother-denied-exemption-to-bury-son>. Dunn, Amelia. “Who Is Deemed an ‘Essential’ Worker under Australia’s COVID-19 Rules?” SBS News 26 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. Emiko. “Women’s Unpaid Care Work in Australia.” YWCA n.d. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.ywca.org.au/opinion/womens-unpaid-care-work-in-australia>. Fullagar, Simone, and Adele Pavlidis. “Thinking through the Disruptive Effects and Affects of the Coronavirus with Feminist New Materialism.” Leisure Sciences (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01490400.2020.1773996?journalCode=ulsc20>. Flood, Michael, and Sue Dyson. “Sport, Athletes, and Violence against Women.” NTV Journal 4.3 (2007): 37–46. Goodwin, Sam. “AFL Boss Left Fuming over ‘Out of Control’ Quarantine Party.” Yahoo! Sport 8 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://au.sports.yahoo.com/afl-2020-uproar-out-of-control-quarantine-party-224251554.html>. Griffith News. “New Research Shows Why Musicians among the Hardest Hit by COVID-19.” 18 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://news.griffith.edu.au/2020/06/18/new-research-shows-why-musicians-among-the-hardest-hit-by-COVID-19>. Hart, Chloe. “‘This Is the Hardest It’s Going to Get’: NZ Warriors Open Up about Relocating to Australia for NRL.” ABC News 8 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-08/nz-warriors-open-up-about-relocation-to-australia-for-nrl/12531074>. Hooper, James. “10 Broncos Hit with Fines as Club Cops Huge Sanction over Pub Bubble Breach.” Fox Sports 18 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.foxsports.com.au/nrl/nrl-premiership/teams/broncos/nrl-2020-brisbane-broncos-pub-covid19-bubble-breach-fine-sanctions-who-was-at-the-pub/news-story/d3bd3c559289a8b83bc3fccbceaffe78>. Hytner, Mike. “AFL Suspends Season and Cancels AFLW amid Coronavirus Crisis.” The Guardian 22 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/22/afl-nrl-and-a-league-press-on-despite-restrictions>. Jones, Wayne. “Ray of Hope for Medical Care across Border.” Echo Netdaily 14 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.echo.net.au/2020/08/ray-of-hope-for-medical-care-across-border>. Jouavel, Levi. “Women’s Football Shutdowns: ‘It’s Unfair Boys’ Academies Can Still Play’.” BBC News 10 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-54876198>. Keh, Andrew. “We Hope Your Cheers for This Article Are for Real.” The New York Times 16 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/sports/coronavirus-stadium-fans-crowd-noise.html>. Kennedy, Else. “‘The Worst Year’: Domestic Violence Soars in Australia during COVID-19.” The Guardian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/the-worst-year-domestic-violence-soars-in-australia-during-COVID-19>. Keoghan, Sarah. “‘Everyone’s Concerned’: Players Cop 70% Pay Cut.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/netball/everyone-s-concerned-players-cop-70-per-cent-pay-cut-20200328-p54esz.html>. Knox, Malcolm. “Gambling’s Share of NRL Revenue Could Well Double: That Brings Power.” Sydney Morning Herald. 15 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/gambling-s-share-of-nrl-revenue-could-well-double-that-brings-power-20200515-p54tbg.html>. McGrath, Pat. “Racing Victoria Got $16.6 Million in Emergency COVID Funding: Then Online Horse Racing Gambling Revenue Skyrocketed.” ABC News 3 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-03/racing-victoria-emergency-coronavirus-COVID-funding/12838012>. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. Madden, Helena. “Lebron James’s Suite in the NBA Bubble Is Fit for a King.” Robb Report 16 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://robbreport.com/travel/hotels/lebron-james-nba-bubble-suite-1234569303>. Maguire, Joseph. “Sportization.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Ed. George Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 4710–11. Mathieson, Craig. “Michael Jordan Pierces the Bubble of Elite Sport in Juicy ESPN Doco.” Sydney Morning Herald. 13 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/michael-jordan-pierces-the-bubble-of-elite-sport-in-juicy-espn-doco-20200511-p54rwc.html>. Maurice, Megan. “Australia’s Summer of Cricket during COVID Is about Money and Power—and Men”. 6 Jan. 2021. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jan/06/australias-summer-of-cricket-during-COVID-is-about-money-and-power-and-men>. Murphy, Catherine. “Cricket Australia Contributed to Circumstances Surrounding Ball-Tampering Scandal, Review Finds”. ABC News 20 Oct. 2018. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-29/scathing-report-released-into-cricket-australia-culture/10440972>. News.com.au. “How an AFL Star Wide’s Instagram Post Led to a Hefty Fine and a Journalist Being Stood Down.” NZ Herald 3 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/how-an-afl-star-wifes-instagram-post-led-to-a-hefty-fine-and-a-journalist-being-stood-down/7IDR4SXQ6QW5WDFBV42BK3M7YQ>. Nicholson, Matthew, Anthony Kerr, and Merryn Sherwood. Sport and the Media: Managing the Nexus. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015. Pavlidis, Adele. “Being Grateful: Materialising ‘Success’ in Women’s Contact Sport.” Emotion, Space and Society 35 (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1755458620300207>. Phillips, Sam. “‘The Future of the Season Is in Their Hands’: Palaszczuk’s NRL Warning.” Sydney Morning Herald 10 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/the-future-of-the-season-is-in-their-hands-palaszczuk-s-nrl-warning-20200810-p55k7j.html>. Pierik, Jon, and Ryan, Peter. “‘I Own the Consequences’: Stack, Coleman-Jones Apologise for Gold Coast Incident.” The Age 5 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/i-own-the-consequences-stack-apologises-for-gold-coast-incident-20200905-p55spq.html>. Poposki, Claudia, and Louise Ayling. “AFL Star’s Wife Who Caused Uproar by Breaching Quarantine to Go to a Spa Reveals She’s Been Smashed by Vile Trolls.” Daily Mail Australia 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8674083/AFL-WAG-Brooke-Cotchin-breached-COVID-19-quarantine-spa-cops-abuse-trolls.html>. Ramsey, Michael. “Axed Swan Spared Jail over Ex-Girlfriend Assault.” AFL.com.au 2 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.afl.com.au/news/526677/axed-swan-spared-jail-over-ex-girlfriend-assault>. Read, Brent. “The NRL Is Set to Finish the Season on a High after Stunning Financial Results.” The Australian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/nrl/the-nrl-is-set-to-finish-the-season-on-a-high-after-stunning-financial-results/news-story/1ce9c2f9b598441d88daaa8cc2b44dc1>. Reel, Justine, J., and Emily Crouch. “#MeToo: Uncovering Sexual Harassment and Assault in Sport.” Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology 13.2 (2018): 177–79. Rogers, Michael. “Buckley, Sanderson to Pay Pies’ Huge Fine for COVID Breach.” AFL.com.au 1 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.afl.com.au/news/479118/buckley-sanderson-to-pay-pies-huge-fine-for-COVID-breach>. Richardson, David, and Richard Denniss. “Gender Experiences during the COVID-19 Lockdown: Women Lose from COVID-19, Men to Gain from Stimulus.” The Australia Institute June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/gender-experiences-during-the-COVID-19-lockdown>. Rowe, David. “All Sport Is Global: A Hard Lesson from the Pandemic.” Open Forum 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.openforum.com.au/all-sport-is-global-a-hard-lesson-from-the-pandemic>. ———. “And the Winner Is … Television: Spectacle and Sport in a Pandemic.” Open Forum 19 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.openforum.com.au/and-the-winner-istelevision-spectacle-and-sport-in-a-pandemic>. ———. Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. ———. “Scandals and Sport.” Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal. Eds. Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord. London: Routledge, 2019. 324–32. ———. “Subjecting Pandemic Sport to a Sociological Procedure.” Journal of Sociology 56.4 (2020): 704–13. Schout, David. “Cricket Prepares for Mental Health Challenges Thrown Up by Bubble Life.” The Guardian 8 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/08/cricket-prepares-for-mental-health-challenges-thrown-up-by-bubble-life>. Spaaij, Ramón. Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2011. The Sporting Bubble. Dir. Peter Dickson. Nine Network Australia, 2020. Swanston, Tim. “With Coronavirus Limiting Interstate Movement, Queensland Is the Nation’s Sporting Hub—Is That Really Safe?” ABC News 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-29/coronavirus-queensland-rules-for-sports-teams-explainer/12542634>. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women's Studies International Forum 30.5 (2007): 427–38. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Walter, Brad. “From Shutdown to Restart: How NRL Walked Tightrope to Get Season Going Again.” NRL.com 25 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/05/25/from-shutdown-to-restart-how-nrl-walked-tightrope-to-get-season-going-again>. Wade, Lisa. “Rape on Campus: Athletes, Status, and the Sexual Assault Crisis.” The Conversation 7 Mar. 2017. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/rape-on-campus-athletes-status-and-the-sexual-assault-crisis-72255>. Webster, Andrew. “Sydney Roosters’ Mitchell Pearce Involved in a Drunken Incident with a Dog? And Your Point Is ...?” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Jan. 2016. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/sydney-roosters-mitchell-pearce-involved-in-a-drunken-incident-with-a-dog-and-your-point-is--20160127-gmfemh.html>. Whittaker, Troy. “Three-Peat Not Driving Broncos in NRLW Grand Final.” NRL.com 24 Oct. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/10/24/three-peat-not-driving-broncos-in-nrlw-grand-final>. Yahoo! Sport Staff. “‘Not Okay’: Uproar over ‘Disgusting’ Find inside Quarantine.” Yahoo! Sport 9 July 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://au.sports.yahoo.com/wnba-disturbing-conditions-coronavirus-bubble-slammed-003557243.html>.

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.

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›.

The National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper—drafted to assist the Australian Government in developing the first national Cultural Policy since Creative Nation nearly two decades ago—envisages a future in which arts, cultural and creative activities directly support the development of an inclusive, innovative and productive Australia. "The policy," it says, "will be based on an understanding that a creative nation produces a more inclusive society and a more expressive and confident citizenry by encouraging our ability to express, describe and share our diverse experiences—with each other and with the world" (Australian Government 3). Even a cursory reading of this Discussion Paper makes it clear that the question of impact—in aesthetic, cultural and economic terms—is central to the Government's agenda in developing a new Cultural Policy. Hand-in-hand with the notion of impact comes the process of measurement of progress. The Discussion Paper notes that progress "must be measurable, and the Government will invest in ways to assess the impact that the National Cultural Policy has on society and the economy" (11). If progress must be measurable, this raises questions about what arts, cultural and creative workers do, whether it is worth it, and whether they could be doing it better. In effect, the Discussion Paper pushes artsworkers ever closer to a climate in which they have to be skilled not just at making work, but at making the impact of this work clear to stakeholders. The Government in its plans for Australia's cultural future, is clearly most supportive of artsworkers who can do this, and the scholars, educators and employers who can best train the artsworkers of the future to do this. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: The Challenges How do we train artsworkers to assess, measure and articulate the impact of what they do? How do we prepare them to be ready to work in a climate that will—as the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper makes clear—emphasise measuring impact, communicating impact, and communicating impact across aesthetic, cultural and economic categories? As educators delivering training in this area, the Discussion Paper has made this already compelling question even more pressing as we work to develop the career-ready graduates the Government seeks. Our program, the Master of Creative Industries (Creative Production & Arts Management) offered in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, is, like most programs in arts and cultural management in the US, UK, Europe and Australia, offering a three-Semester postgraduate program that allows students to develop the career-ready skills required to work as managers of arts, cultural or creative organisations. That we need to train our graduates to work not just as producers of plays, paintings or recordings, but as entrepreneurial arts advocates who can measure and articulate the value of their programs to others, is not news (Hadley "Creating" 647-48; cf. Brkic; Ebewo and Sirayi; Beckerman; Sikes). Our program—which offers training in arts policy, management, marketing and budgeting followed by training in entrepreneurship and a practical project—is already structured around this necessity. The question of how to teach students this diverse skill set is, however, still a subject of debate; and the question of how to teach students to measure the impact of this work is even more difficult. There is, of course, a body of literature on the impact of arts, cultural and creative activities, value and evaluation that has been developed over the past decade, particularly through landmark reports like Matarasso's Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (1997) and the RAND Corporation's Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts (2004). There are also emergent studies in an Australian context: Madden's "Cautionary Note" on using economic impact studies in the arts (2001); case studies on arts and wellbeing by consultancy firm Effective Change (2003); case studies by DCITA (2003); the Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management (2009) issue on "value"; and Australia Council publications on arts, culture and economy. As Richards has explained, "evaluation is basically a straightforward concept. E-value-ation = a process of enquiry that allows a judgment of amount, value or worth to be made" (99). What makes arts evaluation difficult is not the concept, but the measurement of intangible values—aesthetic quality, expression, engagement or experience. In the literature, discussion has been plagued by debate about what is measured, what method is used, and whether subjective values can in fact be measured. Commentators note that in current practice, questions of value are still deferred because they are too difficult to measure (Bilton and Leary 52), discussed only in terms of economic measures such as market share or satisfaction which are statistically quantifiable (Belfiore and Bennett "Rethinking" 137), or done through un-rigorous surveys that draw only ambiguous, subjective, or selective responses (Merli 110). According to Belfiore and Bennett, Public debate about the value of the arts thus comes to be dominated by what might best be termed the cult of the measurable; and, of course, it is those disciplines primarily concerned with measurement, namely, economics and statistics, which are looked upon to find the evidence that will finally prove why the arts are so important to individuals and societies. A corollary of this is that the humanities are of little use in this investigation. ("Rethinking" 137) Accordingly, Ragsdale states, Arts organizations [still] need to find a way to assess their progress in …making great art that matters to people—as evidenced, perhaps, by increased enthusiasm, frequency of attendance, the capacity and desire to talk or write about one's experience, or in some other way respond to the experience, the curiosity to learn about the art form and the ideas encountered, the depth of emotional response, the quality of the social connections made, and the expansion of one's aesthetics over time. Commentators are still looking for a balanced approach (cf. Geursen and Rentschler; Falk and Dierkling), which evaluates aesthetic practices, business practices, audience response, and results for all parties, in tandem. An approach which evaluates intrinsic impacts, instrumental impacts, and the way each enables the other, in tandem—with an emphasis not on the numbers but on whether we are getting better at what we are doing. And, of course, allows evaluators of arts, cultural and creative activities to use creative arts methods—sketches, stories, bodily movements and relationships and so forth—to provide data to inform the assessment, so they can draw not just on statistical research methods but on arts, culture and humanities research methods. