Journal articles on the topic 'Domestic Victoria Melbourne'

AbstractVictorian Bluestone is proposed as a Global Heritage Stone Province from Australia. Numerous heritage stones occur within this province and of these Malmsbury Bluestone is suggested as a Global Heritage Stone Resource. Bluestone, an iconic basalt dimension stone from Victoria, is used domestically and internationally with a recognized heritage value. Sources are located in urban and country areas of Victoria some of which are still utilized for dimension stone. In many instances bluestone has superior technical characteristics, including durability, that surpass high-quality commercial sandstones, despite an architectural preference for lighter-coloured stones. These characteristics are matched by the diversity of significant uses for domestic, commercial and infrastructure purposes especially in Victoria. Notable examples include the Spotswood Pumping Station, Malmsbury Viaduct, the Graving Dock (Williamstown), Malmsbury Reservoir, St Patrick's Cathedral (Melbourne), Kyneton Railway Station and Ararat Gaol. If the bluestone used in pavements and drains is also considered, Victorian Bluestone could be described as Australia's most prominent infrastructure heritage stone. Bluestone use in Melbourne dates from the 1840s, in the other states of Australia and in New Zealand from 1873, with international interest from Asia between 1860 and 1880. The stone continues to be utilized widely around Australia and is also exported.

Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) infection in experimentally infected domestic cats produces characteristic clinical manifestations including hematological changes, neurological disease, neoplasia (most notably lymphoma) and lymphopenia-mediated immunodeficiency predisposing cats to a range of secondary infections. Conflicting reports exist, however, with regard to disease associations and survival time in naturally FIV-infected cats. The purpose of this retrospective case–control study was to investigate the effect of natural FIV infection on hematological, blood biochemical and urinalysis parameters and survival time in three cohorts of pet cats in Australia. Cohorts 1 and 2 were recruited from a large veterinary hospital in Melbourne, Victoria (n = 525 and 282), while a third cohort consisted of cats recruited from around Australia as part of a FIV field vaccine efficacy trial (n = 425). FIV-infected cats in cohorts 1, 2 and 3 were found to have 15/37 (41%), 13/39 (33%) and 2/13 (15%) clinicopathological parameters significantly different to FIV-uninfected cats, respectively. Two changes in FIV-infected cats in cohort 1, hypochromia (low hemoglobin) and hyperglobulinemia, were outside the supplied reference intervals and should serve as diagnostic triggers for FIV testing. Kaplan–Meier survival analysis of cats in cohorts 1 and 2 combined did not find any difference between FIV-infected and FIV-uninfected cats, however a confounding factor was a large euthanasia rate within the first 12 months in both groups. Three significant (p < 0.05) spatial clusters of FIV infection were identified in Melbourne. A possible relationship between FIV infection status and socioeconomic disadvantage was discovered, based on three government indices of socioeconomic status (p < 0.001). Until longitudinal field studies are performed in Australia to further investigate the long-term effects of natural FIV infection, Australian veterinarians should consider FIV to be an important infection of pet cats, and recommend measures to prevent FIV infection.

Abstract ContextBird–aircraft collisions impose an economic cost and safety risk, yet ecological studies that inform bird hazard management are few, and to date no study has formally compared species’ strike profiles across airports. In response to strike risks, airports have implemented customised management on an airport-by-airport basis, based on the assumption that strike risk stems from prevailing local circumstances. We tested this assumption by comparing a decade of wildlife–aircraft strikes at three airports situated in the same bioregion (likely to have similar fauna) of Victoria, Australia. AimTo compare the assemblage of wildlife struck by aircraft at three major airports in the same bioregion. MethodStandardised wildlife strike data were analysed from three airports (Avalon, Melbourne and Essendon Airports), in the Victorian Volcanic Plains bioregion, central Victoria, Australia. Ten discrete 1-year sampling periods from each airport were compared, spanning the period 2009–19. Bird data were comparable, and data on mammals were considered less reliable, so emphasis was placed on birds in the present study. ResultsIn total, 580 bird strikes were analysed, with the most commonly struck species being Australian magpie (Cracticus tibicen; 16.7%), Eurasian skylark (Alauda arvensis; 12.2%), Australian pipit (Anthus australis; 12.1%), masked lapwing (Vanellus miles; 5.9%), nankeen kestrel (Falco cenchroides; 5.0%), house sparrow (Passer domesticus; 4.8%), welcome swallow (Hirundo neoxena; 4.3%) and tree martin (Petrochelidon nigricans; 4.0%). The assemblage of birds struck by aircraft over the decade of study differed between airports. The most commonly struck species drove the assemblage differences between airports. Conclusions and implicationsIn the present study system, airports experienced discrete strike risk profiles, even though they are in the same bioregion. The airports examined differed in terms of air traffic movement rates, aircraft types, landscape context and bird hazard management effort. Given that strike risks profiles differ among airports, customised management at each airport, as is currently the case, is supported.

Introduction: The Creative Arts and Regional Well-BeingThe relationship between regionalism, well-being, and the creative arts has enjoined significant attention from community activists, commercial entrepreneurs, policy analysts, artists, and researchers over recent years (Australia Council for the Arts, “Living Culture”; Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia;” Drummond, Keane, and West; Elg; Warren, and West; Woodward, Bremner, and Cahalan). Underpinning most of the activity and research in this area is the understanding (occasionally bordering on an un-critical presumption) that the creative arts make a positive contribution to regional well-being. Commenting on the Live. Love. Life. creative-arts wellness festival in Daylesford, Victoria, Mary-Anne Thomas (Member of Parliament for the state seat of Macedon) stated that the festival will “reinforce Daylesford and the Macedon Ranges’ status as one of the nation’s leading wellness destinations” (Elg). For Thomas, it would appear that the linkage of the creative arts to regional well-being is never in doubt; which is to say, always already available for reinforcement. According to university-based researchers Margaret Woodward, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan, writing in a more scholarly and critical register, “there is a growing body of research which shows that thriving creative industries and cultural activities are crucial for the health and vitality of a region and its communities” (3). Qualifying this, they add that: “Achieving high levels of community well being through thriving creative activity is not however without its challenges in regional Australia” (3). Similarly, Rozaline Drummond, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West present their work as a test of the efficacy of the creative arts in aiding regional well-being: The opportunity to work collaboratively with a community like the one at Lake Bolac [Victoria] provided an occasion to gauge our discerning and initiating skills within creative-arts research and to test the argument that the combination of our different approaches adds to community and individual well-being. Our approach is informed by Gilles Deleuze’s ethical proposition that the health of a community is directly influenced by the richness of the composition of its parts. (n.p.)Deleuzean philosophy aside, quantitative data indicates that people in regional Australia are increasingly optimistic about the positive impact of the creative arts on their well-being. In 2016, 57% believed the arts impacted their sense of well-being and happiness, up from 52% in 2013 (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Given this article’s emphasis on place and well-being in relation to located creative-arts production, it is worth citing another dataset from the same Australia Council for the Arts publication, which details the “Location of Professional Artists”:There continues to be a concentration of artists in urban areas. Three quarters (74%) live in cities, compared to two thirds of the Australian population. This urban concentration […] may in part be related to concentration of cultural infrastructure in cities.1 in 6 Australian artists live in regional cities or towns (16%) and around 1 in 10 live in rural, remote or very remote areas (11%). (n.p.)Regional artists are a minority voice in the Australian creative arts. But the ways in which a minority voice is constructed, and the (potential) impact a minoritarian position has within the wider debate about regional well-being and the creative arts, requires careful unpacking. Ironically, creative artists themselves have been relatively neglected actors in this space. Working with Tony Birch’s short story, “The Red House”, as a neglected text of regionalism, this article exposes oversights in current understandings of the connection between well-being and regionalism. The Voice of the Regional Artist and “Resistant Speech” It is important to recognise that the “concentration of artists in urban areas” may sometimes lead to situations where non-regional artists, in the undoubtedly well-meaning pursuit of regional well-being, drown out the voices of regional artists in regional places (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). Drummond, Keane, and West, all city-based artists, show sensitivity to this problem in their observation that: “It is not for the artists to presume that they can empower a [regional] community.” Certainly, regional artists and communities should take the lead in the development of regional well-being through the creative arts. The problem of (not) speaking for the other is, however, not so easily dealt with (Spivak). While urban artists might adopt the strategy of consciously allowing regional artists a voice, making such allowance could itself be viewed as a play of privilege and power by the city-based practitioner, resourced by their greater “concentration of cultural infrastructure” (Australia Council for the Arts, “The Arts in Regional Australia”). It is notoriously difficult to give the slip to the relatively invisible operations of entitlement. Furthermore, even if the regional artist is given a voice, there are many different ways of being heard or not heard. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s distinction between “speaking” and “talking” is useful here. Discussing “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in an interview with Bulan Lahiri, Spivak notes that: “It was not about talking. It was about: when the subaltern speaks there is not enough infrastructure for people to recognise it as resistant speech. That’s what it means.” In this crucial move, Spivak refines understanding of the issues at stake around the minoritarian position of regional artists. It is not enough for regional artists merely to “talk”; rather, they must be heard with the full impact of “resistant speech” (Lahiri). Obviously, what Spivak means by the “infrastructure” of “resistant speech” differs from the meaning the word “infrastructure” has in the Australia Council for the Arts publication referred to above, which employs the term as part of a governmental and technocratic discourse (“The Arts in Regional Australia”). The distance separating these two usages of “infrastructure” indicates the difference between the quantitative and the qualitative. Working with Spivak, this article’s focus is on the gap or failing in the infrastructure of qualitative research that has led to the relative neglect of Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” as a significant text of regionalism. The Australia Council for the Arts, with its quantitative and empirical methodology, would not count Birch as a regional writer (to the best of the author’s knowledge, Birch lives and works in Melbourne). Its definition of a regional artist undermines the possibilities of a qualitative research infrastructure. However, recognizing the powerful regional concerns within a text by a primarily city-based writer like Birch is a key move, not only in expanding the definition of who counts as a minoritarian regional writer, but in giving voice to the “resistant speech” of women and children, subalterns on Spivak’s terms, within the regional-urban flux (Lahiri). The aim of this article is to give voice to Tony Birch as a regional writer, at least insofar as he is the author of “The Red House”, while also addressing the issue of well-being (as linked to the curse of domestic violence), through attention to Birch’s artistic re-creation of regionalism. In this way, working with Spivak’s reference to “infrastructure,” the aim is to nurture the growth of a research infrastructure open to a more productive engagement with regionalism, which begins by nuancing the definition of regional. It is not that regional artists, defined either by their demography or (as with Birch) by their creative concerns, are not “talking” rather, what they are saying is not being recognised in Spivak’s strong sense of “speaking”. Indeed, the very fact that Birch is not a regional writer in an empirical sense, and that, as will be explored later in this article, “The Red House” is not even primarily set in a regional location, has at least one important consequence. Potentially, it increases the value of Birch’s short story to an engagement with regionalism, given that “The Red House” unfolds regionalism as a concept always already in productive dialogue with other frameworks of place (such as the urban and the international). To the extent that Birch is a city-based writer of regionalism, and thus on the (urban) margin of the (regional) margin, he enlivens an exquisite position of minoritarian power. Furthermore, “The Red House” contains a diversity of acute insights into the nexus of regionalism and well-being that, to date, critics have overlooked. “The Red House” and the Well-Being of Places Comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to creative work that itself dramatises and interrogates the issue of regional well-being. Tony Birch’s short story “The Red House” (2006), from his collection of linked stories (which is sometimes referred to as a novel) Shadowboxing, is a particularly interesting candidate to fill this gap in the literature, given how delicately it ranges across, and problematises, the division between the urban and the regional.“The Red House” is the opening story of Shadowboxing. Covering a period of close to a decade, loosely overlapping with the 1960s, and set in different parts of Victoria and Melbourne, it is told in the voice of Michael, who recounts the story of a peripatetic family under stress and struggling to survive. The first sentence reads: “We moved to the red house in the winter after my younger sister, May, died of meningitis” (1). The first page also establishes the place-based coordinates of the story: “In the weeks following our move from Clunes back to Fitzroy, our new house was almost submerged by a rising flood” (1). Birch’s interrogation of regionalism will henceforth operate largely along the Clunes-Fitzroy axis. Fitzroy is an inner-city suburb of Melbourne while Clunes is a small regional town (present population: approximately 2000) about 140 kilometres north-west of Melbourne (Clunes). A flashback section of three pages or so, early on in the story, fills in the events leading up to the return to Melbourne after May’s death in Clunes. Apart from this, the story has a linear structure. The various spatial shifts of “The Red House”, both within Melbourne and between Clunes and Melbourne, are all triggered by threats against, or the pursuit of, multiple modes of well-being. The first move reflects the promise of a fresh romantic union: “It was only after he [Michael’s father] had met my mother and moved with her to my [maternal] grandmother’s house over in Carlton that he had left Fitzroy for the first time in his life” (4–5). This move from Fitzroy to Carlton is followed by a much bigger one: Carlton to Clunes. Implicated in this move are at least two modes of well-being: “The eventual move to the bush had come on the advice of a doctor at the public hospital. He said that the fresh air would help my dad recover from [his] asthma” (5); however, “My grandmother told me years later that the move did not really have all that much to do with his asthma. It was the drink” (5). The context is the husband’s assault of “his six months’ pregnant wife” with “a straight right on the end of her nose” (5). The decision to move to Clunes is made by Michael’s mother: “He fought with her so much that my mother eventually decided that she would have to move away from her mother’s house, for both their sakes. Clunes was a drastic move. But it worked, for a time […]. They appeared happy” (6). This part of “The Red House” unpacks the complexities of how well-being and (physical and mental) health are linked in a social matrix; a physical ailment (asthma) elides an addiction to alcohol, until a doctor’s discourse (validated by the authority of a medical establishment) is subverted by the subalternate voice of Michael’s grandmother. This passage also dramatises the abject scenario of a victim (Michael’s mother) attending to the well-being of her persecutor (Michael’s father) by moving to Clunes “for both their sakes” (6).Subsequently, May is born in Clunes, “a ‘special baby’. She was magical even…” (6). Indeed, “My father’s habit of explosive anger melted before May. He was truly besotted with her” (6). Just before what would have been her second birthday, May dies. “My father wanted to bring May back to Melbourne for burial, but my mother stood up to him and demanded that she be buried in the town where she was born” (6). This is the most powerful enduring connection of Michael’s family to regional Clunes. Significantly, well-being (in the sense of survival and the rebuilding of happiness after the tragic death of a daughter) is dispersed differently, through place, by mother and father, along gendered lines. While the mother wants her daughter’s birthplace and place of death to coincide, the father wants to possess his daughter, almost as if she were an object, by returning her to the city for burial. (Space restrictions preclude further exploration here of the many issues raised by May’s death, including those around the gendered nexus between well-being [happiness] and the proximity or otherwise to a child’s burial place.) After May’s death, Michael’s father’s behaviour deteriorates once more. The domestic violence continues: “It was difficult for my mother to find anything safe to say to him […]. She tried to talk about May with him several times, but he either responded with silence, or swore and yelled at her uncontrollably. He also found his way back to the pubs” (7). The decision to return to Melbourne is made by Michael’s father, against his wife’s wishes: And then one night after he had walked in from the pub he sat down at the table and just said to her, ‘Fuck all this fresh-air bullshit, we’re going back to Melbourne.’ She tried persuading him to stay, talked about his job and my school, but he would not listen. He got sick of her talking and slammed a fist into his heavy palm. ‘We’re fucken going. That’s it. We’re going.’ And that was it.She looked across the table that night and saw once again the man she had married six years earlier, the man who she had deceived herself had faded and eventually disappeared with the move away from the city. (7)In this passage, well-being (even if only imagined rather than real) is explicitly linked to place. Shortly afterwards, the family moves into the red house, where they will remain. The flashback section of the text has already sketched out the chain of events that leads to the return to the city, while also commenting on the agency Michael’s mother exercises in dealing with what, to her, is an unwelcome situation: “Mum […] had argued against coming back to the city. She sensed the looming danger in my father moving back both to his old streets and his old habits. But on realising that she had no real say in the matter, she was determined to ensure that she at least have some say in the house she was moving into” (4). Specifically, Michael’s mother turns her Fitzroy house into the regional house left behind in Clunes. Under her influence, “It wasn’t long before the inside of the house came to life and began to resemble the old place at Clunes” (11). Again: she brings a portrait of May, along with assorted baby belongings, into the Fitzroy house, keeping this secret from her husband. Thus, Michael’s mother infiltrates regional place into urban place as a strategy of (subalternate) well-being. In summary, “The Red House” unpacks well-being as an expansive category shaped by domestic violence, in a negative sense, but also more positively by the actuality or promise of happiness. It also interrogates the fine-grained links between well-being in its incarnations as medical and emotional health. At the same time, it maps the rise and fall of well-being against a human geography of regional and urban places, refusing any simplistic connection of place to well-being (more faintly, there is even the problematising presence of international place, in the character of the Italian landlord, Mr Carboni, and the reference to “the local Italian community [2]). Thus, the text’s regionalism suggests a strategic model, reliant on human intervention in the (re-)creation of place; this is most evident in Michael’s mother’s actions. “The Red House” rewards interpretation as a text of how regional place (Clunes) is re-made in urban place (Fitzroy) through the rehabilitation of a house in the interests of well-being. Well-Being and Domestic Violence across Places It is hard to imagine a greater threat to the well-being of women and children than domestic violence. This makes it all the more surprising that “The Red House” is one of relatively few texts (to the author’s knowledge) to offer a detailed outline of the territory of well-being, in its many forms stretching from the health-based to the emotional, while also including a direct and unflinching consideration of domestic violence. (One cognate text is Kathryn Heyman’s novel The Breaking, which merges medical disability and domestic violence within a broader consideration of regional well-being.) Even more unusual is the way Birch’s story of well-being and domestic violence is mapped in relation to regional and non-regional places. “The Red House” is rare and valuable for its triangulation of well-being, domestic violence, and place; above all, in its refusal to resort to any comforting notion that regional places have essential qualities that make them necessarily better for well-being than the experience of cities. This is perhaps the meaning of the colour