Journal articles on the topic 'Dead-beat current control'

Purpose Predictive controllers and permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) got more attention over the past decades thanks to their applicable features. This paper aims to propose and verify a method to design a predictive current controller with consideration of motor characteristics obtained from finite element analysis (FEA). Design/methodology/approach Permanent magnet motor parameters and its maps can be calculated by means of FEA. The model takes into account magnetic saturation and thermal electro-magnetic properties. For each dq current vector and each position, self and mutual inductances are calculated. Based on co-energy method and fundamentals of coordinate transformation dynamic and static, dq inductances are obtained. These are used in classical and modified dead-beat current controller equations. Findings To sustain good features of a controller over higher current regions, it is necessary to adapt control law of a dead-beat controller. After its modification, control quality can be superior over classical solution in high saturation regions. The transient simulations of controller and motor give accurate results. Originality/value Common predictive current controllers use nominal motor parameters in their equations. The authors proposed a modified dead-beat current controller to improve the control quality. There is no need to apply self-tuning algorithms, and implementation of the controller is not much more complicated than that of the classical controller. Designer of a control system can obtain required data from motor designer; in design process of modern machines such data are often already available. The proposed methodology increases control quality of the presented dead-beat controller.

This paper studies the instantaneous output power characteristics of photovoltaic inverters and its flexible power control strategy under unbalanced grid faults. Then the optimal parameters model of the power control is established with minimum integrated fluctuation amplitude of the active and reactive power as a goal when the constraint of the output current harmonic distortion of photovoltaic inverters is taken into account. Finally, the optimal power control of photovoltaic inverters based on dead-beat current tracking is realized and the feasibility of the proposed control strategy is verified with the power system transient software PSCAD/EMTDC.

Abstract To solve the problem that the torque pulsation is serious due to the large current error in the period when the duty cycle is calculated by the deadbeat method in the duty cycle dual-vector model predictive current control method, a vector switching method is proposed. The control objective of the proposed method is not to equate the predicted torque current with the reference value under the dead-beat idea, but to reduce the torque current control error by changing the switching time of the voltage vector and ensuring the symmetry of the positive and negative current errors. By deducing the duty cycle, the maximum current errors in a single control cycle before and after vector switching is compared and analyzed. The vector switching method is verified on the Simulink simulation platform and compared with the duty cycle double vector method. The results show that the vector switching method can effectively reduce the intra-cycle torque current tracking error and realize the optimal process control in each cycle.

The present current control method in doubly fed induction generator cannot realize the segmented grid-connected current control, it’s hard to effectively control the current in doubly fed induction generator. Therefore, a current control method in doubly fed induction generator under low switching frequency is proposed in this paper. Which means to build a mathematical model of the doubly fed induction generator under low switching frequency to analyze the parameters of doubly fed induction generator filter. Then the parameter values of the filter can be obtained. The current in generator can be predicted by adopting the double-sampling predict method. And the current control in generator can be improved according to dead beat control. Then the on-line identification of current parameters by least square method is needed to finish the current control method in doubly fed induction generator under low switching frequency. The experimental results show that the proposed method realized the segmented grid-connected current control in doubly fed induction generator.

Unbalanced grid faults will lead to several drawbacks in the output power quality of photovoltaic generation (PV) converters, such as power fluctuation, current amplitude swell, and a large quantity of harmonics. The aim of this paper is to propose a flexible AC current generation method by selecting coefficients to overcome these problems in an optimal way. Three coefficients are brought in to tune the output current reference within the required limits of the power quality (the current harmonic distortion, the AC current peak, the power fluctuation, and the DC voltage fluctuation). Through the optimization algorithm, the coefficients can be determined aiming to generate the minimum integrated amplitudes of the active and reactive power references with the constraints of the inverter current and DC voltage fluctuation. Dead-beat controller is utilized to track the optimal current reference in a short period. The method has been verified in PSCAD/EMTDC software.

Recently, power quality improvement has gained a lot of attention due to the rapidly increasing use of power electronics equipment. Several control strategies for DC/AC Voltage Source Inverters (VSI) have been developed to obtain good quality output with low harmonic distortion. This paper proposes a robust control scheme to improve the power quality of a three-phase DC/AC VSI. The control scheme includes an outer voltage loop and an inner current loop, with both controllers designed by the standard H∞ robust control technique. The system with the proposed controller has a low total harmonic distortion (THD) and improved power quality of output voltage in the presence of linear and non-linear loads. The simulation is carried out in MATLAB/Simulink environment, and the results of the proposed control scheme are compared with the performance of dead-beat (DB) predictive control and conventional proportional integral (PI) control. It is observed from the results that the proposed control scheme outperforms other control schemes in terms of the THD level, having a better steady-state and transient performance.

In this article, a modified control structure for a single-stage three phase grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system is presented. In the proposed system, the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) function is developed using a new adaptive model-based technique, in which the maximum power point (MPP) voltage can be precisely located based on the characteristics of the PV source. By doing so, the drift problem associated with the traditional perturb and observe (P&O) technique can be easily solved. Moreover, the inverter control is accomplished using a predictive dead-beat function, which directly estimates the required reference voltages from the commanded reference currents. Then, the reference voltages are applied to a space vector pulse width modulator (SVPWM) for switching state generation. Furthermore, the proposed inverter control avoids the conventional and known cascaded loop structure of the voltage oriented control (VOC) method by elimination of the outer PI controller, and hence the overall control strategy is simplified. The proposed system is compared with different MPPT techniques, including the conventional P&O method and other techniques intended for drift avoidance. The evaluation of the suggested control methodology depends on various radiation profiles created in MATLAB. The proposed technique succeeds at capturing the maximum available power from the PV source with no drift in comparison with other methods.

Until now, computational burden alleviation and stability issues for the three-phase four-leg converter has not yet been thoroughly investigated. However, compared to the conventional controllers, the implementation of predictive current control approach for 3-Ø, 4-L inverter suffers a large computational burden due to its additional fourth-leg. Motivated by this fact, this article provides an alternative predictive current control implementation for 3-Ø, 4-L inverter which offers reduced computational effort to achieve similar performance as the conventional FCS-MPC and ensures the global stability of the closed-loop system. To further understand the consequences of the developed control law, theoretical stability analysis has been carried out that links Lyapunov's direct method with the closed-loop system behavior. The outcome of the theoretical stability analysis demonstrates the global stability of the overall system which is later supported by the experimental results. With the proposed method, the number of possible voltage vectors required to obtain the optimal voltage vector in each sampling interval reduces from sixteen to five and thereby simplifies the prediction process. It is also derived that the Lyapunov function-based approach actually yields to the dead-beat control, which has not been previously highlighted in the previous papers. The current work also provides experimental results for different loading conditions (balanced and unbalanced) which further demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed method.

