Journal articles on the topic 'Golf club culture'

The hard, strong, very close-grained wood of common persimmon (Diospyros virginiana L.; Ebenaceae) is desirable for specialty products such as golf club heads, percussion sticks, billiard cues, and for wood turnery. The edible fruit of cultivated varieties is sold as pulp for use in puddings, cookies, cakes, and custards. Persimmon is usually propagated by grafting. Own-rooted clonal persimmon could offer several advantages to specialty fruit growers such as elimination of grafting, graft incompatibility issues, and improved rootstocks for variety testing. Four mature, grafted (male and female) persimmon genotypes and one hybrid were used for nodal explant culture. Nodal stem explants were cultured on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium containing 10 μM zeatin, 3% (w/v) sucrose, and 0.7% (w/v) Bacto agar. Explants were routinely transferred to fresh medium every 3 weeks until shoot cultures were established. All nodal explants excised from grafted greenhouse plants produced at least one viable shoot. For in vitro rooting of microshoots, half-strength MS medium with 0, 5, 10, or 15 μM indole-3-butyric acid (IBA), 0.1 g·L−1 phloroglucinol, 3% (w/v) sucrose, and 0.7% (w/v) Bacto agar were tested with a 10-day dark culture treatment followed by culture in the light. Best rooting (14% to 87%) was achieved on medium containing 5 μM IBA for the common persimmon genotypes with means averaging from 0.5 to 3.9 roots per shoot. Ninety-one percent rooting with 5.3 ± 2.6 roots per shoot was achieved for the hybrid persimmon. Rooted plants were successfully acclimatized to the greenhouse.

The reclamation of Serangan Island in 1995-1998, resulted the physical change of the land that is to change the area of Serangan Island from 111 hectares to 481 hectares or to fourfold from the previous area, and to unite the area of the Serangan Island which on pre-reclamation in the form of island clusters. The first reclamation in Bali is of course due to a reasons, including the incompatibility of the initial planning objectives and the reality of post-reclamation, where most of the land becomes empty land, whereas the original idea was to build megawisata facilities such as golf, resorts, lagoon, yatch club , beach club house, superlot development in the form of villas, other tourism support facilities, and marina / ferry. The reclamation has resulted in changes in the physical condition of the land on a macro (global) and micro (detailed) basis. Based on this phenomenon, will be sought to know the things behind the changing physical condition of land pascareklamasi. The research method used is qualitative descriptive with observation technique, survey and document. Sampling is done by purposive sampling. The results of this study are the factors behind the physical change of land post-reclamation such as : physical conditon of land factors, economic, institutional and other factors such as social factors, culture, and belief or faith. Keywords: Influencing factors in physical changes of land, pre-reclamation, post-reclamation.

This article examines how class and gender hierarchies are reproduced through spatial dynamics among affluent golfers in contemporary Mexico City, using the concepts of collective visibility and invisibility. The analysis focuses on how class and gender principles make some sites and actions visible while reducing the perceptibility of other spaces and acts. To do so, the article addresses three questions: to what extent and in what ways are privileged social spaces, like golf clubs, exclusively organized by class principles? How do Mexican golfers understand the class and gender principles operating in golf clubs? And, how do multiple axes of differences inform space and spatial practices? The study is based on an ethnography of three up-scale golf clubs and 58 in-depth interviews with members of the golfing community, including club members, instructors, caddies, and golf journalists in Mexico City.

During August 2003, a golf course putting green sample composed of Poa annua from the Buffalo Hill Country Club in Kalispell, MT exhibiting symptoms of general decline, wilting, and necrosis was submitted to the University of Rhode Island Turfgrass Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. No pathogenic fungi were observed or cultured from affected plants. Bacterial streaming was observed from cut leaves. Cut leaves were surface disinfested for 5 min in a 0.6% sodium hypochlorite solution and plated on yeast dextrose calcium carbonate (YDC) agar media. A single yellow, mucoid colony type composed of rod-shaped bacteria was isolated from all leaves. Bacteria were gram negative, lacked anaerobic growth, did not fluorescence on King's medium B, and were able to grow at 33°C on YDC. Colonies were transferred to YDC for 10 days, DNA was extracted and a 2,190-bp region encompassing the 16S rRNA, ITS, and 5′ end of the 23S rRNA was amplified via polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using previously published protocols (1). Sequence comparisons of the resulting 2,190-bp PCR product revealed a 99.7% sequence similarity with X. translucens pv. poae (American Type Culture Collection [ATCC] no. 33804) and a 99.8% sequence similarity with X. translucens pv. poae M-1 (Torrington, CT). No higher sequence similarity could be identified from a BLAST search. The Montana isolate and the previously described M-1 isolate were inoculated onto four replicates of 5-month-old P. annua var. annua plants by dipping cut leaves into a bacterial suspension adjusted to 109 CFU/ml in 0.9% NaCl. Control plants were dipped into 0.9% NaCl without the presence of the bacteria. All plants were placed in the greenhouse at an average daytime temperature of approximately 24°C and 12 h of sunlight. After 8 weeks, the plants were assessed for disease and checked for bacterial streaming. This experiment was repeated once. The Montana isolate caused approximately 68 and 70% leaf death and the M-1 isolate caused 21 and 25% leaf death in the two experiments. Bacterial streaming was observed in approximately 50 and 80% of the examined leaves inoculated with the M-1 and Montana isolates, respectively. Control plants showed no leaf mortality or bacterial streaming. Although this pathogen was originally identified in the United States in Michigan (2) and has been prevalent in the northeastern United States for the past 10 to 15 years, to our knowledge, this is the first report of the disease in the northwestern United States. References: (1) N. A. Mitkowski et al. Plant Dis. 89:469, 2005. (2) D. L. Roberts et al. Phytopathology 75:1289, 1985.

Seashore paspalum (Paspalum vaginatum Sw.) is a newly cultivated C4 turfgrass that has exceptional salinity tolerance and is highly suited for use on golf courses in coastal areas. In October 2008 and June 2009, circular patches of blighted seashore paspalum ranging from 30 cm to >3 m in diameter were observed in fairways, tees, and roughs established with ‘Supreme’ seashore paspalum at Roco Ki Golf Club in Macao, Dominican Republic. Affected patches were initially chlorotic followed by reddish brown necrosis of leaves and leaf sheaths. Reddish brown-to-gray lesions were also observed on leaf sheaths during the early stages of necrosis. During periods of wet or humid weather from June through October, basidiocarps were produced on necrotic plant tissue and identified as Marasmiellus mesosporus Singer (2). Three isolates were obtained by plating symptomatic leaf sheaths that were surface sterilized with a 0.5% NaOCl solution on potato dextrose agar amended with 50 ppm each of streptomycin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline (PDA+++). Sequences of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of rDNA, obtained from these three isolates and three stipes of basidiocarps, were identical to each other and 99% similar to a M. mesosporus sequence deposited in the NCBI database (Accession No. AB517375). To confirm pathogenicity, a M. mesosporus isolate obtained from symptomatic plant tissue was inoculated onto 6-week-old P. vaginatum (‘Seaspray’) planted (0.5 mg seed/cm2) in 10-cm-diameter pots containing a mixture of 80% sand and 20% reed sedge peat. Two weeks prior to inoculation, the isolate was grown on a sterilized mixture of 100 cm3 of rye grain, 4.9 ml of CaCO3, and 100 ml of water. Infested grains were placed 0.5 cm below the soil surface for inoculation. Pots were inoculated with five infested grains or five sterilized, uninfested grains with three replications of each treatment. After inoculation, pots were placed in a growth chamber with a 12-h photoperiod set to 30°C during the day and 26°C at night. Approximately 20% of plants in inoculated pots were necrotic 7 days postinoculation and this increased to 75% by 21 days postinoculation. Diseased plants in inoculated pots exhibited symptoms similar to those observed in the field. Leaves were initially chlorotic with brown lesions on lower leaf sheaths and eventually turned necrotic, reddish brown, and collapsed. Pots receiving uninfested grains were healthy and showed no symptoms on all rating dates. At 21 days postinoculation, basidiocarps were observed emerging from three colonized plants at the base of the oldest leaf sheath near the crown. Three reisolations were made on PDA+++ from stem lesions surface sterilized with a 0.5% NaOCl solution. All reisolations were confirmed as M. mesosporus by culture morphology and ITS sequence data. M. mesosporus was previously reported causing disease on American beachgrass (Ammophila breviligulata Fernald) in North Carolina (1) and recently in Japan (3). The pathogen was initially placed in the genus Marasmius and reported as the cause of the disease Marasmius blight (1). Subsequent morphological observation found that the pathogen belonged in the genus Marasmiellus (2). To our knowledge, this is the first report of M. mesosporus causing Marasmiellus blight on seashore paspalum, a high-amenity turfgrass. References: (1) L. Lucas et al. Plant Dis. Rep. 55:582, 1971. (2) R. Singer et al. Mycologia 65:468, 1973. (3) S. Takehashi et al. Mycoscience 48:407, 2007.

Based on literature review and logic analysis, we sorts out golf equipment including golf apparel, golf clubs and golf balls in this paper. We also describe the detailed evolution process of the related golf equipments, which will give people a comprehensive understanding of golf development. Another objective of this paper is to popularize golf culture, and give a guideline for the development of the domestic golf equipment market.

Abstract Golf took the concept of the club from traditional voluntary organizations along with the ideas of committee structures, mechanisms for ensuring exclusivity, and a place, both geographically and socially, for communal conviviality. It became one of the fastest growing recreational activities of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and the first participant sport to expend and invest large sums of money. By means of a model constructed around the development of the British golf club before 1914, this paper offers a new approach to examining the history of associativity in sport. It uses five concepts of capital—physical, financial, cultural, social, and human—and argues that their formation in the context of club development should not be explored in isolation of each other.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia and the other successor states lost much of their collective strategic significance for the international community. Russia's role as a new member of the nuclear club is potentially destabilizing but does not present the overriding nuclear threat once posed by the USSR. Although Russia is attempting to reestablish its traditional roles in Eurasia, the Balkans and eastern Europe, its political importance has generally decreased commensurate with the collapse of the Soviet military machine; Russia is important economically only insofar as it is a powerful magnet for western aid and investment. While this perception of gradual marginalization, apparently shared by western diplomats, academics and journalists, may be largely accurate, it is incomplete. It overlooks Russia's potential role as a source of natural resources.