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: Our Approach As a result of this contested terrain, our method for training artsworkers to measure the impact of their programs has emerged not just from these debates—which tend to conclude by declaring the needs for better methods without providing them—but from a research-teaching nexus in which our own trial-and-error work as consultants to arts, cultural and educational organisations looking to measure the impact of or improve their programs has taught us what is effective. Each of us has worked as managers of professional associations such as Drama Australia and Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA), members of boards or committees for arts organisations such as Youth Arts Queensland and Young People and the Arts Australia (YPAA), as well as consultants to major cultural organisations like the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and the Brisbane Festival. The methods for measuring impact we have developed via this work are based not just on surveys and statistics, but on our own practice as scholars and producers of culture—and are therefore based in arts, culture and humanities approaches. As scholars, we investigate the way marginalised groups tell stories—particularly groups marked by age, gender, race or ability, using community, contemporary and public space performance practices (cf. Hadley, "Bree"; Gattenhof). What we have learned by bringing this sort of scholarly analysis into dialogue with a more systematised approach to articulating impact to government, stakeholders and sponsors is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. What is needed, instead, is a toolkit, which incorporates central principles and stages, together with qualitative, quantitative and performative tools to track aesthetics, accessibility, inclusivity, capacity-building, creativity etc., as appropriate on a case-by-case basis. Whatever the approach, it is critical that the data track the relationship between the experience the artists, audience or stakeholders anticipated the activity should have, the aspects of the activity that enabled that experience to emerge (or not), and the effect of that (or not) for the arts organisation, their artists, their partners, or their audiences. The combination of methods needs to be selected in consultation with the arts organisation, and the negotiations typically need to include detailed discussion of what should be evaluated (aesthetics, access, inclusivity, or capacity), when it should be evaluated (before, during or after), and how the results should be communicated (including the difference between evaluation for reporting purposes and evaluation for program improvement purposes, and the difference between evaluation and related processes like reflection, documentary-making, or market research). Translating what we have learned through our cultural research and consultancy into a study package for students relies on an understanding of what they want from their study. This, typically, is practical career-ready skills. Students want to produce their own arts, or produce other people's arts, and most have not imagined themselves participating in meta-level processes in which they argue the value of arts, cultural and creative activities (Hadley, "Creating" 652). Accordingly, most have not thought of themselves as researchers, using cultural research methods to create reports that inform how the Australian government values, supports, and services the arts. The first step in teaching students to operate effectively as evaluators of arts, cultural and creative activities is, then, to re-orient their expectations to include this in their understanding of what artsworkers do, what skills artsworkers need, and where they deploy these skills. Simply handing over our own methods, as "the" methods, would not enable graduates to work effectively in a climate were one size will not fit all, and methods for evaluating impact need to be negotiated again for each new context. 1. Understanding the Need for Evaluation: Cause and Effect The first step in encouraging students to become effective evaluators is asking them to map their sector, the major stakeholders, the agendas, alignments and misalignments in what the various players are trying to achieve, and the programs, projects and products through which the players are trying to achieve it. This starting point is drawn from Program Theory—which, as Joon-Yee Kwok argues in her evaluation of the SPARK National Mentoring Program for Young and Emerging Artists (2010) is useful in evaluating cultural activities. The Program Theory approach starts with a flow chart that represents relationships between activities in a program, allowing evaluators to unpack some of the assumptions the program's producers have about what activities have what sort of effect, then test whether they are in fact having that sort of effect (cf. Hall and Hall). It could, for example, start with a flow chart representing the relationship between a community arts policy, a community arts organisation, a community-devised show it is producing, and a blog it has created because it assumes it will allow the public to become more interested in the show the participants are creating, to unpack the assumptions about the sort of effect this is supposed to have, and test whether this is in fact having this sort of effect. Masterclasses, conversations and debate with peers and industry professionals about the agendas, activities and assumptions underpinning programs in their sector allows students to look for elements that may be critical in their programs' ability to achieve (or not) an anticipated impact. In effect to start asking about, "the way things are done now, […] what things are done well, and […] what could be done better" (Australian Government 12).2. Understanding the Nature of Evaluation: PurposeOnce students have been alerted to the need to look for cause-effect assumptions that can determine whether or not their program, project or product is effective, they are asked to consider what data they should be developing about this, why, and for whom. Are they evaluating a program to account to government, stakeholders and sponsors for the money they have spent? To improve the way it works? To use that information to develop innovative new programs in future? In other words, who is the audience? Being aware of the many possible purposes and audiences for evaluation information can allow students to be clear not just about what needs to be evaluated, but the nature of the evaluation they will do—a largely statistical report, versus a narrative summary of experiences, emotions and effects—which may differ depending on the audience.3. Making Decisions about What to Evaluate: Priorities When setting out to measure the impact of arts, cultural or creative activities, many people try to measure everything, measure for the purposes of reporting, improvement and development using the same methods, or gather a range of different sorts of data in the hope that something in it will answer questions about whether an activity is having the anticipated effect, and, if so, how. We ask students to be more selective, making strategic decisions about which anticipated effects of a program, project or product need to be evaluated, whether the evaluation is for reporting, improvement or innovation purposes, and what information stakeholders most require. In addition to the concept of collecting data about critical points where programs succeed or fail in achieving a desired effect, and different approaches for reporting, improvement or development, we ask students to think about the different categories of effect that may be more or less interesting to different stakeholders. This is not an exhaustive list, or a list of things every evaluation should measure. It is a tool to demonstrate to would-be evaluators points of focus that could be developed, depending on the stakeholders' priorities, the purpose of the evaluation, and the critical points at which desired effects need to occur to ensure success. Without such framing, evaluators are likely to end up with unusable data, which become a difficulty to deal with rather than a benefit for the artsworkers, arts organisations or stakeholders. 4. Methods for Evaluation: Process To be effective, methods for collecting data about how arts, cultural or creative activities have (or fail to have) anticipated impact need to include conventional survey, interview and focus group style tools, and creative or performative tools such as discussion, documentation or observation. We encourage students to use creative practice to draw out people's experience of arts events—for example, observation, documentation still images, video or audio documentation, or facilitated development of sketches, stories or scenes about an experience, can be used to register and record people's feelings. These sorts of methods can capture what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" of experience (cf. Belfiore and Bennett, "Determinants" 232)—for example, photos of a festival space at hourly intervals or the colours a child uses to convey memory of a performance can capture to flow of movement, engagement, and experience for spectators more clearly than statistics. These, together with conventional surveys or interviews that comment on the feelings expressed, allow for a combination of quantitative, qualitative and performative data to demonstrate impact. The approach becomes arts- and humanities- based, using arts methods to encourage people to talk, write or otherwise respond to their experience in terms of emotion, connection, community, or expansion of aesthetics. The evaluator still needs to draw out the meaning of the responses through content, text or discourse analysis, and teaching students how to do a content analysis of quantitative, qualitative and performative data is critical at this stage. When teaching students how to evaluate their data, our method encourages students not just to focus on the experience, or the effect of the experience, but the relationship between the two—the things that act as "enablers" "determinants" (White and Hede; Belfiore and Bennett, "Determinants" passim) of effect. This approach allows the evaluator to use a combination of conventional and creative methods to describe not just what effect an activity had, but, more critically, what enabled it to have that effect, providing a firmer platform for discussing the impact, and how it could be replicated, developed or deepened next time, than a list of effects and numbers of people who felt those effects alone. 5. Communicating Results: Politics Often arts, cultural or creative organisations can be concerned about the image of their work an evaluation will create. The final step in our approach is to alert students to the professional, political and ethical implications of evaluation. Students learn to share their knowledge with organisations, encouraging them to see the value of reporting both correct and incorrect assumptions about the impact of their activities, as part of a continuous improvement process. Then we assist them in drawing the results of this sort of cultural research into planning, development and training documents which may assist the organisation in improving in the future. In effect, it is about encouraging organisations to take the Australian government at its word when, in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, it says it that measuring impact is about measuring progress—what we do well, what we could do better, and how, not just success statistics about who is most successful—as it is this that will ultimately be most useful in creating an inclusive, innovative, productive Australia. Teaching Artsworkers to Measure the Impact of Their Work: The Impact of Our Approach What, then, is the impact of our training on graduates' ability to measure the impact of work? Have we made measurable progress in our efforts to teach artsworkers to assess and articulate the impact of their work? The MCI (CP&AM) has been offered for three years. Our approach is still emergent and experimental. We have, though, identified a number of impacts of our work. First, our students are less fearful of becoming involved in measuring the value or impact of arts, cultural and creative programs. This is evidenced by the number who chooses to do some sort of evaluation for their Major Project, a 15,000 word individual project or internship which concludes their degree. Of the 50 or so students who have reached the Major Project in three years—35 completed and 15 in planning for 2012—about a third have incorporated evaluation into their Major Project. This includes evaluation of sector, business or producing models (5), youth arts and youth arts mentorship programs (4), audience development programs (2), touring programs (4), and even other arts management training programs (1). Indeed, after internships in programming or producing roles, this work—aligned with the Government's interest in improving training of young artists, touring, audience development, and economic development—has become a most popular Major Project option. This has enabled students to work with a range of arts, cultural and creative organisations, share their training—their methods, their understanding of what their methods can measure, when, and how—with Industry. Second, this Industry-engaged training has helped graduates in securing employment. This is evidenced by the fact that graduates have gone on to be employed with organisations they have interned with as part of their Major Project, or other organisations, including some of Brisbane's biggest cultural organisations—local and state government departments, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane Festival, Metro Arts, Backbone Youth Arts, and Youth Arts Queensland, amongst others. Thirdly, graduates' contribution to local organisations and industry has increased the profile of a relatively new program. This is evidenced by the fact that it enrols 40 to 50 new students a year across Graduate Certificate / MCI (CP&AM) programs, typically two thirds domestic students and one third international students from Canada, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and, of course, China. Indeed, some students are now disseminating this work globally, undertaking their Major Project as an internship or industry project with an organisation overseas. In effect, our training's impact emerges not just from our research, or our training, but from the fact that our graduates disseminate our approach to a range of arts, cultural and creative organisations in a practical way. We have, as a result, expanded the audience for this approach, and the number of people and contexts via which it is being adapted and made useful. Whilst few of students come into our program with a desire to do this sort of work, or even a working knowledge of the policy that informs it, on completion many consider it a viable part of their practice and career pathway. When they realise what they can achieve, and what it can mean to the organisations they work with, they do incorporate research, research consultant and government roles as part of their career portfolio, and thus make a contribution to the strong cultural sector the Government envisages in the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper. Our work as scholars, practitioners and educators has thus enabled us to take a long-term, processual and grassroots approach to reshaping agendas for approaches to this form of cultural research, as our practices are adopted and adapted by students and industry stakeholders. Given the challenges commentators have identified in creating and disseminating effective evaluation methods in arts over the past decade, this, for us—though by no means work that is complete—does count as measurable progress. References Beckerman, Gary. "Adventuring Arts Entrepreneurship Curricula in Higher Education: An Examination of Present Efforts, Obstacles, and Best pPractices." The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 37.2 (2007): 87-112. Belfiore, Eleaonora, and Oliver Bennett. "Determinants of Impact: Towards a Better Understanding of Encounters with the Arts." Cultural Trends 16.3 (2007): 225-75. ———. "Rethinking the Social Impacts of the Arts." International Journal of Cultural Policy 13.2 (2007): 135-51. Bilton, Chris, and Ruth Leary. "What Can Managers Do for Creativity? Brokering Creativity in the Creative Industries." International Journal of Cultural Policy 8.1 (2002): 49-64. Brkic, Aleksandar. "Teaching Arts Management: Where Did We Lose the Core Ideas?" Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 38.4 (2009): 270-80. Czikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. "A Systems Perspective on Creativity." Creative Management. Ed. Jane Henry. Sage: London, 2001. 11-26. Australian Government. "National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper." Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet – Office for the Arts 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://culture.arts.gov.au/discussion-paper›. Ebewo, Patrick, and Mzo Sirayi. "The Concept of Arts/Cultural Management: A Critical Reflection." Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 38.4 (2009): 281-95. Effective Change and VicHealth. Creative Connections: Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing through Community Arts Participation 2003. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/en/Publications/Social-connection/Creative-Connections.aspx›. Effective Change. Evaluating Community Arts and Community Well Being 2003. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.arts.vic.gov.au/Research_and_Resources/Resources/Evaluating_Community_Arts_and_Wellbeing›. Falk, John H., and Lynn. D Dierking. "Re-Envisioning Success in the Cultural Sector." Cultural Trends 17.4 (2008): 233-46. Gattenhof, Sandra. "Sandra Gattenhof." QUT ePrints Article Repository. Queensland University of Technology, 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Gattenhof,_Sandra.html›. Geursen, Gus and Ruth Rentschler. "Unravelling Cultural Value." The Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 33.3 (2003): 196-210. Hall, Irene and David Hall. Evaluation and Social Research: Introducing Small Scale Practice. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2004. Hadley, Bree. "Bree Hadley." QUT ePrints Article Repository. Queensland University of Technology, 2011. 1 Oct. 2011 ‹http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Hadley,_Bree.html›. ———. "Creating Successful Cultural Brokers: The Pros and Cons of a Community of Practice Approach in Arts Management Education." Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management 8.1 (2011): 645-59. Kwok, Joon. When Sparks Fly: Developing Formal Mentoring Programs for the Career Development of Young and Emerging Artists. Masters Thesis. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2010. Madden, Christopher. "Using 'Economic' Impact Studies in Arts and Cultural Advocacy: A Cautionary Note." Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 98 (2001): 161-78. Matarasso, Francis. Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts. Bournes Greens, Stroud: Comedia, 1997. McCarthy, Kevin. F., Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, Laura Zakaras, and Arthur Brooks. Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2004. Merli, Paola. "Evaluating the Social Impact of Participation in Arts Activities." International Journal of Cultural Policy 8.1 (2002): 107-18. Muir, Jan. The Regional Impact of Cultural Programs: Some Case Study Findings. Communications Research Unit - DCITA, 2003. Ragsdale, Diana. "Keynote - Surviving the Culture Change." Australia Council Arts Marketing Summit. Australia Council for the Arts: 2008. Richards, Alison. "Evaluation Approaches." Creative Collaboration: Artists and Communities. Melbourne: Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2006. Sikes, Michael. "Higher Education Training in Arts Administration: A Millennial and Metaphoric Reappraisal. Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 30.2 (2000): 91-101.White, Tabitha, and Anne-Marie Hede. "Using Narrative Inquiry to Explore the Impact of Art on Individuals." Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 38.1 (2008): 19-35.