'He did what the cipher could not, he rescued himself.' -- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (23) On many levels, the new Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile is a gritty meditation about different types of End: the eternal relationship cycle of 'fragility, tension, ordeal, fragmentation' (adapted, with apologies to Wilhelm Reich); fin-de-siècle anxiety; post-millennium foreboding; a spectre of the alien discontinuity that heralds an on-rushing future vastly different from the one envisaged by Enlightenment Project architects. In retrospect, it's easy for this perspective to be dismissed as jargon-filled cyber-crit hyperbole. Cyber-crit has always been at its best too when it invents pre-histories and finds hidden connections between different phenomena (like the work of Greil Marcus and early Mark Dery), and not when it is closer to Chinese Water Torture, name-checking the canon's icons (the 'Deleuze/Guattari' tag-team), texts and key terms. "The organization of sound is interpreted historically, politically, socially ... . It subdues music's ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place, reconciles it to its naturally belated fate", comments imagineer Kodwo Eshun (4) on how cyber-crit destroys albums and the innocence of the listening experience. This is how official histories are constructed a priori and freeze-dried according to personal tastes and prior memes: sometimes the most interesting experiments are Darwinian dead-ends that fail to make the canon, or don't register on the radar. Anyone approaching The Fragile must also contend with the music industry's harsh realities. For every 10 000 Goth fans who moshed to the primal 'kill-fuck-dance' rhythms of the hit single "Closer" (heeding its siren-call to fulfil basic physiological needs and build niche-space), maybe 20 noted that the same riff returned with a darker edge in the title track to The Downward Spiral, undermining the glorification of Indulgent hedonism. "The problem with such alternative audiences," notes Disinformation Creative Director Richard Metzger, "is that they are trying to be different -- just like everyone else." According to author Don Webb, "some mature Chaos and Black Magicians reject their earlier Nine Inch Nails-inspired Goth beginnings and are extremely critical towards new adopters because they are uncomfortable with the subculture's growing popularity, which threatens to taint their meticulously constructed 'mysterious' worlds. But by doing so, they are also rejecting their symbolic imprinting and some powerful Keys to unlocking their personal history." It is also difficult to separate Nine Inch Nails from the commercialisation and colossal money-making machine that inevitably ensued on the MTV tour circuit: do we blame Michael Trent Reznor because most of his audience are unlikely to be familiar with 'first-wave' industrial bands including Cabaret Voltaire and the experiments of Genesis P. Orridge in Throbbing Gristle? Do we accuse Reznor of being a plagiarist just because he wears some of his influences -- Dr. Dre, Daft Punk, Atari Teenage Riot, Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979), Tom Waits's Bone Machine (1992), David Bowie's Low (1977) -- on his sleeve? And do we accept no-brain rock critic album reviews who quote lines like 'All the pieces didn't fit/Though I really didn't give a shit' ("Where Is Everybody?") or 'And when I suck you off/Not a drop will go to waste' ("Starfuckers Inc") as representative of his true personality? Reznor evidently has his own thoughts on this subject, but we should let the music speak for itself. The album's epic production and technical complexity turned into a post-modern studio Vision Quest, assisted by producer Alan Moulder, eleventh-hour saviour Bob Ezrin (brought in by Reznor to 'block-out' conceptual and sonic continuity), and a group of assault-technicians. The fruit of these collaborations is an album where Reznor is playing with our organism's time-binding sense, modulating strange emotions through deeply embedded tonal angularities. During his five-year absence, Trent Reznor fought diverse forms of repetitious trauma, from endogenous depression caused by endless touring to the death of his beloved grandmother (who raised him throughout childhood). An end signals a new beginning, a spiral is an open-ended and ever-shifting structure, and so Reznor sought to re-discover the Elder Gods within, a shamanic approach to renewal and secular salvation utilised most effectively by music PR luminary and scientist Howard Bloom. Concerned with healing the human animal through Ordeals that hard-wire the physiological baselines of Love, Hate and Fear, Reznor also focusses on what happens when 'meaning-making' collapses and hope for the future cannot easily be found. He accurately captures the confusion that such dissolution of meaning and decline of social institutions brings to the world -- Francis Fukuyama calls this bifurcation 'The Great Disruption'. For a generation who experienced their late childhood and early adolescence in Reagan's America, Reznor and his influences (Marilyn Manson and Filter) capture the Dark Side of recent history, unleashed at Altamont and mutating into the Apocalyptic style of American politics (evident in the 'Star Wars'/SDI fascination). The personal 'psychotic core' that was crystallised by the collapse of the nuclear family unit and supportive social institutions has returned to haunt us with dystopian fantasies that are played out across Internet streaming media and visceral MTV film-clips. That such cathartic releases are useful -- and even necessary (to those whose lives have been formed by socio-economic 'life conditions') is a point that escapes critics like Roger Scruton, some Christian Evangelists and the New Right. The 'escapist' quality of early 1980s 'Rapture' and 'Cosmocide' (Hal Lindsey) prophecies has yielded strange fruit for the Children of Ezekiel, whom Reznor and Marilyn Manson are unofficial spokes-persons for. From a macro perspective, Reznor's post-human evolutionary nexus lies, like J.G. Ballard's tales, in a mythical near-future built upon past memory-shards. It is the kind of worldview that fuses organic and morphogenetic structures with industrial machines run amok, thus The Fragile is an artefact that captures the subjective contents of the different mind produced by different times. Sonic events are in-synch but out of phase. Samples subtly trigger and then scramble kinaesthetic-visceral and kinaesthetic-tactile memories, suggestive of dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved (van der Kolk 294). Perhaps this is why after a Century of Identity Confusion some fans find it impossible to listen to a 102-minute album in one sitting. No wonder then that the double album is divided into 'left' and 'right' discs (a reference to split-brain research?). The real-time track-by-track interpretation below is necessarily subjective, and is intended to serve as a provisional listener's guide to the aural ur-text of 1999. The Fragile is full of encrypted tones and garbled frequencies that capture a world where the future is always bleeding into a non-recoverable past. Turbulent wave-forms fight for the listener's attention with prolonged static lulls. This does not make for comfortable or even 'nice' listening. The music's mind is a snapshot, a critical indicator, of the deep structures brewing within the Weltanschauung that could erupt at any moment. "Somewhat Damaged" opens the album's 'Left' disc with an oscillating acoustic strum that anchor's the listener's attention. Offset by pulsing beats and mallet percussion, Reznor builds up sound layers that contrast with lyrical epitaphs like 'Everything that swore it wouldn't change is different now'. Icarus iconography is invoked, but perhaps a more fitting mythopoeic symbol of the journey that lies ahead would be Nietzsche's pursuit of his Ariadne through the labyrinth of