In June of 2009, a golf course putting green sample of creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera L.) cv. Penn G-2 from a golf club in North Carolina was submitted to the Michigan State University Turfgrass Disease Diagnostic Laboratory for diagnosis. The sample exhibited symptoms of general wilt, decline, and characteristic necrosis from the leaf tips down. Fungal pathogens were ruled out when no phytopathogenic fungal structures were observed with microscopic examination of infected tissue. Symptoms appeared similar to those of annual bluegrass affected by bacterial wilt caused by Xanthomonas translucens pv. poae. Bacterial streaming was present in all of the cut infected tissue of the Penn G-2 bentgrass sample when observed with a microscope. To isolate the causal agent, cut leaf tissue (1- to 3-mm tips) exhibiting bacterial streaming was surface disinfected for 1 min in 10% sodium hypochlorite solution and rinsed for 1 min with sterile distilled water. Leaf blades were placed into Eppendorf microtubes with 20 μl of sterile phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) solution (pH 7) and macerated with a sterile scalpel. Serial dilutions up to 1 × 10–4 were performed in sterile PBS; 10 μl of each suspension was plated onto nutrient agar (NA) (Becton Dickinson, Sparks, MD) and incubated at room temperature for 5 days. Pure cultures of three commonly observed single bacterial colonies growing on plates from serial dilutions were made on NA medium. These pure cultures were grown for 5 days and used to inoculate three replicates of 5-week-old Penn G-2 plants that had uniformly filled in 8.5-cm-diameter pots grown under greenhouse conditions. Uninfected Penn G-2 creeping bentgrass plants were inoculated with 1 ml of 1.3 × 109 CFU/ml of bacterial suspension by adding drops of the suspension to blades of sterile scissors used to cut the healthy plants. Of the three different bacterial cultures selected to inoculate healthy plants, only one resulted in slight browning of leaf tips just 2 days after inoculation. The symptoms progressed, and by 5 days after inoculation, browning, twisting and leaf dieback to the sheath were observed. When leaf tips of the inoculated plants were cut, bacterial streaming was observed. Isolation of the bacterium from inoculated Penn G-2 plants was performed to fulfill Koch's postulates. Once isolated, a single bacterial colony was identified by 16S rDNA sequencing (Microcheck Inc. Northfield, VT). 16S rDNA sequencing results indicated that the causal agent of bacterial infection was a member of the Acidovorax genus, with a 100% sequence match to Acidovorax avenae subsp. avenae (2). The same nonflorescent, aerobic, gram-negative bacterium has been consistently isolated from inoculated plants exhibiting symptoms thus far. A member of the Acidovorax genus has also been identified as a pathogen of creeping bentgrass in Japan (1). To our knowledge, this is the first report of a bacterial disease affecting creeping bentgrass caused by Acidovorax spp. in the United States. References: (1) N. Furuya et al. J. Fac. Agric. Kyushu Univ. 54:13. 2009. (2) N. Schaad et al. Syst. Appl. Microbiol. 31:434. 2008.

Elite Sport and Leisure Sport in Hungary: The Double TroubleThe main purpose of this study is to give insight into the current status of two big areas of sport in Hungary: elite sport and leisure sport. As the expression ‘double trouble’ in the title indicates, in Hungary there are several problems in both areas.Hungary is a small country, but its Olympic teams were traditionally very successful in the Games. However, at the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing, Hungarian athletes performed below expectations, winning only three gold medals. The sport's political leaders and the public were very disappointed, therefore many experts tried to analyse the main reasons for the failure. They suggested that there were four problems in the background: the continuous disintegration of the sport clubs system; the low prestige of coaches and professionals working in sport; insufficient financial support and its inadequate timing; and the deficiency of sports science and its health care background. The second trouble concerns the sporting habits of Hungarian society. The country has faced the same problem for many decades: only a very low percentage of the Hungarian population takes part regularly in leisure sport programs. The latest empirical research shows that more than 60% of Hungarians do not do sports with suitable regularity. In comparing previous research results, there are a few changes among Hungarians according to gender, age and status of residence.How can this double trouble be resolved, or at least, how could both areas be somewhat improved? In Hungary, it is not really an easy task.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> With the increase of sonic life in digital spaces, new platforms for the exhibition of sound are emerging; from multisensory web interfaces, open access databases, apps for playing with sound, to experimental locative and geo-located pieces. From iPods, mobile phones, and noise cancelling headphones, new technological tools are constantly remediating how we listen and relate to the sonic spaces around us. The collaboration between digital humanities, sound studies, locative media and cartography holds many possibilities for challenging silent and text-centric cultures of communication into rich multi-sensory experiences that accommodate diverse knowledges and abilities. By thinking through new modes for staging cultural memory and presenting ephemera like sound, digital mapping tools can facilitate alternative forms of sensory relationships to the social and physical spaces around us.</p><p><i>Tempelhofer: Human Scale</i> is a web-based and locative sound mapping project based in Berlin’s Tempelhofer Feld. What was once an airport, military base, and monument of Nazi Germany, the grounds have only recently been transformed into a public park, recreation area, and event space; a blank slate for human potential. On the north side, a Shaolin Temple lies just opposite a mini golf course made up of 18 interactive sculptures designed by local artists. DIY garden communities make up another corner. Recreational activities such as cycling, Segway clubs, and kite flying roam in and around the empty airport runways. A “grillplatz” barbeque area accommodates hundreds of families and youth, emitting thick clouds of smoke that mirror, in a historical juxtaposition, the airplane exhaust of a once operating airport. Bearing the aroma of a new Berlin, Tempelhofer Feld now embodies a melting pot of different foods, activities, and cultures coming into sensory contact. In the shadows of the massive airport structure lies a refugee camp, producing complex questions around heritage, conservation, and the politics of public space.</p><p>Tempelhofer Feld is a space that is highly politicized with its own contentious history and questions of preservation. Originally designed as a cornerstone for Hitler’s “world capital,” the airport sought to “crystalize claims of racial supremacy and world domination through architecture” (Parsloe 2017). Locating a refugee camp on this site not only creates complex associations between past and present but it also illuminates the tensions around living conditions on a site upheld by many strict heritage and conservation bylaws. Tempelhofer Feld is Europe’s largest protected historical monument, meaning complex tensions around preservation/conservation and development/change are consistently playing out. To explore these tensions, my project utilizes mapping technologies to trace how new emerging ephemeral activities are interacting with place, along with its complex politics, preserved history, and cultural memory. These ephemeral activities emerging out of the public spaces of the park produce fascinating tensions between the vital idealism of Berlin’s present and the turbulent history of its recent past. Recycled and reactive spaces like Tempelhofer Feld display the complex tensions between the re-adaptive and ephemeral nature of the park against its permanent state of preservation and commemoration of history. It underscores how charged public spaces in the city can be: “how should Berliners remember the past in a way that will most intelligently inform how they will move forward into the future?” (Malamud 2013).</p><p>The series of sound recordings focus on the quiet, intimate, and ephemeral scale of human activity – from walking, jogging, barbequing, lounging, kite-flying, socializing, gardening. These different sound activities are placed as destinations on a map that can be explored on a web interface as well as through geo-located points when walking through the park. To recreate the locative experience of the park on the web interface, sound clips are set against photographs of the different landscapes of the airport; expansive, barren, and sometimes empty of human activity. The intimacy of these sounds set against the open landscapes is meant to invert a space originally designed for technical infrastructure, transportation, and nationalist domination – a scale in which the individual human body often becomes erased. The question of scale is central to these explorations: how can sound on the intimate human scale be used to invert the scale of a massive airport/urban park? How does sound, with its embodied/sensory functions, invert questions around remote sensing that goes into mapping satellite imagery? What aspects of human sensory experience are erased or go unnoticed through remote, vision-based satellite and mapping technologies?</p><p>Soundscapes embody the complex relationship between human and environment in a complex system of information exchange. To the World Soundscape Project, soundwalking is a method for deep listening and participation in our everyday soundscapes: it involves “not simply a passive monitoring, but an active mental and physical participation in the ongoing composition forever being created” (Truax 1974, 38). This idea that the soundscape is not only something we passively listen to but something we also actively engage in and contribute to is central to the interactivity of this project. Sound can be activated through the user’s touch (on the web, through the mouse and in person, through their location). Different sound nodes can be activated simultaneously, building up a more complex and layered soundscape. By interacting with these different sounds, the user can acoustically design and recompose the soundscape around them, contributing to a greater sense of spatial and aural awareness.</p><p>The ephemeral nature of these activities/happenings is also emphasized through sound’s own elusive materiality, intangibility, and ephemerality. How the temporal and ephemerality of sound can be used as an archival tool to map out the contingent and ephemeral nature of memory is an essential question to this project. In Mark Smith’s theorization of sonic geographies, he states, “if we listen to it, the landscape is not so much a static topography that can be mapped and drawn, [but] a fluid and changing surface that transforms as it is enveloped by different sounds” (Bull and Back 2016, 11). The sonic geography of Tempelhofer Feld therefore represents its transformative and constantly evolving surface. While urban spaces (and its associated cartographic technologies) have dominantly been understood as visual spectacles, sound mapping foregrounds the vital role that sound plays in understanding the everyday cultural, political, and physical spaces around us.</p>

In the fall of 1997, Prewitt and Associates, Inc. conducted archival and oral history research, an archeological survey, and National Register testing of a prehistoric site in the vicinity of the San Felipe Springs in southeastern Val Verde County, Texas. The work was done in preparation for construction of a water treatment plant and related facilities for the City of Del Rio. The survey resulted in the recording of one historic site (41VV1820) and further documentation of historic and prehistoric components at a previously known site, 41VV444. The latter site also was the focus of intensive geoarcheological investigations. National Register testing of 41VV444, called the San Felipe Springs site, was restricted to portions of the alluvial terraces of San Felipe Creek near the East and West San Felipe Springs. A 40-m' block excavation near the East Springs revealed three stratified prehistoric components in the upper ca. 100 m of alluvium. These sediments represent continual deposition over the last 3,000-4,000 years, and archeological materials denoting Late Prehistoric, Protohistoric, Late Archaic, and Middle Archaic occupations were recovered. The upper component post-dates A.D. 1300 and produced plain bone-tempered potsherds, ClifIton and Perdiz arrow points, and steeply beveled scrapers. This component represents a Toyah phase occupation on the western periphery of the Toyah culture area, but it shares many attributes with Protohistoric Infierno phase occupations of the Lower Pecos. The middle component is characterized by Shumla dart points and three pit features originating near the base of a dense burned rock layer. It represents utilization of the area during the Flanders Subperiod of the Late Archaic. Although recovered from many sites (particularly rockshelters), the chronology of Shumla points is not well established in the region. Radiocarbon assays place the age of the San Felipe Springs Shumla component at ca. 800-200 B.C. Geomorphic evidence suggests that a major flood episode (or episodes) occurred along San Felipe Creek between ca. 1300 and 800 B.C. This gravelly deposit separates the middle component from the lower component and is indicative of a high volume flood event, possibly similar to the August 1998 flooding along San Felipe Creek resulting from Hurricane Charley. Underlying this zone is a discrete Middle Archaic occupation containing a dense burned rock layer and an internal pit feature. Radiocarbon dates, along with associated Bulverde and Langtry variant dart points, correlate to the San Felipe Subperiod. Also associated with this occupation is a small concentration of artifacts representing a dump or cache of usable lithic materials. Historic components at 41VV1820 and 41VV444 contain structures related to the City of Del Rio's water pumping and distribution system. These resources, particularly the East Springs pump house and pond enclosure at 41VV444, are historically significant; however, they will be removed during construction of new water pumping facilities. Site 41VV444 encompasses most of what is now the San Felipe Country Club golf course. Built by Texas' first golf course architect, John Bredemus, in 1922, the San Felipe course is now recognized as an important historic landscape.