The purpose of the present study was to define the term “cyberbullying” from the perspective of middle- and high-school students in Vietnam, detailing its characteristics. The study used qualitative focus groups with Vietnamese students, teachers, parents, school psychologists, and psycho-educational experts in Hanoi, Vietnam. From the perspective of these informants, cyberbullying involves seven characteristics: (a) The indirect transmission of negative, untrue, hateful, and/ or secret, personal information through electronic devices and applications, (b) with the intention to hurt the victim, (c) which may or may not be part of a series of repetitive actions that nonetheless may have ongoing effects, (d) with the perpetrator an individual or a group, (e) in the context of a power imbalance relationship, (f) with the perpetrator(s) able to hide his or her identity, (g) and the bullying able to occur at all times in any place the victim has internet access. Keywords: Definition, characteristics, cyberbullying, students, Vietnam. References [1] Álvarez García, D., Núñez Pérez, J. C., Álvarez Pérez, L., Dobarro González, A., Rodríguez Pérez, C., & González Castro, M. P. (2011). Violencia a través de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación en estudiantes de secundaria. Anales de psicología.[2] Aricak, T., Siyahhan, S., Uzunhasanoglu, A., Saribeyoglu, S., Ciplak, S., Yilmaz, N., & Memmedov, C. (2008). Cyberbullying among Turkish adolescents. Cyberpsychology & behavior, 11(3), 253-261.[3] Bauman, S. (2007), Cyberbullying: a Virtual Menace, Paper to be presented at the National Coalition Against Bullying National Conference, Melbourne, Australia.[4] Belsey, B. (2005), Cyberbullying. From: www.cyberbullying.ca.[5] Beran, T., Li, Q. (2007), The Relationship between Cyberbullying and School Bullying, Journal of Student Wellbeing, 1, 2, 15-33.[6] Berne, S., Frisén, A., Schultze-Krumbholz, A., Scheithauer, H., Naruskov, K., Luik, P., ... & Zukauskiene, R. (2013). Cyberbullying assessment instruments: A systematic review. Aggression and violent behavior, 18(2), 320-334.[7] Bottino, S. M. B., Bottino, C., Regina, C. G., Correia, A. V. L., & Ribeiro, W. S. (2015). Cyberbullying and adolescent mental health: systematic review. Cadernos de saude publica, 31, 463-475.[8] Buelga, S., Cava, M. J., & Musitu, G. (2010). Cyberbullying: victimización entre adolescentes a través del teléfono móvil y de Internet. Psicothema, 22(4), 784-789.[9] Cantone, E., Piras, A. P., Vellante, M., Preti, A., Daníelsdóttir, S., D’Aloja, E., ... & Bhugra, D. (2015). Interventions on bullying and cyberbullying in schools: A systematic review. Clinical practice and epidemiology in mental health: CP & EMH, 11(Suppl 1 M4), 58.[10] Carpenter, S. (2018). Ten Steps in Scale Development and Reporting: A Guide for Researchers. Communication Methods and Measures, 12(1), 25-44.[11] Connell, N. M., Schell-Busey, N. M., Pearce, A. N., & Negro, P. (2014). Badgrlz? Exploring sex differences in cyberbullying behaviors. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 12(3), 209-228.[12] Trần Văn Công, Nguyễn Phương Hồng Ngọc, Ngô Thùy Dương, Nguyễn Thị Thắm (2015), Xây dựng thang đo bắt nạt trực tuyến cho học sinh Việt Nam, Kỷ yếu hội thảo khoa học cán bộ trẻ các trường Đại học sư phạm toàn quốc lần thứ V, NXB Giáo dục.[13] Trần Văn Công, Nguyễn Phương Hồng Ngọc, Ngô Thùy Dương, Nguyễn Thị Thắm (2015), Chiến lược ứng phó của học sinh với bắt nạt trực tuyến. Tạp chí Nghiên cứu Giáo dục, Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội, tập 31, số 3, tr. 11-24. [14] Gámez-Guadix, M., Orue, I., Smith, P. K., & Calvete, E. (2013). Longitudinal and reciprocal relations of cyberbullying with depression, substance use, and problematic internet use among adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health, 53(4), 446-452.[15] Garaigordobil, M. (2011). Prevalencia y consecuencias del cyberbullying: una revisión. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 11(2).[16] Hinduja, S., & Patchin, J. W. (2010). Bullying, cyberbullying, and suicide. Archives of suicide research, 14(3), 206-221.[17] Lê Thị Hải Hà, Nguyễn Thanh Hương, Trương Quang Tiến, Marilyn Campell, Michelle Gatton, Michael Dunne (2016), Giá trị và độ tin cậy của thang đo bị bắt nạt học đường và bắt nạt qua mạng: Kết quả nghiên cứu với học sinh đô thị Hà Nội và Hải Dương, Tạp chí Y tế Công cộng, số 40, tr. 199 - 204.[18] Nguyễn Thị Bích Hạnh, Trần Văn Công, (2017), Thực trạng bắt nạt trực tuyến ở học sinh trung học phổ thông trên địa bàn thành phố Đà Nẵng, Kỷ yếu Hội thảo quốc tế Tâm lý học Khu vực Đông Nam Á lần thứ nhất “Hạnh phúc con người và phát triển bền vững”, RCP 2017, Quyển 2, tr. 355-363. [19] Huang, Y., Chou, C. (2010), An analysis of multiple factors of cyberbullying among junior high school students in Taiwan, Computers in Human Behavior, 26, 1581–1590. From: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh.[20] Juvonen, J., & Gross, E. F. (2008). Extending the school grounds?—Bullying experiences in cyberspace. Journal of School health, 78(9), 496-505.[21] Li, Q. (2008). A cross-cultural comparison of adolescents' experience related to cyberbullying. Educational Research, 50(3), 223-234.[22] Lucas-Molina, B., Pérez-Albéniz, A., & Giménez-Dasí, M. (2016). The assessment of cyberbullying: The present situation and future challenge. Papeles Del Psicólogo, 37(1), 27-35.[23] Mark, L., & Ratliffe, K. T. (2011). Cyber worlds: New playgrounds for bullying. Computers in the Schools, 28(2), 92-116.[24] Menesini, E., Nocentini, A., Palladino, B. E., Frisén, A., Berne, S., Ortega-Ruiz, R., ... & Naruskov, K. (2012). Cyberbullying definition among adolescents: A comparison across six European countries. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15(9), 455-463.[25] Mishna, F., Khoury-Kassabri, M., Gadalla, T., Daciuk, J. (2012), Risk factors for involvement in cyber bullying: Victims, bullies and bully–victims, Children and Youth Services Review, 34, 63–70. From: www.elsevier.com/locate/childyouth.[26] Naruskov, K., Luik, P., Nocentini, A., & Menesini, E. (2012). Estonian students'perception and definition of cyberbullying. Trames: A Journal of the Humanities & Social Sciences, 16(4).[27] Nguyễn Phương Hồng Ngọc, Trần Văn Công (2016), Hậu quả của bắt nạt trực tuyến ở học sinh trung học phổ thông, Kỷ yếu hội thảo quốc tế: Sang chấn tâm lý và các hoạt động trợ giúp, NXB Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội, tr.51-63.[28] Olweus, D. (2010). Understanding and researching bullying: some critical issues (pp. 9-33). In. S. Jimerson; S. Swearer & D. Espelage (Eds.). Handbook of bullying in schools: an international perspective.[29] Olweus, D. (2013). School bullying: Development and some important challenges. Annual review of clinical psychology, 9, 751-780.[30] Padgett, S., & Notar, C. E. (2013). Bystanders Are the Key to Stopping Bullying. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 1(2), 33-41.[31] Patchin J., Hinduja, S. (2014), Words Wound: Delete Cyberbullying and Make Kindness Go Viral, Free Spirit Publishing.[32] Peterson, J.M. (2013), How to Beat Cyberbullying, First Edition, The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.[33] Slonje, R., & Smith, P. K. (2008). Cyberbullying: Another main type of bullying?. Scandinavian journal of psychology, 49(2), 147-154.[34] Slonje, R., Smith, P. K., & FriséN, A. (2013). The nature of cyberbullying, and strategies for prevention. Computers in human behavior, 29(1), 26-32.[35] Smith, P. K. (2012). Cyberbullying and cyber aggression. In Handbook of school violence and school safety (pp. 111-121). Routledge.[36] Smith, P. K., Mahdavi, J., Carvalho, M., Fisher, S., Russell, S., & Tippett, N. (2008). Cyberbullying: Its nature and impact in secondary school pupils. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 49(4), 376-385.[37] Smith, P., Mahdavi, J., Carvalho, M., Tippett, N. (2006), An investigation into cyberbullying, its forms, awareness and impact, and the relationship between age and gender in cyberbullying, A Report to the Anti-Bullying Alliance, Goldsmiths College, University of London. [38] Stewart, R. W., Drescher, C. F., Maack, D. J., Ebesutani, C., & Young, J. (2014). The development and psychometric investigation of the Cyberbullying Scale. Journal of interpersonal violence, 29(12), 2218-2238.[39] Rogers, V. (2010), Cyberbullying: Activities to Help Children and Teens to Stay Safe in a texting, twittering, social networking world, Jessica Kingsley Publishers. [40] Thornberg, R., Tenenbaum, L., Varjas, K., Meyers, J., Jungert, T., & Vanegas, G. (2012). Bystander motivation in bullying incidents: To intervene or not to intervene?. Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, 13(3), 247.[41] Tokunaga, R. S. (2010). Following you home from school: A critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization. Computers in human behavior, 26(3), 277-287.[42] Tokunaga, R. S. (2010). Following you home from school: A critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization. Computers in human behavior, 26(3), 277-287.[43] Vismara, M. F. M., Toaff, J., Pulvirenti, G., Settanni, C., Colao, E., Lavano, S. M., ... & Montera, R. (2017). Internet use and access, behavior, cyberbullying, and grooming: results of an investigative whole city survey of adolescents. Interactive journal of medical research, 6(2).[44] Wade, A., Beran, T. (2011), Cyberbullying: The new era of bullying, Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 26, 1, 44 - 61. [45] Willard, N, E. (2007), The authority and responsibility of school officials in responding to cyberbullying, Journal of Adolescent Health, 41, S64-S65.