life, during which the hero is steadily consumed by his numbing psychosis. Reznor fittingly comments: 'Didn't quite/Fell Apart/Where were you?' If we consider that Reznor has been repeating the same cycle with different variations throughout all of his music to date, retro-fitting each new album into a seamless tapestry, then this track signals that he has begun to finally climb out of self-imposed exile in the Underworld. "The Day the World Went Away" has a tremendously eerie opening, with plucked mandolin effects entering at 0:40. The main slashing guitar riff was interpreted by some critics as Reznor's attempt to parody himself. For some reason, the eerie backdrop and fragmented acoustic guitar strums recalls to my mind civil defence nuclear war films. Reznor, like William S. Burroughs, has some powerful obsessions. The track builds up in intensity, with a 'Chorus of the Damned' singing 'na na nah' over apocalyptic end-times imagery. At 4:22 the track ends with an echo that loops and repeats. "The Frail" signals a shift to mournful introspectiveness with piano: a soundtrack to faded 8 mm films and dying memories. The piano builds up slowly with background echo, holds and segues into ... "The Wretched", beginning with a savage downbeat that recalls earlier material from Pretty Hate Machine. 'The Far Aways/Forget It' intones Reznor -- it's becoming clear that despite some claims to the contrary, there is redemption in this album, but it is one borne out of a relentless move forward, a strive-drive. 'You're finally free/You could be' suggest Reznor studied Existentialism during his psychotherapy visits. This song contains perhaps the ultimate post-relationship line: 'It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, did it?' It's over, just not the way you wanted; you can always leave the partner you're with, but the ones you have already left will always stain your memories. The lines 'Back at the beginning/Sinking/Spinning' recall the claustrophobic trapped world and 'eternal Now' dislocation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder victims. At 3:44 a plucked cello riff, filtered, segues into a sludge buzz-saw guitar solo. At 5:18 the cello riff loops and repeats. "We're in This Together Now" uses static as percussion, highlighting the influence of electricity flows instead of traditional rock instrument configurations. At 0:34 vocals enter, at 1:15 Reznor wails 'I'm impossible', showing he is the heir to Roger Waters's self-reflective rock-star angst. 'Until the very end of me, until the very end of you' reverts the traditional marriage vow, whilst 'You're the Queen and I'm the King' quotes David Bowie's "Heroes". Unlike earlier tracks like "Reptile", this track is far more positive about relationships, which have previously resembled toxic-dyads. Reznor signals a delta surge (breaking through barriers at any cost), despite a time-line morphing between present-past-future. At 5:30 synths and piano signal a shift, at 5:49 the outgoing piano riff begins. The film-clip is filled with redemptive water imagery. The soundtrack gradually gets more murky and at 7:05 a subterranean note signals closure. "The Fragile" is even more hopeful and life-affirming (some may even interpret it as devotional), but this love -- representative of the End-Times, alludes to the 'Glamour of Evil' (Nico) in the line 'Fragile/She doesn't see her beauty'. The fusion of synths and atonal guitars beginning at 2:13 summons forth film-clip imagery -- mazes, pageants, bald eagles, found sounds, cloaked figures, ruined statues, enveloping darkness. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Pilgrimage" utilises a persistent ostinato and beat, with a driving guitar overlay at 0:18. This is perhaps the most familiar track, using Reznor motifs like the doubling of the riff with acoustic guitars between 1:12-1:20, march cries, and pitch-shift effects on a 3:18 drumbeat/cymbal. Or at least I could claim it was familiar, if it were not that legendary hip-hop producer and 'edge-of-panic' tactilist Dr. Dre helped assemble the final track mix. "No, You Don't" has been interpreted as an attack on Marilyn Manson and Hole's Courntey Love, particularly the 0:47 line 'Got to keep it all on the outside/Because everything is dead on the inside' and the 2:33 final verse 'Just so you know, I did not believe you could sink so low'. The song's structure is familiar: a basic beat at 0:16, guitars building from 0:31 to sneering vocals, a 2:03 counter-riff that merges at 2:19 with vocals and ascending to the final verse and 3:26 final distortion... "La Mer" is the first major surprise, a beautiful and sweeping fusion of piano, keyboard and cello, reminiscent of Symbolist composer Debussy. At 1:07 Denise Milfort whispers, setting the stage for sometime Ministry drummer Bill Reiflin's jazz drumming at 1:22, and a funky 1:32 guitar/bass line. The pulsing synth guitar at 2:04 serves as anchoring percussion for a cinematic electronica mindscape, filtered through new layers of sonic chiaroscuro at 2:51. 3:06 phase shifting, 3:22 layer doubling, 3:37 outgoing solo, 3:50-3:54 more swirling vocal fragments, seguing into a fading cello quartet as shadows creep. David Carson's moody film-clip captures the end more ominously, depicting the beauty of drowning. This track contains the line 'Nothing can stop me now', which appears to be Reznor's personal mantra. This track rivals 'Hurt' and 'A Warm Place' from The Downward Spiral and 'Something I Can Never Have' from Pretty Hate Machine as perhaps the most emotionally revealing and delicate material that Reznor has written. "The Great Below" ends the first disc with more multi-layered textures fusing nostalgia and reverie: a twelve-second cello riff is counter-pointed by a plucked overlay, which builds to a 0:43 washed pulse effect, transformed by six second pulses between 1:04-1:19 and a further effects layer at 1:24. E-bow effects underscore lyrics like 'Currents have their say' (2:33) and 'Washes me away' (2:44), which a 3:33 sitar riff answers. These complexities are further transmuted by seemingly random events -- a 4:06 doubling of the sitar riff which 'glitches' and a 4:32 backbeat echo that drifts for four bars. While Reznor's lyrics suggest that he is unable to control subjective time-states (like The Joker in the Batman: Dark Knight series of Kali-yuga comic-books), the track constructions show that the Key to his hold over the listener is very carefully constructed songs whose spaces resemble Pythagorean mathematical formulas. Misdirecting the audience is the secret of many magicians. "The Way Out Is Through" opens the 'Right' disc with an industrial riff that builds at 0:19 to click-track and rhythm, the equivalent of a weaving spiral. Whispering 'All I've undergone/I will keep on' at 1:24, Reznor is backed at 1:38 by synths and drums coalescing into guitars, which take shape at 1:46 and turn into a torrential electrical current. The models are clearly natural morphogenetic structures. The track twists through inner storms and torments from 2:42 to 2:48, mirrored by vocal shards at 2:59 and soundscapes at 3:45, before piano fades in and out at 4:12. The title references peri-natal theories of development (particularly those of Stanislav Grof), which is the source of much of the album's imagery. "Into the Void" is not the Black Sabbath song of the same name, but a catchy track that uses the same unfolding formula (opening static, cello at 0:18, guitars at 0:31, drums and backbeat at 1:02, trademark industrial vocals and synth at 1:02, verse at 1:23), and would not appear out of place in a Survival Research Laboratories exhibition. At 3:42 Reznor plays with the edge of synth soundscapes, merging vocals at 4:02 and ending the track nicely at 4:44 alone. "Where Is Everybody?" emulates earlier structures, but relies from 2:01 on whirring effects and organic rhythms, including a flurry of eight beat pulses between 2:40-2:46 and a 3:33 spiralling