"You could think of our kind of scholarship," he said, "as something like 'slow food' in a fast-food culture."— Ivan Kreilkamp, co-editor of Victorian Studies(Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2009) John Hartley’s entertaining and polemical defense of a disappearing art form (the print copy journal designed to be ripped eagerly from its envelope and read from cover to cover like a good book) came my way via the usual slightly disconcerting M/C Journal overture: I believe that your research interests and background make you a potential expert reviewer of the manuscript, "LAMENT FOR A LOST RUNNING ORDER? OBSOLESCENCE AND ACADEMIC JOURNALS," which has been submitted to the '' [sic] issue of M/C Journal. The submission's extract is inserted below, and I hope that you will consider undertaking this important task for us. Automated e-mails like these keep strange company, with reminders about overdue library items and passwords about to expire. Inevitably their tone calls to mind the generic flattery of the internet scam that announces foreign business opportunities or an unexpectedly large windfall from a deceased relative. At face value, this e-mail confirms John Hartley’s suspicions about the personalised craft of journal curation. Journal editing, he implies, is going the way of drywalling and smithying—by the time we realise these ancient and time-intensive skills have been lost, it’ll be too late. The usual culprit is to the fore—the internet—and the risk presented by obsolescence is very significant. At stake is the whole rich and messy infrastructure of academic professional identity: scholarly communication, goodwill, rank, trust, service to peers, collegiality, and knowledge itself. As a time-poor reader of journals both online and in print I warmed to this argument, and enjoyed reading about the particularities of journal editing: the cultivation and refinement of a specialised academic skill set involving typefaces, cover photographs and running order. Journal editors are our creative directors. Authors think selfishly and not always consistently about content, position and opportunity, but it’s the longer term commitment of editors to taking care of their particular shingle in the colourful and crowded bazaar of scholarly publishing, that keeps the market functioning in a way that also works for inspectors and administrators. Thinking of all the print journals I’ve opened and shut and put on shelves (sometimes still in their wrappers) and got down again, and photocopied, and forgotten about, I realised that I do retain a dim sense of their look and shape, and that in practical ways this often helps me remember what was in them. Nevertheless, even having been through the process he describes, whereby “you have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal,” I came to the conclusion that he had underestimated the human in the practice of refereeing. I wasn’t sure made me an expert reviewer for this piece, except perhaps that in undertaking the review itself I was practising a kind of expertise that entitled me to reflect on what I was doing. So as a way of wrestling with the self-referentiality of the process of providing an anonymous report on an article whose criticism of blind refereeing I shared, I commented on the corporeality and collegiality of the practice: I knew who I was writing about (and to), and I was conscious of both disagreeing and wondering how to avoid giving offence. I was also cold in my office, and wondering about a coffee. “I suspect the cyborg reviewer is (like most cyborgs) a slightly romantic, or at least rhetorical, fantasy,” I added, a bit defensively. “Indeed, the author admits to practising editorship via a form of human intersubjectivity that involves email, so the mere fact that the communication in some cases is via a website doesn’t seem to render the human obsolete.” The cyborg reviewer wasn’t the only thing bothering me about the underlying assumptions concerning electronic scholarly publishing, however. The idea that the electronic disaggregation of content threatens the obsolescence of the print journal and its editor is a little disingenuous. Keyword searches do grab articles independently of issues, it’s true, but it’s a stretch to claim that this functionality is what’s turning diligent front-to-back readers and library flaneurs into the kinds of online mercenaries we mean when we say “users”. Quite the opposite: journal searches are highly seductive invitations to linger and explore. Setting out from the starting point of a single article, readers can now follow a citation trail, or chase up other articles by the same author or on similar topics, all the while keeping in plain sight the running order that was designed by the editors as an apt framework for the piece when it first appeared. Journal publishers have the keenest investment in nurturing the distinctive brand of each of their titles, and as a result the journal name is never far from view. Even the cover photo and layout is now likely to be there somewhere, and to crop up often as readers retrace their steps and set out again in another direction. So to propose that online access makes the syntactical form of a journal issue irrelevant to readers is to underestimate both the erotics of syntax, and the capacity of online readers to cope with a whole new libidinous economy of searching characterised by multiple syntactical options. And if readers are no longer sequestered within the pages of an individual hard copy journal—there really is a temptation to mention serial monogamy here—their freedom to operate more playfully only draws attention to the structural horizontalities of the academic public sphere, which is surely the basis of our most durable claims to profess expertise. Precisely because we are hyperlinked together across institutions and disciplines, we can justly argue that we are perpetually peer-reviewing each other, in a fairly disinterested fashion, and no longer exclusively in the kinds of locally parochial clusters that have defined (and isolated) the Australian academy. So although disaggregation irritates journal editors, a more credible risk to their craft comes from the disintermediation of scholarly communication that is one of the web’s key affordances. The shift towards user generated content, collaboratively generated, openly accessible and instantly shareable across many platforms, does make traditional scholarly publishing, with its laborious insistence on double blind refereeing, look a bit retro. How can this kind of thing not become obsolete given how long it takes for new ideas to make their way into print, what with all that courtly call and response between referees, editors and authors, and the time consumed in arranging layout and running order and cover photos? Now that the hegemons who propped up the gold standard journals are blogging and podcasting their ideas, sharing their bookmarks, and letting us know what they’re doing by the hour on Twitter, with presumably no loss of quality to their intellectual presence, what kind of premium or scarcity value can we place on the content they used to submit to print and online journals? So it seems to me that the blogging hegemon is at least as much of a problem for the traditional editor as the time challenged browser hoping for a quick hit in a keyword search. But there are much more complicated reasons why the journal format itself is not at risk, even from www.henryjenkins.org. Indeed, new “traditional” journals are being proposed and launched all the time. The mere award of an A* for the International Journal of Cultural Studies in the Australian journal rankings (Australian Research Council) confirms that journals are persistently evaluated in their own right, that the brand of the aggregating instrument still outranks the bits and pieces of disaggregated content, and that the relative standing of different journals depends precisely on the quantification of difficulty in meeting the standards (or matching the celebrity status) of their editors, editorial boards and peer reviewing panels. There’s very little indication in this process that either editors or reviewers are facing obsolescence; too many careers still depend on their continued willingness to stand in the way of the internet’s capacity to let anyone have a go at presenting ideas and research in the public domain. As the many inputs to the ERA exercise endlessly, and perhaps a bit tediously, confirmed, it’s the reputation of editors and their editorial practices that signals the exclusivity of scholarly publishing: in the era of wikis and blogs, an A* journal is one club that’s not open to all. Academia 1.0 is resilient for all these straightforward reasons. Not only in Australia, tenure and promotion depend on it. As a result, since the mid 1990s, editors, publishers, librarians and other stakeholders in scholarly communication have been keeping a wary eye on the pace and direction of change to either its routines or its standards. Their consistent attention has been on the proposition the risk comes from something loosely defined as “digital”. But as King, Tenopir and Clark point out in their study of journal readership in the sciences, the relevance of journal content itself has been extensively disputed and investigated across the disciplines since the 1960s. Despite the predictions of many authors in the 1990s that electronic publishing and pre-publishing would challenge the professional supremacy of the print journal, it seems just as likely that the simple convenience of filesharing has made more vetted academic material available, more easily, to more readers. As they note in a waspish foonote, even the author of one of the most frequently cited predictions that scholarly journals were on the way out had to modify his views, “perhaps due to the fact that his famous 1996 [sic] article "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals" has had thousands of hits or downloads on his server alone.” (King et al,; see also Odlyzko, " Tragic Loss" and "Rapid Evolution"). In other words, all sides now seem to agree that “digital” has proved to be both opportunity and threat to scholarly publication. Odlyzko’s prediction of the disappearance of the print journal and its complex apparatus of self-perpetuation was certainly premature in 1996. So is John Hartley right that it’s time to ask the question again? Earlier this year, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article “Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis”, which covered much of the same ground, generated brisk online discussion among journal editors in the humanities (Howard; see also the EDITOR-L listserv archive). The article summarised the views of a number of editors of “traditional” journals, and offset these with the views of a group representing the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, canvassing the possibility that scholarly publishing could catch up to the opportunities that we tend to shorthand as “web 2.0”. The short-lived CELJ blog discussion led by Jo Guldi in February 2009 proposed four principles we might expect to shape the future of scholarly publishing in the humanities: technical interoperability, which is pretty uncontroversial; the expansion of scholarly curation to a role in managing and making sense of “the noise of the web”; diversification of content types and platforms; and a more inclusive approach to the contribution of non-academic experts. (Guldi et al.) Far from ceding the inexorability of their own obsolescence, the four authors of this blog (each of them journal editors) have re-imagined the craft of editing, and have drafted an amibitious but also quite achievable manifesto for the renovation of scholarly communication. This is focused on developing a new and more confident role for the academy in the next phase of the development of the knowledge-building capacity of the web. Rather than confining themselves to being accessed only by their professional peers (and students) via university libraries in hardcopy or via institutional electronic subscription, scholars should be at the forefront of the way knowledge is managed and developed in the online public sphere. This would mean developing metrics that worked as well for delicious and diigo as they do for journal rankings; and it would mean a more upfront contribution to quality assurance and benchmarking of information available on the web, including information generated from outside the academy. This resonates with John Hartley’s endorsement of wiki-style open refereeing, which as an idea contains a substantial backwards nod to Ginsparg’s system of pre-publication of the early 1990s (see Ginsparg). It also suggests a more sophisticated understanding of scholarly collaboration than the current assumption that this consists exclusively of a shift to multiply-authored content, the benefit of which has tended to divide scholars in the humanities (Young). But it was not as a reviewer or an author that this article really engaged me in thinking about the question of human obsolescence. Recently I’ve been studying the fragmentation, outsourcing and automation of work processes in the fast food industry or, as it calls itself, the Quick Service Restaurant trade. I was drawn into this study by thinking about the complex reorganisation of time and communication brought about by the partial technologisation of the McDonalds drive-thru in Australia. Now that drive-thru orders are taken through a driveway speaker, the order window (and its operator) have been rendered obsolete, and this now permanently closed window is usually stacked high with cardboard boxes. Although the QSR industry in the US has experimented with outsourcing ordering to call centres at other locations (“May I take your order?”), in Australia the task itself has simply been added to the demands of customer engagement at the paying window, with the slightly odd result that the highest goal of customer service at this point is to be able to deal simultaneously with two customers at two different stages of the drive-thru process—the one who is ordering three Happy Meals and a coffee via your headset, and the one who is sitting in front of you holding out money—without offending or confusing either. This formal approval of a shift from undivided customer attention to the time-efficiency of multitasking is a small but important reorientation of everyday service culture, making one teenager redundant and doubling the demands placed on the other. The management of quick service restaurant workers and their productivity offers us a new perspective on the pressures we are experiencing in the academic labour market. Like many of my colleagues, I have been watching with a degree of ambivalence the way in which the national drive to quantify excellence in research in Australia has resulted in some shallow-end thinking about how to measure what it is that scholars do, and how to demonstrate that we are doing it competitively. Our productivity is shepherded by the constant recalibration of our workload, conceived as a bundle of discrete and measurable tasks, by anxious institutions trying to stay ahead in the national game of musical chairs, which only offers a limited number of seats at the research table—while still keeping half an eye on their enterprise bargaining obligations. Or, as the Quick Service Restaurant sector puts it: Operational margins are narrowing. While you need to increase the quality, speed and accuracy of service, the reality is that you also need to control labor costs. If you reduce unnecessary labor costs and improve workforce productivity, the likelihood of expanding your margins increases. Noncompliance can cost you. (Kronos) In their haste to increase quality, speed and accuracy of academic work, while lowering labor costs and fending off the economic risk of noncompliance, our institutions have systematically overlooked the need to develop meaningful ways to accommodate the significant scholarly work of reading, an activity that takes real time, and that in its nature is radically incompatible with the kinds of multitasking we are all increasingly using to manage the demands placed on us. Without a measure of reading, we fall back on the exceptionally inadequate proxy of citation. As King et al. point out, citation typically skews towards a small number of articles, and the effect of using this as a measure of reading is to suggest that the majority of articles are never read at all. Their long-term studies of what scientists read, and why, have been driven by the need to challenge this myth, and they have demonstrated that while journals might not be unwrapped and read with quite the Christmas-morning eagerness that John Hartley describes, their content is eventually read more than once, and often more than once by the same person. Both electronic scholarly publishing, and digital redistribution of material original published in print, have greatly assisted traditional journals in acquiring something like the pass-on value of popular magazines in dentists’ waiting rooms. But for all this to work, academics have to be given time to sit and read, and as it would be absurd to try to itemise and remunerate this labour specifically, then this time needs to be built into the normative workload for anyone who is expected to engage in any of the complex tasks involved in the collaborative production of knowledge. With that in mind, I concluded my review on what I hoped was a constructive note of solidarity. “What’s really under pressure here—forms of collegiality, altruism and imaginative contributions to a more outward-facing type of scholarship—is not at risk from search engines, it seems to me. What is being pressured into obsolescence, risking subscriptions to journals as much as purchases of books, is the craft and professional value placed on reading. This pressure is not coming from the internet, but from all the other bureaucratic rationalities described in this paper, that for the time being do still value journals selectively above other kinds of public contribution, but fail to appreciate the labour required to make them appear in any form, and completely overlook the labour required to absorb their contents and respond.” For obvious reasons, my warm thanks are due to John Hartley and to the two editors of this M/C Journal issue for their very unexpected invitation to expand on my original referee’s report.References Australian Research Council. “The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative: Journal Lists.” 2009. 3 July 2009 ‹http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_journal_list.htm›. Ginsparg, Paul. “Can Peer Review be Better Focused?” 2003. 1 July 2009 ‹http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/pg02pr.html›. Guldi, Jo, Michael Widner, Bonnie Wheeler, and Jana Argersinger. The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Blog. 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://thecelj.blogspot.com›. Howard, Jennifer. “Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 27 Mar. 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i29/29a00102.htm›. King, Donald, Carol Tenopir, and Michael Clarke. "Measuring Total Reading of Journal Articles." D-Lib Magazine 12.10 (2006). 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october06/king/10king.html›. Kronos Incorporated. “How Can You Reduce Your Labor Costs without Sacrificing Speed of Service?” (2009). 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.qsrweb.com/white_paper.php?id=1738&download=1›.“May I Take Your Order? Local McDonald's Outsources to a Call Center.” Billings Gazette, Montana, 5 July 2006. SharedXpertise Forum. 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.sharedxpertise.org/file/3433/mcdonalds-outsourcing-to-call-center.html›.Odlyzko, Andrew. “The Rapid Evolution of Scholarly Publishing.” Learned Publishing 15.1 (2002): 7-19. ———. “Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 42 (1995): 71-122. Young, Jeffrey. “Digital Humanities Scholars Collaborate More on Journal Articles than 'Traditional' Researchers.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 27 April 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3736/digital-humanities-scholars-collaborate-more-on-journal-articles-than-on-traditional-researchers›.