Introduction I think the Privacy Act is a huge edifice to protect the minority of things that could go wrong. I’ve got a good example for you, I’m just trying to think … yeah the worst one I’ve ever seen was the Balga Youth Program where we took these students on a reward excursion all the way to Fremantle and suddenly this very alienated kid started to jump under a bus, a moving bus so the kid had to be restrained. The cops from Fremantle arrived because all the very good people in Fremantle were alarmed at these grown-ups manhandling a kid and what had happened is that DCD [Department of Community Development] had dropped him into the program but hadn’t told us that this kid had suicide tendencies. No, it’s just chronically bad. And there were caseworkers involved and … there is some information that we have to have that doesn’t get handed down. Rather than a blanket rule that everything’s confidential coming from them to us, and that was a real live situation, and you imagine how we’re trying to handle it, we had taxis going from Balga to Fremantle to get staff involved and we only had to know what to watch out for and we probably could have … well what you would have done is not gone on the excursion I suppose (School Principal, quoted in Balnaves and Luca 49). These comments are from a school principal in Perth, Western Australia in a school that is concerned with “at-risk” students, and in a context where the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 has imposed limitations on their work. Under this Act it is illegal to pass health, personal or sensitive information concerning an individual on to other people. In the story cited above the Department of Community Development personnel were apparently protecting the student’s “negative right”, that is, “freedom from” interference by others. On the other hand, the principal’s assertion that such information should be shared is potentially a “positive right” because it could cause something to be done in that person’s or society’s interests. Balnaves and Luca noted that positive and negative rights have complex philosophical underpinnings, and they inform much of how we operate in everyday life and of the dilemmas that arise (49). For example, a ban on euthanasia or the “assisted suicide” of a terminally ill person can be a “positive right” because it is considered to be in the best interests of society in general. However, physicians who tacitly approve a patient’s right to end their lives with a lethal dose by legally prescribed dose of medication could be perceived as protecting the patient’s “negative right” as a “freedom from” interference by others. While acknowledging the merits of collaboration between people who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk”, this paper examines some of the barriers to collaboration. Based on both primary and secondary sources, and particularly on oral testimonies, the paper highlights the tension between privacy as a negative right and collaborative helping as a positive right. It also points to other difficulties and dilemmas within and between the institutions engaged in this joint undertaking. The authors acknowledge Michel Foucault’s contention that discourse is power. The discourse on privacy and the sharing of information in modern societies suggests that privacy is a negative right that gives freedom from bureaucratic interference and protects the individual. However, arguably, collaboration between agencies that are working to support individuals “at-risk” requires a measured relaxation of the requirements of this negative right. Children and young people “at-risk” are a case in point. Towards Collaboration From a series of interviews conducted in 2004, the school authorities at Balga Senior High School and Midvale Primary School, people working for the Western Australian departments of Community Development, Justice, and Education and Training in Western Australia, and academics at the Edith Cowan and Curtin universities, who are working to improve the wellbeing of students “at-risk” as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project called Smart Communities, have identified students “at-risk” as individuals who have behavioural problems and little motivation, who are alienated and possibly violent or angry, who under-perform in the classroom and have begun to truant. They noted also that students “at-risk” often suffer from poor health, lack of food and medication, are victims of unwanted pregnancies, and are engaged in antisocial and illegal behaviour such as stealing cars and substance abuse. These students are also often subject to domestic violence (parents on drugs or alcohol), family separation, and homelessness. Some are depressed or suicidal. Sometimes cultural factors contribute to students being regarded as “at-risk”. For example, a social worker in the Smart Communities project stated: Cultural factors sometimes come into that as well … like with some Muslim families … they can flog their daughter or their son, usually the daughter … so cultural factors can create a risk. Research elsewhere has revealed that those children between the ages of 11-17 who have been subjected to bullying at school or physical or sexual abuse at home and who have threatened and/or harmed another person or suicidal are “high-risk” youths (Farmer 4). In an attempt to bring about a positive change in these alienated or “at-risk” adolescents, Balga Senior High School has developed several programs such as the Youth Parents Program, Swan Nyunger Sports Education program, Intensive English Centre, and lower secondary mainstream program. The Midvale Primary School has provided services such as counsellors, Aboriginal child protection workers, and Aboriginal police liaison officers for these “at-risk” students. On the other hand, the Department of Community Development (DCD) has provided services to parents and caregivers for children up to 18 years. Academics from Edith Cowan and Curtin universities are engaged in gathering the life stories of these “at-risk” students. One aspect of this research entails the students writing their life stories in a secured web portal that the universities have developed. The researchers believe that by engaging the students in these self-exploration activities, they (the students) would develop a more hopeful outlook on life. Though all agencies and educational institutions involved in this collaborative project are working for the well-being of the children “at-risk”, the Privacy Act forbids the authorities from sharing information about them. A school psychologist expressed concern over the Privacy Act: When the Juvenile Justice Department want to reintroduce a student into a school, we can’t find out anything about this student so we can’t do any preplanning. They want to give the student a fresh start, so there’s always that tension … eventually everyone overcomes [this] because you realise that the student has to come to the school and has to be engaged. Of course, the manner and consequences of a student’s engagement in school cannot be predicted. In the scenario described above students may have been given a fair chance to reform themselves, which is their positive right but if they turn out to be at “high risk” it would appear that the Juvenile Department protected the negative right of the students by supporting “freedom from” interference by others. Likewise, a school health nurse in the project considered confidentiality or the Privacy Act an important factor in the security of the student “at-risk”: I was trying to think about this kid who’s one of the children who has been sexually abused, who’s a client of DCD, and I guess if police got involved there and wanted to know details and DCD didn’t want to give that information out then I’d guess I’d say to the police “Well no, you’ll have to talk to the parents about getting further information.” I guess that way, recognising these students are minor and that they are very vulnerable, their information … where it’s going, where is it leading? Who wants to know? Where will it be stored? What will be the outcomes in the future for this kid? As a 14 year old, if they’re reckless and get into things, you know, do they get a black record against them by the time they’re 19? What will that information be used for if it’s disclosed? So I guess I become an advocate for the student in that way? Thus the nurse considers a sexually abused child should not be identified. It is a positive right in the interest of the person. Once again, though, if the student turns out to be at “high risk” or suicidal, then it would appear that the nurse was protecting the youth’s negative right—“freedom from” interference by others. Since collaboration is a positive right and aims at the students’ welfare, the workable solution to prevent the students from suicide would be to develop inter-agency trust and to share vital information about “high-risk” students. Dilemmas of Collaboration Some recent cases of the deaths of young non-Caucasian girls in Western countries, either because of the implications of the Privacy Act or due to a lack of efficient and effective communication and coordination amongst agencies, have raised debates on effective child protection. For example, the British Laming report (2003) found that Victoria Climbié, a young African girl, was sent by her parents to her aunt in Britain in order to obtain a good education and was murdered by her aunt and aunt’s boyfriend. However, the risk that she could be harmed was widely known. The girl’s problems were known to 6 local authorities, 3 housing authorities, 4 social services, 2 child protection teams, and the police, the local church, and the hospital, but not to the education authorities. According to the Laming Report, her death could have been prevented if there had been inter-agency sharing of information and appropriate evaluation (Balnaves and Luca 49). The agencies had supported the negative rights of the young girl’s “freedom from” interference by others, but at the cost of her life. Perhaps Victoria’s racial background may have contributed to the concealment of information and added to her disadvantaged position. Similarly, in Western Australia, the Gordon Inquiry into the death of Susan Taylor, a 15 year old girl Aboriginal girl at the Swan Nyungah Community, found that in her short life this girl had encountered sexual violation, violence, and the ravages of alcohol and substance abuse. The Gordon Inquiry reported: Although up to thirteen different agencies were involved in providing services to Susan Taylor and her family, the D[epartment] of C[ommunity] D[evelopment] stated they were unaware of “all the services being provided by each agency” and there was a lack of clarity as to a “lead coordinating agency” (Gordon et al. quoted in Scott 45). In this case too, multiple factors—domestic, racial, and the Privacy Act—may have led to Susan Taylor’s tragic end. In the United Kingdom, Harry Ferguson noted that when a child is reported to be “at-risk” from domestic incidents, they can suffer further harm because of their family’s concealment (204). Ferguson’s study showed that in 11 per cent of the 319 case sample, children were known to be re-harmed within a year of initial referral. Sometimes, the parents apply a veil of secrecy around themselves and their children by resisting or avoiding services. In such cases the collaborative efforts of the agencies and education may be thwarted. Lack of cultural education among teachers, youth workers, and agencies could also put the “at-risk” cultural minorities into a high risk category. For example, an “at-risk” Muslim student may not be willing to share personal experiences with the school or agencies because of religious sensitivities. This happened in the UK when Khadji Rouf was abused by her father, a Bangladeshi. Rouf’s mother, a white woman, and her female cousin from Bangladesh, both supported Rouf when she finally disclosed that she had been sexually abused for over eight years. After group therapy, Rouf stated that she was able to accept her identity and to call herself proudly “mixed race”, whereas she rejected the Asian part of herself because it represented her father. Other Asian girls and young women in this study reported that they could not disclose their abuse to white teachers or social workers because of the feeling that they would be “letting down their race or their Muslim culture” (Rouf 113). The marginalisation of many Muslim Australians both in the job market and in society is long standing. For example, in 1996 and again in 2001 the Muslim unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total (Australian Bureau of Statistics). But since the 9/11 tragedy and Bali bombings visible Muslims, such as women wearing hijabs (headscarves), have sometimes been verbally and physically abused and called ‘terrorists’ by some members of the wider community (Dreher 13). The Howard government’s new anti-terrorism legislation and the surveillance hotline ‘Be alert not alarmed’ has further marginalised some Muslims. Some politicians have also linked Muslim asylum seekers with terrorists (Kabir 303), which inevitably has led Muslim “at-risk” refugee students to withdraw from school support such as counselling. Under these circumstances, Muslim “at-risk” students and their parents may prefer to maintain a low profile rather than engage with agencies. In this case, arguably, federal government politics have exacerbated the barriers to collaboration. It appears that unfamiliarity with Muslim culture is not confined to mainstream Australians. For example, an Aboriginal liaison police officer engaged in the Smart Communities project in Western Australia had this to say about Muslim youths “at-risk”: Different laws and stuff from different countries and they’re coming in and sort of thinking that they can bring their own laws and religions and stuff … and when I say religions there’s laws within their religions as well that they don’t seem to understand that with Australia and our laws. Such generalised misperceptions of Muslim youths “at-risk” would further alienate them, thus causing a major hindrance to collaboration. The “at-risk” factors associated with Aboriginal youths have historical connections. Research findings have revealed that indigenous youths aged between 10-16 years constitute a vast majority in all Australian States’ juvenile detention centres. This over-representation is widely recognised as associated with the nature of European colonisation, and is inter-related with poverty, marginalisation and racial discrimination (Watson et al. 404). Like the Muslims, their unemployment rate was three times higher than the national total in 2001 (ABS). However, in 1998 it was estimated that suicide rates among Indigenous peoples were at least 40 per cent higher than national average (National Advisory Council for Youth Suicide Prevention, quoted in Elliot-Farrelly 2). Although the wider community’s unemployment rate is much lower than the Aboriginals and the Muslims, the “at-risk” factors of mainstream Australian youths are often associated with dysfunctional families, high conflict, low-cohesive families, high levels of harsh parental discipline, high levels of victimisation by peers, and high behavioural inhibition (Watson et al. 404). The Macquarie Fields riots in 2005 revealed the existence of “White” underclass and “at-risk” people in Sydney. Macquarie Fields’ unemployment rate was more than twice the national average. Children growing up in this suburb are at greater risk of being involved in crime (The Age). Thus small pockets of mainstream underclass youngsters also require collaborative attention. In Western Australia people working on the Smart Communities project identified that lack of resources can be a hindrance to collaboration for all sectors. As one social worker commented: “government agencies are hierarchical systems and lack resources”. They went on to say that in their department they can not give “at-risk” youngsters financial assistance in times of crisis: We had a petty cash box which has got about 40 bucks in it and sometimes in an emergency we might give a customer a couple of dollars but that’s all we can do, we can’t give them any larger amount. We have bus/metro rail passes, that’s the only thing that we’ve actually got. A youth worker in Smart Communities commented that a lot of uncertainty is involved with young people “at-risk”. They said that there are only a few paid workers in their field who are supported and assisted by “a pool of volunteers”. Because the latter give their time voluntarily they are under no obligation to be constant in their attendance, so the number of available helpers can easily fluctuate. Another youth worker identified a particularly important barrier to collaboration: because of workers’ relatively low remuneration and high levels of work stress, the turnover rates are high. The consequence of this is as follows: The other barrier from my point is that you’re talking to somebody about a student “at-risk”, and within 14 months or 18 months a new person comes in [to that position] then you’ve got to start again. This way you miss a lot of information [which could be beneficial for the youth]. Conclusion The Privacy Act creates a dilemma in that it can be either beneficial or counter-productive for a student’s security. To be blunt, a youth who has suicided might have had their privacy protected, but not their life. Lack of funding can also be a constraint on collaboration by undermining stability and autonomy in the workforce, and blocking inter-agency initiatives. Lack of awareness about cultural differences can also affect unity of action. The deepening inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the Australian society, and the Howard government’s harshness on national security issues, can also pose barriers to collaboration on youth issues. Despite these exigencies and dilemmas, it would seem that collaboration is “the only game” when it comes to helping students “at-risk”. To enhance this collaboration, there needs to be a sensible modification of legal restrictions to information sharing, an increase in government funding and support for inter-agency cooperation and informal information sharing, and an increased awareness about the cultural needs of minority groups and knowledge of the mainstream underclass. Acknowledgments The research is part of a major Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project, Smart Communities. The authors very gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the interviewees, and thank *Donald E. Scott for conducting the interviews. References Australian Bureau of Statistics. 1996 and 2001. Balnaves, Mark, and Joe Luca. “The Impact of Digital Persona on the Future of Learning: A Case Study on Digital Repositories and the Sharing of Information about Children At-Risk in Western Australia”, paper presented at Ascilite, Brisbane (2005): 49-56. 10 April 2006. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/ 06_Balnaves.pdf>. Dreher, Tanya. ‘Targeted’: Experiences of Racism in NSW after September 11, 2001. Sydney: University of Technology, 2005. Elliot-Farrelly, Terri. “Australian Aboriginal Suicide: The Need for an Aboriginal Suicidology”? Australian e-Journal for the Advancement of Mental Health, 3.3 (2004): 1-8. 15 April 2006 http://www.auseinet.com/journal/vol3iss3/elliottfarrelly.pdf>. Farmer, James. A. High-Risk Teenagers: Real Cases and Interception Strategies with Resistant Adolescents. Springfield, Ill.: C.C. Thomas, 1990. Ferguson, Harry. Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Kabir, Nahid. Muslims in Australia: Immigration, Race Relations and Cultural History. London: Kegan Paul, 2005. Rouf, Khadji. “Myself in Echoes. My Voice in Song.” Ed. A. Bannister, et al. Listening to Children. London: Longman, 1990. Scott E. Donald. “Exploring Communication Patterns within and across a School and Associated Agencies to Increase the Effectiveness of Service to At-Risk Individuals.” MS Thesis, Curtin University of Technology, August 2005. The Age. “Investing in People Means Investing in the Future.” The Age 5 March, 2005. 15 April 2006 http://www.theage.com.au>. Watson, Malcolm, et al. “Pathways to Aggression in Children and Adolescents.” Harvard Educational Review, 74.4 (Winter 2004): 404-428. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Kabir, Nahid, and Mark Balnaves. "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>. APA Style Kabir, N., and M. Balnaves. (May 2006) "Students “at Risk”: Dilemmas of Collaboration," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/04-kabirbalnaves.php>.