guitar solo. The 4:26 guitar solo is pure Adrian Belew, and is suddenly ended by spluttering static and white noise at 5:13. "The Mark Has Been Made" signals another downshift into introspectiveness with 0:32 ghostly synth shimmers, echoed by cello at 1:04 which is the doubled at 1:55 by guitar. At 2:08 industrial riffs suddenly build up, weaving between 3:28 distorted guitars and the return of the repressed original layer at 4:16. The surprise is a mystery 32 second soundscape at the end with Reznor crooning 'I'm getting closer, all the time' like a zombie devil Elvis. "Please" highlights spacious noise at 0:48, and signals a central album motif at 1:04 with the line 'Time starts slowing down/Sink until I drown'. The psychic mood of the album shifts with the discovery of Imagination as a liberating force against oppression. The synth sound again is remarkably organic for an industrial album. "Starfuckers Inc" is the now infamous sneering attack on rock-stardom, perhaps at Marilyn Manson (at 3:08 Reznor quotes Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'). Jungle beats and pulsing synths open the track, which features the sound-sculpting talent of Pop Will Eat Itself member Clint Mansell. Beginning at 0:26, Reznor's vocals appear to have been sampled, looped and cut up (apologies to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs). The lines 'I have arrived and this time you should believe the hype/I listened to everyone now I know everyone was right' is a very savage and funny exposure of Manson's constant references to Friedrich Nietzsche's Herd-mentality: the Herd needs a bogey-man to whip it into submission, and Manson comes dangerous close to fulfilling this potential, thus becoming trapped by a 'Stacked Deck' paradox. The 4:08 lyric line 'Now I belong I'm one of the Chosen Ones/Now I belong I'm one of the Beautiful Ones' highlights the problem of being Elect and becoming intertwined with institutionalised group-think. The album version ditches the closing sample of Gene Simmons screaming "Thankyou and goodnight!" to an enraptured audience on the single from KISS Alive (1975), which was appropriately over-the-top (the alternate quiet version is worth hearing also). "The danger Marilyn Manson faces", notes Don Webb (current High Priest of the Temple of Set), "is that he may end up in twenty years time on the 'Tonight Show' safely singing our favourite songs like a Goth Frank Sinatra, and will have gradually lost his antinomian power. It's much harder to maintain the enigmatic aura of an Evil villain than it is to play the clown with society". Reznor's superior musicianship and sense of irony should keep him from falling into the same trap. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "The Big Come Down" begins with a four-second synth/static intro that is smashed apart by a hard beat at 0:05 and kaleidoscope guitars at 0:16. Critics refer to the song's lyrics in an attempt to project a narcissistic Reznor personality, but don't comment on stylistic tweaks like the AM radio influenced backing vocals at 1:02 and 1:19, or the use of guitars as a percussion layer at 1:51. A further intriguing element is the return of the fly samples at 2:38, an effect heard on previous releases and a possible post-human sub-text. The alien mythos will eventually reign over the banal and empty human. At 3:07 the synths return with static, a further overlay adds more synths at 3:45 as the track spirals to its peak, before dissipating at 3:1 in a mesh of percussion and guitars. "Underneath It All" opens with a riff that signals we have reached the album's climatic turning point, with the recurring theme of fragmenting body-memories returning at 0:23 with the line 'All I can do/I can still feel you', and being echoed by pulsing static at 0:42 as electric percussion. A 'Messiah Complex' appears at 1:34 with the line 'Crucify/After all I've died/After all I've tried/You are still inside', or at least it appears to be that on the surface. This is the kind of line that typical rock critics will quote, but a careful re-reading suggests that Reznor is pointing to the painful nature of remanifesting. Our past shapes us more than we would like to admit particularly our first relationships. "Ripe (With Decay)" is the album's final statement, a complex weaving of passages over a repetitive mesh of guitars, pulsing echoes, back-beats, soundscapes, and a powerful Mike Garson piano solo (2:26). Earlier motifs including fly samples (3:00), mournful funeral violas (3:36) and slowing time effects (4:28) recur throughout the track. Having finally reached the psychotic core, Reznor is not content to let us rest, mixing funk bass riffs (4:46), vocal snatches (5:23) and oscillating guitars (5:39) that drag the listener forever onwards towards the edge of the abyss (5:58). The final sequence begins at 6:22, loses fidelity at 6:28, and ends abruptly at 6:35. At millennium's end there is a common-held perception that the world is in an irreversible state of decay, and that Culture is just a wafer-thin veneer over anarchy. Music like The Fragile suggests that we are still trying to assimilate into popular culture the 'war-on-Self' worldviews unleashed by the nineteenth-century 'Masters of Suspicion' (Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche). This 'assimilation gap' is evident in industrial music, which in the late 1970s was struggling to capture the mood of the Industrial Revolution and Charles Dickens, so the genre is ripe for further exploration of the scarred psyche. What the self-appointed moral guardians of the Herd fail to appreciate is that as the imprint baseline rises (reflective of socio-political realities), the kind of imagery prevalent throughout The Fragile and in films like Strange Days (1995), The Matrix (1999) and eXistenZ (1999) is going to get even darker. The solution is not censorship or repression in the name of pleasing an all-saving surrogate god-figure. No, these things have to be faced and embraced somehow. Such a process can only occur if there is space within for the Sadeian aesthetic that Nine Inch Nails embodies, and not a denial of Dark Eros. "We need a second Renaissance", notes Don Webb, "a rejuvenation of Culture on a significant scale". In other words, a global culture-shift of quantum (aeon or epoch-changing) proportions. The tools required will probably not come just from the over-wordy criticism of Cyber-culture and Cultural Studies or the logical-negative feeding frenzy of most Music Journalism. They will come from a dynamic synthesis of disciplines striving toward a unity of knowledge -- what socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson has described as 'Consilience'. Liberating tools and ideas will be conveyed to a wider public audience unfamiliar with such principles through predominantly science fiction visual imagery and industrial/electronica music. The Fragile serves as an invaluable model for how such artefacts could transmit their dreams and propagate their messages. For the hyper-alert listener, it will be the first step on a new journey. But sadly for the majority, it will be just another hysterical industrial album promoted as selection of the month. References Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination. London: Millennium Books, 1999. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. "Trauma and Memory." Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Eds. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. Nine Inch Nails. Downward Spiral. Nothing/Interscope, 1994. ---. The Fragile. Nothing, 1999. ---. Pretty Hate Machine. TVT, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Alex Burns. "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php>. Chicago style: Alex Burns, "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Alex Burns. (1999) 'This machine is obsolete': a listeners' guide to Nine Inch Nails' The fragile. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]).