Conurbation [f. CON- + L. urb- and urbs city + -ation] An aggregation of urban areas. (OED) Beyond the urban, further and lower even than the suburban, lies the con-urban. The conurban: with the urban, partaking of the urbane, lying against but also perhaps pushing against or being contra the urban. Conurbations stretch littorally from Australian cities, along coastlines to other cities, joining cities through the passage of previously outlying rural areas. Joining the dots between cities, towns, and villages. Providing corridors between the city and what lies outside. The conurban is an accretion, an aggregation, a piling up, or superfluity of the city: Greater London, for instance. It is the urban plus, filling the gaps between cities, as Los Angeles oozing urbanity does for the dry, desert areas abutting it (Davis 1990; Soja 1996). I wish to propose that the conurban imaginary is a different space from its suburban counterpart. The suburban has provided a binary opposition to what is not the city, what lies beneath its feet, outside its ken. Yet it is also what is greater than the urban, what exceeds it. In modernism, the city and its denizens define themselves outside what is arrayed around the centre, ringing it in concentric circles. In stark relief to the modernist lines of the skyscraper, contrasting with the central business district, central art galleries and museums, is to be found the masses in the suburbs. The suburban as a maligned yet enabling trope of modernism has been long revalued, in the art of Howard Arkeley, and in photography of suburban Gothic. It comes as no surprise to read a favourable newspaper article on the Liverpool Regional Art Gallery, in Sydney's Western Suburbs, with its exhibition on local chicken empires, Liverpool sheds, or gay and lesbians living on the city fringe. Nor to hear in the third way posturing of Australian Labor Party parliamentarian Mark Latham, the suburbs rhetorically wielded, like a Victa lawn mover, to cut down to size his chardonnay-set inner-city policy adversaries. The politics of suburbia subtends urban revisionism, reformism, revanchism, and recidivism. Yet there is another less exhausted, and perhaps exhaustible, way of playing the urban, of studying the metropolis, of punning on the city's proper name: the con-urban. World cities, as Saskia Sassen has taught us, have peculiar features: the juxtaposition of high finance and high technology alongside subaltern, feminized, informal economy (Sassen 1998). The Australian city proudly declared to be a world city is, of course, Sydney while a long way from the world's largest city by population, it is believed to be the largest in area. A recent newspaper article on Brisbane's real estate boom, drew comparisons with Sydney only to dismiss them, according to one quoted commentator, because as a world city, Sydney was sui generis in Australia, fairly requiring comparison with other world cities. One form of conurbanity, I would suggest, is the desire of other settled areas to be with the world city. Consider in this regard, the fate of Byron Bay a fate which lies very much in the balance. Byron Bay is sign that circulates in the field of the conurban. Craig MacGregor has claimed Byron as the first real urban culture outside an Australian city (MacGregor 1995). Local residents hope to keep the alternative cultural feel of Byron, but to provide it with a more buoyant economic outlook. The traditional pastoral, fishing, and whaling industries are well displaced by niche handicrafts, niche arts and craft, niche food and vegetables, a flourishing mind, body and spirit industry, and a booming film industry. Creative arts and cultural industries are blurring into creative industries. The Byron Bay area at the opening of the twenty-first century is attracting many people fugitive from the city who wish not to drop out exactly; rather to be contra wishes rather to be gently contrary marked as distinct from the city, enjoying a wonderful lifestyle, but able to persist with the civilizing values of an urban culture. The contemporary figure of Byron Bay, if such a hybrid chimera may be represented, wishes for a conurbanity. Citizens relocate from Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, seeking an alternative country and coastal lifestyle and, if at all possible, a city job (though without stress) (on internal migration in Australia see Kijas 2002): Hippies and hip rub shoulders as a sleepy town awakes (Still Wild About Byron, (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2002). Forerunners of Byron's conurbanity leave, while others take their place: A sprawling $6.5 million Byron Bay mansion could be the ultimate piece of memorabilia for a wealthy fan of larrikin Australian actor Paul Hogan (Hoges to sell up at Byron Bay, Illawarra Mercury, 14 February 2002). The ABC series Seachange is one key text of conurbanity: Laura Gibson has something of a city job she can ply the tools of her trade as a magistrate while living in an idyllic rural location, a nice spot for a theme park of contemporary Australian manners and nostalgia for community (on Sea Change see Murphy 2002). Conurban designates a desire to have it both ways: cityscape and pastoral mode. Worth noting is that the Byron Shire has its own independent, vibrant media public sphere, as symbolized by the Byron Shire Echo founded in 1986, one of the great newspapers outside a capital city (Martin & Ellis 2002): <http://www.echo.net.au>. Yet the textual repository in city-based media of such exilic narratives is the supplement to the Saturday broadsheet papers. A case in point is journalist Ruth Ostrow, who lives in hills in the Byron Shire, and provides a weekly column in the Saturday Australian newspaper, its style gently evocative of just one degree of separation from a self-parody of New Age mores: Having permanently relocated to the hills behind Byron Bay from Sydney, it's interesting for me to watch friends who come up here on holiday over Christmas… (Ostrow 2002). The Sydney Morning Herald regards Byron Bay as another one of its Northern beaches, conceptually somewhere between Palm Beach and Pearl Beach, or should one say Pearl Bay. The Herald's fascination for Byron Bay real estate is coeval with its obsession with Sydney's rising prices: Byron Bay's hefty price tags haven't deterred beach-lovin' boomers (East Enders, Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 2002). The Australian is not immune from this either, evidence 'Boom Times in Byron', special advertising report, Weekend Australia, Saturday 2 March 2002. And plaudits from The Financial Review confirm it: Prices for seafront spots in the enclave on the NSW north coast are red hot (Smart Property, The Financial Review, 19 January 2002). Wacky North Coast customs are regularly covered by capital city press, the region functioning as a metonym for drugs. This is so with Nimbin especially, with regular coverage of the Nimbin Mardi Grass: Mardi Grass 2001, Nimbin's famous cannabis festival, began, as they say, in high spirits in perfect autumn weather on Saturday (Oh, how they danced a high old time was had by all at the Dope Pickers' Ball, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2001). See too coverage of protests over sniffer dogs in Byron Bay in Easter 2001 showed (Peatling 2001). Byron's agony over its identity attracts wider audiences, as with its quest to differentiate itself from the ordinariness of Ballina as a typical Aussie seaside town (Buttrose 2000). There are national metropolitan audiences for Byron stories, readers who are familiar with the Shire's places and habits: Lismore-reared Emma Tom's 2002 piece on the politics of perving at King's beach north of Byron occasioned quite some debate from readers arguing the toss over whether wanking on the beach was perverse or par for the course: Public masturbation is a funny old thing. On one hand, it's ace that some blokes feel sexually liberated enough to slap the salami any old time… (Tom 2002). Brisbane, of course, has its own designs upon Byron, from across the state border. Brisbane has perhaps the best-known conurbation: its northern reaches bleed into the Sunshine Coast, while its southern ones salute the skyscrapers of Australia's fourth largest city, the Gold Coast (on Gold Coast and hinterland see Griffin 2002). And then the conburbating continues unabated, as settlement stretches across the state divide to the Tweed Coast, with its mimicking of Sanctuary Cove, down to the coastal towns of Ocean Shores, Brunswick Heads, Byron, and through to Ballina. Here another type of infrastructure is key: the road. Once the road has massively overcome the topography of rainforest and mountain, there will be freeway conditions from Byron to Brisbane, accelerating conurbanity. The caf is often the short-hand signifier of the urban, but in Byron Bay, it is film that gives the urban flavour. Byron Bay has its own International Film Festival (held in the near-by boutique town of Bangalow, itself conurban with Byron.), and a new triple screen complex in Byron: Up north, film buffs Geraldine Hilton and Pete Castaldi have been busy. Last month, the pair announced a joint venture with Dendy to build a three-screen cinema in the heart of Byron Bay, scheduled to open mid-2002. Meanwhile, Hilton and Castaldi have been busy organising the second Byron All Screen Celebration Film Festival (BASC), after last year's inaugural event drew 4000 visitors to more than 50 sessions, seminars and workshops. Set in Bangalow (10 minutes from Byron by car, less if you astral travel)… (Cape Crusaders, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 2002). The film industry is growing steadily, and claims to be the largest concentration of film-makers outside of an Australian capital city (Henkel 2000 & 2002). With its intimate relationship with the modern city, film in its Byron incarnation from high art to short video, from IMAX to multimedia may be seen as the harbinger of the conurban. If the case of Byron has something further to tell us about the transformation of the urban, we might consider the twenty-first century links between digital communications networks and conurbanity. It might be proposed that telecommunications networks make it very difficult to tell where the city starts and ends; as they interactively disperse information and entertainment formerly associated with the cultural institutions of the metropolis (though this digitization of urbanity is more complex than hyping the virtual suggest; see Graham & Marvin 1996). The bureau comes not just to the 'burbs, but to the backblocks as government offices are closed in country towns, to be replaced by online access. The cinema is distributed across computer networks, with video-on-demand soon to become a reality. Film as a cultural form in the process of being reconceived with broadband culture (Jacka 2001). Global movements of music flow as media through the North Coast, with dance music culture and the doof (Gibson 2002). Culture and identity becomes content for the information age (Castells 1996-1998; Cunningham & Hartley 2001; OECD 1998; Trotter 2001). On e-mail, no-one knows, as the conceit of internet theory goes, where you work or live; the proverbial refashioning of subjectivity by the internet affords a conurbanity all of its own, a city of bits wherever one resides (Mitchell 1995). To render the digital conurban possible, Byron dreams of broadband. In one of those bizarre yet recurring twists of Australian media policy, large Australian cities are replete with broadband infrastructure, even if by 2002 city-dwellers are not rushing to take up the services. Telstra's Foxtel and Optus's Optus Vision raced each other down streets of large Australian cities in the mid-1990s to lay fibre-coaxial cable to provide fast data (broadband) capacity. Cable modems and quick downloading of video, graphics, and large files have been a reality for some years. Now the Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology is allowing people in densely populated areas close to their telephone exchanges to also avail themselves of broadband Australia. In rural Australia, broadband has not been delivered to most areas, much to the frustration of the conurbanites. Byron Bay holds an important place in the history of the internet in Australia, because it was there that one of Australia's earliest and most important internet service providers, Pegasus Network, was established in the late 1980s. Yet Pegasus relocated to Brisbane in 1993, because of poor quality telecommunications networks (Peters 1998). As we rethink the urban in the shadow of modernity, we can no longer ignore or recuse ourselves from reflecting upon its para-urban modes. As we deconstruct the urban, showing how the formerly pejorative margins actually define the centre the suburban for instance being more citified than the grand arcades, plazas, piazzas, or malls; we may find that it is the conurban that provides the cultural imaginary for the urban of the present century. Work remains to be done on the specific modalities of the conurban. The conurban has distinct temporal and spatial coordinates: citizens of Sydney fled to Manly earlier in the twentieth century, as they do to Byron at the beginning of the twenty-first. With its resistance to the transnational commercialization and mass culture that Club Med, McDonalds, and tall buildings represent, and with its strict environment planning regulation which produce a litigious reaction (and an editorial rebuke from the Sydney Morning Herald [SMH 2002]), Byron recuperates the counter-cultural as counterpoint to the Gold Coast. Subtle differences may be discerned too between Byron and, say, Nimbin and Maleny (in Queensland), with the two latter communities promoting self-sufficient hippy community infused by new agricultural classes still connected to the city, but pushing the boundaries of conurbanity by more forceful rejection of the urban. Through such mapping we may discover the endless attenuation of the urban in front and beyond our very eyes; the virtual replication and invocation of the urban around the circuits of contemporary communications networks; the refiguring of the urban in popular and elite culture, along littoral lines of flight, further domesticating the country; the road movies of twenty-first century freeways; the perpetuation and worsening of inequality and democracy (Stilwell 1992) through the action of the conurban. Cities without bounds: is the conurban one of the faces of the postmetropolis (Soja 2000), the urban without end, with no possibility for or need of closure? My thinking on Byron Bay, and the Rainbow Region in which it is situated, has been shaped by a number of people with whom I had many conversations during my four years living there in 1998-2001. My friends in the School of Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies, Southern Cross University, Lismore, provided focus for theorizing our ex-centric place, of whom I owe particular debts of gratitude to Baden Offord (Offord 2002), who commented upon this piece, and Helen Wilson (Wilson 2002). Thanks also to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. References Buttrose, L. (2000). Betray Byron at Your Peril. Sydney Morning Herald 7 September 2000. Castells, M. (1996-98). The Information Age. 3 vols. Blackwell, Oxford. Cunningham, S., & Hartley, J. (2001). Creative Industries from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes. Address to the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, National Museum of Canberra. July 2001. Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, London. Gibson, C. (2002). Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. Routledge, London & New York. Griffin, Graham. (2002). Where Green Turns to Gold: Strip Cultivation and the Gold Coast Hinterland. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...> Henkel, C. (2002). Development of Audiovisual Industries in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Master thesis. Queensland University of Technology. . (2000). Imagining the Future: Strategies for the Development of 'Creative Industries' in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Northern Rivers Regional Development Board in association with the Northern Rivers Area Consultative Committee, Lismore, NSW. Jacka, M. (2001). Broadband Media in Australia Tales from the Frontier, Australian Film Commission, Sydney. Kijas, J. (2002). A place at the coast: Internal migration and the shift to the coastal-countryside. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. MacGregor, Craig. (1995). The Feral Signifier and the North Coast. In The Abundant Culture: Meaning And Significance in Everyday Australia, ed. Donald Horne & Jill Hooten. Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Martin, F., & Ellis, R. (2002). Dropping in, not out: the evolution of the alternative press in Byron Shire 1970-2001. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Mitchell, W.J. (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Molnar, Helen. (1998). 'National Convergence or Localism?: Rural and Remote Communications.' Media International Australia 88: 5-9. Moyal, A. (1984). Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Thomas Nelson, Melbourne. Murphy, P. (2002). Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Offord, B. (2002). Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of belonging and sites of confluence. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (1998). Content as a New Growth Industry: Working Party for the Information Economy. OECD, Paris. Ostrow, R. (2002). Joyous Days, Childish Ways. The Australian, 9 February. Peatling, S. (2001). Keep Off Our Grass: Byron stirs the pot over sniffer dogs. Sydney Morning Herald. 16 April. <http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/natio...> Peters, I. (1998). Ian Peter's History of the Internet. Lecture at Southern Cross University, Lismore. CD-ROM. Produced by Christina Spurgeon. Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Productivity Commission. (2000). Broadcasting Inquiry: Final Report, Melbourne, Productivity Commission. Sassen, S. (1998). Globalisation and its Contents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New Press, New York. Soja, E. (2000). Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions. Blackwell, Oxford. . (1996). Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass. Stilwell, F. (1992). Understanding Cities and Regions: Spatial Political Economy. Pluto Press, Sydney. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). (2002). Byron Should Fix its own Money Mess. Editorial. 5 April. Tom, E. (2002). Flashing a Problem at Hand. The Weekend Australian, Saturday 12 January. Trotter, R. (2001). Regions, Regionalism and Cultural Development. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 334-355. Wilson, H., ed. (2002). Fleeing the City. Special Issue of Transformations journal, no. 2. < http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Links http://www.echo.net.au http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/national/national3.html http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformations/journal/issue2/issue.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php>. Chicago Style Goggin, Gerard, "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Goggin, Gerard. (2002) Conurban. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]).