of the red house, a colour Michael’s father hates. According to a local know-all, Emu Bailey, the red was originally a form of protest by Ettie Rogers, “‘some sort of communist’” (10). “‘Most everyone around here back then was DLP [Democratic Labour Party]. Still is, some of them. Ettie wasn’t in agreement with the others in the street, so she let them know all about it. Redone it every summer too, the same colour, red’” (10). When Michael’s mother responds to her husband’s injunction to re-paint the house “‘any colour but that fucken red’” (13) by preparing to re-paint it, subversively, “a deep red splash of colour” (19) it is not difficult to discern a silent protest, passed down from woman to woman, against the domestic violence suffered by Michael and his mother. Indeed, Birch comes very close to describing the red of the house as blood-like, labelling it “a rich congealed red” (2). “Congealed” is often used to describe blood. In this way, through a colour that evokes the body, a house becomes a visible and metaphorical protest against the bodily violence (but also emotional and mental torment) that is domestic violence. As Meg Mundell argues, “the body is integral to how literary sense of place is produced” (8). This bodily, coloured protest folds back into the special sort of place the Fitzroy home becomes. If Michael’s mother cannot keep living in Clunes, she can at least paint her city house red. Perhaps attesting to the success of this female protest, there is, towards the end of “The Red House”, a fascinating moment when, as if influenced by the domestic circumstances of transplanted place (from regional Clunes) created by Michael’s mother, domestic violence threatens, but is thwarted. Michael’s mother has just told her husband that she is going to have another baby: “He spun around and moved towards her. I thought that maybe he was going to hit her. But he didn’t. He stopped in front of her. They were toe to toe” (17). Place and (pregnant) body, in an intensified combination (or even, to riff on Spivak’s terminology, as an “infrastructure”), allow the subaltern to “speak” against her oppression. Conclusion: Re-Defining Regionalism through the Literary Creative Arts Tony Birch’s “The Red House” re-creates the regional as something other than a pre-determined place. Regionalism is “activated,” in a strategic mode, within the flux of the urban and the regional. This is particularly evident in the actions of Michael’s mother. She preserves her well-being (located in Clunes, as it were, where her daughter is buried) even after she is forced by her husband to return to Melbourne (the place she left to escape from his domestic violence). The picture of May acts as a talisman of well-being (aptly, given Clunes is described by Michael as “a town where old superstitions held sway over logic” [6]), which Michael’s mother smuggles from regional Clunes into her Melbourne house. “The Red House” is thus a vital literary rejoinder to the conceptualisation of well-being, and regional areas employed by government bodies and commercial entities, which instrumentalizes a binary opposition of the regional/non-regional. By extension, it contests the naïve linkage of regional place to well-being through a nuanced investigation into the complex links between place (regional, urban, even international) and multi-faceted well-being. Birch’s story is a valuable, fine-grained creative analysis of well-being (extending from happiness, comfort and security through to what might be called the “ill-being” of domestic violence), which is matched to an equally fine-grained engagement with multiple modalities of place. It challenges the reader to creatively re-think how regionalism and well-being might align. References Australia Council for the Arts. “Living Culture: First Nations Arts Participation and Wellbeing.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/living-culture/>.———. “The Arts in Regional Australia: A Research Summary.” Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/regional-arts-summary/>.Birch, Tony. “The Red House.” Shadowboxing. Melbourne: Scribe, 2006. 1–19. Clunes, Victoria. Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clunes,_Victoria>.Drummond, Rozalind, Jondi Keane, and Patrick West. “Zones of Practice: Embodiment and Creative Arts Research.” M/C Journal 15.4 (2012). 1 Mar. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/528>.Elg, Hayley. “New Wellness Festival for Daylesford.” The Advocate 22 Jan. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.hepburnadvocate.com.au/story/5182322/the-live-love-life-festival-is-coming-to-daylesford-this-november/>.Heyman, Kathryn. “When I First Wrote about Domestic Violence, No One Talked about It. Now the Shame has Lifted.” The Guardian. 21 May 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/21/when-i-first-wrote-about-domestic-violence-no-one-talked-about-it-now-the-shame-has-lifted>.Lahiri, Bulan. “In Conversation: Speaking to Spivak.” The Hindu 5 Feb. 2011. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.thehindu.com/books/In-Conversation-Speaking-to-Spivak/article15130635.ece>.Mundell, Meg. “Crafting ‘Literary Sense of Place’: The Generative Work of Literary Place-Making.” JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 18.1 (2018): 1–17. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/12375>.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 66–111. Warren, Brad, and Patrick West. “From Ecological Creativity to an Ecology of Well-Being: ‘Flows & Catchments’ as a Case Study of NVivo.” Landscapes: The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language 5.2 (2013): 1–15. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol5/iss2/21/>.Woodward, Margaret, Craig Bremner, and Anthony Cahalan. “Defining the Geography of Creativity in a Regional Australian University.” Proceedings of the 2012 Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference: Region and Isolation: The Changing Function of Art & Design Education within Diasporic Cultures and Borderless Communities. Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) Conference 2012. Perth: Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS), 2012: 1–13. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://acuads.com.au/conference/article/defining-the-geography-of-creativity-in-a-regional-australian-university/>.

At a time when a trip abroad was out of the reach of most women, even if they could not make the journey, Australian women could imagine “abroad” just by reading popular women’s magazines such as Woman (later Woman’s Day and Home then Woman’s Day) and The Australian Women’s Weekly, and journals, such as The Progressive Woman and The Housewife. Increasingly in the post-war period, these magazines and journals contained advertisements for holidaying abroad, recipes for international foods and articles on overseas fashions. It was not unusual for local manufacturers, to use the lure of travel and exotic places as a way of marketing their goods. Healing Bicycles, for example, used the slogan “In Venice men go to work on Gondolas: In Australia it’s a Healing” (“Healing Cycles” 40), and Exotiq cosmetics featured landscapes of countries where Exotiq products had “captured the hearts of women who treasured their loveliness: Cincinnati, Milan, New York, Paris, Geneva and Budapest” (“Exotiq Cosmetics” 36).Unlike Homer’s Penelope, who stayed at home for twenty years waiting for Odysseus to return from the Trojan wars, women have always been on the move to the same extent as men. Their rich travel stories (Riggal, Haysom, Lancaster)—mostly written as letters and diaries—remain largely unpublished and their experiences are not part of the public record to the same extent as the travel stories of men. Ros Pesman argues that the women traveller’s voice was one of privilege and authority full of excitement and disbelief (Pesman 26). She notes that until well into the second part of the twentieth century, “the journey for Australian women to Europe was much more than a return to the sources of family identity and history” (19). It was also:a pilgrimage to the centres and sites of culture, literature and history and an encounter with “the real world.”Europe, and particularly London,was also the place of authority and reference for all those seeking accreditation and recognition, whether as real writers, real ladies or real politicians and statesmen. (19)This article is about two Australian writers; Helen Seager, a journalist employed by The Argus, a daily newspaper in Melbourne Australia, and Gwen Hughes, a graduate of Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy in Melbourne, working in England as a lecturer, demonstrator and cookbook writer for Parkinsons’ Stove Company. Helen Seager travelled to England on an assignment for The Argus in 1950 and sent articles each day for publication in the women’s section of the newspaper. Gwen Hughes travelled extensively in the Balkans in the 1930s recording her impressions, observations, and recipes for traditional foods whilst working for Parkinsons in England. These women were neither returning to the homeland for an encounter with the real world, nor were they there as cultural tourists in the Cook’s Tour sense of the word. They were professional writers and their observations about the places they visited offer fresh and lively versions of England and Europe, its people, places, and customs.Helen SeagerAustralian Journalist Helen Seager (1901–1981) wrote a daily column, Good Morning Ma’am in the women’s pages of The Argus, from 1947 until shortly after her return from abroad in 1950. Seager wrote human interest stories, often about people of note (Golding), but with a twist; a Baroness who finds knitting exciting (Seager, “Baroness” 9) and ballet dancers backstage (Seager, “Ballet” 10). Much-loved by her mainly female readership, in May 1950 The Argus sent her to England where she would file a daily report of her travels. Whilst now we take travel for granted, Seager was sent abroad with letters of introduction from The Argus, stating that she was travelling on a special editorial assignment which included: a certificate signed by the Lord Mayor of The City of Melbourne, seeking that any courtesies be extended on her trip to England, the Continent, and America; a recommendation from the Consul General of France in Australia; and introductions from the Premier’s Department, the Premier of Victoria, and Austria’s representative in Australia. All noted the nature of her trip, her status as an esteemed reporter for a Melbourne newspaper, and requested that any courtesy possible to be made to her.This assignment was an indication that The Argus valued its women readers. Her expenses, and those of her ten-year-old daughter Harriet, who accompanied her, were covered by the newspaper. Her popularity with her readership is apparent by the enthusiastic tone of the editorial article covering her departure. Accompanied with a photograph of Seager and Harriet boarding the aeroplane, her many women readers were treated to their first ever picture of what she looked like:THOUSANDS of "Argus" readers, particularly those in the country, have wanted to know what Helen Seager looks like. Here she is, waving good-bye as she left on the first stage of a trip to England yesterday. She will be writing her bright “Good Morning, Ma'am” feature as she travels—giving her commentary on life abroad. (The Argus, “Goodbye” 1)Figure 1. Helen Seager and her daughter Harriet board their flight for EnglandThe first article “From Helen in London” read,our Helen Seager, after busy days spent exploring England with her 10-year-old daughter, Harriet, today cabled her first “Good Morning, Ma’am” column from abroad. Each day from now on she will report from London her lively impressions in an old land, which is delightfully new to her. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Whilst some of her dispatches contain the impressions of the awestruck traveller, for the most they are exquisitely observed stories of the everyday and the ordinary, often about the seemingly most trivial of things, and give a colourful, colonial and egalitarian impression of the places that she visits. A West End hair-do is described, “as I walked into that posh looking establishment, full of Louis XV, gold ornateness to be received with bows from the waist by numerous satellites, my first reaction was to turn and bolt” (Seager, “West End” 3).When she visits Oxford’s literary establishments, she is, for this particular article, the awestruck Australian:In Oxford, you go around saying, soto voce and aloud, “Oh, ye dreaming spires of Oxford.” And Matthew Arnold comes alive again as a close personal friend.In a weekend, Ma’am, I have seen more of Oxford than lots of native Oxonians. I have stood and brooded over the spit in Christ Church College’s underground kitchens on which the oxen for Henry the Eighth were roasted.I have seen the Merton Library, oldest in Oxford, in which the chains that imprisoned the books are still to be seen, and have added by shoe scrape to the stone steps worn down by 500 years of walkers. I have walked the old churches, and I have been lost in wonder at the goodly virtues of the dead. And then, those names of Oxford! Holywell, Tom’s Quad, Friars’ Entry, and Long Wall. The gargoyles at Magdalen and the stones untouched by bombs or war’s destruction. It adds a new importance to human beings to know that once, if only, they too have walked and stood and stared. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Her sense of wonder whilst in Oxford is, however, moderated by the practicalities of travel incorporated into the article. She continues to describe the warnings she was given, before her departure, of foreign travel that had her alarmed about loss and theft, and the care she took to avoid both. “It would have made you laugh, Ma’am, could you have seen the antics to protect personal property in the countries in transit” (Seager, “From Helen” 3).Her description of a trip to Blenheim Palace shows her sense of fun. She does not attempt to describe the palace or its contents, “Blenheim Palace is too vast and too like a great Government building to arouse much envy,” settling instead on a curiosity should there be a turn of events, “as I surged through its great halls with a good-tempered, jostling mob I couldn’t help wondering what those tired pale-faced guides would do if the mob mood changed and it started on an old-fashioned ransack.” Blenheim palace did not impress her as much as did the Sunday crowd at the palace:The only thing I really took a fancy to were the Venetian cradle, which was used during the infancy of the present Duke and a fine Savvonerie carpet in the same room. What I never wanted to see again was the rubbed-fur collar of the lady in front.Sunday’s crowd was typically English, Good tempered, and full of Cockney wit, and, if you choose to take your pleasures in the mass, it is as good a company as any to be in. (Seager, “We Look” 3)In a description of Dublin and the Dubliners, Seager describes the food-laden shops: “Butchers’ shops leave little room for customers with their great meat carcasses hanging from every hook. … English visitors—and Dublin is awash with them—make an orgy of the cakes that ooze real cream, the pink and juicy hams, and the sweets that demand no points” (Seager, “English” 6). She reports on the humanity of Dublin and Dubliners, “Dublin has a charm that is deep-laid. It springs from the people themselves. Their courtesy is overlaid with a real interest in humanity. They walk and talk, these Dubliners, like Kings” (ibid.).In Paris she melds the ordinary with the noteworthy:I had always imagined that the outside of the Louvre was like and big art gallery. Now that I know it as a series of palaces with courtyards and gardens beyond description in the daytime, and last night, with its cleverly lighted fountains all aplay, its flags and coloured lights, I will never forget it.Just now, down in the street below, somebody is packing the boot of a car to go for, presumably, on a few days’ jaunt. There is one suitcase, maybe with clothes, and on the footpath 47 bottles of the most beautiful wines in the world. (Seager, “When” 3)She writes with a mix of awe and ordinary:My first glimpse of that exciting vista of the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, and the little bistros that I’ve always wanted to see, and all the delights of a new city, […] My first day in Paris, Ma’am, has not taken one whit from the glory that was London. (ibid.) Figure 2: Helen Seager in ParisIt is my belief that Helen Seager intended to do something with her writings abroad. The articles have been cut from The Argus and pasted onto sheets of paper. She has kept copies of the original reports filed whist she was away. The collection shows her insightful egalitarian eye and a sharp humour, a mix of awesome and commonplace.On Bastille Day in 1950, Seager wrote about the celebrations in Paris. Her article is one of exuberant enthusiasm. She writes joyfully about sirens screaming overhead, and people in the street, and looking from windows. Her article, published on 19 July, starts:Paris Ma’am is a magical city. I will never cease to be grateful that I arrived on a day when every thing went wrong, and watched it blossom before my eyes into a gayness that makes our Melbourne Cup gala seem funeral in comparison.Today is July 14.All places of business are closed for five days and only the places of amusement await the world.Parisians are tireless in their celebrations.I went to sleep to the music of bands, dancing feet and singing voices, with the raucous but cheerful toots from motors splitting the night air onto atoms. (Seager, “When” 3)This article resonates uneasiness. How easily could those scenes of celebration on Bastille Day in 1950 be changed into the scenes of carnage on Bastille Day 2016, the cheerful toots of the motors transformed into cries of fear, the sirens in the sky from aeroplanes overhead into the sirens of ambulances and police vehicles, as a Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, as part of a terror attack drives a truck through crowds of people celebrating in Nice.Gwen HughesGwen Hughes graduated from Emily Macpherson College of Domestic Economy with a Diploma of Domestic Science, before she travelled to England to take up employment as senior lecturer and demonstrator of Parkinson’s England, a company that manufactured electric and gas stoves. Hughes wrote in her unpublished manuscript, Balkan Fever, that it was her idea of making ordinary cooking demonstration lessons dramatic and homelike that landed her the job in England (Hughes, Balkan 25-26).Her cookbook, Perfect Cooking, was produced to encourage housewives to enjoy cooking with their Parkinson’s modern cookers with the new Adjusto temperature control. The message she had to convey for Parkinsons was: “Cooking is a matter of putting the right ingredients together and cooking them at the right temperature to achieve a given result” (Hughes, Perfect 3). In reality, Hughes used this cookbook as a vehicle to share her interest in and love of Continental food, especially food from the Balkans where she travelled extensively in the 1930s.Recipes of Continental foods published in Perfect Cooking sit seamlessly alongside traditional British foods. The section on soup, for example, contains recipes for Borscht, a very good soup cooked by the peasants of Russia; Minestrone, an everyday Italian soup; Escudella, from Spain; and Cream of Spinach Soup from France (Perfect 22-23). Hughes devoted a whole chapter to recipes and descriptions of Continental foods labelled “Fascinating Foods From Far Countries,” showing her love and fascination with food and travel. She started this chapter with the observation:There is nearly as much excitement and romance, and, perhaps fear, about sampling a “foreign dish” for the “home stayer” as there is in actually being there for the more adventurous “home leaver”. Let us have a little have a little cruise safe within the comfort of our British homes. Let us try and taste the good things each country is famed for, all the while picturing the romantic setting of these dishes. (Hughes, Perfect 255)Through her recipes and descriptive passages, Hughes took housewives in England and Australia into the strange and wonderful kitchens of exotic women: Madame Darinka Jocanovic in Belgrade, Miss Anicka Zmelova in Prague, Madame Mrskosova at Benesova. These women taught her to make wonderful-sounding foods such as Apfel Strudel, Knedlikcy, Vanilla Kipfel and Christmas Stars. “Who would not enjoy the famous ‘Goose with Dumplings,’” she declares, “in the company of these gay, brave, thoughtful people with their romantic history, their gorgeously appareled peasants set in their richly picturesque scenery” (Perfect 255).It is Hughes’ unpublished manuscript Balkan Fever, written in Melbourne in 1943, to which I now turn. It is part of the Latrobe Heritage collection at the State Library of Victoria. Her manuscript was based on her extensive travels in the Balkans in the 1930s whilst she lived and worked in England, and it was, I suspect, her intention to seek publication.In her twenties, Hughes describes how she set off to the Balkans after meeting a fellow member of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW) at the Royal Yugoslav Legation. He was an expert on village life in the Balkans and advised her, that as a writer she would get more information from the local villagers than she would as a tourist. Hughes, who, before television gave cooking demonstrations on the radio, wrote, “I had been writing down recipes and putting them in books for years and of course the things one talks about over the air have to be written down first—that seemed fair enough” (Hughes, Balkan 25-26). There is nothing of the awestruck traveller in Hughes’ richly detailed observations of the people and the places that she visited. “Travelling in the Balkans is a very different affair from travelling in tourist-conscious countries where you just leave it to Cooks. You must either have unlimited time at your disposal, know the language or else have introductions that will enable the right arrangements to be made for you” (Balkan 2), she wrote. She was the experiential tourist, deeply immersed in her surroundings and recording food culture and society as it was.Hughes acknowledged that she was always drawn away from the cities to seek the real life of the people. “It’s to the country district you must go to find the real flavour of a country and the heart of its people—especially in the Balkans where such a large percentage of the population is agricultural” (Balkan 59). Her descriptions in Balkan Fever are a blend of geography, history, culture, national songs, folklore, national costumes, food, embroidery, and vivid observation of the everyday city life. She made little mention of stately homes or buildings. Her attitude to travel can be summed up in her own words:there are so many things to see and learn in the countries of the old world that, walking with eyes and mind wide open can be an immensely delightful pastime, even with no companion and nowhere to go. An hour or two spent in some unpretentious coffee house can be worth all the dinners at Quaglino’s or at The Ritz, if your companion is a good talker, a specialist in your subject, or knows something of the politics and the inner life of the country you are in. (Balkan 28)Rather than touring the