The following article is in response to a research project that took the form of a road trip from Perth to Lombadina re-enacting the journey undertaken by the characters in the play Bran Nue Dae by playwright Jimmy Chi and Broome band Kuckles. This project was facilitated by the assistance of a Creative and Research Publication Grant from the Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. The project was carried out by researchers Kara Jacob and Margaret Hair. One thing is plainly clear. Aboriginal art expresses the possibility of human intimacy with landscapes. This is the key to its power: it makes available a rich tradition of human ethics and relationships with place and other species to a worldwide audience. For the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, their appreciation of this art embodies at least a striving for the kind of citizenship that republicans wanted: to belong to this place rather than to another (Marcia Langton in Watson 191). Marcia Langton is talking here about painting. My question is whether this “kind of citizenship” can also be accessed through appreciation of indigenous theatre, and specifically through the play Bran Nue Dae, by playwright Jimmy Chi and Broome band Kuckles, a play closely linked to the Western Australian landscape through its appropriation of the road trip genre. The physical journey taken by the characters metaphorically takes them also through the contact history of black and white Australians in Western Australia. Significantly, the non-indigenous characters experience the redemptive power of “human intimacy with landscapes” through travelling to the traditional country of their road trip companions. The road trip genre typically places its characters on a quest for knowledge. American poet Gary Snyder says that the two sources of human knowledge are symbols and sense-impressions (vii). Bran Nue Dae abounds with symbols, from the priest’s cassock and mitre to Roebourne prison; however, the sense impressions, which are so strong in the performance of the play, are missing from the written text, apart from ironic comments on the weather. In my efforts to understand Bran Nue Dae, I undertook the road trip from Perth to the Kimberley myself in order to discover those missing sense-impressions, as they form part of the “back story” of the play. In the play there is a void between the time the characters leave Perth and reach first Roebourne, where they are locked up, and then Roebuck Plains, not far from Broome, yet in the “real world” they would have travelled more than two thousand kilometres. What would they have seen and experienced on this journey? I took note of Krim Benterrak, Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke’s Reading the Country, a cross-cultural and cross-textual study on Roebuck Plains, near Broome. Muecke talks about “stories being contingent upon place … Aboriginal storytellers have a similar policy. If one is not prepared to take the trouble to go to the place, then its story can only be given as a short version” (72). In preparing for the trip, I collected tourist brochures and maps. The use of maps, seemingly essential on any road trip as guides to “having a look at” country (Muecke ibid.), was instantly problematic in itself, in that maps represent country as colonised space. In Saltwater People, Nonie Sharp discusses the “distinction between mapping and personal journeying”: Maps and mapping describe space in a way that depersonalises it. Mapping removes the footprints of named creatures – animal, human, ancestral – who belong to this place or that place. A map can be anywhere. ‘Itineraries’, however, are actions and movements within a named and footprinted land (Sharp 199-200). The country journeyed through in Bran Nue Dae, which privileges indigenous experience, could be designated as the potentially dangerous liminal space between the “map” and the “itinerary”. This “space between” resonates with untold stories, with invisibilities. One of the most telling discoveries on the research trip was the thoroughness with which indigenous people have been made to disappear from the “mapped” zones through various colonial policies. It was very evident that indigenous people are still relegated to the fringes of town, as in Onslow and Port Hedland, in housing situations closely resembling the old missions and reserves. Although my travelling companion and I made an effort in every place we visited to pay our respects by at least finding out the language group of the traditional owners, it became clear that a major challenge in travelling through post-colonial space is in avoiding becoming complicit in the disappearance of indigenous people. We wanted our focus to be “on the people whose bodies, territories, beliefs and values have been travelled though” (Tuhiwai Smith 78) but our experience was that finding even written guides into the “footprinted land” is not easy when few tourist pamphlets acknowledge the traditional owners of the country. Even when “local Aboriginal” words are quoted, as in the CALM brochure for Nambung National Park (i.e., the Pinnacles), the actual language or language group is not mentioned. In many interpretive brochures and facilities, traditional owners are represented as absent, as victims or as prisoners. The fate of the “original inhabitants of the Greenough Flats”, the Yabbaroo people, is alluded to in the Greenough River Nature Walk Trail Guide, under the title, “A short history of Greenough River from the Rivermouth to Westbank Road”: The Gregory brothers, exploring for pastoral land in 1848, peacefully met with a large group of Aborigines camped beside a freshwater spring in a dense Melaleuca thicket. They named the spring Bootenal, from the Nyungar word Boolungal, meaning pelican. Gregory’s glowing reports of good grazing prompted pastoralists to move their flocks to Greenough, and by 1852 William Criddle was watering cattle for the Cattle Company at the Bootenal Spring. The Aborigines soon resented this intrusion and in 1854, large numbers with many from surrounding tribes, gathered in the relative safety of the Bootenal thicket. Making forays at night, they killed cattle and sheep and attacked homesteads. The pastoralists retaliated by forming a posse at Glengarry under the command of the Resident Magistrate. On the night of the 4th/5th July they rode to Bootenal and drove the Aborigines from the thicket. No arrests were made and no official report given of casualties. Aboriginal resistance in the area was finished. The fact that the extract actually describes a massacre while purporting to be a “history of Greenough River” subverts the notion that the land can ever really be “depersonalised”. At the very heart of the difference lie different ways of being human: in Aboriginal classical tradition the person dwells within a personified landscape which is alive, named, inscribed by spiritual and human agents. It is a ‘Thou’ not an ‘It’, and I and Thou belong together (Sharp 199-200). Peter Read’s book Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership contains a section titled “The Past Embedded in the Landscape” in which Read discusses whether the land holds the memory of events enacted upon it, so forming a tangible link between the dispossessed and the possessors. While discussing Judith Wright’s poem Bora Ring, Read states: “The unlaid violence of dispossession lingers at the sites of evil or old magic”, bringing to mind Wright’s notion of Australia as “a haunted country” (14). It is not surprising that the “unlaid violence of dispossession lingers” at the sites of old prisons and lock-ups, since it is built into the very architecture. The visitor pamphlet states that the 1890s design by George Temple Poole of the third Roebourne gaol, further up the great Northern Highway from Greenough and beautifully constructed from stone, “represents a way in which the state ideology of control of a remote and potentially dangerous population could be expressed in buildings”. The current Roebourne prison, still holding a majority of Aboriginal inmates, does away with any pretence of architectural elegance but expresses the same state ideology with its fence topped with razor wire. Without a guide like Bran Nue Dae’s Uncle Tadpole to keep us “off the track”, non-indigenous visitors to these old