At its core the quality of being fungible is the quality of being interchangeable, more specifically interchangeable with its likeness. Our currencies, ergo our financial systems, ergo our ways of life have been underpinned by the stability that a $5 note is worth the same as every other $5 note. This is perhaps why the word fungible has never really spilled over into everyday usage: it has traditionally been a word for legal documents and economics texts. However, in the last couple of years the word fungible has made its way out of the lecture theatres of law classes and into the headlines of mainstream news services. On the back of a crypto currency boom it seemed only logical that markets that utilised this new form of wealth would emerge, the most prominent of these being the, at times lucrative, NFT (non-fungible token) market. Defining an NFT is problematic, because it is more about what it isn’t than what it is. People who have searched online looking for a definition will probably find an article or video that starts off with a semantic definition, e.g. it is a digital token with a unique signature making it unlike other tokens that are similar, which is then followed up by a spuriously comprehensible but ultimately ephemeral analogy. These definitions perhaps suffer by their ulterior motive of making NFTs sound more ground-breaking and more revolutionary than they are. If you were to say NFTs are like digital snowflakes, in that no two are the same, that might help, but it doesn’t add anything to their significance because whilst we may notionally find the idea interesting that no two snowflakes are the same, we ultimately don’t really care, and this doesn’t make any snowflake more important or valuable than any other. However, imagine a scenario in late capitalism where a certain configuration of snowflake has an exchange value greater than other configurations, or a scenario where a snowflake is worth more because Elon Musk once owned it. In practice, NFTs are comparable to digital receipts that give the owner exclusive access to a piece of data. This data maybe a small digital image, it might be a gif, it might be a high resolution digital artwork, it might be anything that can be stored digitally. The allure or uniqueness of these pieces of data lies in their non-fungibility. They are acquired through a crypto currency exchange (more often than not Ethereum, but not necessarily so) and as such are verified and secure, though it is worth noting that in 2021 crypto currency theft totalled A$4.5b and money lost to crypto scams totalled A$11b (Lane). There is an irony that emerges here in that the digital culture that has allowed the proliferation of fungible content has given rise to its own non-fungible counter-culture. It is as if the digital annihilation of Benjamin’s aura has been replaced by an 8-bit digital aura. Every $5 note may still have exactly the same value as another $5 note, and the actual Mona Lisa may be less beguiling now you can own it on a tote bag, but not every Bored Ape (an avatar comprised of a cartoon ape, generated by an algorithm) has the same value as another Bored Ape (see Bored Ape Yacht Club statistics). For example, less than 0.5% of generated Bored Apes have gold fur, making them more desirable, and all of a sudden it begins to feel like a familiar market with familiar characteristics of supply and demand. 2020 was a turbulent year, so it’s understandable that the seeds of some culturally significant trends were overlooked. Amongst these was the boom in the trading card market. This saw trading cards – those things kids buy in packs with their pocket money – become an investor industry. Sale prices skyrocketed during global pandemic lockdowns: for example, a LeBron James 2003-4 Upper Deck Exquisite Rookie Patch Autograph card (numbered 14/23) sold at Golden Auctions for US$1.84m; another version of the same card sold in April of 2021 for US$5.2m. This boom in the trading card market rolled over into the early adoption of NFT technology within the sports trading card market, a development that has been generally glossed over. Well before Beeple’s sale of Everydays: The First 5,000 Days (a collage of 5,000 digital artworks sold as an NFT) at Christie’s for slightly under US$70m (see Guardian), NFTs were breaking new ground in the sports card market in the form of NBA Top Shots (an official NBA product produced by Dapper Labs). When a person opens a digital pack of Top Shots they reveal “moments”, uniquely serial numbered highlight videos lasting a few seconds. Sales of NBA Top Shots totalled US$230m in 2020 (Young). There is perhaps little surprise in this early adoption of the investor/trading aspects of NFTs, given the crossover between pandemic-era sports card collectors and crypto currency speculators (Yahoo! Finance). Beyond these developments in NFT hobby collectibles, there has also been the development and gamification of NFT gambling in the form of horse-racing platforms like Zed Run. Zed Run allows users to race NFT horses in their virtual stable at the cost of a fee (payable in crypto currency), which is ostensibly a wager. Users can breed NFT horses with other NFT horses to create new NFT horses with unique characteristics, and then race them against other horses with comparable attributes. This platform, and ones like it, are playing a role in creating an unregulated gambling platform that operates on a global scale, at a time where many states in the USA are only years into a relaxed sports betting environment (in 2018 a Supreme Court ruling opened the door for all states to legalise sports betting; until that point sports betting was only legal in 4 states). It remains to be seen if the continued gamification of gambling will entrench itself further through means such as Zed Run, or if the practice will remain niche without the existence of a widely populated metasphere. It is clear that we are currently in the midst of a wave, potentially a flood, of NFT content, and a majority of this content exists as a variation of the theme “how to make money through NFTs”. NFTs are currently considered more for their potential profitability rather than their utility. The residue of this is that non-fungible markets seem to be replicating the traditional markets that they are notionally trying to subvert, and the practical uses of NFTs, e.g. as a solution to issues of digital ownership, are being overlooked. Perhaps this is the new manifestation of the neoliberal ideology, or perhaps it is the case in point that future generations will look back upon. Of course, there is an as yet generally unstated and significant point here, that what is being discussed is fungibility in terms of its non-ness. The mention of the term fungibility in a popular culture context immediately gives way to the consideration of the non-fungible, and the non-fungible is seemingly resolving itself, or at least can be understood, in the context of traditional wealth, with all of its fungible interchangeability. This issue of M/C Journal presents a range of insights and perspectives on this word that is increasingly flowing through discourses and practices. NFTs have a range of implications and a spectrum of potential uses depending on their context. But additionally, the usefulness of fungibility as a concept also comes into play here, as terminology traditionally shackled to other disciplines but increasingly pliable in the arts and humanities. This issue’s feature by Russell, “NFTs and Value”, meets some of the above issues head-on by immediately addressing the dichotomy of NFTs as the start of a new art format or NFTs as Western society’s most recent bubble market. Irrespective of these two positions there is an undeniable reality that these digital artefacts can potentially have real world wealth. Russell explores the potential underlying factors of this wealth and in turn what creates artistic wealth. Here a combination of factors such as the discourse around the work itself, or the place that work has in the context of Western art history are all considered as potential drivers of this new wave/bubble. Mason takes up the financial gains associated with some NFTs by examining the commodification of memes through the NFT format. In particular Mason considers the broader implications of this phenomenon outside of NFTs themselves by discussing the potential cultural and racial legacies at play. Mason’s work also notes the dominance of non-Black memes in the non-fungible market and the subsequent development of non-Black wealth that follows. Through this case study Mason touches upon an as of yet widely overlooked cultural implication of the non-fungible market, that of racial inequality and exploitation. In a different wing of the art world, Binns focusses on film, noting, after highlighting the significant ecological price and damage that comes with making transactions on prominent block chains, that the implications of NFTs on the film industry are still emerging. Despite the presence of some emerging marketplaces and vendors, the full utility of NFTs within the film industry remains untapped and unclear. Perhaps NFTs will supplement crowdfunding by offering exclusive memberships or perks (similar to the Bored Apes Yacht Club), or perhaps the fad will fade into the background without ever leaving an impression. In contrast, Robinson embraces the notion of fungibility as fungibility, stepping away from the contemporary discussion of “fungible” as being inherently “non-fungible” and looking at the interchangeability of identity and experience in online spaces. Through interviews Robinson considers how traditional notions of national and political identity are rendered fungible by digital spaces and how this aspect of fungibility manifests itself in invisibility, efficacy, and antagonism. This work is an important reminder of the suitability of fungible as a term in academic scholarship: Robinson’s notion of fungible citizenship opens up new perspectives in who we are, who we see ourselves to be, and to what we might aspire. Lyubchenko’s work is concerned with the place that NFT art has within a broader sense of art history. For Lyubchenko, crypto art can be considered as the culmination of the Dada movement, influenced by its various iterations such as Neo-Dadaism and Pop-Art. The result here is not so much a digital embodiment of the anti-art movement, arriving to land the final blow, but rather the newest form of anti-art, whose existence seems to only breathe life into that which it intends to kill. For Lyubchenko, crypto art it not so much a threat to traditional art forms, but rather a call to arms, a catalyst to regroup and reassert art’s timeless values. The place of the NFT in music is then the focus of Rogers et al., who seek to explore where music sits in the newly framed context of Web3. Whilst this position is not entirely constituted by the integration of NFT technology in music, it is at present a considerable factor and one that Rogers et al. explore through examination of functionality and discourse analysis. They note a degree of cynicism in the discourses surrounding popular music’s flirtation with NFTs, emerging largely from environmental impacts of blockchain ledgers and potential grey areas surrounding the industry’s legitimacy as a whole when it comes to claims of authenticity, security, and capacity. Interestingly they also note similarities in many of the cases they discuss with discourses surrounding previously emergent forms of music. Even seemingly banal music technologies in the past, such as the jukebox and the player piano, were subjected to comparable scrutiny. In the end time will give us a greater sense of whether the first few years of music within Web3 represent a cultural touchstone or a commercially driven false start. Finally, this collection progresses the discussion on how NFTs themselves present new opportunities for art practitioners. As Wilson notes, there is an inevitability that artists will begin to embrace the production of NFTs as part of the artistic process, as opposed to simply porting over existing artworks to the NFT format. Wilson considers his own work and Damien Hirst’s 2021 NFT works as examples of how considered and practical adoption of this new format challenges the neo-liberal economic conception of what NFTs are and what they are for. References Bored Ape Yacht Club statistics. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub>. The Guardian. “Christie’s Auctions 'First Digital-Only Artwork' for $70m.” 12 Mar. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/mar/11/christies-first-digital-only-artwork-70m-nft-beeple>. Lane, Aaron M. “Crypto Theft Is on the Rise. Here’s How the Crimes are Committed, and How You Can Protect Yourself.” The Conversation 3 Feb. 2022. 15 Apr. 2022 <https://theconversation.com/crypto-theft-is-on-the-rise-heres-how-the-crimes-are-committed-and-how-you-can-protect-yourself-176027>. Yahoo! Finance. “Collector Coin Becomes First and Only Cryptocurrency for Card Collectors.” 30 June 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://finance.yahoo.com/news/collector-coin-becomes-first-only-185000184.html>. Young, Jabari. “People Have Spent More than $230 Million Buying and Trading Digital Collectibles of NBA Highlights.” CNBC 28 Feb. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/28/230-million-dollars-spent-on-nba-top-shot.html>.