grand cities, she was seduced by the market places with their abundance of food, colour, and action. Describing Sarajevo she wrote:On market day the main square is a blaze of colour and movement, the buyers no less colourful than the peasants who have come in from the farms around with their produce—cream cheese, eggs, chickens, fruit and vegetables. Handmade carpets hung up for sale against walls or from trees add their barbaric colour to the splendor of the scene. (Balkan 75)Markets she visited come to life through her vivid descriptions:Oh those markets, with the gorgeous colours, and heaped untidiness of the fruits and vegetables—paprika, those red and green peppers! Every kind of melon, grape and tomato contributing to the riot of colour. Then there were the fascinating peasant embroideries, laces and rich parts of old costumes brought in from the villages for sale. The lovely gay old embroideries were just laid out on a narrow carpet spread along the pavement or hung from a tree if one happened to be there. (Balkan 11)Perhaps it was her radio cooking shows that gave her the ability to make her descriptions sensorial and pictorial:We tasted luxurious foods, fish, chickens, fruits, wines, and liqueurs. All products of the country. Perfect ambrosial nectar of the gods. I was entirely seduced by the rose petal syrup, fragrant and aromatic, a red drink made from the petals of the darkest red roses. (Balkan 151)Ordinary places and everyday events are beautifully realised:We visited the cheese factory amongst other things. … It was curious to see in that far away spot such a quantity of neatly arranged cheeses in the curing chamber, being prepared for export, and in another room the primitive looking round balls of creamed cheese suspended from rafters. Later we saw trains of pack horses going over the mountains, and these were probably the bearers of these cheeses to Bitolj or Skoplje, whence they would be consigned further for export. (Balkan 182)ConclusionReading Seager and Hughes, one cannot help but be swept along on their travels and take part in their journeys. What is clear, is that they were inspired by their work, which is reflected in the way they wrote about the places they visited. Both sought out people and places that were, as Hughes so vividly puts it, not part of the Cook’s Tour. They travelled with their eyes wide open for experiences that were both new and normal, making their writing relevant even today. Written in Paris on Bastille Day 1950, Seager’s Bastille Day article is poignant when compared to Bastille Day in France in 2016. Hughes’s descriptions of Sarajevo are a far cry from the scenes of destruction in that city between 1992 and 1995. The travel writing of these two women offers us vivid impressions and images of the often unreported events, places, daily lives, and industry of the ordinary and the then every day, and remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.Pesman writes, “women have always been on the move and Australian women have been as numerous as passengers on the outbound ships as have men” (20), but the records of their travels seldom appear on the public record. Whilst their work-related writings are part of the public record (see Haysom; Lancaster; Riggal), this body of women’s travel writing has not received the attention it deserves. Hughes’ cookbooks, with their traditional Eastern European recipes and evocative descriptions of people and kitchens, are only there for the researcher who knows that cookbooks are a trove of valuable social and cultural material. Digital copies of Seager’s writing can be accessed on Trove (a digital repository), but there is little else about her or her body of writing on the public record.ReferencesThe Argus. “Goodbye Ma’am.” 26 May 1950: 1. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22831285?searchTerm=Goodbye%20Ma%E2%80%99am%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.“Exotiq Cosmetics.” Advertisement. Woman 20 Aug. 1945: 36.Golding, Peter. “Just a Chattel of the Sale: A Mostly Light-Hearted Retrospective of a Diverse Life.” In Jim Usher, ed., The Argus: Life & Death of Newspaper. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing 2007.Haysom, Ida. Diaries and Photographs of Ida Haysom. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1637361>.“Healing Cycles.” Advertisement. Woman 27 Aug. 1945: 40. Hughes, Gwen. Balkan Fever. Unpublished Manuscript. State Library of Victoria, MS 12985 Box 3846/4. 1943.———. Perfect Cooking London: Parkinsons, c1940.Lancaster, Rosemary. Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France 1880-1945. Crawley WA: UWA Press, 2008.Pesman, Ros. “Overseas Travel of Australian Women: Sources in the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library of Victoria.” The Latrobe Journal 58 (Spring 1996): 19-26.Riggal, Louie. (Louise Blanche.) Diary of Italian Tour 1905 February 21 - May 1. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1635602>.Seager, Helen. “Ballet Dancers Backstage.” The Argus 10 Aug. 1944: 10. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11356057?searchTerm=Ballet%20Dancers%20Backstage&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “The Baroness Who Finds Knitting Exciting.” The Argus 1 Aug. 1944: 9. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11354557?searchTerm=Helen%20seager%20Baroness&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “English Visitors Have a Food Spree in Eire.” The Argus 29 Sep. 1950: 6. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22912011?searchTerm=English%20visitors%20have%20a%20spree%20in%20Eire&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “From Helen in London.” The Argus 20 June 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22836738?searchTerm=From%20Helen%20in%20London&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “Helen Seager Storms Paris—Paris Falls.” The Argus 15 July 1950: 7.<http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906913?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Storms%20Paris%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “We Look over Blenheim Palace.” The Argus 28 Sep. 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22902040?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Its%20as%20a%20good%20a%20place%20as%20you%20would%20want%20to%20be&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “West End Hair-Do Was Fun.” The Argus 3 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22913940?searchTerm=West%20End%20hair-do%20was%20fun%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “When You Are in Paris on July 14.” The Argus 19 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906244?searchTerm=When%20you%20are%20in%20Paris%20on%20July%2014&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.

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.

IntroductionFood Studies is a relatively recent area of research enquiry in Australia and Magazine Studies is even newer (Le Masurier and Johinke), with the consequence that Australian culinary magazines are only just beginning to be investigated. Moreover, although many major libraries have not thought such popular magazines worthy of sustained collection (Fox and Sornil), considering these publications is important. As de Certeau argues, it can be of considerable consequence to identify and analyse everyday practices (such as producing and reading popular magazines) that seem so minor and insignificant as to be unworthy of notice, as these practices have the ability to affect our lives. It is important in this case as these publications were part of the post-war gastronomic environment in Australia in which national tastes in domestic cookery became radically internationalised (Santich). To further investigate Australian magazines, as well as suggesting how these cosmopolitan eating habits became more widely embraced, this article will survey the various ways in which the idea of “abroad” is expressed in one Australian culinary serial from the post-war period, Australian Wines & Food Quarterly magazine, which was published from 1956 to 1960. The methodological approach taken is an historically-informed content analysis (Krippendorff) of relevant material from these magazines combined with germane media data (Hodder). All issues in the serial’s print run have been considered.Australian Post-War Culinary PublishingTo date, studies of 1950s writing in Australia have largely focused on literary and popular fiction (Johnson-Wood; Webby) and literary criticism (Bird; Dixon; Lee). There have been far fewer studies of non-fiction writing of any kind, although some serial publications from this time have attracted some attention (Bell; Lindesay; Ross; Sheridan; Warner-Smith; White; White). In line with studies internationally, groundbreaking work in Australian food history has focused on cookbooks, and includes work by Supski, who notes that despite the fact that buying cookbooks was “regarded as a luxury in the 1950s” (87), such publications were an important information source in terms of “developing, consolidating and extending foodmaking knowledge” at that time (85).It is widely believed that changes to Australian foodways were brought about by significant post-war immigration and the recipes and dishes these immigrants shared with neighbours, friends, and work colleagues and more widely afield when they opened cafes and restaurants (Newton; Newton; Manfredi). Although these immigrants did bring new culinary flavours and habits with them, the overarching rhetoric guiding population policy at this time was assimilation, with migrants expected to abandon their culture, language, and habits in favour of the dominant British-influenced ways of living (Postiglione). While migrants often did retain their foodways (Risson), the relationship between such food habits and the increasingly cosmopolitan Australian food culture is much more complex than the dominant cultural narrative would have us believe. It has been pointed out, for example, that while the haute cuisine of countries such as France, Italy, and Germany was much admired in Australia and emulated in expensive dining (Brien and Vincent), migrants’ own preference for their own dishes instead of Anglo-Australian choices, was not understood (Postiglione). Duruz has added how individual diets are eclectic, “multi-layered and hybrid” (377), incorporating foods from both that person’s own background with others available for a range of reasons including availability, cost, taste, and fashion. In such an environment, popular culinary publishing, in terms of cookbooks, specialist magazines, and recipe and other food-related columns in general magazines and newspapers, can be posited to be another element contributing to this change.Australian Wines & Food QuarterlyAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly (AWFQ) is, as yet, a completely unexamined publication, and there appears to be only three complete sets of this magazine held in public collections. It is important to note that, at the time it was launched in the mid-1950s, food writing played a much less significant part in Australian popular publishing than it does today, with far fewer cookbooks released than today, and women’s magazines and the women’s pages of newspapers containing only small recipe sections. In this environment, a new specialist culinary magazine could be seen to be timely, an audacious gamble, or both.All issues of this magazine were produced and printed in, and distributed from, Melbourne, Australia. Although no sales or distribution figures are available, production was obviously a struggle, with only 15 issues published before the magazine folded at the end of 1960. The title of the magazine changed over this time, and issue release dates are erratic, as is the method in which volumes and issues are numbered. Although the number of pages varied from 32 up to 52, and then less once again, across the magazine’s life, the price was steadily reduced, ending up at less than half the original cover price. All issues were produced and edited by Donald Wallace, who also wrote much of the content, with contributions from family members, including his wife, Mollie Wallace, to write, illustrate, and produce photographs for the magazine.When considering the content of the magazine, most is quite familiar in culinary serials today, although AWFQ’s approach was radically innovative in Australia at this time when cookbooks, women’s magazines, and newspaper cookery sections focused on recipes, many of which were of cakes, biscuits, and other sweet baking (Bannerman). AWFQ not only featured many discursive essays and savory meals, it also featured much wine writing and review-style content as well as information about restaurant dining in each issue.Wine-Related ContentWine is certainly the most prominent of the content areas, with most issues of the magazine containing more wine-related content than any other. Moreover, in the early issues, most of the food content is about preparing dishes and/or meals that could be consumed alongside wines, although the proportion of food content increases as the magazine is published. This wine-related content takes a clearly international perspective on this topic. While many articles and advertisements, for example, narrate the long history of Australian wine growing—which goes back to early 19th century—these articles argue that Australia's vineyards and wineries measure up to international, and especially French, examples. In one such example, the author states that: “from the earliest times Australia’s wines have matched up to world standard” (“Wine” 25). This contest can be situated in Australia, where a leading restaurant (Caprice in Sydney) could be seen to not only “match up to” but also, indeed to, “challenge world standards” by serving Australian wines instead of imports (“Sydney” 33). So good, indeed, are Australian wines that when foreigners are surprised by their quality, this becomes newsworthy. This is evidenced in the following excerpt: “Nearly every English businessman who has come out to Australia in the last ten years … has diverted from his main discussion to comment on the high quality of Australian wine” (Seppelt, 3). In a similar nationalist vein, many articles feature overseas experts’ praise of Australian wines. Thus, visiting Italian violinist Giaconda de Vita shows a “keen appreciation of Australian wines” (“Violinist” 30), British actor Robert Speaight finds Grange Hermitage “an ideal wine” (“High Praise” 13), and the Swedish ambassador becomes their advocate (Ludbrook, “Advocate”).This competition could also be located overseas including when Australian wines are served at prestigious overseas events such as a dinner for members of the Overseas Press Club in New York (Australian Wines); sold from Seppelt’s new London cellars (Melbourne), or the equally new Australian Wine Centre in Soho (Australia Will); or, featured in exhibitions and promotions such as the Lausanne Trade Fair (Australia is Guest;“Wines at Lausanne), or the International Wine Fair in Yugoslavia (Australia Wins).Australia’s first Wine Festival was held in Melbourne in 1959 (Seppelt, “Wine Week”), the joint focus of which was the entertainment and instruction of the some 15,000 to 20,000 attendees who were expected. At its centre was a series of free wine tastings aiming to promote Australian wines to the “professional people of the community, as well as the general public and the housewife” (“Melbourne” 8), although admission had to be recommended by a wine retailer. These tastings were intended to build up the prestige of Australian wine when compared to international examples: “It is the high quality of our wines that we are proud of. That is the story to pass on—that Australian wine, at its best, is at least as good as any in the world and better than most” (“Melbourne” 8).There is also a focus on promoting wine drinking as a quotidian habit enjoyed abroad: “We have come a long way in less than twenty years […] An enormous number of husbands and wives look forward to a glass of sherry when the husband arrives home from work and before dinner, and a surprising number of ordinary people drink table wine quite un-selfconsciously” (Seppelt, “Advance” 3). However, despite an acknowledged increase in wine appreciation and drinking, there is also acknowledgement that this there was still some way to go in this aim as, for example, in the statement: “There is no reason why the enjoyment of table wines should not become an Australian custom” (Seppelt, “Advance” 4).The authority of European experts and European habits is drawn upon throughout the publication whether in philosophically-inflected treatises on wine drinking as a core part of civilised behaviour, or practically-focused articles about wine handling and serving (Keown; Seabrook; “Your Own”). Interestingly, a number of Australian experts are also quoted as stressing that these are guidelines, not strict rules: Crosby, for instance, states: “There is no ‘right wine.’ The wine to drink is the one you like, when and how you like it” (19), while the then-manager of Lindemans Wines is similarly reassuring in his guide to entertaining, stating that “strict adherence to the rules is not invariably wise” (Mackay 3). Tingey openly acknowledges that while the international-style of regularly drinking wine had “given more dignity and sophistication to the Australian way of life” (35), it should not be shrouded in snobbery.Food-Related ContentThe magazine’s cookery articles all feature international dishes, and certain foreign foods, recipes, and ways of eating and dining are clearly identified as “gourmet”. Cheese is certainly the most frequently mentioned “gourmet” food in the magazine, and is featured in every issue. These articles can be grouped into the following categories: understanding cheese (how it is made and the different varieties enjoyed internationally), how to consume cheese (in relation to other food and specific wines, and in which particular parts of a meal, again drawing on international practices), and cooking with cheese (mostly in what can be identified as “foreign” recipes).Some of this content is produced by Kraft Foods, a major advertiser in the magazine, and these articles and recipes generally focus on urging people to eat more, and varied international kinds of cheese, beyond the ubiquitous Australian cheddar. In terms of advertorials, both Kraft cheeses (as well as other advertisers) are mentioned by brand in recipes, while the companies are also profiled in adjacent articles. In the fourth issue, for instance, a full-page, infomercial-style advertisement, noting the different varieties of Kraft cheese and how to serve them, is published in the midst of a feature on cooking with various cheeses (“Cooking with Cheese”). This includes recipes for Swiss Cheese fondue and two pasta recipes: spaghetti and spicy tomato sauce, and a so-called Italian spaghetti with anchovies.Kraft’s company history states that in 1950, it was the first business in Australia to manufacture and market rindless cheese. Through these AWFQ advertisements and recipes, Kraft aggressively marketed this innovation, as well as its other new products as they were launched: mayonnaise, cheddar cheese portions, and Cracker Barrel Cheese in 1954; Philadelphia Cream Cheese, the first cream cheese to be produced commercially in Australia, in 1956; and, Coon Cheese in 1957. Not all Kraft products were seen, however, as “gourmet” enough for such a magazine. Kraft’s release of sliced Swiss Cheese in 1957, and processed cheese slices in 1959, for instance, both passed unremarked in either the magazine’s advertorial or recipes.An article by the Australian Dairy Produce Board urging consumers to “Be adventurous with Cheese” presented general consumer information including the “origin, characteristics and mode of serving” cheese accompanied by a recipe for a rich and exotic-sounding “Wine French Dressing with Blue Cheese” (Kennedy 18). This was followed in the next issue by an article discussing both now familiar and not-so familiar European cheese varieties: “Monterey, Tambo, Feta, Carraway, Samsoe, Taffel, Swiss, Edam, Mozzarella, Pecorino-Romano, Red Malling, Cacio Cavallo, Blue-Vein, Roman, Parmigiano, Kasseri, Ricotta and Pepato” (“Australia’s Natural” 23). Recipes for cheese fondues recur through the magazine, sometimes even multiple times in the same issue (see, for instance, “Cooking With Cheese”; “Cooking With Wine”; Pain). In comparison, butter, although used in many AWFQ’s recipes, was such a common local ingredient at this time that it was only granted one article over the entire run of the magazine, and this was largely about the much more unusual European-style unsalted butter (“An Expert”).Other international recipes that were repeated often include those for pasta (always spaghetti) as well as mayonnaise made with olive oil. Recurring sweets and desserts include sorbets and zabaglione from Italy, and flambéd crepes suzettes from France. While tabletop cooking is the epitome of sophistication and described as an international technique, baked Alaska (ice cream nestled on liquor-soaked cake, and baked in a meringue shell), hailing from America, is the most featured recipe in the magazine. Asian-inspired cuisine was rarely represented and even curry—long an Anglo-Australian staple—was mentioned only once in the magazine, in an article reprinted from the South African The National Hotelier, and which included a recipe alongside discussion of blending spices (“Curry”).Coffee was regularly featured in both articles and advertisements as a staple of the international gourmet kitchen (see, for example, Bancroft). Articles on the history, growing, marketing, blending, roasting, purchase, percolating and brewing, and serving of coffee were common during the magazine’s run, and are accompanied with advertisements for Bushell’s, Robert Timms’s and Masterfoods’s coffee ranges. AWFQ believed Australia’s growing coffee consumption was the result of increased participation in quality internationally-influenced dining experiences, whether in restaurants, the “scores of colourful coffee shops opening their doors to a new generation” (“Coffee” 39), or at home (Adams). Tea, traditionally the Australian hot drink of choice, is not mentioned once in the magazine (Brien).International Gourmet InnovationsAlso featured in the magazine are innovations in the Australian food world: new places to eat; new ways to cook, including a series of sometimes quite unusual appliances; and new ways to shop, with a profile of the first American-style supermarkets to open in Australia in this period. These are all seen as overseas innovations, but highly suited to Australia. The laws then controlling the service of alcohol are also much discussed, with many calls to relax the licensing laws which were seen as inhibiting civilised dining and drinking practices. The terms this was often couched in—most commonly in relation to the Olympic Games (held in Melbourne in 1956), but also in relation to tourism in general—are that these restrictive regulations were an embarrassment for Melbourne when considered in relation to international practices (see, for example, Ludbrook, “Present”). This was at a time when the nightly hotel closing time of 6.00 pm (and the performance of the notorious “six o’clock swill” in terms of drinking behaviour) was only repealed in Victoria in 1966 (Luckins).Embracing scientific approaches in the