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth” (Semmler) and “extremely powerful description of Gallipoli” (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an “Enduring Classic.” Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey’s “extraordinary memory” and “ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision” (“NBC” 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press’s ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey’s success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey’s manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book’s production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer’s PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey’s life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).A hundred reprints and two million readers on from initial publication, A Fortunate Life continues to rate among the most appreciated Australian books of all time. Commenting on a reader survey in 2012, writer and critic Marieke Hardy enthused, “I really loved it [. . .] I felt like I was seeing a part of my country and my country’s history through a very human voice . . .” (First Tuesday Book Club). Registering a transformed reading, Hardy’s reference to Australian “history” is unproblematically juxtaposed with amused delight in an autobiography that invents and embellishes: not believing “half” of what Facey wrote, she insists he was foremost a yarn spinner. While the work’s status as a witness account has become less authoritative over time, it seems appreciation of the author’s imagination and literary skill has increased (Williamson). A Fortunate Life has been read more commonly as an uncomplicated, first-hand account, such that editor Wendy Jenkins felt it necessary to refute as an “utter mirage” that memoir is “transferred to the page by an act of perfect dictation.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue of life narratives that some “autobiographical claims [. . .] can be verified or discounted by recourse to documentation outside the text. But autobiographical truth is a different matter” (16). With increased access to archives, especially digitised personnel records, historians have asserted that key elements of Facey’s autobiography are incorrect or “fabricated” (Roberts), including his enlistment in 1914 and participation in the Gallipoli Landing on 25 April 1915. We have researched various sources relevant to Facey’s early years and war service, including hard-copy medical and repatriation records released in 2012, and find A Fortunate Life in a range of ways deviates from “documentation outside of the text,” revealing intriguing, layered storytelling. We agree with Smith and Watson that “autobiographical acts” are “anything but simple or transparent” (63). As “symbolic interactions in the world,” they are “culturally and historically specific” and “engaged in an argument about identity” (63). Inevitably, they are also “fractured by the play of meaning” (63). Our approach, therefore, includes textual analysis of Facey’s drafts alongside the published narrative and his medical records. We do not privilege institutional records as impartial but rather interpret them in terms of their hierarchies and organisation of knowledge. This leads us to speculate on alternative readings of A Fortunate Life as an illness narrative that variously resists and subscribes to dominant cultural plots, tropes, and attitudes. Facey set about writing in earnest in the 1970s and generated (at least) three handwritten drafts, along with a typescript based on the third draft. FACP produced its own working copy from the typescript. Our comparison of the drafts offers insights into the production of Facey’s final text and the otherwise “hidden” roles of editors as transformers and enablers (Munro 1). The notion that a working man with basic literacy could produce a highly readable book in part explains Facey’s enduring appeal. His grandson and literary executor, John Rose, observed in early interviews that Facey was a “natural storyteller” who had related details of his life at every opportunity over a period of more than six decades (McLeod). Jenkins points out that Facey belonged to a vivid oral culture within which he “told and retold stories to himself and others,” so that they eventually “rubbed down into the lines and shapes that would so memorably underpin the extended memoir that became A Fortunate Life.” A mystique was thereby established that “time” was Albert Facey’s “first editor” (Jenkins). The publisher expressly aimed to retain Facey’s voice, content, and meaning, though editing included much correcting of grammar and punctuation, eradication of internal inconsistencies and anomalies, and structural reorganisation into six sections and 68 chapters. We find across Facey’s drafts a broadly similar chronology detailing childhood abandonment, life-threatening incidents, youthful resourcefulness, physical prowess, and participation in the Gallipoli Landing. However, there are also shifts and changed details, including varying descriptions of childhood abuse at a place called Cave Rock; the introduction of (incompatible accounts of) interstate boxing tours in drafts two and three which replace shearing activities in Draft One; divergent tales of Facey as a world-standard athlete, league footballer, expert marksman, and powerful swimmer; and changing stories of enlistment and war service (see Murphy and Nile, “Wounded”; “Naked”).Jenkins edited those sections concerned with childhood and youth, while Coffey attended to Facey’s war and post-war life. Drawing on C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, Coffey introduced specificity to the draft’s otherwise vague descriptions of battle and amended errors, such as Facey’s claim to have witnessed Lord Kitchener on the beach at Gallipoli. Importantly, Coffey suggested the now famous title, “A Fortunate Life,” and encouraged the author to alter the ending. When asked to suggest a title, Facey offered “Cave Rock” (Interview)—the site of his violent abuse and humiliation as a boy. Draft One concluded with Facey’s repatriation from the war and marriage in 1916 (106); Draft Two with a brief account of continuing post-war illness and ultimate defeat: “My war injuries caught up with me again” (107). The submitted typescript concludes: “I have often thought that going to War has caused my life to be wasted” (Typescript 206). This ending differs dramatically from the redemptive vision of the published narrative: “I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back” (412).In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that literary markets exist for stories of “narrative wreckage” (196) that are redeemed by reconciliation, resistance, recovery, or rehabilitation, which is precisely the shape of Facey’s published life story and a source of its popularity. Musing on his post-war experiences in A Fortunate Life, Facey focuses on his ability to transform the material world around him: “I liked the challenge of building up a place from nothing and making a success where another fellow had failed” (409). If Facey’s challenge was building up something from nothing, something he could set to work on and improve, his life-writing might reasonably be regarded as a part of this broader project and desire for transformation, so that editorial interventions helped him realise this purpose. Facey’s narrative was produced within a specific zeitgeist, which historian Joy Damousi notes was signalled by publication in 1974 of Bill Gammage’s influential, multiply-reprinted study of front-line soldiers, The Broken Years, which drew on the letters and diaries of a thousand Great War veterans, and also the release in 1981 of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, for which Gammage was the historical advisor. The story of Australia’s war now conceptualised fallen soldiers as “innocent victims” (Damousi 101), while survivors were left to “compose” memories consistent with their sacrifice (Thomson 237–54). Viewing Facey’s drafts reminds us that life narratives are works of imagination, that the past is not fixed and memory is created in the present. Facey’s autobiographical efforts and those of his publisher to improve the work’s intelligibility and relevance together constitute an attempt to “objectify the self—to present it as a knowable object—through a narrative that re-structures [. . .] the self as history and conclusions” (Foster 10). Yet, such histories almost invariably leave “a crucial gap” or “censored chapter.” Dennis Foster argues that conceiving of narration as confession, rather than expression, “allows us to see the pathos of the simultaneous pursuit and evasion of meaning” (10); we believe a significant lacuna in Facey’s life writing is intimated by its various transformations.In a defining episode, A Fortunate Life proposes that Facey was taken from Gallipoli on 19 August 1915 due to wounding that day from a shell blast that caused sandbags to fall on him, crush his leg, and hurt him “badly inside,” and a bullet to the shoulder (348). The typescript, however, includes an additional but narratively irreconcilable date of 28 June for the same wounding. The later date, 19 August, was settled on for publication despite the author’s compelling claim for the earlier one: “I had been blown up by a shell and some 7 or 8 sandbags had fallen on top of me, the day was the 28th of June 1915, how I remembered this date, it was the day my brother Roy had been killed by a shell burst.” He adds: “I was very ill for about six weeks after the incident but never reported it to our Battalion doctor because I was afraid he would send me away” (Typescript 205). This account accords with Facey’s first draft and his medical records but is inconsistent with other parts of the typescript that depict an uninjured Facey taking a leading role in fierce fighting throughout July and August. It appears, furthermore, that Facey was not badly wounded at any time. His war service record indicates that he was removed from Gallipoli due to “heart troubles” (Repatriation), which he also claims in his first draft. Facey’s editors did not have ready access to military files in Canberra, while medical files were not released until 2012. There existed, therefore, virtually no opportunity to corroborate the author’s version of events, while the official war history and the records of the State Library of Western Australia, which were consulted, contain no reference to Facey or his war service (Interview). As a consequence, the editors were almost entirely dependent on narrative logic and clarifications by an author whose eyesight and memory had deteriorated to such an extent he was unable to read his amended text. A Fortunate Life depicts men with “nerve sickness” who were not permitted to “stay at the Front because they would be upsetting to the others, especially those who were inclined that way themselves” (350). By cross referencing the draft manuscripts against medical records, we can now perceive that Facey was regarded as one of those nerve cases. According to Facey’s published account, his wounds “baffled” doctors in Egypt and Fremantle (353). His medical records reveal that in September 1915, while hospitalised in Egypt, his “palpitations” were diagnosed as “Tachycardia” triggered by war-induced neuroses that began on 28 June. This suggests that Facey endured seven weeks in the field in this condition, with the implication being that his debility worsened, resulting in his hospitalisation. A diagnosis of “debility,” “nerves,” and “strain” placed Facey in a medical category of “Special Invalids” (Butler 541). Major A.W. Campbell noted in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1916 that the war was creating “many cases of little understood nervous and mental affections, not only where a definite wound has been received, but in many cases where nothing of the sort appears” (323). Enlisted doctors were either physicians or surgeons and sometimes both. None had any experience of trauma on the scale of the First World War. In 1915, Campbell was one of only two Australian doctors with any pre-war experience of “mental diseases” (Lindstrom 30). On staff at the Australian Base Hospital at Heliopolis throughout the Gallipoli campaign, he claimed that at times nerve cases “almost monopolised” the wards under his charge (319). Bearing out Facey’s description, Campbell also reported that affected men “received no sympathy” and, as “carriers of psychic contagion,” were treated as a “source of danger” to themselves and others (323). Credentialed by royal colleges in London and coming under British command, Australian medical teams followed the practice of classifying men presenting “nervous or mental symptoms” as “battle casualties” only if they had also been wounded by “enemy action” (Loughran 106). By contrast, functional disability, with no accompanying physical wounds, was treated as unmanly and a “hysterical” reaction to the pressures of war. Mental debility was something to be feared in the trenches and diagnosis almost invariably invoked charges of predisposition or malingering (Tyquin 148–49). This shifted responsibility (and blame) from the war to the individual. Even as late as the 1950s, medical notes referred to Facey’s condition as being “constitutional” (Repatriation).Facey’s narrative demonstrates awareness of how harshly sufferers were treated. We believe that he defended himself against this with stories of physical injury that his doctors never fully accepted and that he may have experienced conversion disorder, where irreconcilable experience finds somatic expression. His medical diagnosis in 1915 and later life writing establish a causal link with the explosion and his partial burial on 28 June, consistent with opinion at the time that linked concussive blasts with destabilisation of the nervous system (Eager 422). Facey was also badly shaken by exposure to the violence and abjection of war, including hand-to-hand combat and retrieving for burial shattered and often decomposed bodies, and, in particular, by the death of his brother Roy, whose body was blown to pieces on 28 June. (A second brother, Joseph, was killed by multiple bayonet wounds while Facey was convalescing in Egypt.) Such experiences cast a different light on Facey’s observation of men suffering nerves on board the hospital ship: “I have seen men doze off into a light sleep and suddenly jump up shouting, ‘Here they come! Quick! Thousands of them. We’re doomed!’” (350). Facey had escaped the danger of death by explosion or bayonet but at a cost, and the war haunted him for the rest of his days. On disembarkation at Fremantle on 20 November 1915, he was admitted to hospital where he remained on and off for several months. Forty-one other sick and wounded disembarked with him (HMAT). Around one third, experiencing nerve-related illness, had been sent home for rest; while none returned to the war, some of the physically wounded did (War Service Records). During this time, Facey continued to present with “frequent attacks of palpitation and giddiness,” was often “short winded,” and had “heart trouble” (Repatriation). He was discharged from the army in June 1916 but, his drafts suggest, his war never really ended. He began a new life as a wounded Anzac. His dependent and often fractious relationship with the Repatriation Department ended only with his death 66 years later. Historian Marina Larsson persuasively argues that repatriated sick and wounded servicemen from the First World War represented a displaced presence at home. Many led liminal lives of “disenfranchised grief” (80). Stephen Garton observes a distinctive Australian use of repatriation to describe “all policies involved in returning, discharging, pensioning, assisting and training returned men and women, and continuing to assist them throughout their lives” (74). Its primary definition invokes coming home but to repatriate also implies banishment from a place that is not home, so that Facey was in this sense expelled from Gallipoli and, by extension, excluded from the myth of Anzac. Unlike his two brothers, he would not join history as one of the glorious dead; his name would appear on no roll of honour. Return home is not equivalent to restoration of his prior state and identity, for baggage from the other place perpetually weighs. Furthermore, failure to regain health and independence strains hospitality and gratitude for the soldier’s service to King and country. This might be exacerbated where there is no evident or visible injury, creating suspicion of resistance, cowardice, or malingering. Over 26 assessments between 1916 and 1958, when Facey was granted a full war pension, the Repatriation Department observed him as a “neuropathic personality” exhibiting “paroxysmal tachycardia” and “neurocirculatory asthenia.” In 1954, doctors wrote, “We consider the condition is a real handicap and hindrance to his getting employment.” They noted that after “attacks,” Facey had a “busted depressed feeling,” but continued to find “no underlying myocardial disease” (Repatriation) and no validity in Facey’s claims that he had been seriously physically wounded in the war (though A Fortunate Life suggests a happier outcome, where an independent medical panel finally locates the cause of his ongoing illness—rupture of his spleen in the war—which results in an increased war pension). Facey’s condition was, at times, a source of frustration for the doctors and, we suspect, disappointment and shame to him, though this appeared to reduce on both sides when the Repatriation Department began easing proof of disability from the 1950s (Thomson 287), and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was created in 1976. This had the effect of shifting public and media scrutiny back onto a system that had until then deprived some “innocent victims of the compensation that was their due” (Garton 249). Such changes anticipated the introduction of Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Revisions to the DSM established a “genealogy of trauma” and “panic disorders” (100, 33), so that diagnoses such as “neuropathic personality” (Echterling, Field, and Stewart 192) and “soldier’s heart,” that is, disorders considered “neurotic,” were “retrospectively reinterpreted” as a form of PTSD. However, Alberti points out that, despite such developments, war-related trauma continues to be contested (80). We propose that Albert Facey spent his adult life troubled by a sense of regret and failure because of his removal from Gallipoli and that he attempted to compensate through storytelling, which included his being an original Anzac and seriously wounded in action. By writing, Facey could shore up his rectitude, work ethic, and sense of loyalty to other servicemen, which became necessary, we believe, because repatriation doctors (and probably others) had doubted him. In 1927 and again in 1933, an examining doctor concluded: “The existence of a disability depends entirely on his own unsupported statements” (Repatriation). We argue that Facey’s Gallipoli experiences transformed his life. By his own account, he enlisted for war as a physically robust and supremely athletic young man and returned nine months later to life-long anxiety and ill-health. Publication transformed him into a national sage, earning him, in his final months, the credibility, empathy, and affirmation he had long sought. Exploring different accounts of Facey, in the shape of his drafts and institutional records, gives rise to new interpretations. In this context, we believe it is time for a new edition of A Fortunate Life that recognises it as a complex testimonial narrative and theorises Facey’s deployment of national legends and motifs in relation to his “wounded storytelling” as well as to shifting cultural and medical conceptualisations and treatments of shame and trauma. ReferencesAlberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Butler, A.G. Official History of the Australian Medical Services 1814-1918: Vol I Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1930.Campbell, A.W. “Remarks on Some Neuroses and Psychoses in War.” Medical Journal of Australia 15 April (1916): 319–23.Damousi, Joy. “Why Do We Get So Emotional about Anzac.” What’s Wrong with Anzac. Ed. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds. Sydney: UNSWP, 2015. 94–109.Dutton, Geoffrey. “Fremantle Arts Centre Press Publicity.” Australian Book Review May (1981): 16.Eager, R. “War Neuroses Occurring in Cases with a Definitive History of Shell Shock.” British Medical Journal 13 Apr. 1918): 422–25.Echterling, L.G., Thomas A. Field, and Anne L. Stewart. “Evolution of PTSD in the DSM.” Future Directions in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment. Ed. Marilyn P. Safir and Helene S. Wallach. New York: Springer, 2015. 189–212.Facey, A.B. A Fortunate Life. 1981. Ringwood: Penguin, 2005.———. Drafts 1–3. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.———. Transcript. University of Western Australia, Special Collections.First Tuesday Book Club. ABC Splash. 4 Dec. 2012. <http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/media/1454096/http&>.Foster, Dennis. Confession and Complicity in Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller. London: U of Chicago P, 1995.Fraser, Jane. “CEO Says.” Fremantle Press. 7 July 2015. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/news/3747-ceo-says-9>.Garton, Stephen. The Cost of War: Australians Return. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1994.HMAT Aeneas. “Report of Passengers for the Port of Fremantle from Ports Beyond the Commonwealth.” 20 Nov. 1915. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=9870708&S=1>.“Interview with Ray Coffey.” Personal interview. 6 May 2016. Follow-up correspondence. 12 May 2016.Jenkins, Wendy. “Tales from the Backlist: A Fortunate Life Turns 30.” Fremantle Press, 14 April 2011. <https://www.fremantlepress.com.au/c/bookclubs/574-tales-from-the-backlist-a-fortunate-life-turns-30>.Keesing, Nancy. ‘An Enduring Classic.’ Australian Book Review (May 1981). FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.King, Noel. “‘I Can’t Go On … I’ll Go On’: Interview with Ray Coffey, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 22 Dec. 2004; 24 May 2006.” Westerly 51 (2006): 31–54.Larsson, Marina. “A Disenfranchised Grief: Post War Death and Memorialisation in Australia after the First World War.” Australian Historical Studies 40.1 (2009): 79–95.Lindstrom, Richard. “The Australian Experience of Psychological Casualties in War: 1915-1939.” PhD dissertation. Victoria University, Feb. 1997.Loughran, Tracey. “Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and its Histories.” Journal of the History of Medical and Allied Sciences 67.1 (2012): 99–119.Lucas, Anne. “Curator’s Notes.” A Fortunate Life. Australian Screen. <http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/a-fortunate-life/notes/>.McLeod, Steve. “My Fortunate Life with Grandad.” Western Magazine Dec. (1983): 8.Munro, Craig. Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing. Brunswick: Scribe, 2015.Murphy, Ffion, and Richard Nile. “The Naked Anzac: Exposure and Concealment in A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life.” Southerly 75.3 (2015): 219–37.———. “Wounded Storyteller: Revisiting Albert Facey’s Fortunate Life.” Westerly 60.2 (2015): 87–100.“NBC Book Awards.” Australian Book Review Oct. (1981): 1–4.PBL. Prospectus: A Fortunate Life, the Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Bloke. 1–8.Repatriation Records. Albert Facey. National Archives of Australia.Roberts, Chris. “Turkish Machine Guns at the Landing.” Wartime: Official Magazine of the Australian War Memorial 50 (2010). <https://www.awm.gov.au/wartime/50/roberts_machinegun/>.Semmler, Clement. “The Way We Were before the Good Life.” Courier Mail 10 Oct. 1981. FACP Press Clippings. Fremantle. n. pag.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2001. 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, 2010.Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend. 1994. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2013. Tyquin, Michael. Gallipoli, the Medical War: The Australian Army Services in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915. Kensington: UNSWP, 1993.War Service Records. National Archives of Australia. <http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/NameSearch/Interface/NameSearchForm.aspx>.Williamson, Geordie. “A Fortunate Life.” Copyright Agency. <http://readingaustralia.com.au/essays/a-fortunate-life/>.