In 1988, historian Nadia Wheatley and indigenous artist Donna Rawlins published their award-winning picture book, My Place, a reinterpretation of Australian national identity and sovereignty prompted by the bicentennial of white settlement. Twenty years later, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) commissioned Penny Chapman’s multi-platform project based on this book. The 13 episodes of the television series begin in 2008, each telling the story of a child at a different point in history, and are accompanied by substantial interactive online content. Issues as diverse as religious difference and immigration, wartime conscription and trauma, and the experiences of Aboriginal Australians are canvassed. The program itself, which has a second series currently in production, introduces child audiences to—and implicates them in—a rich ideological fabric of deeply politicised issues that directly engage with vexed questions of Australian nationhood. The series offers a subversive view of Australian history and society, and it is the child—whether protagonist on the screen or the viewer/user of the content—who is left to discover, negotiate and move beyond often problematic societal norms. As one of the public broadcaster’s keystone projects, My Place signifies important developments in ABC’s construction of multicultural child citizenship. The digitisation of Australian television has facilitated a wave of multi-channel and new media innovation. Though the development of a multi-channel ecology has occurred significantly later in Australia than in the US or Europe, in part due to genre restrictions on broadcasters, all major Australian networks now have at least one additional free-to-air channel, make some of their content available online, and utilise various forms of social media to engage their audiences. The ABC has been in the vanguard of new media innovation, leveraging the industry dominance of ABC Online and its cross-platform radio networks for the repurposing of news, together with the additional funding for digital renewal, new Australian content, and a digital children’s channel in the 2006 and 2009 federal budgets. In line with “market failure” models of broadcasting (Born, Debrett), the ABC was once the most important producer-broadcaster for child viewers. With the recent allocation for the establishment of ABC3, it is now the catalyst for a significant revitalisation of the Australian children’s television industry. The ABC Charter requires it to broadcast programs that “contribute to a sense of national identity” and that “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community” (ABC Documents). Through its digital children’s channel (ABC3) and its multi-platform content, child viewers are not only exposed to a much more diverse range of local content, but also politicised by an intricate network of online texts connected to the TV programs. The representation of diasporic communities through and within multi-platformed spaces forms a crucial part of the way(s) in which collective identities are now being negotiated in children’s texts. An analysis of one of the ABC’s My Place “projects” and its associated multi-platformed content reveals an intricate relationship between postcolonial concerns and the construction of child citizenship. Multicultural Places, Multi-Platformed Spaces: New Media Innovation at the ABC The 2007 restructure at the ABC has transformed commissioning practices along the lines noted by James Bennett and Niki Strange of the BBC—a shift of focus from “programs” to multi-platform “projects,” with the latter consisting of a complex network of textual production. These “second shift media practices” (Caldwell) involve the tactical management of “user flows structured into and across the textual terrain that serve to promote a multifaceted and prolonged experience of the project” (Bennett and Strange 115). ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s polemic deployment of the “digital commons” trope (Murdock, From) differs from that of his opposite number at the BBC, Mark Thompson, in its emphasis on the glocalised openness of the Australian “town square”—at once distinct from, and an integral part of, larger conversations. As announced at the beginning of the ABC’s 2009 annual report, the ABC is redefining the town square as a world of greater opportunities: a world where Australians can engage with one another and explore the ideas and events that are shaping our communities, our nation and beyond … where people can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from each other. (ABC ii)The broad emphasis on engagement characterises ABC3’s positioning of children in multi-platformed projects. As the Executive Producer of the ABC’s Children’s Television Multi-platform division comments, “participation is very much the mantra of the new channel” (Glen). The concept of “participation” is integral to what has been described elsewhere as “rehearsals in citizenship” (Northam). Writing of contemporary youth, David Buckingham notes that “‘political thinking’ is not merely an intellectual or developmental achievement, but an interpersonal process which is part of the construction of a collective, social identity” (179). Recent domestically produced children’s programs and their associated multimedia applications have significant potential to contribute to this interpersonal, “participatory” process. Through multi-platform experiences, children are (apparently) invited to construct narratives of their own. Dan Harries coined the term “viewser” to highlight the tension between watching and interacting, and the increased sense of agency on the part of audiences (171–82). Various online texts hosted by the ABC offer engagement with extra content relating to programs, with themed websites serving as “branches” of the overarching ABC3 metasite. The main site—strongly branded as the place for its targeted demographic—combines conventional television guide/program details with “Watch Now!,” a customised iView application within ABC3’s own themed interface; youth-oriented news; online gaming; and avenues for viewsers to create digital art and video, or interact with the community of “Club3” and associated message boards. The profiles created by members of Club3 are moderated and proscribe any personal information, resulting in an (understandably) restricted form of “networked publics” (boyd 124–5). Viewser profiles comprise only a username (which, the website stresses, should not be one’s real name) and an “avatar” (a customisable animated face). As in other social media sites, comments posted are accompanied by the viewser’s “name” and “face,” reinforcing the notion of individuality within the common group. The tool allows users to choose from various skin colours, emphasising the multicultural nature of the ABC3 community. Other customisable elements, including the ability to choose between dozens of pre-designed ABC3 assets and feeds, stress the audience’s “ownership” of the site. The Help instructions for the Club3 site stress the notion of “participation” directly: “Here at ABC3, we don’t want to tell you what your site should look like! We think that you should be able to choose for yourself.” Multi-platformed texts also provide viewsers with opportunities to interact with many of the characters (human actors and animated) from the television texts and share further aspects of their lives and fictional worlds. One example, linked to the representation of diasporic communities, is the Abatti Pizza Game, in which the player must “save the day” by battling obstacles to fulfil a pizza order. The game’s prefacing directions makes clear the ethnicity of the Abatti family, who are also visually distinctive. The dialogue also registers cultural markers: “Poor Nona, whatsa she gonna do? Now it’s up to you to help Johnny and his friends make four pizzas.” The game was acquired from the Canadian-animated franchise, Angela Anaconda; nonetheless, the Abatti family, the pizza store they operate and the dilemma they face translates easily to the Australian context. Dramatisations of diasporic contributions to national youth identities in postcolonial or settler societies—the UK (My Life as a Popat, CITV) and Canada (How to Be Indie)—also contribute to the diversity of ABC3’s television offerings and the positioning of its multi-platform community. The negotiation of diasporic and postcolonial politics is even clearer in the public broadcaster’s commitment to My Place. The project’s multifaceted construction of “places,” the ethical positioning of the child both as an individual and a member of (multicultural) communities, and the significant acknowledgement of ongoing conflict and discrimination, articulate a cultural commons that is more open-ended and challenging than the Eurocentric metaphor, the “town square,” suggests. Diversity, Discrimination and Diasporas: Positioning the Viewser of My Place Throughout the first series of My Place, the experiences of children within different diasporic communities are the focal point of five of the initial six episodes, the plots of which revolve around children with Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek, and Irish backgrounds. This article focuses on an early episode of the series, “1988,” which explicitly confronts the cultural frictions between dominant Anglocentric Australian and diasporic communities. “1988” centres on the reaction of young Lily to the arrival of her cousin, Phuong, from Vietnam. Lily is a member of a diasporic community, but one who strongly identifies as “an Australian,” allowing a nuanced exploration of the ideological conflicts surrounding the issue of so-called “boat people.” The protagonist’s voice-over narration at the beginning of the episode foregrounds her desire to win Australia’s first Olympic gold medal in gymnastics, thus mobilising nationally identified hierarchies of value. Tensions between diasporic and settler cultures are frequently depicted. One potentially reactionary sequence portrays the recurring character of Michaelis complaining about having to use chopsticks in the Vietnamese restaurant; however, this comment is contextualised several episodes later, when a much younger Michaelis, as protagonist of the episode “1958,” is himself discriminated against, due to his Greek background. The political irony of “1988” pivots on Lily’s assumption that her cousin “won’t know Australian.” There is a patronising tone in her warning to Phuong not to speak Vietnamese for fear of schoolyard bullying: “The kids at school give you heaps if you talk funny. But it’s okay, I can talk for you!” This encourages child viewers to distance themselves from this fictional parallel to the frequent absence of representation of asylum seekers in contemporary debates. Lily’s assumptions and attitudes are treated with a degree of scepticism, particularly when she assures her friends that the silent Phuong will “get normal soon,” before objectifying her cousin for classroom “show and tell.” A close-up camera shot settles on Phuong’s unease while the children around her gossip about her status as a “boat person,” further encouraging the audience to empathise with the bullied character. However, Phuong turns the tables on those around her when she reveals she can competently speak English, is able to perform gymnastics and other feats beyond Lily’s ability, and even invents a story of being attacked by “pirates” in order to silence her gossiping peers. By the end of the narrative, Lily has redeemed herself and shares a close friendship with Phuong. My Place’s structured child “participation” plays a key role in developing the postcolonial perspective required by this episode and the project more broadly. Indeed, despite the record project budget, a second series was commissioned, at least partly on the basis of the overwhelmingly positive reception of viewsers on the ABC website forums (Buckland). The intricate My Place website, accessible through the ABC3 metasite, generates transmedia intertextuality interlocking with, and extending the diegesis of, the televised texts. A hyperlinked timeline leads to collections of personal artefacts “owned” by each protagonist, such as journals, toys, and clothing. Clicking on a gold medal marked “History” in Lily’s collection activates scrolling text describing the political acceptance of the phrase “multiculturalism” and the “Family Reunion” policy, which assisted the arrival of 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants. The viewser is reminded that some people were “not very welcoming” of diasporic groups via an explicit reference to Mrs Benson’s discriminatory attitudes in the series. Viewsers can “visit” virtual representations of the program’s sets. In the bedroom, kitchen, living room and/or backyard of each protagonist can be discovered familiar and additional details of the characters’ lives. The artefacts that can be “played” with in the multimedia applications often imply the enthusiastic (and apparently desirable) adoption of “Australianness” by immigrant children. Lily’s toys (her doll, hair accessories, roller skates, and glass marbles) invoke various aspects of western children’s culture, while her “journal entry” about Phuong states that she is “new to Australia but with her sense of humour she has fitted in really well.” At the same time, the interactive elements within Lily’s kitchen, including a bowl of rice and other Asian food ingredients, emphasise cultural continuity. The description of incense in another room of Lily’s house as a “common link” that is “used in many different cultures and religions for similar purposes” clearly normalises a glocalised world-view. Artefacts inside the restaurant operated by Lily’s mother link to information ranging from the ingredients and (flexible) instructions for how to make rice paper rolls (“Lily and Phuong used these fillings but you can use whatever you like!”) to a brief interactive puzzle game requiring the arrangement of several peppers in order from least hot to most hot. A selectable picture frame downloads a text box labelled “Images of Home.” Combined with a slideshow of static, hand-drawn images of traditional Vietnamese life, the text can be read as symbolic of the multiplicity of My Place’s target audience(s): “These images would have reminded the family of their homeland and also given restaurant customers a sense of Vietnamese culture.” The social-developmental, postcolonial agenda of My Place is registered in both “conventional” ancillary texts, such as the series’ “making of” publication (Wheatley), and the elaborate pedagogical website for teachers developed by the ACTF and Educational Services Australia (http://www.myplace.edu.au/). The politicising function of the latter is encoded in the various summaries of each decade’s historical, political, social, cultural, and technological highlights, often associated with the plot of the relevant episode. The page titled “Multiculturalism” reports on the positive amendments to the Commonwealth’s Migration Act 1958 and provides links to photographs of Vietnamese migrants in 1982, exemplifying the values of equality and cultural diversity through Lily and Phuong’s story. The detailed “Teaching Activities” documents available for each episode serve a similar purpose, providing, for example, the suggestion that teachers “ask students to discuss the importance to a new immigrant of retaining links to family, culture and tradition.” The empathetic positioning of Phuong’s situation is further mirrored in the interactive map available for teacher use that enables children to navigate a boat from Vietnam to the Australian coast, encouraging a perspective that is rarely put forward in Australia’s mass media. This is not to suggest that the My Place project is entirely unproblematic. In her postcolonial analysis of Aboriginal children’s literature, Clare Bradford argues that “it’s all too possible for ‘similarities’ to erase difference and the political significances of [a] text” (188). Lily’s schoolteacher’s lesson in the episode “reminds us that boat people have been coming to Australia for a very long time.” However, the implied connection between convicts and asylum seekers triggered by Phuong’s (mis)understanding awkwardly appropriates a mythologised Australian history. Similarly in the “1998” episode, the Muslim character Mohammad’s use of Ramadan for personal strength in order to emulate the iconic Australian cricketer Shane Warne threatens to subsume the “difference” of the diasporic community. Nonetheless, alongside the similarities between individuals and the various ethnic groups that make up the My Place community, important distinctions remain. Each episode begins and/or ends with the child protagonist(s) playing on or around the central motif of the series—a large fig tree—with the characters declaring that the tree is “my place.” While emphasising the importance of individuality in the project’s construction of child citizens, the cumulative effect of these “my place” sentiments, felt over time by characters from different socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, builds a multifaceted conception of Australian identity that consists of numerous (and complementary) “branches.” The project’s multi-platformed content further emphasises this, with the website containing an image of the prominent (literal and figurative) “Community Tree,” through which the viewser can interact with the generations of characters and families from the series (http://www.abc.net.au/abc3/myplace/). The significant role of the ABC’s My Place project showcases the ABC’s remit as a public broadcaster in the digital era. As Tim Brooke-Hunt, the Executive Head of Children’s Content, explains, if the ABC didn’t do it, no other broadcaster was going to come near it. ... I don’t expect My Place to be a humungous commercial or ratings success, but I firmly believe ... that it will be something that will exist for many years and will have a very special place. Conclusion The reversion to iconic aspects of mainstream Anglo-Australian culture is perhaps unsurprising—and certainly telling—when reflecting on the network of local, national, and global forces impacting on the development of a cultural commons. However, this does not detract from the value of the public broadcaster’s construction of child citizens within a clearly self-conscious discourse of “multiculturalism.” The transmedia intertextuality at work across ABC3 projects and platforms serves an important politicising function, offering positive representations of diasporic communities to counter the negative depictions children are exposed to elsewhere, and positioning child viewsers to “participate” in “working through” fraught issues of Australia’s past that still remain starkly relevant today.References ABC. Redefining the Town Square. ABC Annual Report. Sydney: ABC, 2009. Bennett, James, and Niki Strange. “The BBC’s Second-Shift Aesthetics: Interactive Television, Multi-Platform Projects and Public Service Content for a Digital Era.” Media International Australia: Incorporating Culture and Policy 126 (2008): 106-19. Born, Georgina. Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. London: Vintage, 2004. boyd, danah. “Why Youth ♥ Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 119-42. Bradford, Clare. Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2001. Brooke-Hunt, Tim. Executive Head of Children’s Content, ABC TV. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Ultimo Center, 16 Mar. 2010. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Buckland, Jenny. Chief Executive Officer, Australian Children’s Television Foundation. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford and Dr Nina Weerakkody, ACTF, 2 June 2010. Caldwell, John T. “Second Shift Media Aesthetics: Programming, Interactivity and User Flows.” New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. Eds. John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett. London: Routledge, 2003. 127-44. Debrett, Mary. “Riding the Wave: Public Service Television in the Multiplatform Era.” Media, Culture & Society 31.5 (2009): 807-27. From, Unni. “Domestically Produced TV-Drama and Cultural Commons.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Eds. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 163-77. Glen, David. Executive Producer, ABC Multiplatform. Interviewed by Dr Leonie Rutherford, ABC Elsternwick, 6 July 2010. Harries, Dan. “Watching the Internet.” The New Media Book. Ed. Dan Harries. London: BFI, 2002. 171-82. Murdock, Graham. “Building the Digital Commons: Public Broadcasting in the Age of the Internet.” Cultural Dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting. Ed. Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Per Jauert. Göteborg: Nordicom, 2005. 213–30. My Place, Volumes 1 & 2: 2008–1888. DVD. ABC, 2009. Northam, Jean A. “Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop-Motion Animation Programmes for Young Children.” Journal for Cultural Research 9.3 (2005): 245-63. Wheatley, Nadia. Making My Place. Sydney and Auckland: HarperCollins, 2010. ———, and Donna Rawlins. My Place, South Melbourne: Longman, 1988.