kitchen was largely seen to be an American habit. The promotion of the use of electricity in the kitchen, and the adoption of new electric appliances (Gas and Fuel; Gilbert “Striving”), was described not only as a “revolution that is being wrought in our homes”, but one that allowed increased levels of personal expression and fulfillment, in “increas[ing] the time and resources available to the housewife for the expression of her own personality in the management of her home” (Gilbert, “The Woman’s”). This mirrors the marketing of these modes of cooking and appliances in other media at this time, including in newspapers, radio, and other magazines. This included features on freezing food, however AWFQ introduced an international angle, by suggesting that recipe bases could be pre-prepared, frozen, and then defrosted to use in a range of international cookery (“Fresh”; “How to”; Kelvinator Australia). The then-new marvel of television—another American innovation—is also mentioned in the magazine ("Changing concepts"), although other nationalities are also invoked. The history of the French guild the Confrerie de la Chaine des Roitisseurs in 1248 is, for instance, used to promote an electric spit roaster that was part of a state-of-the-art gas stove (“Always”), and there are also advertisements for such appliances as the Gaggia expresso machine (“Lets”) which draw on both Italian historical antecedence and modern science.Supermarket and other forms of self-service shopping are identified as American-modern, with Australia’s first shopping mall lauded as the epitome of utopian progressiveness in terms of consumer practice. Judged to mark “a new era in Australian retailing” (“Regional” 12), the opening of Chadstone Regional Shopping Centre in suburban Melbourne on 4 October 1960, with its 83 tenants including “giant” supermarket Dickens, and free parking for 2,500 cars, was not only “one of the most up to date in the world” but “big even by American standards” (“Regional” 12, italics added), and was hailed as a step in Australia “catching up” with the United States in terms of mall shopping (“Regional” 12). This shopping centre featured international-styled dining options including Bistro Shiraz, an outdoor terrace restaurant that planned to operate as a bistro-snack bar by day and full-scale restaurant at night, and which was said to offer diners a “Persian flavor” (“Bistro”).ConclusionAustralian Wines & Food Quarterly was the first of a small number of culinary-focused Australian publications in the 1950s and 1960s which assisted in introducing a generation of readers to information about what were then seen as foreign foods and beverages only to be accessed and consumed abroad as well as a range of innovative international ideas regarding cookery and dining. For this reason, it can be posited that the magazine, although modest in the claims it made, marked a revolutionary moment in Australian culinary publishing. As yet, only slight traces can be found of its editor and publisher, Donald Wallace. The influence of AWFQ is, however, clearly evident in the two longer-lived magazines that were launched in the decade after AWFQ folded: Australian Gourmet Magazine and The Epicurean. Although these serials had a wider reach, an analysis of the 15 issues of AWFQ adds to an understanding of how ideas of foods, beverages, and culinary ideas and trends, imported from abroad were presented to an Australian readership in the 1950s, and contributed to how national foodways were beginning to change during that decade.ReferencesAdams, Jillian. “Australia’s American Coffee Culture.” Australian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 23–36.“Always to Roast on a Turning Spit.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 17.“An Expert on Butter.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 11.“Australia Is Guest Nation at Lausanne.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 18–19.“Australia’s Natural Cheeses.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 23.“Australia Will Be There.” The Magazine of Good Living: Australian Wines and Food 4.2 (1960): 14.“Australian Wines Served at New York Dinner.” Australian Wines & Food Quarterly 1.5 (1958): 16.“Australia Wins Six Gold Medals.” Australian Wines & Food: The Magazine of Good Living 2.11 (1959/1960): 3.Bancroft, P.A. “Let’s Make Some Coffee.” The Magazine of Good Living: The Australian Wine & Food 4.1 (1960): 10. 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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. 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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. 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Historians have often been compared with detectives; searching for clues as evidence of a mystery they are seeking to solve. I would prefer an association with food, making history like a trained cook who blends particular ingredients, some fresh, some traditional, using specific methods to create an object that is consumed. There are primary sources, fresh and raw ingredients that you often have to go to great lengths to procure, and secondary sources, prepared initially by someone else. The same recipe may yield different meals, the same meal may provoke different responses. On a continuum of approaches to history and food, there are those who approach both as a scientific endeavour and, at the other end of the spectrum, those who make history and food as art. Brought together, it is possible to see cookbooks as history in at least two important ways; they give meaning to the past by representing culinary heritage and they are in themselves sources of history as documents and blueprints for experiences that can be interpreted to represent the past. Many people read cookbooks and histories with no intention of preparing the meal or becoming a historian. I do a little of both. I enjoy reading history and cookbooks for pleasure but, as a historian, I also read them interchangeably; histories to understand cookbooks and cookbooks to find out more about the past. History and the past are different of course, despite their use in the English language. It is not possible to relive the past, we can only interpret it through the traces that remain. Even if a reader had an exact recipe and an antique stove, vegetables grown from heritage seeds in similar conditions, eggs and grains from the same region and employed the techniques his or her grandparents used, they could not replicate their experience of a meal. Undertaking those activities though would give a reader a sense of that experience. Active examination of the past is possible through the processes of research and writing, but it will always be an interpretation and not a reproduction of the past itself. Nevertheless, like other histories, cookbooks can convey a sense of what was important in a culture, and what contemporaries might draw on that can resonate a cultural past and make the food palatable. The way people eat relates to how they apply ideas and influences to the material resources and knowledge they have. Used in this way, cookbooks provide a rich and valuable way to look at the past. Histories, like cookbooks, are written in the present, inspired and conditioned by contemporary issues and attitudes and values. Major shifts in interpretation or new directions in historical studies have more often arisen from changes in political or theoretical preoccupations, generated by contemporary social events, rather than the recovery of new information. Likewise, the introduction of new ingredients or methods rely on contemporary acceptance, as well as familiarity. How particular versions of history and new recipes promote both the past and present is the concern of this paper. My focus below will be on the nineteenth century, although a much larger study would reveal the circumstances that separated that period from the changes that followed. Until the late nineteenth century Australians largely relied on cookbooks that were brought with them from England and on their own private recipe collection, and that influenced to a large extent the sort of food that they ate, although of course they had to improvise by supplementing with local ingredients. In the first book of recipes that was published in Australia, The English and Australian Cookery Book that appeared in 1864, Edward Abbott evoked the ‘roast beef of old England Oh’ (Bannerman, Dictionary). The use of such a potent symbol of English identity in the nineteenth century may seem inevitable, and colonists who could afford them tended to use their English cookbooks and the ingredients for many years, even after Abbott’s publication. New ingredients, however, were often adapted to fit in with familiar culinary expectations in the new setting. Abbott often drew on native and exotic ingredients to produce very familiar dishes that used English methods and principles: things like kangaroo stuffed with beef suet, breadcrumbs, parsley, shallots, marjoram, thyme, nutmeg, pepper, salt, cayenne, and egg. It was not until the 1890s that a much larger body of Australian cookbooks became available, but by this time the food supply was widely held to be secure and abundant and the cultivation of exotic foods in Australia like wheat and sheep and cattle had established a long and familiar food supply for English colonists. Abbott’s cookbook provides a record of the culinary heritage settlers brought with them to Australia and the contemporary circumstances they had to adapt to. Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide is an example of the popularity of British cookbooks in Australia. Beeton’s Kangaroo Tail Curry was included in the Australian cooking section of her household management (2860). In terms of structure it is important for historians as one of the first times, because Beeton started writing in the 1860s, that ingredients were clearly distinguished from the method. This actually still presents considerable problems for publishers. There is debate about whether that should necessarily be the case, because it takes up so much space on the page. Kangaroo Tail CurryIngredients:1 tail2 oz. Butter1 tablespoon of flour1 tablespoon of curry2 onions sliced1 sour apple cut into dice1 desert spoon of lemon juice3/4 pint of stocksaltMethod:Wash, blanch and dry the tail thoroughly and divide it at the joints. Fry the tail in hot butter, take it up, put it in the sliced onions, and fry them for 3 or 4 minutes without browning. Sprinkle in the flour and curry powder, and cook gently for at least 20 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the stock, apple, salt to taste, bring to the boil, stirring meanwhile, and replace the tail in the stew pan. Cover closely, and cook gently until tender, then add the lemon juice and more seasoning if necessary. Arrange the pieces of tail on a hot dish, strain the sauce over, and serve with boiled rice.Time: 2-3 hoursSufficient for 1 large dish. Although the steps are not clearly distinguished from each other the method is more systematic than earlier recipes. Within the one sentence, however, there are still two or three different sorts of tasks. The recipe also requires to some extent a degree of discretion, knowledge and experience of cooking. Beeton suggests adding things to taste, cooking something until it is tender, so experience or knowledge is necessary to fulfil the recipe. The meal also takes between two and three hours, which would be quite prohibitive for a lot of contemporary cooks. New recipes, like those produced in Delicious have recipes that you can do in ten minutes or half an hour. Historically, that is a new development that reveals a lot about contemporary conditions. By 1900, Australian interest in native food had pretty much dissolved from the record of cookbooks, although this would remain a feature of books for the English public who did not need to distinguish themselves from Indigenous people. Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide gave a selection of Australian recipes but they were primarily for the British public rather than the assumption that they were being cooked in Australia: kangaroo tail soup was cooked in the same way as ox tail soup; roast wallaby was compared to hare. The ingredients were wallaby, veal, milk and butter; and parrot pie was said to be not unlike one made of pigeons. The novelty value of such ingredients may have been of interest, rather than their practical use. However, they are all prepared in ways that would make them fairly familiar to European tastes. Introducing something new with the same sorts of ingredients could therefore proliferate the spread of other foods. The means by which ingredients were introduced to different regions reflects cultural exchanges, historical processes and the local environment. The adaptation of recipes to incorporate local ingredients likewise provides information about local traditions and contemporary conditions. Starting to see those ingredients as a two-way movement between looking at what might have been familiar to people and what might have been something that they had to do make do with because of what was necessarily available to them at that time tells us about their past as well as the times they are living in. Differences in the level of practical cooking knowledge also have a vital role to play in cookbook literature. Colin Bannerman has suggested that the shortage of domestic labour in Australia an important factor in supporting the growth of the cookbook industry in the late nineteenth century. The poor quality of Australian cooking was also an occasional theme in the press during the same time. The message was generally the same: bad food affected Australians’ physical, domestic, social and moral well-being and impeded progress towards civilisation and higher culture. The idea was really that Australians had to learn how to cook. Colin Bannerman (Acquired Tastes 19) explains the rise of domestic science in Australia as a product of growing interest in Australian cultural development and the curse of bad cookery, which encouraged support for teaching girls and women how to cook. Domestic Economy was integrated into the Victorian and New South Wales curriculum by the end of the nineteenth century. Australian women have faced constant criticism of their cooking skills but the decision to teach cooking shouldn’t necessarily be used to support that judgement. Placed in a broader framework is possible to see the support for a modern, scientific approach to food preparation as part of both the elevation of science and systematic knowledge in society more generally, and a transnational movement to raise the status of women’s role in society. It would also be misleading not to consider the transnational context. Australia’s first cookery teachers were from Britain. The domestic-science movement there can be traced to the congress on domestic economy held in Manchester in 1878, at roughly the same time as the movement was gaining strength in Australia. By the 1890s domestic economy was widely taught in both British and Australian schools, without British women facing the same denigration of their cooking skills. Other comparisons with Britain also resulted from Australia’s colonial heritage. People often commented on the quality of the ingredients in Australia and said they were more widely available than they were in England but much poorer in quality. Cookbooks emerged as a way of teaching people. Among the first to teach cookery skills was Mina Rawson, author of The Antipodean Cookery Book and the Kitchen Companion first published in 1885. The book was a compilation of her own recipes and remedies, and it organised and simplified food preparation for the ordinary housewife. But the book also included directions and guidance on things like household tasks and how to cure diseases. Cookbooks therefore were not completely distinct from other aspects of everyday life. They offered much more than culinary advice on how to cook a particular meal and can similarly be used by historians to comment on more than food. Mrs Rawson also knew that people had to make do. She included a lot of bush foods that you still do not get in a lot of Australian meals, ingredients that people could substitute for the English ones they were used to like pig weed. By the end of the nineteenth century cooking had become a recognised classroom subject, providing early training in domestic service, and textbooks teaching Australians how to cook also flourished. Measurements became much more uniform, the layout of cookbooks became more standardised and the procedure was clearly spelled out. This allowed companies to be able to sell their foods because it also meant that you could duplicate the recipes and they could potentially taste the same. It made cookbooks easier to use. The audience for these cookbooks were mostly young women directed to cooking as a way of encouraging social harmony. Cooking was elevated in lots of ways at this stage as a social responsibility. Cookbooks can also be seen as a representation of domestic life, and historically this prescribed the activities of men and women as being distinct The dominance of women in cookbooks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attested to the strength of that idea of separate spheres. The consequences of this though has been debated by historians: whether having that particular kind of market and the identification that women were making with each other also provided a forum for women’s voices and so became quite significant in women’s politics at a later date. Cookbooks have been a strategic marketing device for products and appliances. By the beginning of the twentieth century food companies began to print recipes on their packets and to release their own cookbooks to promote their products. Davis Gelatine produced its first free booklet in 1904 and other companies followed suit (1937). The largest gelatine factory was in New South Wales and according to Davis: ‘It bathed in sunshine and freshened with the light breezes of Botany all year round.’ These were the first lavishly illustrated Australian cookbooks. Such books were an attempt to promote new foods and also to sell local foods, many of which were overproduced – such as milk, and dried fruits – which provides insights into the supply chain. Cookbooks in some ways reflected the changing tastes of the public, their ideas, what they were doing and their own lifestyle. But they also helped to promote some of those sorts of changes too. Explaining the reason for cooking, Isabella Beeton put forward an historical account of the shift towards increasing enjoyment of it. She wrote: "In the past, only to live has been the greatest object of mankind, but by and by comforts are multiplied and accumulating riches create new wants. The object then is to not only live but to live economically, agreeably, tastefully and well. Accordingly the art of cookery commences and although the fruits of the earth, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field and the fish of the sea are still the only food of mankind, yet these are so prepared, improved and dressed by skill and ingenuity that they are the means of immeasurably extending the boundaries of human enjoyment. Everything that is edible and passes under the hands of cooks is more or less changed and assumes new forms, hence the influence of that functionary is immense upon the happiness of the household" (1249). Beeton anticipates a growing trend not just towards cooking and eating but an interest in what sustains cooking as a form of recreation. The history of cookbook publishing provides a glimpse into some of those things. The points that I have raised provide a means for historians to use cookbooks. Cookbooks can be considered in terms of what was eaten, by whom and how: who prepared the food, so to whom the books were actually directed? Clever books like Isabella Beeton’s were directed at both domestic servants and at wives, which gave them quite a big market. There are also changes in the inclusion of themes. Economy and frugality becomes quite significant, as do organisation and management at different times. Changes in the extent of detail, changes in authorship, whether it is women, men, doctors, health professionals, home economists and so on all reflect contemporary concerns. Many books had particular purposes as well, used to fund raise or promote a particular perspective, relate food reform and civic life which gives them a political agenda. Promotional literature produced by food and kitchen equipment companies were a form of advertising and quite significant to the history of cookbook publishing in Australia. Other themes include the influence of cookery school and home economics movements; advice on etiquette and entertaining; the influence of immigration and travel; the creation of culinary stars and authors of which we are all fairly familiar. Further themes include changes in ingredients, changes in advice about health and domestic medicine, and the impact of changes in social consciousness. It is necessary to place those changes in a more general historical context, but for a long time cookbooks have been ignored as a source of information in their own right about the period in which they were published and the kinds of social and political changes that we can see coming through. More than this active process of cooking with the books as well becomes a way of imagining the past in quite different ways than historians are often used to. Cookbooks are not just sources for historians, they are histories in themselves. The privileging of written and visual texts in postcolonial studies has meant other senses, taste and smell, are frequently neglected; and yet the cooking from historical cookbooks can provide an embodied, sensorial image of the past. From nineteenth century cookbooks it is possible to see that British foods were central to the colonial identity project in Australia, but the fact that “British” culinary culture was locally produced, challenges the idea of an “authentic” British cuisine which the colonies tried to replicate. By the time Abbot was advocating rabbit curry as an Australian family meal, back “at home” in England, it was not authentic Indian food but the British invention of curry power that was being incorporated into English cuisine culture. More than cooks, cookbook authors told a narrative that forged connections and disconnections with the past. They reflected the contemporary period and resonated with the culinary heritage of their readers. Cookbooks make history in multiple ways; by producing change, as the raw materials for making history and as historical narratives. References Abbott, Edward. The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as well as the Upper Ten Thousand. London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1864. Bannerman, Colin. Acquired Tastes: Celebrating Australia’s Culinary History. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1998. Bannerman, Colin. "Abbott, Edward (1801–1869)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. 21 May 2013. . Beeton, Isabella. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. New Ed. London and Melbourne: Ward, Lock and Co. Ltd., n.d. (c. 1909). Davis Gelatine. Davis Dainty Dishes. Rev ed. Sydney: Davis Gelatine Organization, 1937. Rawson, Lance Mrs. The Antipodean Cookery Book and Kitchen Companion. Melbourne: George Robertson & Co., 1897.