gaols, now largely museums, may be quickly led by the interpretation into the “mapped zone” – the narrative of imperialist expansion. However, we can follow Paul Carter’s injunction to “deepen grooves” and start with John Pat’s story at the Roebourne police lock-up, or the story of any indigenous inmate of the present Roebuck prison, spiralling back a century to the first Roebuck prison in settler John Withnell’s woolshed (Weightman 4). Then we gain a sense of the contact experience of the local indigenous peoples. John Withnell and his wife Emma are represented as particularly resourceful by the interpretation at the old Roebourne gaol (now Roebourne Visitors Centre and Museum). The museum has a replica of a whalebone armchair that John Withnell built for his wife with vertebrae as the seat and other bones as the back and armrests. The family also invented the canvas waterbag. The interpretation fails to mention that the same John Withnell beat an Aboriginal woman named Talarong so severely for refusing to care for sheep at Withnell’s Hillside Station that “she retreated into the bush and died of her injuries two days later”. No charges were brought against Withnell because, according to the Acting Government Resident, of the “great provocation” by Talarong in the incident (Hunt 99-100). Such omissions and silences in the official record force indigenous people into a parallel “invisible country” and leave us stranded on the highways of the “mapped zone”, bereft of our rights and responsibilities to connect either to the country or to its traditional owners. Roebourne, and its coastal port Cossack, stand on the hauntingly beautiful country of the Ngarluma and seaside Yapurarra peoples. Settlers first arrived in the 1860s and Aboriginal people began to be officially imprisoned soon after, primarily as a result of their resistance to being “blackbirded” and exploited as labour for the pearling and pastoral industries. Prisoners were chained by the neck, day and night, and forced to build roads and tramlines, ostensibly a “civilising” practice. As the history pamphlet for The Old Roebourne Gaol reads: “It was widely believed that the Roebourne Gaol was where the ‘benefit’ of white civilisation could be shown to the ‘savage’ Aboriginal” (Weightman 2). The “back story” I discovered on this research trip was one of disappearance – indigenous people being made to disappear from their countries, from non-indigenous view and from the written record. The symbols I surprisingly most engaged with and which most affected me were the gaols and prisons which the imperialists used as tools of their trade in disappearance. The sense impressions I experienced – extreme beauty, isolation, heat and sandflies – reinforced the complexity of Western Australian contact history. I began to see the central achievement of Bran Nue Dae as being the return of indigenous people to country and to story. This return, so beautifully realised in when the characters finally reach Lombadina and a state of acceptance, is critical to healing the country and to the attainment of an equitable “kind of citizenship” that denotes belonging for all. References Aboriginal Tourism Australia. Welcome to Country: Respecting Indigenous Culture for Travellers in Australia. 2004. Benterrak, Krim, Stephen Muecke, and Paddy Roe. Reading the Country. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984. Carter, Paul. The Lie of the Land. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Dalton, Peter. “Broome: A Multiracial Community. A Study of Social and Cultural Relationships in a Town in the West Kimberleys, Western Australia”. Thesis for Master of Arts in Anthropology. Perth: University of Western Australia, 1964. Hunt, Susan Jane. Spinifex and Hessian: Women’s Lives in North-Western Australia 1860–1900. Nedlands, WA: U of Western Australia P, 1986. Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership. UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Reynolds, Henry. North of Capricorn: The Untold History of Australia’s North. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003. Reynolds, Henry. Why Weren’t We Told? Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 1999. Sharp, Nonie. Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Shire of Greenough. Greenough River Nature Walk Trail Guide. 2005. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. Dunedin, New Zealand: U of Otago P, 1999. Watson, Christine. Piercing the Ground. Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre P, 2003. Weightman, Llyrus. The Old Roebourne Gaol: A History. Pilbara Classies & Printing Service. Wright, Judith. The Cry for the Dead. 1981. 277-80. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hair, Margaret. "Invisible Country." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/09-hair.php>. APA Style Hair, M. (Dec. 2005) "Invisible Country," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/09-hair.php>.

Over the past century, many books for general readers have styled sharks as “monsters of the deep” (Steele). In recent decades, however, at least some writers have also turned to representing how sharks are seriously threatened by human activities. At a time when media coverage of shark sightings seems ever increasing in Australia, scholarship has begun to consider people’s attitudes to sharks and how these are formed, investigating the representation of sharks (Peschak; Ostrovski et al.) in films (Le Busque and Litchfield; Neff; Schwanebeck), newspaper reports (Muter et al.), and social media (Le Busque et al., “An Analysis”). My own research into representations of surfing and sharks in Australian writing (Brien) has, however, revealed that, although reporting of shark sightings and human-shark interactions are prominent in the news, and sharks function as vivid and commanding images and metaphors in art and writing (Ellis; Westbrook et al.), little scholarship has investigated their representation in Australian books published for a general readership. While recognising representations of sharks in other book-length narrative forms in Australia, including Australian fiction, poetry, and film (Ryan and Ellison), this enquiry is focussed on non-fiction books for general readers, to provide an initial review. Sampling holdings of non-fiction books in the National Library of Australia, crosschecked with Google Books, in early 2021, this investigation identified 50 Australian books for general readers that are principally about sharks, or that feature attitudes to them, published from 1911 to 2021. Although not seeking to capture all Australian non-fiction books for general readers that feature sharks, the sampling attempted to locate a wide range of representations and genres across the time frame from the earliest identified text until the time of the survey. The books located include works of natural and popular history, travel writing, memoir, biography, humour, and other long-form non-fiction for adult and younger readers, including hybrid works. A thematic analysis (Guest et al.) of the representation of sharks in these texts identified five themes that moved from understanding sharks as fishes to seeing them as monsters, then prey, and finally to endangered species needing conservation. Many books contained more than one theme, and not all examples identified have been quoted in the discussion of the themes below. Sharks as Part of the Natural Environment Drawing on oral histories passed through generations, two memoirs (Bradley et al.; Fossa) narrate Indigenous stories in which sharks play a central role. These reveal that sharks are part of both the world and a wider cosmology for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Clua and Guiart). In these representations, sharks are integrated with, and integral to, Indigenous life, with one writer suggesting they are “creator beings, ancestors, totems. Their lifecycles reflect the seasons, the landscape and sea country. They are seen in the movement of the stars” (Allam). A series of natural history narratives focus on zoological studies of Australian sharks, describing shark species and their anatomy and physiology, as well as discussing shark genetics, behaviour, habitats, and distribution. A foundational and relatively early Australian example is Gilbert P. Whitley’s The Fishes of Australia: The Sharks, Rays, Devil-fish, and Other Primitive Fishes of Australia and New Zealand, published in 1940. Ichthyologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney from the early 1920s to 1964, Whitley authored several books which furthered scientific thought on sharks. Four editions of his Australian Sharks were published between 1983 and 1991 in English, and the book is still held in many libraries and other collections worldwide. In this text, Whitley described a wide variety of sharks, noting shared as well as individual features. Beautiful drawings contribute information on shape, colouring, markings, and other recognisable features to assist with correct identification. Although a scientist and a Fellow and then President of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Whitley recognised it was important to communicate with general readers and his books are accessible, the prose crisp and clear. Books published after this text (Aiken; Ayling; Last and Stevens; Tricas and Carwardine) share Whitley’s regard for the diversity of sharks as well as his desire to educate a general readership. By 2002, the CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.) also featured numerous striking photographs of these creatures. Titles such as Australia’s Amazing Sharks (Australian Geographic) emphasise sharks’ unique qualities, including their agility and speed in the water, sensitive sight and smell, and ability to detect changes in water pressure around them, heal rapidly, and replace their teeth. These books also emphasise the central role that sharks play in the marine ecosystem. There are also such field guides to sharks in specific parts of Australia (Allen). This attention to disseminating accurate zoological information about sharks is also evident in books written for younger readers including very young children (Berkes; Kear; Parker and Parker). In these and other similar books, sharks are imaged as a central and vital component of the ocean environment, and the narratives focus on their features and qualities as wondrous rather than monstrous. Sharks as Predatory Monsters A number of books for general readers do, however, image sharks as monsters. In 1911, in his travel narrative Peeps at Many Lands: Australia, Frank Fox describes sharks as “the most dangerous foes of man in Australia” (23) and many books have reinforced this view over the following century. This can be seen in titles that refer to sharks as dangerous predatory killers (Fox and Ruhen; Goadby; Reid; Riley; Sharpe; Taylor and Taylor). The covers of a large proportion of such books feature sharks emerging from the water, jaws wide open in explicit homage to the imaging of the monster shark in the film Jaws (Spielberg). Shark!: Killer Tales from the Dangerous Depths (Reid) is characteristic of books that portray encounters with sharks as terrifying and dramatic, using emotive language and stories that describe sharks as “the world’s most feared sea creature” (47) because they are such “highly efficient killing machines” (iv, see also 127, 129). This representation of sharks is also common in several books for younger readers (Moriarty; Rohr). Although the risk of being injured by an unprovoked shark is extremely low (Chapman; Fletcher et al.), fear of sharks is prevalent and real (Le Busque et al., “People’s Fear”) and described in a number of these texts. Several of the memoirs located describe surfers’ fear of sharks (Muirhead; Orgias), as do those of swimmers, divers, and other frequent users of the sea (Denness; de Gelder; McAloon), even if the author has never encountered a shark in the wild. In these texts, this fear of sharks is often traced to viewing Jaws, and especially to how the film’s huge, bloodthirsty great white shark persistently and determinedly attacks its human hunters. Pioneer Australian shark expert Valerie Taylor describes such great white sharks as “very big, powerful … and amazingly beautiful” but accurately notes that “revenge is not part of their thought process” (Kindle version). Two books explicitly seek to map and explain Australians’ fear of sharks. In Sharks: A History of Fear in Australia, Callum Denness charts this fear across time, beginning with his own “shark story”: a panicked, terror-filled evacuation from the sea, following the sighting of a shadow which turned out not to be a shark. Blake Chapman’s Shark Attacks: Myths, Misunderstandings and Human Fears explains commonly held fearful perceptions of sharks. Acknowledging that sharks are a “highly emotive topic”, the author of this text does not deny “the terror [that] they invoke in our psyche” but makes a case that this is “only a minor characteristic of what makes them such intriguing animals” (ix). In Death by Coconut: 50 Things More Dangerous than a Shark and Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Ocean, Ruby Ashby Orr utilises humour to educate younger readers about the real risk humans face from sharks and, as per the book’s title, why they should not be feared, listing champagne corks and falling coconuts among the many everyday activities more likely to lead to injury and death in Australia than encountering a shark. Taylor goes further in her memoir – not only describing her wonder at swimming with these creatures, but also her calm acceptance of the possibility of being injured by a shark: "if we are to be bitten, then we are to be bitten … . One must choose a life of adventure, and of mystery and discovery, but with that choice, one must also choose the attendant risks" (2019: Kindle version). Such an attitude is very rare in the books located, with even some of the most positive about these sea creatures still quite sensibly fearful of potentially dangerous encounters with them. Sharks as Prey There is a long history of sharks being fished in Australia (Clark). The killing of sharks for sport is detailed in An American Angler in Australia, which describes popular adventure writer Zane Grey’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s to fish ‘big game’. This text includes many bloody accounts of killing sharks, which are justified with explanations about how sharks are dangerous. It is also illustrated with gruesome pictures of dead sharks. Australian fisher Alf Dean’s biography describes him as the “World’s Greatest Shark Hunter” (Thiele), this text similarly illustrated with photographs of some of the gigantic sharks he caught and killed in the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from being killed during pleasure and sport fishing, sharks are also hunted by spearfishers. Valerie Taylor and her late husband, Ron Taylor, are well known in Australia and internationally as shark experts, but they began their careers as spearfishers and shark hunters (Taylor, Ron Taylor’s), with the documentary Shark Hunters gruesomely detailing their killing of many sharks. The couple have produced several books that recount their close encounters with sharks (Taylor; Taylor, Taylor and Goadby; Taylor and Taylor), charting their movement from killers to conservationists as they learned more about the ocean and its inhabitants. Now a passionate campaigner against the past butchery she participated in, Taylor’s memoir describes her shift to a more respectful relationship with sharks, driven by her desire to understand and protect them. In Australia, the culling of sharks is supposedly carried out to ensure human safety in the ocean, although this practice has long been questioned. In 1983, for instance, Whitley noted the “indiscriminate” killing of grey nurse sharks, despite this species largely being very docile and of little threat to people (Australian Sharks, 10). This is repeated by Tony Ayling twenty-five years later who adds the information that the generally harmless grey nurse sharks have been killed to the point of extinction, as it was wrongly believed they preyed on surfers and swimmers. Shark researcher and conservationist Riley Elliott, author of Shark Man: One Kiwi Man’s Mission to Save Our Most Feared and Misunderstood Predator (2014), includes an extremely critical chapter on Western Australian shark ‘management’ through culling, summing up the problems associated with this approach: it seems to me that this cull involved no science or logic, just waste and politics. It’s sickening that the people behind