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. New York: Springer, 2010. 324-326. Farrow, David, Anthea Rutter and Rosalind Hurworth. Evaluation of the Inclusive Emergency Management with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Communities Program. Parkville, Vic.: Centre for Program Evaluation, U of Melbourne, July 2009. ‹http://www.ag.gov.au/www/emaweb/rwpattach.nsf/VAP/(9A5D88DBA63D32A661E6369859739356)~Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf/$file/Final+Evaluation+Report+-+July+2009.pdf>.Folke, Carl, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg. “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30 (2005): 441-73. ‹http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.30.050504.144511>. Garmezy, Norman. “The Study of Competence in Children at Risk for Severe Psychopathology.” The Child in His Family: Children at Psychiatric Risk. Vol. 3. Eds. E. J. Anthony and C. Koupernick. New York: Wiley, 1974. 77-97. Grossman, Michele. “Resilient Multiculturalism? Diversifying Australian Approaches to Community Resilience and Cultural Difference”. Global Perspectives on Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. Eds. B. E. de B’beri and F. Mansouri. London: Routledge, 2014. Grossman, Michele, and Hussein Tahiri. Harnessing Resilience Capital in Culturally Diverse Communities to Counter Violent Extremism. Canberra: Australia-New Zealand Counter-Terrorism Committee, forthcoming 2014. Grossman, Michele. “Cultural Resilience and Strengthening Communities”. Safeguarding Australia Summit, Canberra. 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.safeguardingaustraliasummit.org.au/uploader/resources/Michele_Grossman.pdf>. Gunnestad, Arve. “Resilience in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: How Resilience Is Generated in Different Cultures.” Journal of Intercultural Communication 11 (2006). ‹http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr11/gunnestad.htm>. Hajek, Lisa J. “Belonging and Resilience: A Phenomenological Study.” Unpublished Master of Science thesis, U of Wisconsin-Stout. Menomonie, Wisconsin, 2003. Hunter, Cathryn. “Is Resilience Still a Useful Concept When Working with Children and Young People?” Child Family Community Australia (CFA) Paper 2. Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Joppke, Christian. "Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe". West European Politics 30.1 (2007): 1-22. Liebenberg, Linda, Michael Ungar, and Fons van de Vijver. “Validation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28) among Canadian Youth.” Research on Social Work Practice 22.2 (2012): 219-226. Longstaff, Patricia H., Nicholas J. Armstrong, Keli Perrin, Whitney May Parker, and Matthew A. Hidek. “Building Resilient Communities: A Preliminary Framework for Assessment.” Homeland Security Affairs 6.3 (2010): 1-23. ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=6.3.6>. McGhee, Derek. The End of Multiculturalism? Terrorism, Integration and Human Rights. Maidenhead: Open U P, 2008.Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton U P, 2000. Mohaupt, Sarah. “Review Article: Resilience and Social Exclusion.” Social Policy and Society 8 (2009): 63-71.Mouritsen, Per. "The Culture of Citizenship: A Reflection on Civic Integration in Europe." Ed. R. Zapata-Barrero. Citizenship Policies in the Age of Diversity: Europe at the Crossroad." Barcelona: CIDOB Foundation, 2009: 23-35. Mouritsen, Per. “Political Responses to Cultural Conflict: Reflections on the Ambiguities of the Civic Turn.” Ed. P. Mouritsen and K.E. Jørgensen. Constituting Communities. Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict, London: Palgrave, 2008. 1-30. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Intr. Fernando Coronil and Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995 [1940]. Robins, Kevin. The Challenge of Transcultural Diversities: Final Report on the Transversal Study on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity. Culture and Cultural Heritage Department. Strasbourg: Council of European Publishing, 2006. Rutter, Michael. “Protective Factors in Children’s Responses to Stress and Disadvantage.” Annals of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore 8 (1979): 324-38. Stein, Mark. “The Location of Transculture.” Transcultural English Studies: Fictions, Theories, Realities. Eds. F. Schulze-Engler and S. Helff. Cross/Cultures 102/ANSEL Papers 12. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 251-266. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work 38.2 (2008): 218-235. First published online 2006: 1-18. In-text references refer to the online Advance Access edition ‹http://bjsw.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2006/10/18/bjsw.bcl343.full.pdf>. VanBreda, Adrian DuPlessis. Resilience Theory: A Literature Review. Erasmuskloof: South African Military Health Service, Military Psychological Institute, Social Work Research & Development, 2001. Weine, Stevan. “Building Resilience to Violent Extremism in Muslim Diaspora Communities in the United States.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict 5.1 (2012): 60-73. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation World. Eds. M. Featherstone and S. Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213. Werner, Emmy E., and Ruth S. Smith. Vulnerable But Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of\ Resilience and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill, 1982. 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).

Introduction It is now commonplace for babies to begin their lives inhabiting media environments characterised by the presence, distribution, and mobility of digital devices and screens. Such arrangements can be traced, in part, to the birth of a new regime of mobile and touchscreen media beginning with the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, which stimulated a surge in household media consumption, underpinned by broadband and wireless Internet infrastructures. Research into these conditions of ambient mediation at the beginnings of life, however, is currently dominated by medical and educational literature, largely removed from media studies approaches that seek to understand the everyday contexts of babies using media. Putting aside discourses of promise or peril familiar to researchers of children’s media (Buckingham; Postman), this paper draws on ongoing research in both domestic and social media settings exploring infants’ everyday encounters and entanglements with mobile media and communication technologies. The paper identifies the ways infants’ mobile communication is assembled and distributed through touchscreen interfaces, proxy parent users, and commercial software sorting. It argues that within these interfacial, intermediary, and interactive contexts, we can conceptualise infants’ communicative agency through an emerging repertoire of techniques: accidental, assisted and automated. This assemblage of infant communication recognises that children no longer live with but in media (Deuze), which underscores the impossibility of a path of media resistance found in medical discourses of ‘exposure’ and restriction, and instead points to the need for critical and ethical responses to these immanent conditions of infant media life. Background and Approach Infants, understandably, have largely been excluded from analyses of mobile mediality given their historically limited engagement with or capacity to use mobile media. Yet, this situation is undergoing change as mobile devices become increasingly prominent in children’s homes (OfCom; Rideout), and as touchscreen interfaces lower thresholds of usability (Buckleitner; Hourcade et al.). The dominant frameworks within research addressing infants and media continue to resonate with long running and widely circulated debates in the study of children and mass media (Wartella and Robb), responding in contradictory ways to what is seen as an ever-increasing ‘technologization of childhood’ (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Education research centres on digital literacy, emphasising the potential of mobile computing for these future digital learners, labourers, and citizens (McPake, Plowman and Stephen). Alternatively, health research largely positions mobile media within the rubric of ‘screen time’ inherited from older broadcast models, with paediatric groups continuing to caution parents about the dangers of infants’ ‘exposure’ to electronic screens (Strasburger and Hogan), without differentiating between screen types or activities. In turn, a range of digital media channels seek to propel or profit from infant media culture, with a number of review sites, YouTube channels and tech blogs promoting or surveying the latest gadgets and apps for babies. Within media studies, research is beginning to analyse the practices, conceptions and implications of digital interfaces and content for younger children. Studies are, for example, quantifying the devices, activities, and time spent by young children with mobile devices (Ofcom; Rideout), reviewing the design and marketing of children’s mobile application software products (e.g. Shuler), analysing digital content shared about babies on social media platforms (Kumar & Schoenebeck; Morris), and exploring emerging interactive spaces and technologies shaping young children’s ‘postdigital’ play (Giddings; Jayemanne, Nansen and Apperley). This paper extends this growing area of research by focusing specifically on infants’ early encounters, contexts, and configurations of mobile mediality, offering some preliminary analysis of an emerging repertoire of mobile communication techniques: accidental, assisted, and automated. That is, through infants playing with devices and accidentally activating them; through others such as parents assisting use; and through software features in applications that help to automate interaction. This analysis draws from an ongoing research project exploring young children’s mobile and interactive media use in domestic settings, which is employing ethnographic techniques including household technology tours and interviews, as well as participant observation and demonstrations of infant media interaction. To date 19 families, with 31 children aged between 0 and 5, located in Melbourne, Australia have participated. These participating families are largely homogeneous and privileged; though are a sample of relatively early and heavy adopters that reveal emerging qualities about young children’s changing media environments and encounters. This approach builds on established traditions of media and ethnographic research on technology consumption and use within domestic spaces (e.g. Mackay and Ivey; Silverstone and Hirsch), but turns to the digital media encountered by infants, the geographies and routines of these encounters, and how families mediate these encounters within the contexts of home life. This paper offers some preliminary findings from this research, drawing mostly from discussions with parents about their babies’ use of digital, mobile, and touchscreen media. In this larger project, the domestic and family research is accompanied by the collection of online data focused on the cultural context of, and content shared about, infants’ mobile media use. In this paper I report on social media analysis of publicly shared images tagged with #babyselfie queried from Instagram’s API. I viewed all publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, and collected the associated captions, comments, hashtags, and metadata, over a period of 48 hours in October 2014, resulting in a dataset of 324 posts. Clearly, using this data for research purposes raises ethical issues about privacy and consent given the posts are being used in an unintended context from which they were originally shared; something that is further complicated by the research focus on young children. These issues, in which the ease of extracting online data using digital methods research (Rogers), needs to be both minimised and balanced against the value of the research aims and outcomes (Highfield and Leaver). To minimise risks, captions and comments cited in this paper have been de-identified; whist the value of this data lies in complementing and contextualising the more ethnographically informed research, despite perceptions of incompatibility, through analysis of the wider cultural and mediated networks in which babies’ digital lives are now shared and represented. This field of cultural production also includes analysis of examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores that support baby image capture and sharing, and in particular in this paper discussion of the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. The rationale for drawing on these multiple sources of data within the larger project is to locate young children’s digital entanglements within the diverse places, platforms and politics in which they unfold. This research scope is limited by the constraints of this short paper, however different sources of data are drawn upon here in order to identify, compare, and contextualise the emerging themes of accidental, assisted, and automated. Accidental Media Use The domestication and aggregation of mobile media in the home, principally laptops, mobile phones and tablet computers has established polymediated environments in which infants are increasingly surrounded by mobile media; in which they often observe their parents using mobile devices; and in which the flashing of screens unsurprisingly draws their attention. Living within these ambient media environments, then, infants often observe, find and reach for mobile devices: on the iPad or whatever, then what's actually happening in front of them, then naturally they'll gravitate towards it. These media encounters are animated by touchscreens interfaces that are responsive to the gestural actions of infants. Conversely, touchscreen interfaces drive attempts to swipe legacy media screens. Underscoring the nomenclature of ‘natural user interfaces’ within the design and manufacturer communities, screens lighting up through touch prompts interest, interaction, and even habituation through gestural interaction, especially swiping: It's funny because when she was younger she would go up the T.V. and she would try swiping to turn the channel.They can grab it and start playing with it. It just shows that it's so much part of their world … to swipe something. Despite demonstrable capacities of infants to interact with mobile screens, discussions with parents revealed that accidental forms of media engagement were a more regular consequence of these ambient