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: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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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>.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)We need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination … so we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts … each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest (Hulme 347). Acclaimed climate scientist, the late Stephen Schneider, made this comment in 1988. Later he regretted it and said that there are ways of using metaphors that can “convey both urgency and uncertainty” (Hulme 347). What Schneider encapsulates here is the great conundrum for those attempting to communicate climate change to the everyday public. How do scientists capture the public’s imagination and convey the desperation they feel about climate change, but do it ethically? If scientific findings are presented carefully, in boring technical jargon that few can understand, then they are unlikely to attract audiences or provide an impetus for behavioural change. “What can move someone to act?” asks communication theorists Susan Moser and Lisa Dilling (37). “If a red light blinks on in a cockpit” asks Donella Meadows, “should the pilot ignore it until in speaks in an unexcited tone? … Is there any way to say [it] sweetly? Patiently? If one did, would anyone pay attention?” (Moser and Dilling 37). In 2010 Tim Flannery was appointed Panasonic Chair in Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University. His main teaching role remains within the new science communication programme. One of the first things Flannery was emphatic about was acquainting students with Karl Popper and the origin of the scientific method. “There is no truth in science”, he proclaimed in his first lecture to students “only theories, hypotheses and falsifiabilities”. In other words, science’s epistemological limits are framed such that, as Michael Lemonick argues, “a statement that cannot be proven false is generally not considered to be scientific” (n.p., my emphasis). The impetus for the following paper emanates precisely from this issue of scientific uncertainty — more specifically from teaching a course with Tim Flannery called Communicating climate change to a highly motivated group of undergraduate science communication students. I attempt to illuminate how uncertainty is constructed differently by different groups and that the “public” does not necessarily interpret uncertainty in the same way the sciences do. This paper also analyses how doubt has been politicised and operates polemically in media coverage of climate change. As Andrew Gorman-Murray and Gordon Waitt highlight in an earlier issue of M/C Journal that focused on the climate-culture nexus, an understanding of the science alone is not adequate to deal with the cultural change necessary to address the challenges climate change brings (n.p). Far from being redundant in debates around climate change, the humanities have much to offer. Erosion of Trust in Science The objectives of Macquarie’s science communication program are far more ambitious than it can ever hope to achieve. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The initiative is a response to declining student numbers in maths and science programmes around the country and is designed to address the perceived lack of communication skills in science graduates that the Australian Council of Deans of Science identified in their 2001 report. According to Macquarie Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz’s blog, a broader, and much more ambitious aim of the program is to “restore public trust in science and scientists in the face of widespread cynicism” (n.p.). In recent times the erosion of public trust in science was exacerbated through the theft of e-mails from East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit and the so-called “climategate scandal” which ensued. With the illegal publication of the e-mails came claims against the Research Unit that climate experts had been manipulating scientific data to suit a pro-global warming agenda. Three inquiries later, all the scientists involved were cleared of any wrongdoing, however the damage had already been done. To the public, what this scandal revealed was a certain level of scientific hubris around the uncertainties of the science and an unwillingness to explain the nature of these uncertainties. The prevailing notion remained that the experts were keeping information from public scrutiny and not being totally honest with them, which at least in the short term, damaged the scientists’s credibility. Many argued that this signalled a shift in public opinion and media portrayal on the issue of climate change in late 2009. University of Sydney academic, Rod Tiffen, claimed in the Sydney Morning Herald that the climategate scandal was “one of the pivotal moments in changing the politics of climate change” (n.p). In Australia this had profound implications and meant that the bipartisan agreement on an emissions trading scheme (ETS) that had almost been reached, subsequently collapsed with (climate sceptic) Tony Abbott's defeat of (ETS advocate) Malcolm Turnbull to become opposition leader (Tiffen). Not long after the reputation of science received this almighty blow, albeit unfairly, the federal government released a report in February 2010, Inspiring Australia – A national strategy for engagement with the sciences as part of the country’s innovation agenda. The report outlines a commitment from the Australian government and universities around the country to address the challenges of not only communicating science to the broader community but, in the process, renewing public trust and engagement in science. The report states that: in order to achieve a scientifically engaged Australia, it will be necessary to develop a culture where the sciences are recognized as relevant to everyday life … Our science institutions will be expected to share their knowledge and to help realize full social, economic, health and environmental benefits of scientific research and in return win ongoing public support. (xiv-xv) After launching the report, Innovation Minister Kim Carr went so far as to conflate “hope” with “science” and in the process elevate a discourse of technological determinism: “it’s time for all true friends of science to step up and defend its values and achievements” adding that, "when you denigrate science, you destroy hope” (n.p.). Forever gone is our naïve post-war world when scientists were held in such high esteem that they could virtually use humans as guinea pigs to test out new wonder chemicals; such as organochlorines, of which DDT is the most widely known (Carson). Thanks to government-sponsored nuclear testing programs, if you were born in the 1950s, 1960s or early 1970s, your brain carries a permanent nuclear legacy (Flannery, Here On Earth 158). So surely, for the most part, questioning the authority and hubristic tendencies of science is a good thing. And I might add, it’s not just scientists who bear this critical burden, the same scepticism is directed towards journalists, politicians and academics alike – something that many cultural theorists have noted is characteristic of our contemporary postmodern world (Lyotard). So far from destroying hope, as the former Innovation Minister Kim Carr (now Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) suggests, surely we need to use the criticisms of science as a vehicle upon which to initiate hope and humility. Different Ways of Knowing: Bayesian Beliefs and Matters of Concern At best, [science] produces a robust consensus based on a process of inquiry that allows for continued scrutiny, re-examination, and revision. (Oreskes 370) In an attempt to capitalise on the Macquarie Science Faculty’s expertise in climate science, I convened a course in second semester 2010 called SCOM201 Science, Media, Community: Communicating Climate Change, with invaluable assistance from Penny Wilson, Elaine Kelly and Liz Morgan. Mike Hulme’s provocative text, Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity provided an invaluable framework for the course. Hulme’s book brings other types of knowledge, beyond the scientific, to bear on our attitudes towards climate change. Climate change, he claims, has moved from being just a physical, scientific, and measurable phenomenon to becoming a social and cultural phenomenon. In order to understand the contested nature of climate change we need to acknowledge the dynamic and varied meanings climate has played in different cultures throughout history as well as the role that our own subjective attitudes and judgements play. Climate change has become a battleground between different ways of knowing, alternative visions of the future, competing ideas about what’s ethical and what’s not. Hulme makes the point that one of the reasons that we disagree about climate change is because we disagree about the role of science in today’s society. He encourages readers to use climate change as a tool to rigorously question the basis of our beliefs, assumptions and prejudices. Since uncertainty was the course’s raison d’etre, I was fortunate to have an extraordinary cohort of students who readily engaged with a course that forced them to confront their own epistemological limits — both personally and in a disciplinary sense. (See their blog: https://scom201.wordpress.com/). Science is often associated with objective realities. It thus tends to distinguish itself from the post-structuralist vein of critique that dominates much of the contemporary humanities. At the core of post-structuralism is scepticism about everyday, commonly accepted “truths” or what some call “meta-narratives” as well as an acknowledgement of the role that subjectivity plays in the pursuit of knowledge (Lyotard). However if we can’t rely on objective truths or impartial facts then where does this leave us when it comes to generating policy or encouraging behavioural change around the issue of climate change? Controversial philosophy of science scholar Bruno Latour sits squarely in the post-structuralist camp. In his 2004 article, “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern”, he laments the way the right wing has managed to gain ground in the climate change debate through arguing that uncertainty and lack of proof is reason enough to deny demands for action. Or to use his turn-of-phrase, “dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives” (Latour n.p). Through co-opting (the Left’s dearly held notion of) scepticism and even calling themselves “climate sceptics”, they exploited doubt as a rationale for why we should do nothing about climate change. Uncertainty is not only an important part of science, but also of the human condition. However, as sociologist Sheila Jasanoff explains in her Nature article, “Technologies of Humility”, uncertainty has become like a disease: Uncertainty has become a threat to collective action, the disease that knowledge must cure. It is the condition that poses cruel dilemmas for decision makers; that must be reduced at all costs; that is tamed with scenarios and assessments; and that feeds the frenzy for new knowledge, much of it scientific. (Jasanoff 33) If we move from talking about climate change as “a matter of fact” to “a matter of concern”, argues Bruno Latour, then we can start talking about useful ways to combat it, rather than talking about whether the science is “in” or not. Facts certainly matter, claims Latour, but they can’t give us the whole story, rather “they assemble with other ingredients to produce a matter of concern” (Potter and Oster 123). Emily Potter and Candice Oster suggest that climate change can’t be understood through either natural or cultural frames alone and, “unlike a matter of fact, matters of concern cannot be explained through a single point of view or discursive frame” (123). This makes a lot of what Hulme argues far more useful because it enables the debate to be taken to another level. Those of us with non-scientific expertise can centre debates around the kinds of societies we want, rather than being caught up in the scientific (un)certainties. If we translate Latour’s concept of climate change being “a matter of concern” into the discourse of environmental management then what we come up with, I think, is the “precautionary principle”. In the YouTube clip, “Stephen Schneider vs Skeptics”, Schneider argues that when in doubt about the potential environmental impacts of climate change, we should always apply the precautionary principle. This principle emerged from the UN conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and concerns the management of scientific risk. However its origins are evident much earlier in documents such as the “Use of Pesticides” from US President’s Science Advisory Committee in 1962. Unlike in criminal and other types of law where the burden of proof is on the prosecutor to show that the person charged is guilty of a particular offence, in environmental law the onus of proof is on the manufacturers to demonstrate the safety of their product. For instance, a pesticide should be restricted or disproved for use if there is “reasonable doubt” about its safety (Oreskes 374). Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development in 1992 has its foundations in the precautionary principle: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation” (n.p). According to Environmental Law Online, the Rio declaration suggests that, “The precautionary principle applies where there is a ‘lack of full scientific certainty’ – that is, when science cannot say what consequences to expect, how grave they are, or how likely they are to occur” (n.p.). In order to make predictions about the likelihood of an event occurring, scientists employ a level of subjectivity, or need to “reveal their degree of belief that a prediction will turn out to be correct … [S]omething has to substitute for this lack of certainty” otherwise “the only alternative is to admit that absolutely nothing is known” (Hulme 85). These statements of “subjective probabilities or beliefs” are called Bayesian, after eighteenth century English mathematician Sir Thomas Bayes who developed the theory of evidential probability. These “probabilities” are estimates, or in other words, subjective, informed judgements that draw upon evidence and experience about the likelihood of event occurring. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses Bayesian beliefs to determine the risk or likelihood of an event occurring. The IPCC provides the largest international scientific assessment of climate change and often adopts a consensus model where viewpoint reached by the majority of scientists is used to establish knowledge amongst an interdisciplinary community of scientists and then communicate it to the public (Hulme 88). According to the IPCC, this consensus is reached amongst more than more than 450 lead authors, more than 800 contributing authors, and 2500 scientific reviewers. While it is an advisory body and is not policy-prescriptive, the IPCC adopts particular linguistic conventions to indicate the probability of a statement being correct. Stephen Schneider convinced the IPCC to use this approach to systemise uncertainty (Lemonick). So for instance, in the IPCC reports, the term “likely” denotes a chance of 66%-90% of the statement being correct, while “very likely” denotes more than a 90% chance. Note the change from the Third Assessment Report (2001), indicating that “most of the observed warming in over the last fifty years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions” to the Fourth Assessment (February 2007) which more strongly states: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (Hulme 51, my italics). A fiery attack on Tim Flannery by Andrew Bolt on Steve Price’s talkback radio show in June 2010 illustrates just how misunderstood scientific uncertainty is in the broader community. When Price introduces Flannery as former Australian of the Year, Bolt intercedes, claiming Flannery is “Alarmist of the Year”, then goes on to chastise Flannery for making various forecasts which didn’t eventuate, such as that Perth and Brisbane might run out of water by 2009. “How much are you to blame for the swing in sentiment, the retreat from global warming policy and rise of scepticism?” demands Bolt. In the context of the events of late 2009 and early 2010, the fact that these events didn’t materialise made Flannery, and others, seem unreliable. And what Bolt had to say on talkback radio, I suspect, resonated with a good proportion of its audience. What Bolt was trying to do was discredit Flannery’s scientific credentials and in the process erode trust in the expert. Flannery’s response was to claim that, what he said was that these events might eventuate. In much the same way that the climate sceptics have managed to co-opt scepticism and use it as a rationale for inaction on climate change, Andrew Bolt here either misunderstands basic scientific method or quite consciously misleads and manipulates the public. As Naomi Oreskes argues, “proof does not play the role in science that most people think it does (or should), and therefore it cannot play the role in policy that skeptics demand it should” (Oreskes 370). Doubt and ‘Situated’ Hope Uncertainty and ambiguity then emerge here as resources because they force us to confront those things we really want–not safety in some distant, contested future but justice and self-understanding now. (Sheila Jasanoff, cited in Hulme, back cover) In his last published book before his death in mid-2010, Science as a contact sport, Stephen Schneider’s advice to aspiring science communicators is that they should engage with the media “not at all, or a lot”. Climate scientist Ann Henderson-Sellers adds that there are very few scientists “who have the natural ability, and learn or cultivate the talents, of effective communication with and through the media” (430). In order to attract the public’s attention, it was once commonplace for scientists to write editorials and exploit fear-provoking measures by including a “useful catastrophe or two” (Moser and Dilling 37). But are these tactics effective? Susanne Moser thinks not. She argues that “numerous studies show that … fear may change attitudes … but not necessarily increase active engagement or behaviour change” (Moser 70). Furthermore, risk psychologists argue that danger is always context specific (Hulme 196). If the risk or danger is “situated” and “tangible” (such as lead toxicity levels in children in Mt Isa from the Xstrata mine) then the public will engage with it. However if it is “un-situated” (distant, intangible and diffuse) like climate change, the audience is less likely to. In my SCOM201 class we examined the impact of two climate change-related campaigns. The first one was a short film used to promote the 2010 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit (“Scary”) and the second was the State Government of Victoria’s “You have the power: Save Energy” public awareness campaign (“You”). Using Moser’s article to guide them, students evaluated each campaign’s effectiveness. Their conclusions were that the “You have the power” campaign had far more impact because it a) had very clear objectives (to cut domestic power consumption) b) provided a very clear visualisation of carbon dioxide through the metaphor of black balloons wafting up into the atmosphere, c) gave viewers a sense of empowerment and hope through describing simple measures to cut power consumption and, d) used simple but effective metaphors to convey a world progressed beyond human control, such