Moldy core is a fungal disease of apple fruits that is characterized by mycelial growth in the seed locules and is sometimes accompanied by penetration of the immediate surrounding flesh. The disease can go undetected until the fruit is cut open, as no external symptoms appear on the fruit. Alternaria, Aspergillus, Cladosporium, Coniothyrium, Epicoccum, Phoma and Stemphylium are some of the common pathogens associated with moldy core (Serdani et al. 2002; Gao et al. 2013; McLeod 2014). The disease is more common in apple cultivars with an open calyx, where spores may initiate infections during the growing season or at the post-harvest storage stage (Spotts et al. 1988). In 2018, a shipment of ‘Sweet Tango’ apples from New Zealand to Scotian Gold Co-operative Ltd., Nova Scotia, Canada, was found to be affected by moldy core. Moderate to severe moldy core symptoms were observed when 10 apples were cut open (Figure S1). In comparison, ‘Sweet Tango’ apples grown in Nova Scotia showed no moldy core symptoms when 10 random fruits were cut open. Small pieces of the diseased fruit tissue from the core region were surface-disinfected for 1 min in 1% NaOCl, rinsed three times with sterilized water and placed onto potato dextrose agar (PDA) dishes. The PDA dishes were incubated in dark at 22 oC and single spore isolation was carried out to fresh PDA dishes. These isolate produced colonies of regular shape, tan black with prominent white gray margin and gray colour conidia (Figure S2 AB). The colonies turn dark black after 3 weeks of growth on PDA. Mycelia were septate and conidia were oval or obclavate or club-shaped with a tapering end with 4-6 longitudinal and transverse septa (Figure S2 C-D). The size of conidia ranges from 12.5-20 x 8.7-12.5 µM on 20 days old PDA dishes. Based on the size and shape of conidia and other morphological characteristics the isolated fungi were identical to Alternaria spp. (Simmons 2007). To assess the identity of the isolated pathogen species by multi-locus sequence analysis, genomic DNA was extracted from the pure cultures of two isolates (5.8 and 8) using the E.Z.N.A. SP Fungal DNA Kit (Omega Bio-Tek). The glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), major allergen (Alt a 1), OPA10-2, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of ribosomal DNA and the translation elongation factor 1-α (TEF1-α) region from two Alternaria spp. isolates (5.8 and 8) were amplified and sequenced using primers gpd1/2 (Berbee et al. 1999), A21F/A21R (Gabriel 2015), OPA10-2/ OPA10-2L (Andrew et al. 2009), ITS1/ITS4 (White et al. 1990) and EF1-up /EF1-low (O’Donnell et al. 1998) respectively. The resulting sequences of both isolates were deposited in the NCBI GenBank (GAPDH; MW411052, MW411053, Alt a 1; MW411050, MW411051, OPA10-2; MW415762, MW415763, ITS; MK140445, MT225559, TEF1-α; MT305773 and MT305774 ). Sequences of GAPDH, Alt a 1, OPA-10-2, ITS and TEF1-α genes of both isolates were identical to each other and showed 100 %, 100 %, 99.21 %, 100% and 100% identity to A. arborescens S. (AY278810.1, AY563303.1, KP124712.1, KY965831.1, KY965831.1) respectively. Identity with reference strain CBS 102605 confirms that both of the isolated strains 5.8 and 8 are A. arborescens. The pathogenicity of the two A. arborescens isolates were confirmed by artificially inoculating healthy ‘Sweet Tango’ fruit by dispensing the conidial suspension directly on the seed locule. Briefly, surface-disinfected fruits were air-dried for 5 min and then peeled using a sterilized knife and cut transversally. Each half of the fruit was inoculated with 100 µl of conidial suspensions (∼1 × 104 conidia/ml) in potato dextrose broth (PDB) and incubated at 22 °C in a humid chamber for 7–10 days, or until symptoms with visible mycelial growth were observed. The control fruits were treated with 100 µl of sterilized PDB. Both A. arborescens isolates produced visible moldy core symptoms on the inoculated ‘Sweet Tango’ fruits, whereas no symptoms were observed on the control fruits (Figure S1). The experiment was repeated three times with at least three replicates with similar results. A. arborescens was successfully re-isolated from the artificially-inoculated fruits to complete Koch’s postulates. To our knowledge, this is the first report of Alternaria arborescens causing moldy core disease in ‘Sweet Tango’ apples from New Zealand. Acknowledgments We thank Eric Bevis for his help in sample preparation for DNA sequencing, Willy Renderos for pathogenicity assay. We also thank Joan Hebb (Scotian Gold Cooperative Ltd.,) for providing the apple sample for this study. This research was made possible through financial support from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. The authors(s) declare no conflict of interest. Literature Cited Andrew M., Peever T.L., Pryor B.M. An expanded multilocus phylogeny does not resolve species among the small-spored Alternaria species complex. 2009. Mycologia. 101:95–109. Berbee, M. L. et al. 1999. Cochliobolus phylogenetics and the origin of known, highly virulent pathogens, inferred from ITS and glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase gene sequences Mycologia. 91:964. Gabriel, M.F. I. Postigo, A. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, E. Suñén, C.T. Tomaz, J. Martínez 2015. Development of a PCR-based tool for detecting immunologically relevant Alt a 1 and Alt a 1 homologue coding sequences. Medical Mycology. 53 (6):636–642. Gao, L. L., Zhang, Q., Sun, X. Y., Jiang, L., Zhang, R., Sun, G. Y., Zha, Y. L., and Biggs, A. R. 2013. Etiology of moldy core, core browning, and core rot of Fuji apple in China. Plant Dis. 97:510–516. Kerry, O’Donnell, H.C. Kistler, E. Cigelnik, R.C. Ploetz. 1998. Multiple evolutionary origins of the fungus causing Panama disease of banana: concordant evidence from nuclear and mitochondrial gene genealogies. PNAS. 95: 2044-2049. McLeod, A. 2014. Moldy core and core rots. Pages 40–41 in: Compendium of Apple and Pear Diseases and Pests, 2nd ed. T. B. Sutton, H. S. Aldwinckle, A. M. Agnello, and J. F. Walgenbach, eds. American Phytopathological Society, St Paul, MN. Serdani, M., Kang, J. C., Peever, T. L., Andersen, B., and Crous, P. W. 2002. Characterization of Alternaria species groups associated with core rot of apples in South Africa. Mycol. Res. 106:561–569. Simmons, E. G. 2007. Alternaria: an identification manual. CBS Biodiversity Series. 6:780 pp. Spotts, R. A., Holmes, R. J., and Washington, W. S. 1988. Factors affecting wet core rot of apples. Australas. Plant Pathol. 17:53–57. White, T. J., Bruns, T., Lee, S., and Taylor, J. 1990. Amplification and direct sequencing of fungal ribosomal RNA genes for phylogenetics. Pages 315–322 in: PCR Protocols: A Guide to Methods and Applications. M. A. Innis, D. H. Gelfand, J. J. Sninsky, and T. J. White, eds. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Woudenberg, J. H. C., et al. 2015. Alternaria section Alternaria: Species, formae speciales or pathotypes. Stud. Mycol. 82:1-21.