contexts, interfacial affordances and early encounters with mobile media. It was not uncommon for infants to accidentally swipe and activate applications, to temporarily lock the screen, or even to dial contacts: He didn't know the password, and he just kept locking it … find it disabled for 15 minutes.If I've got that on YouTube, they can quite quickly get on to some you know [video] … by pressing … and they don't do it on purpose, they're just pushing random buttons.He does Skype calls! I think he recognizes their image, the icon. Then just taps it and … Similarly, in the analysis of publicly shared images on Instagram tagged with #babyselfie, there were instances in which it appeared infants had accidentally taken photos with the cameraphone based on the image content, photo framing or descriptions in the caption. Many of these photos showed a baby with an arm in view reaching towards the phone in a classic trope of a selfie image; others were poorly framed shots showing parts of baby faces too close to the camera lens suggesting they accidentally took the photograph; whilst most definitive was many instances in which the caption of the image posted by parents directly attributed the photographic production to an infant: Isabella's first #babyselfie She actually pushed the button herself! My little man loves taking selfies lol Whilst, then, the research identified many instances in which infants accidentally engaged in mobile media use, sometimes managing to communicate with an unsuspecting interlocutor, it is important to acknowledge such encounters could not have emerged without the enabling infrastructure of ambient media contexts and touchscreen interfaces, nor observed without studying this infrastructure utilising materially-oriented ethnographic perspectives (Star). Significantly, too, was the intermediary role played by parents. With parents acting as intermediaries in household environments or as proxy users in posting content on their behalf, multiple forms of assisted infant communication were identified. Assisted Media Use Assisted communication emerged from discussions with parents about the ways, routines, and rationale for making mobile media available to their children. These sometimes revolved around keeping their child engaged whilst they were travelling as a family – part of what has been described as the pass-back effect – but were more frequently discussed in terms of sharing and showing digital content, especially family photographs, and in facilitating infant mediated communication with relatives abroad: they love scrolling through my photos on my iPhone …We quite often just have them [on Skype] … have the computers in there while we're having dinner … the laptop will be there, opened up at one end of the table with the family here and there will be my sister having breakfast with her family in Ireland … These forms of parental mediated communication did not, however, simply situate or construct infants as passive recipients of their parents’ desires to make media content available or their efforts to establish communication with extended family members. Instead, the research revealed that infants were often active participants in these processes, pushing for access to devices, digital content, and mediated communication. These distributed relations of agency were expressed through infants verbal requests and gestural urging; through the ways parents initiated use by, for example, unlocking a device, preparing software, or loading an application, but then handed them over to infants to play, explore or communicate; and through wider networks of relations in which others including siblings, acted as proxies or had a say in the kinds of media infants used: she can do it, once I've unlocked … even, even with iView, once I'm on iView she can pick her own show and then go to the channel she wants to go to.We had my son’s birthday and there were some photos, some footage of us singing happy birthday and the little one just wants to watch it over and over again. She thinks it's fantastic watching herself.He [sibling] becomes like a proxy user … with the second one … they don't even need the agency because of their sibling. Similarly, the assisted communication emerging from the analysis of #babyselfie images on Instagram revealed that parents were not simply determining infant media use, but often acting as proxies on their behalf. #Selfie obsessed baby. Seriously though. He won't stop. Insists on pressing the button and everything. He sees my phone and points and says "Pic? Pic?" I've created a monster lol. In sharing this digital content on social networks, parents were acting as intermediaries in the communication of their children’s digital images. Clearly they were determining the platforms and networks where these images were published online, yet the production of these images was more uncertain, with accidental self-portraits taken by infants suggesting they played a key role in the circuits of digital photography distribution (van Dijck). Automated Media Use The production, archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito). Here, software automates process of sorting and shaping information, and in doing so both empowers and governs forms of infant media conduct. The final theme emerging from the research, then, is the identification of automated forms of infant mobile media use enabled through software applications and algorithmic operations. Automated techniques of interaction emerged as part of the repertoire of infant mobile mediality and communication through observations and discussions during the family research, and through surveying commercial software applications. Within family discussions, parents spoke about the ways digital databases and applications facilitated infant exploration and navigation. These included photo galleries stored on mobile devices, as well as children’s Internet television services such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s catch-up online TV service, iView, which are visually organised and easily scrollable. In addition, algorithmic functions for sorting, recommending and autoplay on the video-sharing platform YouTube meant that infants were often automatically delivered an ongoing stream of content: They just keep watching it [YouTube]. So it leads on form the other thing. Which is pretty amazing, that's pretty interactive.Yeah, but the kids like, like if they've watched a YouTube clip now, they'll know to look down the next column to see what they want to play next … you get suggestions there so. Forms of automated communication specifically addressing infants was also located in examples of children’s software products from mobile app stores: the My Baby Selfie app from the iTunes App Store and the Baby Selfie app from the Google Play store. These applications are designed to support baby image capture and sharing, promising to “allow your baby to take a photo of him himself [sic]” (Giudicelli), based on automated software features that use sounds and images to capture a babies attention and touch sensors to activate image capture and storage. In one sense, these applications may appear to empower infants to participate in the production of digital content, namely selfies, yet they also clearly distribute this agency with and through mobile media and digital software. Moreover, they imply forms of conduct, expectations and imperatives around the possibilities of infant presence in a participatory digital culture. Immanent Ethic and Critique Digital participation typically assumes a degree of individual agency in deciding what to share, post, or communicate that is not typically available to infants. The emerging communicative practices of infants detailed above suggests that infants are increasingly connecting, however this communicative agency is distributed amongst a network of ambient devices, user-friendly interfaces, proxy users, and software sorting. Such distributions reflect conditions Deuze has noted, that we do not live with but in media. He argues this ubiquity, habituation, and embodiment of media and communication technologies pervade and constitute our lives becoming effectively invisible, negating the possibility of an outside from which resistance can be mounted. Whilst, resistance remains a solution promoted in medical discourses and paediatric advice proposing no ‘screen time’ for children aged below two (Strasburger and Hogan), Deuze’s thesis suggests this is ontologically futile and instead we should strive for a more immanent relation that seeks to modulate choices and actions from within our media life: finding “creative ways to wield the awesome communication power of media both ethically and aesthetically” ("Unseen" 367). An immanent ethics and a critical aesthetics of infant mediated life can be located in examples of cultural production and everyday parental practice addressing the arrangements of infant mobile media and communication discussed above. For example, an article in the Guardian, ‘Toddlers pose a serious risk to smartphones and tablets’ parodies moral panics around children’s exposure to media by noting that media devices are at greater risk of physical damage from children handling them, whilst a design project from the Eindhoven Academy – called New Born Fame – built from soft toys shaped like social media logos, motion and touch sensors that activate image capture (much like babyselfie apps), but with automated social media sharing, critically interrogates the ways infants are increasingly bound-up with the networked and algorithmic regimes of our computational culture. Finally, parents in this research revealed that they carefully considered the ethics of media in their children’s lives by organising everyday media practices that balanced dwelling with new, old, and non media forms, and by curating their digitally mediated interactions and archives with an awareness they were custodians of their children’s digital memories (Garde-Hansen et al.). I suggest these examples work from an immanent ethical and critical position in order to make visible and operate from within the conditions of infant media life. Rather than seeking to deny or avoid the diversity of encounters infants have with and through mobile media in their everyday lives, this analysis has explored the ways infants are increasingly configured as users of mobile media and communication technologies, identifying an emerging repertoire of infant mobile communication techniques. The emerging practices of infant mobile communication outlined here are intertwined with contemporary household media environments, and assembled through accidental, assisted, and automated relations of living with mobile media. Moreover, such entanglements of use are both represented and discursively reconfigured through multiple channels, contexts, and networks of public mediation. Together, these diverse contexts and forms of conduct have implications for both studying and understanding the ways babies are emerging as active participants and interpellated subjects within a continually expanding digital culture. Acknowledgments This research was supported with funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE130100735). I would like to express my appreciation to the children and families involved in this study for their generous contribution of time and experiences. References Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Polity Press: Oxford, 2000. Buckleitner, Warren. “A Taxonomy of Multi-Touch Interaction Styles, by Stage.” Children's Technology Review 18.11 (2011): 10-11. Chun, Wendy. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Deuze, Mark. “Media Life.” Media, Culture and Society 33.1 (2011): 137-148. Deuze, Mark. “The Unseen Disappearance of Invisible Media: A Response to Sebastian Kubitschko and Daniel Knapp.” Media, Culture and Society 34.3 (2012): 365-368. Garde-Hansen, Joanne, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading. Save as … Digital Memories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Giddings, Seth. Gameworlds: Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Eds. Tarelton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Giudicelli, Patrick. "My Baby Selfie." iTunes App Store. Apple Inc., 2015. Highfield, Tim, and Tama Leaver. “A Methodology for Mapping Instagram Hashtags.” First Monday 20.1 (2015). Hourcade, Juan Pablo, Sarah Mascher, David Wu, and Luiza Pantoja. “Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of Youtube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets.” Proceedings of CHI 15. New York: ACM Press, 2015. 1915–1924. Ito, Mizuko. Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Jayemanne, Darshana, Bjorn Nansen and Thomas Apperley. “Post-Digital Play and the Aesthetics of Recruitment.” Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) 2015. Lüneburg, 14-17 May 2015. Kumar, Priya, and Sarita Schoenebeck. “The Modern Day Baby Book: Enacting Good Mothering and Stewarding Privacy on Facebook.” Proceedings of CSCW 2015. Vancouver, 14-18 March 2015. Mackay, Hugh, and Darren Ivey. Modern Media in the Home: An Ethnographic Study. Rome: John Libbey, 2004. Morris, Meredith. “Social Networking Site Use by Mothers of Young Children.” Proceedings of CSCW 2014. 1272-1282. OfCom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report. London: OfCom, 2013. McPake, Joanna, Lydia Plowman and Christine Stephen. "The Technologisation of Childhood? Young Children and Technology in The Home.” Children and Society 24.1 (2010): 63–74. Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1993. Rideout, Victoria. Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013. Common Sense Media, 2013. Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. Boston. MIT Press, 2013. Silverstone, Roger, and Eric Hirsch (eds). Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. London: Routledge, 1992. Shuler, Carly. iLearn: A Content Analysis of the iTunes App Store’s Education Section. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, 2009. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43.3 (1999): 377–391. Strasburger, Victor, and Marjorie Hogan. “Policy Statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics: Children, Adolescents, and the Media.” Pediatrics 132 (2013): 958-961. Van Dijck, José. “Digital Photography: Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory.” Visual Communication 7.1 (2008): 57-76. Wartella, Ellen, and Michael Robb. “Historical and Recurring Concerns about Children’s Use of the Mass Media.” The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development. Eds. Sandra Calvert and Barbara Wilson. Malden: Blackwell, 2008.