as household appliances robotically operating themselves in the absence of humans. Despite its high production values, in comparison, the Copenhagen Summit promotion was more than ineffective and bordered on propaganda. It actually turned viewers off with its whining, righteous appeal of, “please help the world”. Its message and objectives were ambiguous, it conveyed environmental catastrophe through hackneyed images, exploited children through a narrative based on fear and gave no real sense of hope or empowerment. In contrast the Victorian Government’s campaign focused on just one aspect of climate change that was made both tangible and situated. Doubt and uncertainty are productive tools in the pursuit of knowledge. Whether it is scientific or otherwise, uncertainty will always be the motivation that “feeds the frenzy for new knowledge” (Jasanoff 33). Articulating the importance of Hulme’s book, Sheila Jasanoff indicates we should make doubt our friend, “Without downplaying its seriousness, Hulme demotes climate change from ultimate threat to constant companion, whose murmurs unlock in us the instinct for justice and equality” (Hulme back cover). The “murmurs” that Jasanoff gestures to here, I think, can also be articulated as hope. And it is in this discussion of climate change that doubt and hope sit side-by-side as bedfellows, mutually entangled. Since the “failed” Copenhagen Summit, there has been a distinct shift in climate change discourse from “experts”. We have moved away from doom and gloom discourses and into the realm of what I shall call “situated” hope. “Situated” hope is not based on blind faith alone, but rather hope grounded in evidence, informed judgements and experience. For instance, in distinct contrast to his cautionary tale The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change, Tim Flannery’s latest book, Here on Earth is a biography of our Earth; a planet that throughout its history has oscillated between Gaian and Medean impulses. However Flannery’s wonder about the natural world and our potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change is not founded on empty rhetoric but rather tempered by evidence; he presents a series of case studies where humanity has managed to come together for a global good. Whether it’s the 1987 Montreal ban on CFCs (chlorinated fluorocarbons) or the lesser-known 2001 Stockholm Convention on POP (Persistent Organic Pollutants), what Flannery envisions is an emerging global civilisation, a giant, intelligent super-organism glued together through social bonds. He says: If that is ever achieved, the greatest transformation in the history of our planet would have occurred, for Earth would then be able to act as if it were as Francis Bacon put it all those centuries ago, ‘one entire, perfect living creature’. (Here on Earth, 279) While science might give us “our most reliable understanding of the natural world” (Oreskes 370), “situated” hope is the only productive and ethical currency we have. ReferencesAustralian Council of Deans of Science. What Did You Do with Your Science Degree? A National Study of Employment Outcomes for Science Degree Holders 1990-2000. Melbourne: Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, 2001. Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Inspiring Australia – A National Strategy for Engagement with the Sciences. Executive summary. Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 24 May 2010 ‹http://www.innovation.gov.au/SCIENCE/INSPIRINGAUSTRALIA/Documents/InspiringAustraliaSummary.pdf›. “Andrew Bolt with Tim Flannery.” Steve Price. Hosted by Steve Price. Melbourne: Melbourne Talkback Radio, 2010. 9 June 2010 ‹http://www.mtr1377.com.au/index2.php?option=com_newsmanager&task=view&id=6209›. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. London: Penguin, 1962 (2000). Carr, Kim. “Celebrating Nobel Laureate Professor Elizabeth Blackburn.” Canberra: DIISR, 2010. 19 Feb. 2010 ‹http://minister.innovation.gov.au/Carr/Pages/CELEBRATINGNOBELLAUREATEPROFESSORELIZABETHBLACKBURN.aspx›. Environmental Law Online. “The Precautionary Principle.” N.d. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.envirolaw.org.au/articles/precautionary_principle›. Flannery, Tim. The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005. ———. Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Gordon Waitt. “Climate and Culture.” M/C Journal 12.4 (2009). 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/184/0›. Harrison, Karey. “How ‘Inconvenient’ Is Al Gore’s Climate Change Message?” M/C Journal 12.4 (2009). 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/175›. Henderson-Sellers, Ann. “Climate Whispers: Media Communication about Climate Change.” Climatic Change 40 (1998): 421–456. Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding, Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A Picture of Climate Change: The Current State of Understanding. 2007. 11 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/press-ar4/ipcc-flyer-low.pdf›. Jasanoff, Sheila. “Technologies of Humility.” Nature 450 (2007): 33. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004). 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html›. Lemonick, Michael D. “Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues.” Nature News 1 Nov. 2010. 9 Mar 2011 ‹http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101101/full/news.2010.577.html›. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 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Rio de Janeiro, 1992. 19 Jan 2011 ‹http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163›. “Scary Global Warming Propaganda Video Shown at the Copenhagen Climate Meeting – 7 Dec. 2009.” YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzSuP_TMFtk&feature=related›. Schneider, Stephen. Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate. National Geographic Society, 2010. ———. “Stephen Schneider vs. the Sceptics”. YouTube. 21 Mar. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rj1QcdEqU0›. Schwartz, Steven. “Science in Search of a New Formula.” 2010. 20 May 2010 ‹http://www.vc.mq.edu.au/blog/2010/03/11/science-in-search-of-a-new-formula/›. Tiffen, Rodney. "You Wouldn't Read about It: Climate Scientists Right." 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When historian Graeme Davison famously declared that “Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban” (98), he was clearly referring to Melbourne or Sydney, but certainly not Brisbane. Although the Brisbane of 2011 might resemble a contemporary, thriving metropolis, its genealogy is not an urban one. For most of its history, as Gillian Whitlock has noted, Brisbane was “a place where urban industrial society is kept at bay” (80). What distinguishes Brisbane from Australia’s larger southern capital cities is its rapid morphology into a city from a provincial, suburban, town. Indeed it is Brisbane’s distinctive regionalism, with its sub-tropical climate, offering a steamy, fecund backdrop to narratives of the city that has produced a plethora of writing in literary accounts of the city, from author David Malouf through to contemporary writers such as Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham, Venero Armanno, Susan Johnson, and Nick Earls. Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition makes its transformation unique among Australian cities. Its rapid population growth and urban development have changed the way that many people now live in the city. Unlike the larger cities of Sydney or Melbourne, whose inner cities were established on the Victorian model of terrace-row housing on small lots, Brisbane’s early planners eschewed this approach. So, one of the features that gives the city its distinction is the languorous suburban quality of its inner-city areas, where many house blocks are the size of the suburban quarter-acre block, all within coo-ee of the city centre. Other allotments are medium to small in size, and, until recently, housed single dwellings of varying sizes and grandeur. Add to this a sub-tropical climate in which ‘green and growth’ is abundant and the pretty but flimsy timber vernacular housing, and it’s easy to imagine that you might be many kilometres from a major metropolitan centre as you walk around Brisbane’s inner city areas. It is partly this feature that prompted demographer Bernard Salt to declare Brisbane “Australia’s most suburban city” (Salt 5). Prior to urban renewal in the early 1990s, Brisbane was a low-density town with very few apartment blocks; most people lived in standalone houses.From the inception of the first Urban Renewal program in 1992, a joint initiative of the Federal government’s Building Better Cities Program and managed by the Brisbane City Council (BCC), Brisbane’s urban development has undergone significant change. In particular, the city’s Central Business District (CBD) and inner city have experienced intense development and densification with a sharp rise in medium- to high-density apartment dwellings to accommodate the city’s swelling population. Population growth has added to the demand for increased density, and from the period 1995–2006 Brisbane was Australia’s fastest growing city (ABS).Today, parts of Brisbane’s inner city resembles the density of the larger cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Apartment blocks have mushroomed along the riverfront and throughout inner and middle ring suburbs. Brisbane’s population has enthusiastically embraced apartment living, with “empty nesters” leaving their suburban family homes for the city, and apartments have become the affordable option for renters and first home purchasers. A significant increase in urban amenities such as large-scale parklands and river side boardwalks, and a growth in service industries such as cafes, restaurants and bars—a feature of cities the world over—have contributed to the appeal of the city and the changing way that people live in Brisbane.Urbanism demands specific techniques of living—life is different in medium- to high-density dwellings, in populous places, where people live in close proximity to one another. In many ways it’s the antithesis to suburban life, a way of living that, as Davison notes, was established around an ethos of privacy, health, and seclusion and is exemplified in the gated communities seen in the suburbs today. The suburbs are characterised by generosity of space and land, and developed as a refuge and escape from the city, a legacy of the nineteenth-century industrial city’s connection with overcrowding, disease, and disorder. Suburban living flourished in Australia from the eighteenth century and Davison notes how, when Governor Phillip drew up the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, it embodied the aspirations of “decency, good order, health and domestic privacy,” which lie at the heart of suburban ideals (100).The health and moral impetus underpinning the establishment of suburban life—that is, to remove people from overcrowding and the unhygienic conditions of slums—for Davison meant that the suburban ethos was based on a “logic of avoidance” (110). Attempting to banish anything deemed dangerous and offensive, the suburbs were seen to offer a more natural, orderly, and healthy environment. A virtuous and happy life required plenty of room—thus, a garden and the expectation of privacy was paramount.The suburbs as a site of lived experience and cultural meaning is significant for understanding the shift from suburban living to the adoption of medium- to high-density inner-city living in Brisbane. I suggest that the ways in which this shift is captured discursively, particularly in promotional material, are indicative of the suburbs' stronghold on the collective imagination. Reinforcing this perception of Brisbane as a suburban city is a history of literary narratives that have cast Brisbane in ways that set it apart from other Australian cities, and that are to do with its non-urban characteristics. Imaginative and symbolic discourses of place have real and material consequences (Lefebvre), as advertisers are only too well aware. Discursively, city life has been imagined oppositionally from life in the suburbs: the two sites embody different cultural meanings and values. In Australia, the suburbs are frequently a site of derision and satire, characterized as bastions of conformity and materialism (Horne), offering little of value in contrast to the city’s many enchantments and diverse pleasures. In the well-established tradition of satire, “suburban bashing is replete in literature, film and popular culture” (Felton et al xx). From Barry Humphries’s characterisation of Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar, who first appeared in the 1960s, to the recent television comedy series Kath and Kim, suburbia and its inhabitants are represented as dull-witted, obsessed with trivia, and unworldly. This article does not intend to rehearse the tradition of suburban lampooning; rather, it seeks to illustrate how ideas about suburban living are hard held and how the suburban ethos maintains its grip, particularly in relation to notions of privacy and peace, despite the celebratory discourse around the emerging forms of urbanism in Brisbane.As Brisbane morphed rapidly from a provincial, suburban town to a metropolis throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a set of metropolitan discourses developed in the local media that presented new ways of inhabiting and imagining the city and offered new affiliations and identifications with the city. In establishing Brisbane’s distinction as a city, marketing material relied heavily on the opposition between the city and the suburbs, implying that urban vitality and diversity rules triumphant over the suburbs’ apparent dullness and homogeneity. In a billboard advertisement for apartments in the urban renewal area of Newstead (2004), images of architectural renderings of the apartments were anchored by the words—“Urban living NOT suburban”—leaving little room for doubt. It is not the design qualities of the apartments or the building itself being promoted here, but a way of life that alludes to utopian ideas of urban life, of enchantment with the city, and implies, with the heavy emphasis of “NOT suburban,” the inferiority of suburban living.The cultural commodification of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century city has been well documented (Evans; Dear; Zukin; Harvey) and its symbolic value as a commodity is expressed in marketing literature via familiar metropolitan tropes that are frequently amorphous and international. The malleability of such images makes them easily transportable and transposable, and they provided a useful stockpile for promoting a city such as Brisbane that lacked its own urban resources with which to construct a new identity. In the early days of urban renewal, the iconic images and references to powerhouse cities such as New York, London, and even Venice were heavily relied upon. In the latter example, an advertisement promoting Brisbane appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald colour magazine (May 2005). This advertisement represented Brisbane as an antipodean Venice, showing a large reach of the Brisbane river replete with gondolas flanked by the city’s only nineteenth-century riverside building, the Custom’s House. The allusion to traditional European culture is a departure from the usual tropes of “fun and sun” associated with promotions of Queensland, including Brisbane, while the new approach to promoting Brisbane is cognizant of the value of culture in the symbolic and economic hierarchy of the contemporary city. Perhaps equally, the advertisement could be read as ironic, a postmodern self-parodying statement about the city in general. In a nod to the centrality of the spectacle, the advertisement might be a salute to idea of the city as theme park, a pleasure playground and a collective fantasy of escape. Nonetheless, either interpretation presents Brisbane as somewhere else.In other promotional literature for apartment dwellings, suburban living maintains its imaginative grip, evident in a brochure advertising Petrie Point apartments in Brisbane’s urban renewal area of inner-city New Farm (2000). In the brochure, the promise of peace and calm—ideals that have their basis in suburban living—are imposed and promoted as a feature of inner-city living. Paradoxically, while suggesting that a wholesale evacuation and rejection of suburban life is occurring presumably because it is dull, the brochure simultaneously upholds the values of suburbia:Discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers who prefer lounging over latte rather than mowing the quarter acre block, are abandoning suburban living in droves. Instead, hankering after a more cosmopolitan lifestyle without the mind numbing drive to work, they are retreating to the residential mecca, the inner city, for chic shops and a lively dining, arts and theatre culture. (my italics)In the above extract, the rhetoric used to promote and uphold the virtues of a cosmopolitan inner-city life is sabotaged by a language that in many respects capitulates to the ideals of suburban living, and evokes the health and retreat ethos of suburbia. “Lounging” over lattes and “retreating to a residential mecca”[i] allude to precisely the type of suburban living the brochure purports to eschew. Privacy, relaxation, and health is a discourse and, more importantly, a way of living that is in many ways anathema to life in the city. It is a dream-wish that those features most valued about suburban life, can and should somehow be transplanted to the city. In its promotion of urban amenity, the brochure draws upon a somewhat bourgeois collection of cultural amenities and activities such as a (presumably traditional) arts and theatre culture, “lively dining,” and “chic” shops. The appeal to “discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers” has more than a whiff of status and class, an appeal that disavows the contemporary city’s attention to diversity and inclusivity, and frequently the source of promotion of many international cities. In contrast to the suburban sub-text of exclusivity and seclusion in the Petrie Point Apartment’s brochure, is a promotion of Sydney’s inner-city Newtown as a tourist site and spectacle, which makes an appeal to suburban antipathy clear from the outset. The brochure, distributed by NSW Tourism (2000) displays a strong emphasis on Newtown’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and the various forms of cultural consumption on offer. The inner-city suburb’s appeal is based on its re-framing as a site of tourist consumption of diversity and difference in which diversity is central to its performance as a tourist site. It relies on the distinction between “ordinary” suburbs and “cosmopolitan” places:Some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney’s blessed with Newtown — a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of more than 600 stores, 70 restaurants, 42 cafes, theatres, pubs, and entertainment venues, all trading in two streets whose origins lie in the nineteenth century … Newtown is the Catwalk for those with more style than money … a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul, where Milano meets post-punk bohemia, where Max Mara meets Doc Marten, a stage where a petticoat is more likely to be your grandma’s than a Colette Dinnigan designer original (From Sydney Marketing brochure)Its opening oppositional gambit—“some cities are cursed with suburbs”—conveniently elides the fact that like all Australian cities, Sydney is largely suburban and many of Sydney’s suburbs are more ethnically diverse than its inner-city areas. Cabramatta, Fairfield, and most other suburbs have characteristically high numbers of ethnic groups such as Vietnamese, Korean, Lebanese, and so forth. Recent events, however, have helped to reframe these places as problem areas, rather than epicentres of diversity.The mingling of social groups invites the tourist-flâneur to a performance of difference, “a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul (my italics), where Milano meets post-punk bohemia,” and where “the upwardly mobile and down at heel” appear in what is presented as something of a theatrical extravaganza. Newtown is a product, its diversity a commodity. Consumed visually and corporeally via its divergent sights, sounds, smells and tastes (the brochure goes on to state that 70 restaurants offer cuisine from all over the globe), Newtown is a “successful neighbourhood experiment in the new globalism.” The area’s social inequities—which are implicit in the text, referred to as the “down at heel”—are vanquished and celebrated, incorporated into the rhetoric of difference.Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition and culture, as well as its lack of diversity in comparison to Sydney, reveals itself in the first brochure while the Newtown brochure appeals to the idea of a consumer-based cosmopolitanism. As a sociological concept, cosmopolitanism refers to a set of "subjective attitudes, outlooks and practices" broadly characterized as “disposition of openness towards others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non local” (Skrbis and Woodward 1). Clearly cosmopolitan attitudes do not have to be geographically located, but frequently the city is promoted as the site of these values, with the suburbs, apparently, forever looking inward.In the realm of marketing, appeals to the imagination are ubiquitous, but discursive practices can become embedded in everyday life. Despite the growth of urbanism, the increasing take up of metropolitan life and the enduring disdain among some for the suburbs, the hard-held suburban values of peace and privacy have pragmatic implications for the ways in which those values are embedded in people’s expectations of life in the inner city.The exponential growth in apartment living in Brisbane offers different ways of living to the suburban house. For a sub-tropical city where "life on the verandah" is a significant feature of the Queenslander house with its front and exterior verandahs, in the suburbs, a reasonable degree of privacy is assured. Much of Brisbane’s vernacular and contemporary housing is sensitive to this indoor-outdoor style of living, a distinct feature and appeal of everyday life in many suburbs. When "life on the verandah" is adapted to inner-city apartment buildings, expectations that indoor-outdoor living can be maintained in the same way can be problematic. In the inner city, life on the verandah may challenge expectations about privacy, noise and visual elements. While the Brisbane City Plan 2000 attempts to deal with privacy issues by mandating privacy screenings on verandahs, and the side screening of windows to prevent overlooking neighbours, there is ample evidence that attitudinal change is difficult. The exchange of a suburban lifestyle for an urban one, with the exposure to urbanity’s complexity, potential chaos and noise, can be confronting. In the Urban Renewal area and entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley, during the late 1990s, several newly arrived residents mounted a vigorous campaign to the Brisbane City Council (BCC) and State government to have noise levels reduced from local nightclubs and bars. Fortitude Valley—the Valley, as it is known locally—had long been Brisbane’s main area for nightclubs, bars and brothels. A small precinct bounded by two major one-way roads, it was the locus of the infamous ABC 4 Corners “Moonlight State” report, which exposed the lines of corruption between politicians, police, and the judiciary of the former Bjelke-Petersen government (1974–1987) and who met in the Valley’s bars and brothels. The Valley was notorious for Brisbanites as the only place in a provincial, suburban town that resembled the seedy side of life associated with big cities. The BCC’s Urban Renewal Task Force and associated developers initially had a tough task convincing people that the area had been transformed. But as more amenity was established, and old buildings were converted to warehouse-style living in the pattern of gentrification the world over, people started moving in to the area from the suburbs and interstate (Felton). One of the resident campaigners against noise had purchased an apartment in the Sun Building, a former newspaper house and in which one of the apartment walls directly abutted the adjoining and popular nightclub, The Press Club. The Valley’s location as a music venue was supported by the BCC, who initially responded to residents’ noise complaints with its “loud and proud” campaign (Valley Metro). The focus of the campaign was to alert people moving into the newly converted apartments in the Valley to the existing use of the neighbourhood by musicians and music clubs. In another iteration of this campaign, the BCC worked with owners of music venues to ensure the area remains a viable music precinct while implementing restrictions on noise levels. Residents who objected to nightclub noise clearly failed to consider the impact of moving into an area that was already well known, even a decade ago, as the city’s premier precinct for music and entertainment venues. Since that time, the Valley has become Australia’s only regulated and promoted music precinct.The shift from suburban to urban living requires people to live in very different ways. Thrust into close proximity with strangers amongst a diverse population, residents can be confronted with a myriad of sensory inputs—to a cacophony of noise, sights, smells (Allon and Anderson). Expectations of order, retreat, and privacy inevitably come into conflict with urbanism’s inherent messiness. The contested nature of urban space is expressed in neighbour disputes, complaints about noise and visual amenity, and sometimes in eruptions of street violence. There is no shortage of examples in the Brisbane’s Urban Renewal areas such as Fortitude Valley, where acts of homophobia, racism, and other less destructive conflicts continue to be a frequent occurrence. While the refashioned discursive Brisbane is re-presented as cool, cultured, and creative, the tensions of urbanism and tests to civility remain in a process of constant negotiation. This is the way the city’s past disrupts and resists its cool new surface.[i] The use of the word mecca in the brochure occurred prior to 11 September 2001.ReferencesAllon, Fiona, and Kay Anderson. "Sentient Sydney." In Passionate City: An International Symposium. Melbourne: RMIT, School of Media Communication, 2004. 89–97.Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Regional Population Growth, Australia, 1996-2006.Birmingham, John. "The Lost City of Vegas: David Malouf’s Old Brisbane." Hot Iron Corrugated Sky. Ed. R. Sheahan-Bright and S. Glover. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. xx–xx.Davison, Graeme. "The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb." Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities. Ed. L. Johnson. Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1994. xx–xx.Dear, Michael. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Evans, Graeme. “Hard-Branding the Cultural City—From Prado to Prada.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.2 (2003): 417–40.Evans, Raymond, and Carole Ferrier, eds. Radical Brisbane. Melbourne: The Vulgar Press, 2004.Felton, Emma, Christy Collis, and Phil Graham. “Making Connections: Creative Industries Networks in Outer Urban Locations.” Australian Geographer 14.1 (Mar. 2010): 57–70.Felton, Emma. Emerging Urbanism: A Social and Cultural Study of Urban Change in Brisbane. PhD thesis. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.Glover, Stuart, and Stuart Cunningham. "The New Brisbane." Artlink 23.2 (2003): 16–23. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Horne, Donald. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Ringwood: Penguin, 1964.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.Malouf, David. Johnno. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975. ---. 12 Edmondstone Street. London: Penguin, 1986.NSW Tourism. Sydney City 2000. Sydney, 2000.Salt, Bernard. Cinderella City: A Vision of Brisbane’s Rise to Prominence. Sydney: Austcorp, 2005.Skrbis, Zlatko, and Ian Woodward. “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitanism Openness.” Sociological Review (2007): 1-14.Valley Metro. 1 May 2011 < http://www.valleymetro.com.au/the_valley.aspx >.Whitlock, Gillian. “Queensland: The State of the Art on the 'Last Frontier.’" Westerly 29.2 (1984): 85–90.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

Rage can come from anywhere, it ignites as a flash of lightening and hisses rapidly down a darkened tunnel, landing wherever it finds a target. Sigmund Freud, and many other psychoanalysts, have attempted to explain the inception of human’s two primordial emotions, rage and fear – encapsulated in the popular phrase, fight or flight. Our earliest historical records detail the myriad battles that determined the world’s future course of events. Without rage, and its adjutants, violence and war, the world’s countries would not exist with their current boundaries. In fact, our species, Homo sapiens would necessarily have evolved through a different course. Since 2016, the public has been outraged by current events at an unprecedented level: the confluence of the election of US President Donald Trump, the struggles over the UK’s Brexit, and the revelations of systematic sexual abuse of women and African Americans, culminating in the recent #metoo and the #blacklivesmatter social media campaigns. More and more women have protested against sexual abuse, and recently the free-verse poem book Shout, from pop cultural icon Laurie Halse Anderson, “raise[s] urgent alarms, warning against the evils propagated by a culture that values dominance over respect” (Feldman 52). The rage revolution is here now. The nine articles included in this issue of M/C Journal on ‘rage’ unpack the concept of rage and its significant linkages to injustice, anger, personal and sexual abuse of women and minority cultures, violence and war. It is no surprise that many authors have chosen to focus on women’s rage and anger. Below, three articles develop the themes of political disenfranchisement for women and Indigenous cultures with a special emphasis on Australia, and the significant role that clothing plays in group-based activism.In the feature article, Angelika Heurich explores the fraught territory of women’s rights starting with the slogan: ‘the personal is the political’. In both the First and Second Waves of feminism, she reports, “concerns about issues of inequality, including sexuality, the right to abortion, availability of childcare, and sharing of household duties” became “personal problems” rather than a matter for national debate and policy changes (Hanisch qtd. in Heurich). Heurich cites the need for “feminist intervention in the state” (van Acker 120). These issues are very much alive today: how can enraged women change government policy in a meaningful way to address past and present injustices? Author Jo Coghlan further develops the theme of protestation with how clothing depicts the history of dissent. Coghlan’s argument suggests that the political efficacy of dress can perform “an ideological function that either bring[s] diverse members of society together for a cause ... or act[s] as a fence to keep identities separate” (Coghlan qtd Barnard). Clothing, as liberation, was celebrated in Mahatma Gandhi’s hand-spun cotton that symbolised the separation of India from Great Britain. Later, the Australian Aborigines’ Black Protest Committee adopted a set of particular colours for their movement towards equality, in this case, red, black and yellow worn first in 1982. To continue the theme, Lisa Hackett outlines the response of women’s rage’ to how their garments remain unsuitable from several standpoints. Hackett notes that the issues that surround fast fashion inspire women’s anger by its production: clothing that is cheaply made, in workplaces of virtual slavery, and made of unsustainable fabrics which lead to mountains of discarded garments in the world’s landfills. These problems inspire the rage of women who desire to protect the environment and also seek clothing that fits over forced obsolescence. Even as this issue on ‘rage’ widely presents people, activities and events that are driven by rage – across the broad spectrum of personal, artistic and cultural and socio-political storytelling, we also sought solutions in productive and/or philosophical frameworks that could explore how to ameliorate conditions under which rage arises. So the next two articles address the under-used (and under-implemented) word civility. In his article “Of ‘Rage of Party’ and the Coming of Civility”, Greg Melleuish presents the English Civil War as a case study. This conflict between the Royalists and Parliamentarians disrupted the authority of the crown, and resulted in a more moderated English government, in stark contrast to regime changes later on the European continent (e.g., the French Revolution). Melleuish offers that a “new ideal of ‘politeness and moderation’ had conquered English political culture” and promoted civility as a standard of behaviour for the government and worthy individuals. This concept of civility would later evolve to introduce philosophies of the Enlightenment. A collection of authors (Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Madalena Grobbelaar, Eyal Gringart, Alise Bender, and Rose Williams) have worked through the serious issues of ‘intimate civility’ – to encourage pathways to counteract ‘rage’ and its impact on the most vulnerable in society, especially women and children. The authors, in their coinage of the term, “envisage intimate civility – and our relationships – as dynamic, dialectical, discursive and interactive, above and beyond dualism.” They introduce a ‘decalogue’ of civility, relying on notions of politeness, respect, and emphasise dialogue between the affected parties and the Australian government’s campaigns and policies on domestic and sexual violence to reduce rage in the arena of interpersonal and intergenerational conflicts. The last articles in this M/C Journal issue on ‘rage’ address the media side of the equation. These authors all deal with aspects of rage as expressed on various screens, as films, television series or downloads to other devices. Richard Gehrmann, in his analysis of the Hollywood film American Sniper (2014), first provides a capsule timeline of conflicts in the Middle East, from the Second World War to the current day’s ongoing battles in Syria and elsewhere in the region. He highlights the propaganda-based, pro-American ‘jingoism’ presented in American Sniper, contrasting its portrayal of the returned veteran Chris Kyle with other true-life accounts of US Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. Gehrmann presents a bleak commentary on the ‘hot and cold rage’ required of the lone sniper, while many ‘hot’ unresolved issues, including the refugee crisis, remain in the Middle East situation. American Sniper’s celebration of the lone gunman contributes to the acceptance of violence in an America where mass shootings indicate an ever-growing expression of individual rage.”In his article on ‘Cage rage’, Sasa Miletic outlines Hollywood actor Nicholas Cage and his violent, sometimes over-acted outbursts on film as one of “the most famous Internet memes”. Miletic asks: has the overexpression of anger depicted in ‘Cage rage’ become “a pop cultural reminder “that rage, for a lack of a better word, is good ... or can [his filmic rage] only serve for catharsis on an individual level?” With this question, Miletic explores Nicholas Cage throughout his acting career, and presents his argument that the potential for ‘double-reading’ of his angry overacting in movies is a sort of ‘parapraxis’ – or “a Freudian slip of the tongue, a term borrowed by Elsaesser and Wedel (131). Miletic’s exploration of ‘Cage rage’ introduces new concepts of rage from the contemporary Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.The exploration of rage in film now turns to Jessica Gildersleeve’s article that locates ambiguous meanings of rage in recent television adaptations based in the Australian outback. Guildersleeve explores the two adaptations Wake in Fright (2017) and Mystery Road (2108) for how they depict rage: “in this context rage is turned to melancholy and thus to self-destruction, [serving] as an allegory for the state of the contemporary nation.” Gildersleeve notes that previous Australian authors have outlined the trope of ‘outback noir,’ and in her analysis of these two adaptations, she realigns the previous literary analysis of ‘noir’ to the emerging genre of Outback Gothic horror. The two shows depict the force of inward rage that turns to melancholy from different perspectives. While Wake in Fright (2107) seems to offer no hope for the future, Mystery Road harnesses the power of rage to locate a potential way to reconcile the two ‘classic’ opposing factions that inhabit the Outback: the colonisers and the indigenous Aborigines. Lastly, this collection on ‘rage’ comes full circle, back to the omnipresent ‘women’s rage’.From the viewpoint of Gothic literary traditions, and their challengers, author Katharine Hawkins develops the trope of Monstrous gothic through women’s roles depicted in Showtime’s television series, Penny Dreadful (2014-2016). Here, Hawkins echoes the themes from the introductory articles: as women must comply with men and their comforts, women’s rage turns both inward and outward. In Penny Dreadful, the actress Billie Piper constitutes a figure of the “Monstrous Gothic Feminine” arising from “the parlours of bored Victorian housewives into a contemporary feminist moment that is characterised by a split between respectable diplomacy and the visibility of female rage.” Piper’s Bride figure then mutates “from coerced docility [towards] abject, sexualised anger” which makes itself heard in the show’s second season (2016). Hawkins discussion introduces Ahmed’s figure of the “kill joy”, which becomes “a term to refer to feminists – particularly black feminists – whose actions or presence refuse this obligation, and in turn project their discomfort outwards, instead of inwards.” In summary, rage is with us, always. But there is hope that the outward expression of women’s rage, and of other disenfranchised populations as echoed in the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements will change the culture of global politics to value respect over violence. References Anderson, Laurie Halse. Shout. New York: Penguin Random House.Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion as Communication. New York: Routledge, 1996.Elsaesser, Thomas, and Michael Wedel, Körper Tod und Technik: Metamorphosen des Kriegsfilms. Paderborn: Konstanz University Press, 2016.Feldman, Lucy. “A Voice for Others Speaks for Herself.” TIME, 11 Mar. 2019: 52-53.Hanisch, Carol. “Introduction: The Personal Is Political.” 2006. 18 Sep. 2016 <http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html>.Van Acker, Elizabeth. Different Voices: Gender and Politics in Australia. Melbourne: MacMillan Education Australia, 1999.Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, 2009.

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.

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.