this cull were the Fisheries department, which prior to this was the very department responsible for setting up the world’s best acoustic tagging system for sharks. (Kindle version, Chapter 7) Describing sharks as “misunderstood creatures”, Orr is also clear in her opposition to killing sharks to ‘protect’ swimmers noting that “each year only around 10 people are killed in shark attacks worldwide, while around 73 million sharks are killed by humans”. She adds the question and answer, “sounds unfair? Of course it is, but when an attack is all over the news and the people are baying for shark blood, it’s easy to lose perspective. But culling them? Seriously?” (back cover). The condemnation of culling is also evident in David Brooks’s recent essay on the topic in his collection of essays about animal welfare, conservation and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams. This disapproval is also evident in narratives by those who have been injured by sharks. Navy diver Paul de Gelder and surfer Glen Orgias were both bitten by sharks in Sydney in 2009 and both their memoirs detail their fear of sharks and the pain they suffered from these interactions and their lengthy recoveries. However, despite their undoubted suffering – both men lost limbs due to these encounters – they also attest to their ongoing respect for these creatures and specify a shared desire not to see them culled. Orgias, instead, charts the life story of the shark who bit him alongside his own story in his memoir, musing at the end of the book, not about himself or his injury, but about the fate of the shark he had encountered: great whites are portrayed … as pathological creatures, and as malevolent. That’s rubbish … they are graceful, mighty beasts. I respect them, and fear them … [but] the thought of them fighting, dying, in a net upsets me. I hope this great white shark doesn’t end up like that. (271–271) Several of the more recent books identified in this study acknowledge that, despite growing understanding of sharks, the popular press and many policy makers continue to advocate for shark culls, these calls especially vocal after a shark-related human death or injury (Peppin-Neff). The damage to shark species involved caused by their killing – either directly by fishing, spearing, finning, or otherwise hunting them, or inadvertently as they become caught in nets or affected by human pollution of the ocean – is discussed in many of the more recent books identified in this study. Sharks as Endangered Alongside fishing, finning, and hunting, human actions and their effects such as beach netting, pollution and habitat change are killing many sharks, to the point where many shark species are threatened. Several recent books follow Orr in noting that an estimated 100 million sharks are now killed annually across the globe and that this, as well as changes to their habitats, are driving many shark species to the status of vulnerable, threatened or towards extinction (Dulvy et al.). This is detailed in texts about biodiversity and climate change in Australia (Steffen et al.) as well as in many of the zoologically focussed books discussed above under the theme of “Sharks as part of the natural environment”. The CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.), for example, emphasises not only that several shark species are under threat (and protected) (8–9) but also that sharks are, as individuals, themselves very fragile creatures. Their skeletons are made from flexible, soft cartilage rather than bone, meaning that although they are “often thought of as being incredibly tough; in reality, they need to be handled carefully to maximise their chance of survival following capture” (9). Material on this theme is included in books for younger readers on Australia’s endangered animals (Bourke; Roc and Hawke). Shark Conservation By 1991, shark conservation in Australia and overseas was a topic of serious discussion in Sydney, with an international workshop on the subject held at Taronga Zoo and the proceedings published (Pepperell et al.). Since then, the movement to protect sharks has grown, with marine scientists, high-profile figures and other writers promoting shark conservation, especially through attempts to educate the general public about sharks. De Gelder’s memoir, for instance, describes how he now champions sharks, promoting shark conservation in his work as a public speaker. Peter Benchley, who (with Carl Gottlieb) recast his novel Jaws for the film’s screenplay, later attested to regretting his portrayal of sharks as aggressive and became a prominent spokesperson for shark conservation. In explaining his change of heart, he stated that when he wrote the novel, he was reflecting the general belief that sharks would both seek out human prey and attack boats, but he later discovered this to be untrue (Benchley, “Without Malice”). Many recent books about sharks for younger readers convey a conservation message, underscoring how, instead of fearing or killing sharks, or doing nothing, humans need to actively assist these vulnerable creatures to survive. In the children’s book series featuring Bindi Irwin and her “wildlife adventures”, there is a volume where Bindi and a friend are on a diving holiday when they find a dead shark whose fin has been removed. The book not only describes how shark finning is illegal, but also how Bindi and friend are “determined to bring the culprits to justice” (Browne). This narrative, like the other books in this series, has a dual focus; highlighting the beauty of wildlife and its value, but also how the creatures described need protection and assistance. Concluding Discussion This study was prompted by the understanding that the Earth is currently in the epoch known as the Anthropocene, a time in which humans have significantly altered, and continue to alter, the Earth by our activities (Myers), resulting in numerous species becoming threatened, endangered, or extinct. It acknowledges the pressing need for not only natural science research on these actions and their effects, but also for such scientists to publish their findings in more accessible ways (see, Paulin and Green). It specifically responds to demands for scholarship outside the relevant areas of science and conservation to encourage widespread thinking and action (Mascia et al.; Bennett et al.). As understanding public perceptions and overcoming widely held fear of sharks can facilitate their conservation (Panoch and Pearson), the way sharks are imaged is integral to their survival. The five themes identified in this study reveal vastly different ways of viewing and writing about sharks. These range from seeing sharks as nothing more than large fishes to be killed for pleasure, to viewing them as terrifying monsters, to finally understanding that they are amazing creatures who play an important role in the world’s environment and are in urgent need of conservation. This range of representation is important, for if sharks are understood as demon monsters which hunt humans, then it is much more ‘reasonable’ to not care about their future than if they are understood to be fascinating and fragile creatures suffering from their interactions with humans and our effect on the environment. Further research could conduct a textual analysis of these books. In this context, it is interesting to note that, although in 1949 C. Bede Maxwell suggested describing human deaths and injuries from sharks as “accidents” (182) and in 2013 Christopher Neff and Robert Hueter proposed using “sightings, encounters, bites, and the rare cases of fatal bites” (70) to accurately represent “the true risk posed by sharks” to humans (70), the majority of the books in this study, like mass media reports, continue to use the ubiquitous and more dramatic terminology of “shark attack”. The books identified in this analysis could also be compared with international texts to reveal and investigate global similarities and differences. While the focus of this discussion has been on non-fiction texts, a companion analysis of representation of sharks in Australian fiction, poetry, films, and other narratives could also be undertaken, in the hope that such investigations contribute to more nuanced understandings of these majestic sea creatures. 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