There have been a number of Australian memoirs written by adoptees over the last twenty years—Robert Dessaix’s A Mother’s Disgrace, Suzanne Chick’s Searching for Charmian, Tom Frame’s Binding Ties:An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia, for example—as well as international adoptee narratives by Betty Jean Lifton, Florence Fisher, and A. M. Homes amongst others. These works form a component of the small but growing field of adoption life writing that includes works by “all members of the adoption triad” (Hipchen and Deans 163): adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoptees. As the broad genre of memoir becomes more theorised and mapped, many sub-genres are emerging (Brien). My own adoptee story (which I am currently composing) could be a further sub-categorisation of the adoptee memoir, that of “late discovery adoptees” (Perl and Markham), those who are either told, or find out, about their adoption in adulthood. When this is part of a life story, secrets and silences are prominent, and digging into these requires using whatever resources can be found. These include cookbooks, recipes written by hand, and the scraps of paper shoved between pages. There are two cookbooks from my adoptive mother’s belongings that I have kept. One of them is titled Miss Tuxford’s Modern Cookery for the Middle Classes: Hints on Modern Gas Stove Cooking, and this was published around 1937 in England. It’s difficult to date this book exactly, as there is no date in my copy, but one of the advertisements (for Bird’s Custard, I think; the page is partly obscured by an Orange Nut Loaf recipe from a Willow baking pan that has been glued onto the page) is headed with a date range of 1837 to 1937. It has that smell of long ago that lingers strongly even now, out of the protective custody of my mother’s storage. Or should I say, out of the range of my adoptive father’s garbage dump zeal. He loved throwing things away, but these were often things that I saw as valuable, or at least of sentimental value, worth keeping for the memories they evoked. Maybe my father didn’t want to remember. My mother was brimming with memories, I discovered after her death, but she did not reveal them during her life. At least, not to me, making objects like these cookbooks precious in my reconstruction of the lives I know so little about, as well as in the grieving process (Gibson).Miss Tuxford (“Diplomée Board of Education, Gold Medallist, etc”) produced numerous editions of her book. My mother’s is now fragile, loose at the spine and browned with age. There are occasional stains showing that the bread and cakes section got the most use, with the pages for main meals of meat and vegetables relatively clean. The author divided her recipes into the main chapters of Soups (lentil, kidney, sheep’s head broth), Sauces (white, espagnol, mushroom), Fish (“It is important that all fish is fresh when cooked” (23)), Meats (roasted, boiled, stuffed; roast rabbit, boiled turkey, scotch collop), Vegetables (creamed beetroot, economical salad dressing, potatoes baked in their skins), Puddings and Sweets (suet pastry, Yorkshire pudding, chocolate tarts, ginger cream), Bread and Cakes (household bread, raspberry sandwich cake, sultana scones, peanut fancies), Icings and Fillings, Invalid Cookery (beef tea, nourishing lemonade, Virol pudding), Jams, Sweetmeats and Pickles (red currant jelly, piccalilli) and Miscellaneous Dishes including Meatless Recipes (cheese omelette, mock white fish, mock duck, mock goose, vegetarian mincemeat). At the back, Miss Tuxford includes sections on gas cooking hints, “specimen household dinners” (206), and household hints. There is then a “Table of Foods in Season” (208–10) taking the reader through the months and the various meats and vegetables available at those times. There is a useful index and finally an advertisement for an oven cleaner on the last page (which is glued to the back cover). There are food and cookery advertisements throughout the book, but my favourite is the one inside the front cover, for Hartley’s jam, featuring two photographs of a little boy. The first shows him looking serious, and slightly anxious, the second wide-eyed and smiling, eager for his jam. The text tells mothers that “there’s nothing like plenty of bread and Hartley’s for a growing boy” (inside front cover). I love the simple appeal to making your little boy happy that is contained within this tiny narrative. Did my mother and father eat this jam when they were small? By 1937, my mother was twenty-one, not yet married, living with her mother in Weston-super-Mare. She was learning secretarial skills—I have her certificate of proficiency in Pitman’s shorthand—and I think she and my father had met by then. Perhaps she thought about when she would be giving her own children Hartley’s jam, or something else prepared from Miss Tuxford’s recipes, like the Christmas puddings, shortbread, or chocolate cake. She would not have imagined that no children would arrive, that twenty-five years of marriage would pass before she held her own baby, and this would be one who was born to another woman. In the one other cookbook I have kept, there are several recipes cut out from newspapers, and a few typed or handwritten recipes hidden within the pages. This is The Main Cookery Book, in its August 1944 reprint, which was written and compiled by Marguerite K. Gompertz and the “Staff of the Main Research Kitchen”. My mother wrote her name and the date she obtained the cookbook (31 January 1945) on the first blank page. She had been married just over five years, and my father may, or may not, have still been in the Royal Air Force. I have only a sketchy knowledge of my adoptive parents. My mother was born in Newent, Gloucestershire, and my father in Bromley, Kent; they were both born during the first world war. My father served as a navigator in the Royal Air Force in the second world war in the 1940s, received head and psychological injuries and was invalided out before the war ended. He spent some time in rehabilitation, there being letters from him to my mother detailing his stay in one hospital in the 1950s. Their life seemed to become less and less secure as the years passed, more chaotic, restless, and unsettled. By the time I came into their lives, they were both nearly fifty, and moving from place to place. Perhaps this is one reason why I have no memory of my mother cooking. I cannot picture her consulting these cookbooks, or anything more modern, or even cutting out the recipes from newspapers and magazines, because I do not remember seeing her do it. She did not talk to me about cooking, we didn’t cook together, and I do not remember her teaching me anything about food or its preparation. This is a gap in my memory that is puzzling. There is evidence—the books and additional paper recipes and stains on the pages—that my mother was involved in the world of the kitchen. This suggests she handled meats, vegetables, and flours, kneaded, chopped, mashed, baked, and boiled all manners of foods. But I cannot remember her doing any of it. I think the cooking must have been a part of her life before me, when she lived in England, her home country, which she loved, and when she still had hope that children would come. It must have then been apparent that her husband was going to need support and care after the war, and I can imagine she came to realise that any dreams she had would need rearranging.What I do remember is that our meals were prepared by my father, and contained no spices, onions, or garlic because he suffered frequently from indigestion and said these ingredients made it worse. He was a big-chested man with small hips who worried he was too heavy and so put himself on diets every other week. For my father, dieting meant not eating anything, which tended to lead to binges on chocolate or cheese or whatever he could grab easily from the fridge.Meals at night followed a pattern. On Sundays we ate roast chicken with vegetables as a treat, then finished it over the next days as a cold accompaniment with salad. Other meals would feature fish fingers, mince, ham, or a cold luncheon meat with either salad or boiled vegetables. Sometimes we would have a tin of peaches in juice or ice cream, or both. No cookbooks were consulted to prepare these meals.What was my mother doing while my father cooked? She must have been in the kitchen too, probably contributing, but I don’t see her there. By the time we came back to Australia permanently in 1974, my father’s working life had come to an end, and he took over the household cookery for something to do, as well as sewing his own clothes, and repairing his own car. He once hoisted the engine out of a Morris Minor with the help of a young mechanic, a rope, and the branch of a poinciana tree. I have three rugs that he wove before I was born, and he made furniture as well. My mother also sewed, and made my school uniforms and other clothes as well as her own skirts and blouses, jackets and pants. Unfortunately, she was fond of crimplene, which came in bright primary colours and smelled of petrol, but didn’t require ironing and dried quickly on the washing line. It didn’t exactly hang on your body, but rather took it over, imposing itself with its shapelessness. The handwritten recipe for salad cream shown on the pink paper is not in my mother’s hand but my father’s. Her correction can be seen to the word “gelatine” at the bottom; she has replaced it with “c’flour” which I assume means cornflour. This recipe actually makes me a liar, because it shows my father writing about using pepper, paprika, and tumeric to make a food item, when I have already said he used no spices. When I knew him, and ate his food, he didn’t. But he had another life for forty-seven years before my birth, and these recipes with their stains and scribbles help me to begin making a picture of both his life, and my mother’s. So much of them is a complete mystery to me, but these scraps of belongings help me inch along in my thinking about them, who they were, and what they meant to me (Turkle).The Main Cookery Book has a similar structure to Miss Tuxford’s, with some variations, like the chapter titled Réchauffés, which deals with dishes using already cooked foodstuffs that only then require reheating, and a chapter on home-made wines. There are also notes at the end of the book on topics such as gas ovens and methods of cooking (boiling, steaming, simmering, and so on). What really interests me about this book are the clippings inserted by my mother, although the printed pages themselves seem relatively clean and uncooked upon. There is a recipe for pickles and chutneys torn from a newspaper, and when I look on the other side I find a context: a note about Charlie Chaplin and the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee starting its investigations into the influence of Communists on Hollywood. I wonder if my parents talked about these events, or if they went to see Charlie Chaplin’s films. My mother’s diaries from the 1940s include her references to movies—Shirley Temple in Kiss and Tell, Bing Crosby in Road to Utopia—as well as day to day activities and visits to, and from, family and friends, her sinus infections and colds, getting “shock[ed] from paraffin lamp”, food rationing. If my father kept diaries during his earlier years, nothing of them survives. I remember his determined shredding of documents after my mother’s death, and his fear of discovery, that his life’s secrets would be revealed. He did not tell me I had been adopted until I was twenty-three, and rarely spoke of it afterwards. My mother never mentioned it. I look at the recipe for lemon curd. Did my mother ever make this? Did she use margarine instead of butter? We used margarine on sandwiches, as butter was too hard to spread. Once again, I turn over this clipping to read the news, and find no date but an announcement of an exhibition of work by Marc Chagall at the Tate Gallery, the funeral of Sir Geoffrey Fison (who I discover from The Peerage website died in 1948, unmarried, a Baronet and decorated soldier), and a memorial service for Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian poet and prose writer, during which the Poet Laureate of the time, John Masefield, gave the address. And there was also a note about the latest wills, including that of a reverend who left an estate valued at over £50 000. My maternal adoptive grandmother, who lived in Weston-super-Mare across the road from the beach, and with whom we stayed for several months in 1974, left most of her worldly belongings to my mother and nothing to her son. He seems to have been cut out from her life after she separated from her husband, and her children’s father, sometime in the 1920s. Apparently, my uncle followed his father out to Australia, and his mother never forgave him, refusing to have anything more to do with her son for the rest of her life, not even to see her grandchildren. When I knew her in that brief period in 1974, she was already approaching eighty and showing signs of dementia. But I do remember dancing the Charleston with her in the kitchen, and her helping me bathe my ragdoll Pollyanna in a tub in the garden. The only food I remember at her stone house was afternoon tea with lots of different, exotic cakes, particularly one called Neopolitan, with swirls of red and brown through the moist sponge. My grandmother had a long narrow garden filled with flowers and a greenhouse with tomatoes; she loved that garden, and spent a lot of time nurturing it.My father and his mother-in-law were not each other’s favourite person, and this coloured my mother’s relationship with her, too. We were poor for many years, and the only reason we were able to go to England was because of the generosity of my grandmother, who paid for our airfares. I think my father searched for work while we were there, but whether he was successful or not I do not know. We returned to Australia and I went into grade four at the end of 1974, an outsider of sorts, and bemused by the syllabus, because I had moved around so much. I went to eight different primary schools and two high schools, eventually obtaining a scholarship to a private girls’ school for the last four years. My father was intent on me becoming a doctor, and so my life was largely study, which is another reason why I took little notice of what went on in the kitchen and what appeared on the dining table. I would come home from school and my parents would start meal preparation almost straight away, so we sat down to dinner at about four o’clock during the week, and I started the night’s study at five. I usually worked through until about ten, and then read a novel for a little while before sleep. Every parcel of time was accounted for, and nothing was wasted. This schedule continued throughout those four years of high school, with my father berating me if I didn’t do well at an exam, but also being proud when I did. In grades eight, nine, and ten, I studied home economics, and remember being offered a zucchini to taste because I had never seen one before. I also remember making Greek biscuits of some sort for an exam, and the sieve giving out while I was sifting a large quantity of flour. We learned to cook simple meals of meats and vegetables, and to prepare a full breakfast. We also baked cakes but, when my sponges remained flat, I realised that my strengths might lay elsewhere. This probably also contributed to my lack of interest in cooking. Domestic pursuits were not encouraged at home, although my mother did teach me to sew and knit, resulting in skewed attempts at a shirt dress and a white blouse, and a wildly coloured knitted shoulder bag that I actually liked but which embarrassed my father. There were no such lessons in cakemaking or biscuit baking or any of the recipes from Miss Tuxford. By this time, my mother bought such treats from the supermarket.This other life, this previous life of my parents, a life far away in time and place, was completely unknown to me before my mother’s death. I saw little of them after the revelation of my adoption, not because of this knowledge I then had, but because of my father’s controlling behaviour. I discovered that the rest of my adoptive family, who I hardly knew apart from my maternal grandmother, had always known. It would have been difficult, after all, for my parents to keep such a secret from them. Because of this life of constant moving, my estrangement from my family, and our lack of friends and connections with other people, there was a gap in my experience. As a child, I only knew one grandmother, and only for a relatively brief period of time. I have no grandfatherly memories, and none either of aunts and uncles, only a few fleeting images of a cousin here and there. It was difficult to form friendships as a child when we were only in a place for a limited time. We were always moving on, and left everything behind, to start again in a new suburb, state, country. Continuity and stability were not our trademarks, for reasons that are only slowly making themselves known to me: my father’s mental health problems, his difficult personality, our lack of money, the need to keep my adoption secret.What was that need? From where did it spring? My father always seemed to be a secretive person, an intensely private man, one who had things to hide, and seemed to suffer many mistakes and mishaps and misfortune. At the end, after my mother’s death, we spent two years with each other as he became frailer and moved into a nursing home. It was a truce formed out of necessity, as there was no one else to care for him, so thoroughly had he alienated his family; he had no friends, certainly not in Australia, and only the doctor and helping professionals to talk to most days. My father’s brother John had died some years before, and the whereabouts of his other sibling Gordon were unknown. I discovered that he had died three years previously. Nieces had not heard from my father for decades. My mother’s niece revealed that my mother and she had never met. There is a letter from my mother’s father in the 1960s, probably just before he died, remarking that he would like a photograph of her as they hadn’t seen each other for forty years. None of this was talked about when my mother was alive. It was as if I was somehow separate from their stories, from their history, that it was not suitable for my ears, or that once I came into their lives they wanted to make a new life altogether. At that time, all of their past was stored away. Even my very origins, my tiny past life, were unspoken, and made into a secret. The trouble with secrets, however, is that they hang around, peek out of boxes, lurk in the corners of sentences, and threaten to be revealed by the questions of puzzled strangers, or mistakenly released by knowledgeable relatives. Adoptee memoirs like mine seek to go into those hidden storage boxes and the corners and pages of sources like these seemingly innocent old cookbooks, in the quest to bring these secrets to light. Like Miss Tuxford’s cookbook, with its stains and smudges, or the Main Cookery Book with its pages full of clippings, the revelation of such secrets threaten to tell stories that contradict the official version. ReferencesBrien, Donna Lee. “Pathways into an ‘Elaborate Ecosystem’: Ways of Categorising the Food Memoir”. TEXT (October 2011). 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct11/brien.htm›.Chick, Suzanne. Searching for Charmian. Sydney: Picador, 1995.Dessaix, Robert. A Mother’s Disgrace. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994.Fisher, Florence. The Search for Anna Fisher. New York: Arthur Fields, 1973.Frame, Tom. Binding Ties: An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia. Alexandria: Hale & Iremonger, 1999.Gibson, Margaret. Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne U P, 2008. Gompertz, Marguerite K., and the Staff of the Main Research Kitchen. The Main Cookery Book. 52nd. ed. London: R. & A. Main, 1944. Hipchen, Emily, and Jill Deans. “Introduction. Adoption Life Writing: Origins and Other Ghosts”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 18.2 (2003): 163–70. Special Issue on Adoption.Homes, A. M. The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir. London: Granta, 2007.Kiss and Tell. Dir. By Richard Wallace. Columbia Pictures, 1945.Lifton, Betty Jean. Twice Born: Memoirs of An Adopted Daughter. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1977.Lundy, Darryl, comp. The Peerage: A Genealogical Survey of the Peerage of Britain as well as the Royal Families of Europe. 30 May 2013 ‹http://www.thepeerage.com/p40969.htm#i409684›Perl, Lynne and Shirin Markham. Why Wasn’t I Told? Making Sense of the Late Discovery of Adoption. Bondi: Post Adoption Resource Centre/Benevolent Society of NSW, 1999.Road to Utopia. Dir. By Hal Walker. Paramount, 1946.Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 2011. Tuxford, Miss H. H. Miss Tuxford’s Modern Cookery for the Middle Classes: Hints on Modern Gas Stove Cooking. London: John Heywood, c.1937.