Introduction Gore Vidal, the famous writer and literary critic, was recently buried next to his long-term partner, Howard Austen. The couple, who met in the 1950s, had lived together happily for decades. They were in many ways the kind of same-sex couple frequently valorised in contemporary gay marriage campaigns. Vidal and Austen, however, could not serve as emblematic figures for this campaign, and not only because the two men had no interest in marriage. Vidal, who reportedly had over a hundred lovers, both male and female, once attributed the longevity of their relationship to its platonic nature; both men continued to sleep with other people, and they reportedly stopped having sex with each other after they moved in together (Vidal, Palimpsest, 131–32). A relationship that decoupled monogamy, romance, companionship, and sexuality, and reconnected them in a way that challenged the accepted truths of institutionalised marriage, stands as an implicit questioning of the way in which gay marriage campaigns construct the possibilities for life, love, and sex. It is this questioning that we draw out in this article. In his writing, Vidal also offers a perspective that challenges the assumptions and certainties of contemporary politics around gay marriage. In 1981, he wrote “Some Jews and the Gays” in response to an article entitled “The Boys on the Beach” by conservative Jewish writer Midge Decter. Vidal’s riposte to Decter’s depiction of the snide superiority of the “boys” who disturbed her beachside family holidays highlighted the lack of solidarity conservative members of the Jewish community displayed towards another persecuted minority. From Vidal’s perspective, this was because Decter could not conceive of gay identity as anything other than pathological: Since homosexualists choose to be the way they are out of idle hatefulness, it has been a mistake to allow them to come out of the closet to the extent that they have, but now that they are out (which most are not), they will have no choice but to face up to their essential hatefulness and abnormality and so be driven to kill themselves with promiscuity, drugs, S-M, and suicide. (Vidal, Some Gays) In response, Vidal made a strong case for solidarity between Jews, African-Americans, and what he termed “homosexualists” (or “same-sexers”). More importantly for our argument, he also contested Decter’s depiction of the typical homosexual: To begin to get at the truth about homosexualists, one must realise that the majority of those millions of Americans who prefer same-sex to other-sex are obliged, sometimes willingly and happily but often not, to marry and have children and to conform to the guidelines set down by the heterosexual dictatorship. (Vidal, Some Gays) According to Vidal, Decter’s article applied only to a relatively privileged section of homosexualists who were able to be “self-ghettoized”, and who, despite Decter’s paranoid fantasies, lived lives perfectly “indifferent to the world of the other-sexers.” In the thirty years since the publication of “Some Jews and the Gays” much has clearly changed. It is unlikely that even a conservative publication would publish an article that depicts all homosexualists as marked by idle hatefulness. However, Decter’s self-hating homosexualist continues to haunt contemporary debates about same-sex marriage, albeit in sublimated form. Critiques of gay marriage campaigns, which are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, often focus on the politics of inclusion and exclusion, whether on the terrain of gender (non)conformity (Spade), or the campaigns’ implicit and racialised assumption of a white, middle-class homosexual couple as the subject of their efforts (Riggs; Farrow). While our article is indebted to these critiques, our argument is focused more specifically on the unintended effect of the Australian debate about same-sex marriage, namely the (re)creation of the married couple’s other in the form of the adolescent, promiscuous, and unhappy homosexual. It is here that we find the source of our title, also chosen in tribute to Vidal, who in his life and writing disrupts this dichotomy. We argue that the construction of the respectable white middle-class same-sexer who sits at the centre of gay marriage discourse relies on a contemporary manifestation of the self-hating homosexualist – the sexually irresponsible queer constructed in contrast to the responsible gay. The first half of this article traces this construction. In the second section, we argue that this process cannot be divorced from the ways that advocates of same-sex marriage depict the institution of marriage. While critics such as Judith Butler have attempted to separate arguments against homophobic discrimination from the need to advocate for marriage, we argue that the two are intrinsically linked in marriage equality campaigns. These campaigns seek to erase both the explicit critique of marriage found in Vidal’s article and the implicit possibility of living otherwise found in his life. Instead of a heterosexual dictatorship that can be successfully avoided, marriage is proclaimed to be not only benign but the only institution capable of saving self-hating queers from misery by turning them into respectable gay married couples. This is, therefore, not an article about today’s Midge Decters, but about how contemporary same-sex marriage supporters rely on a characterisation of those of us who would or could not choose to marry as, to return to Vidal (Some Jews), “somehow evil or inadequate or dangerous.” As queer people who continue to question both the desirability and inevitability of marriage, we are ultimately concerned with thinking through the political consequences of the same-sex marriage campaign’s obsessive focus on normative sexuality and on the supposedly restorative function of the institution of marriage itself. Hateful Queers and Patient Gays Contemporary supporters of gay marriage, like Vidal so many years earlier, do often oppose conservative attempts to label homosexualists as inherently pathological. Tim Wright, the former convenor of “Equal Love,” one of Australia’s primary same-sex marriage campaign groups, directly addressing this in an opinion piece for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, writes, “Every so often, we hear them in the media calling homosexuals promiscuous or sick.” Disputing this characterisation, Wright supplants it with an image of patient lesbians and gay men “standing at the altar.” Unlike Vidal, however, Wright implicitly accepts the link between promiscuity and pathology. For Wright, homosexuals are not sick precisely because, and only to the extent that they accept, a forlorn chastity, waiting for their respectable monogamous sexuality to be sanctified through matrimony. A shared moral framework based upon conservative norms is a notable feature of same-sex marriage debates. Former Rainbow Labor convenor Ryan Heath articulates this most clearly in his 2010 Griffith Review article, excerpts of which also appeared in the metropolitan Fairfax newspapers. In this article, Heath argues that marriage equality would provide a much-needed dose of responsibility to “balance” the rights that Australia has accorded to homosexuals. For Heath, Australia’s gay and lesbian communities have been given sexual freedoms by an indulgent adult (heterosexual) society, but are not sufficiently mature to develop the social responsibilities that go with them: “Like teenagers getting their hands on booze and cars and freedom from parental surveillance for the first time, Australia’s gay and lesbian communities have enthusiastically taken up their new rights.” For Heath, the immaturity of the (adult) gay community, with its lack of married role models, results in profound effects for same-sex attracted youth: Consider what the absence of role models, development paths, and stability might do to those who cannot marry. Is there no connection between this and the disproportionate numbers of suicides and risky and addictive behaviours found in gay communities? It is this immaturity, rather than the more typically blamed homophobic prejudice, bullying or persecution, that is for Heath the cause of the social problems that disproportionately affect same-sex attracted adolescents. Heath continues, asking why, after journalist Jonathan Rauch, any parent would want to “condemn their child to…‘a partnerless life in a sexual underworld’.” His appeal to well-meaning parental desires for the security and happiness of children echoes countless insidious commentaries about the tragedy of homosexual existence, such as Decter’s above. These same commentaries continue to be used to justify exclusionary and even violent reactions by families and communities when children reveal their (non-heterosexual) sexualities. As for so many social conservatives, for Heath it is inconceivable to view a partnerless life as anything other than tragedy. Like Wright, he is also convinced that if one must be partnerless it is far better to be forlornly chaste than to participate in an “underworld” focused primarily on promiscuous sex. The opinions of those condemned to this purgatorial realm, either through compulsion or their own immaturity, are of little interest to Heath. When he states that “No families and couples I have interviewed in my research on the topic want this insecure existence,” we are to understand that it is only the desires of these responsible adults that matter. In this way, Heath explicitly invokes the image of what Mariana Valverde has called the “respectable same-sex couple”, homosexualists who are socially acceptable because being “same-sex” is the only thing that differentiates them from the white, middle-class norm that continues to sit at the heart of Australian politics. Heath goes on to describe marriage as the best “social safety net”, adopting the fiscal rhetoric of conservatives such as former federal leader of the Liberal party, Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull argued in 2012’s annual Michael Kirby lecture (a lecture organised by Southern Cross University’s School of Law and Justice in tribute to the retired gay High Court justice) that same-sex marriage would save the state money, as other relationship recognition such as the 2008 Rudd reforms have. In one of the few passages widely reported from his speech he states: “There will plainly be less demand for social services, medical expenses, hospital care if people, especially older people, like Michael [Kirby] and [partner] Johan, live together as opposed to being in lonely isolation consoled only by their respective cats.” Same-sex marriage is not simply a fight for equality but a fight to rescue homosexualists from the immiserated and emotionally impoverished lives that they, through their lack of maturity, have constructed for themselves, and which, after a brief sojourn in the sexual underworld, can only end in a lonely feline-focused existence funded by the responsible citizens that constitute the bulk of society. We are told by gay marriage advocates that the acceptance of proper adult relationships and responsibilities will not only cure the self-hatred of same-sexers, but simultaneously end the hatred expressed through homophobia and bullying. In the most recent Victorian state election, for example, the Greens ran an online Q&A session about their policies and positions in which they wrote the following in response to a question on relationship recognition: “It would create a more harmonious, less discriminatory society, more tolerant of diversity. It would also probably reduce bullying against same-sex attracted teenagers and lower the suicide rate.” This common position has been carefully unpicked by Rob Cover, who argues that while there may be benefits for the health of some adults in recognition of same-sex marriage, there is absolutely no evidence of a connection between this and youth suicide. He writes: “We are yet to have evidence that there are any direct benefits for younger persons who are struggling to cope with being bullied, humiliated, shamed and cannot (yet) envisage a liveable life and a happy future—let alone a marriage ceremony.” While same-sex marriage advocates consider themselves to be speaking for these same-sex attracted youth, offering them a happy future in the form of a wedding, Cover reminds us that these are not the same thing. As we have shown here, this is not a process of simple exclusion, but an erasure of the possibility of a life outside of heteronormative or “respectable”, coupledom. The “respectable same-sex couple”, like its respectable heterosexual counterpart, not only denies the possibility of full participation in adult society to those without partners but also refuses the lived experience of the many people like Vidal and Austen who do not accept the absolute equation of domesticity, responsibility, and sexual monogamy that the institution of marriage represents. A Good Institution? The connection between marriage and the mythical end of homophobia is not about evidence, as Cover rightly points out. Instead it is based on an ideological construction of marriage as an inherently valuable institution. Alongside this characterisation of marriage as a magical solution to homophobia and other social ills, comes the branding of other models of living, loving and having sex as inherently inferior and potentially harmful. In this, the rhetoric of conservatives and same-sex marriage advocates becomes disturbingly similar. Margaret Andrews, the wife of former Howard minister Kevin and a prominent (straight) marriage advocate, featured in the news a couple of years ago after making a public homophobic outburst directed at (queer) writer Benjamin Law. In response, Andrews outlined what for her were the clearly evident benefits of marriage: “For centuries, marriage has provided order, stability, and nurture for both adults and children. Indeed, the status of our marriages influences our well-being at least as much as the state of our finances.” Despite being on the apparent opposite of the debate, Amanda Villis and Danielle Hewitt from Doctors for Marriage Equality agree with Andrews about health benefits, including, significantly, those linked to sexual behaviour: It is also well known that people in long term monogamous relationships engage in far less risky sexual behaviour and therefore have significantly lower rates of sexually transmitted infections. Therefore legalisation of same sex marriage can lead to a reduction in the rates of sexually transmitted disease by decreasing stigma and discrimination and also promoting long term, monogamous relationships as an option for LGBTI persons. Here same-sex marriage is of benefit precisely because it eradicates the social risks of contagion and disease attributed to risky and promiscuous queers. To the extent that queers continue to suffer it can be attributed to the moral deficiency of their current lifestyle. This results in the need to “promote” marriage and marriage-like relationships. However, this need for promotion denies that marriage itself could be subject to discussion or debate and constructs it as both permanent and inevitable. Any discussion which might question the valuation of marriage is forestalled through the rhetoric of choice, as in the following example from a contributor to the “Equal Love” website: We understand that not everyone will want to get married, but there is no denying that marriage is a fundamental institution in Australian society. The right to be married should therefore be available to all those who choose to pursue it. It is a right that we chose to exercise. (Cole) This seemingly innocuous language of choice performs a number of functions. The first is that it seeks to disallow political debates about marriage by simply reducing critiques of the institution to a decision not to partake in it. In a process mirroring the construction of queers as inherently immature and adolescent, as discussed in the previous section, this move brands political critiques of marriage as historical remnants of an immature radicalism that has been trumped by liberal maturity. The contribution of Alyena Mohummadally and Catherine Roberts to Speak Now highlights this clearly. In this piece, Roberts is described as having used “radical feminism” as a teenage attempt to fill a “void” left by the lack of religion in her life. The teenage Roberts considered marriage “a patriarchal institution to be dismantled” (134). However, ten years later, now happily living with her partner, Roberts finds that “the very institutions she once riled against were those she now sought to be a part of” (137). Roberts’ marriage conversion, explained through a desire for recognition from Mohummadally’s Muslim family, is presented as simply a logical part of growing up, leaving behind the teenage commitment to radical politics along with the teenage attraction to “bars and nightclubs.” Not coincidentally, “life and love” taught Roberts to leave both of these things behind (134). The second consequence of arguments based on choice is that the possibility of any other terrain of choice is erased. This rhetoric thus gives marriage a false permanence and stability, failing to recognise that social institutions are vulnerable to change, and potentially to crisis. Beyond the same-sex marriage debates, the last fifty years have demonstrated the vulnerability of marriage to social change. Rising divorce rates, increasing acceptance of de facto relationships and the social recognition of domestic violence and rape within marriage have altered marriage inescapably, and forced questions about its inevitability (see: Stacey). This fact is recognised by conservatives, such as gay marriage opponent Patrick Parkinson who stated in a recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald that a “heartening aspect” of the “otherwise divisive” debate around gay marriage is that it has marked a “turnaround” in support for marriage, particularly among feminists, gays and other progressives. Malcolm Turnbull also explains his transition to support for same-sex marriage rights on the basis of this very premise: “I am very firmly of the view that families are the foundation of our society and that we would be a stronger society if more people were married, and by that I mean formally, legally married, and fewer were divorced.” He continued, “Are not the gays who seek the right to marry, to formalise their commitment to each other, holding up a mirror to the heterosexuals who are marrying less frequently and divorcing more often?” As Parkinson and Turnbull note, the decision to prioritise marriage is a decision to not only accept the fundamental nature of marriage as a social institution but to further universalise it as a social norm against the historical trends away from such normalisation. This is also acknowledged by campaign group Australian Marriage Equality who suggests that people like Parkinson and Turnbull who are “concerned about the preservation of marriage may do best to focus on ways to increase its appeal amongst the current population, rather than direct their energies towards the exclusion of a select group of individuals from its privileges.” Rather than challenging conservatism then, the gay marriage campaign aligns itself with Turnbull and Parkinson against the possibility of living otherwise embodied in the shadowy figure of the sexually irresponsible queer. The connection between ideological support for marriage and the construction of the “respectable homosexual couple” is made explicit by Heath in the essay quoted earlier. It is, he says, part of “the pattern of Western liberal history” to include “in an institution good people who make a good case to join.” The struggle for gay marriage, he argues, is linked to that of “workers to own property, Indigenous Australians to be citizens, women to vote.” By including these examples, Heath implicitly highlights the assimilationist dimension of this campaign, a dimension which has been importantly emphasised by Damien Riggs. Heath’s formulation denies the possibility of Indigenous sovereignty beyond assimilationist incorporation into the Australian state, just as it denies the possibility of a life of satisfying love and sex beyond marriage. More generally, Heath fails to acknowledge that none of these histories have disrupted the fundamental power dynamics at play: the benefits of property ownership accrue disproportionately to the rich, those of citizenship to white Australians, and political power remains primarily in the hands of men. Despite the protestations of gay marriage advocates there is no reason to believe that access to marriage would end homophobia while racism, class-based exploitation, and institutional sexism continue. This too, is part of the pattern of Western liberal history. Conclusion Our intention here is not to produce an anti-marriage manifesto—there are many excellent ones out there (see: Conrad)—but rather to note that gay marriage campaigns are not as historically innocuous as they present themselves to be. We are concerned that the rush to enter fully into institutions that, while changed, remain synonymous with normative (hetero)sexuality, has two unintended but nonetheless concerning consequences. Gay marriage advocates risk not only the discarding of a vision in which people may choose to not worship at the altar of the nuclear family, they also reanimate a new version of Decter’s self-hating gay. Political blogger Tim Dunlop encapsulates the political logic of gay marriage campaigns when he says, rather optimistically, that barring homosexualists from marriage “is the last socially acceptable way of saying you are not like us, you do not count, you matter less.” An alternative view proffered here is that saying yes to gay marriage risks abandoning a project that says we do not wish to be like you, not because we matter less, but because we see the possibility of different lives, and we refuse to accept a normative political logic that brands those lives as inferior. In casting this critique as adolescent, as something that a mature community should have grown out of, the same-sex marriage campaign rejects what we see as the most important social contributions that “same-sexers” have made. Where we think Vidal was mistaken back in 1981 was in his assertion that we “same-sexers” have been simply indifferent to the world of the “other-sexers.” We have also turned a critical eye upon “heterosexualist” existence, offering important critiques of a so-called adult or responsible life. It is this history that queer writer Sara Ahmed reminds us of, when she celebrates the angry queer at the family dinner table who refuses to simply succumb to a coercive demand to be happy and pleasant. A similar refusal can be found in queer critiques of the “dead citizenship” of heterosexuality, described by José Esteban Muñoz as: a modality of citizenship that is predicated on negation of liveness or presentness on behalf of a routinized investment in futurity. This narrative of futurity is most familiar to those who live outside of it. It is the story of the [sic] nation's all-consuming investment in the nuclear family, and its particular obsession with the children, an investment that instantly translates into the (monological) future. (399) In the clamour to fully assert their membership in the world of adult citizenship, same-sex marriage advocates negate the potential liveness and presentness of queer experience, opting instead for the routinised futurity that Muñoz warns against. Imagining ourselves as forlorn figures, standing with tear-stained cheeks and quivering lips at the altar, waiting for normative relationships and responsible citizenship is not the only option. Like Vidal and Austen, with whom we began, queers are already living, loving, and fucking, in and above our sexual underworlds, imagining that just possibly there may be other ways to live, both in the present and in constructing different futures. References Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Andrews, Margaret. “A Health Check on Marriage.” The Punch, 13 Aug. 2010. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/a-health-check-on-marriage/›. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” differences: A Feminist Journal of Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002): 14–44. Cole, Jules. “Marriage Equality Upholds the rights of all Australians.” Equal Love website, 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.equallove.info/node/83›. Conrad, Ryan, ed. Against Equality: queer critiques of gay marriage. Lewiston: Against Equality Publishing Collective, 2010. Cover, Rob. “Is same-sex marriage an adequate responst to queer youth suicide?”Online Opinion: Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate, 22 Aug. 2012. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14017›. Dunlop, Tim. “There is no excuse.” ABC The Drum Unleashed, 8 Apr. 2010. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/34402.html›. Farrow, Kenyon, “Why is gay marriage anti-black?” Against Equality: queer critiques of gay marriage. Ed. Ryan Conrad. Lewiston: Against Equality Publishing Collective, 2010. 21–33. Frequently Asked Questions, Australian Marriage Equality, 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/faqs.htm›. Grattan, Michelle. “Turnbull’s Gay Marriage Swipe.” The Age. 7 July 2012. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/turnbulls-gay-marriage-swipe-20120706-21mou.html›. Heath, Ryan. “Love in a Cold Climate.” Griffith Review. 29 (2010). 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.griffithreview.com/edition-29-prosper-or-perish/251-essay/949.html›. Mohummadally, Alyena and Catherine Roberts. “When Worlds, Happily, Collide.” Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Ed. Victor Marsh. Thornbury: Clouds of Magellan, 2012, 134–139. Muñoz, José Esteban. “Citizens and Superheroes.” American Quarterly. 52.2 (2000): 397–404. Parkinson, Patrick. “About Time We All Cared More About Marriage.” Sydney Morning Herald, 24 Aug. 2012. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/about-time-we-all-cared-more-about-marriage-20120823-24p2g.html›. Rauch, Jonathan. Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004. Riggs, Damien. “The Racial Politics of Marriage Claims.” Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Gay Marriage. Ed. Victor Marsh. Thornbury: Clouds of Magellan, 2012. 191–201. Stacey, Judith. Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1998. Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2011. Turnbull, Malcolm. “Reflections on Gay Marriage: Michael Kirby Lecture 2012.” 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/speeches/reflections-on-the-gay-marriage-issue-michael-kirby-lecture-2012/›. Valverde, Mariana. “A New Entity in the History of Sexuality: The Respectable Same-Sex Couple.” Feminist Studies. 32.1 (2006): 155–162. Vidal, Gore. “Some Jews and the Gays.” The Nation. 14 Nov. 1981. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.thenation.com/article/169197/some-jews-gays›. —. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York and London: Random House, 1995. Villis, Amanda, and Danielle Hewitt. “Why Legalising Same Sex Marriage Will Benefit Health.”17 Aug. 2012. 24 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14004›. Wright, Tim. “Same-Sex Couples Still Waiting at the Altar For a Basic Right.” The Age. 31 July 2009. 12 Sept. 2012 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/samesex-couples-still-waiting-at-the-altar-for-a-basic-right-20090730-e2xk.html›.