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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The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role (Illich 25).The most basic definition of Stillness refers to a state of being in the absence of both motion and disturbance. Some might say it is anti-American. Stillness denies the democratic freedom of mobility in a social system where, as Ivan Illich writes in Energy and Equity, people “believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen” (26). In America, it isn’t too far of a stretch to say that most are quite used to being interpolated as some sort of subject of the screen, be it the windshield or the flat screen. Whether in transport or tele-vision, life is full of traffic and flickering images. In the best of times there is a choice between being citizen-audience member or citizen-passenger. A full day might include both.But during the summer of 2008 things seemed to change. The citizen-passenger was left beached, not in some sandy paradise but in their backyard. In this state of SIMBY (stuck in my backyard), the citizen-passenger experienced the energy crisis first hand. Middle class suburbanites were forced to come to terms with a new disturbance due to rising fuel prices: unattainable motion. Domestic travel had been exchanged for domestication. The citizen-passenger was rendered what Paul Virilio might call, “a voyager without a voyage, this passenger without a passage, the ultimate stranger, and renegade to himself” (Crepuscular 131). The threat to capitalism posed by this unattainable motion was quickly thwarted by America’s 'big box' stores, hotel chains, and news networks. What might have become a culturally transformative politics of attainable stillness was hijacked instead by The Great American Staycation. The Staycation is a neologism that refers to the activity of making a vacation out of staying at home. But the Staycation is more than a passing phrase; it is a complex cultural phenomenon that targeted middle class homes during the summer of 2008. A major constraint to a happy Staycation was the uncomfortable fact that the middle class home was not really a desirable destination as it stood. The family home would have to undergo a series of changes, one being the initiation of a set of time management strategies; and the second, the adoption of new objects for consumption. Good Morning America first featured the Staycation as a helpful parenting strategy for what was expected to be a long and arduous summer. GMA defined the parameters of the Staycation with four golden rules in May of 2008:Schedule start and end dates. Otherwise, it runs the risk of feeling just like another string of nights in front of the tube. Take Staycation photos or videos, just as you would if you went away from home on your vacation. Declare a 'choratorium.' That means no chores! Don't make the bed, vacuum, clean out the closets, pull weeds, or nothing, Pack that time with activities. (Leamy)Not only did GMA continue with the theme throughout the summer but the other networks also weighed in. Expert knowledge was doled out and therapeutic interventions were made to make people feel better about staying at home. Online travel companies such as expedia.com and tripadvisor.com, estimated that 60% of regular vacation takers would be staying home. With the rise and fall of gas prices, came the rise of fall of the Staycation.The emergence of the Staycation occurred precisely at a time when American citizens were confronted with the reality that their mobility and localities, including their relationship to domestic space, were structurally bound to larger geopolitical forces. The Staycation was an invention deployed by various interlocutors most threatened by the political possibilities inherent in stillness. The family home was catapulted into the circuits of production, consumption, and exchange. Big TV and Big Box stores furthered individual’s unease towards having to stay at home by discursively constructing the gas prices as an impediment to a happy domestic life and an affront to the American born right to be mobile. What was reinforced was that Americans ideally should be moving, but could not. Yet, at the same time it was rather un-American not to travel. The Staycation was couched in a powerful rhetoric of one’s moral duty to the nation while playing off of middle class anxieties and senses of privilege regarding the right to be mobile and the freedom to consume. The Staycation satiates all of these tensions by insisting that the home can become a somewhere else. Between spring and autumn of 2008, lifestyle experts, representatives from major retailers, and avid Staycationers filled morning slots on ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, and CNN with Staycation tips. CNN highlighted the Staycation as a “1st Issue” in their Weekend Report on 12 June 2008 (Alban). This lead story centred on a father in South Windsor, Connecticut “who took the money he would normally spend on vacations and created a permanent Staycation residence.” The palatial home was fitted with a basketball court, swimming pool, hot tub, gardening area, and volleyball court. In the same week (and for those without several acres) CBS’s Early Show featured the editor of behindthebuy.com, a company that specialises in informing the “time starved consumer” about new commodities. The lifestyle consultant previewed the newest and most necessary items “so you could get away without leaving home.” Key essentials included a “family-sized” tent replete with an air conditioning unit, a projector TV screen amenable to the outdoors, a high-end snow-cone maker, a small beer keg, a mini-golf kit, and a fast-setting swimming pool that attaches to any garden hose. The segment also extolled the virtues of the Staycation even when gas prices might not be so high, “you have this stuff forever, if you go on vacation all you have are the pictures.” Here, the value of the consumer products outweighs the value of erstwhile experiences that would have to be left to mere recollection.Throughout the summer ABC News’ homepage included links to specific products and profiled hotels, such as Hiltons and Holiday Inns, where families could at least get a few miles away from home (Leamy). USA Today, in an article about retailers and the Staycation, reported that Wal-Mart would be “rolling back prices on everything from mosquito repellent to portable DVD players to baked beans and barbecue sauce”. Target and Kohl’s were celebrated for offering discounts on patio furniture, grills, scented candles, air fresheners and other products to make middle class homes ‘staycationable’. A Lexis Nexis count revealed over 200 news stories in various North American sources, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Investors Guide, the Christian Science Monitor, and various local Consumer Credit Counselling Guides. Staying home was not necessarily an inexpensive option. USA Today reported brand new grills, grilling meats, patio furniture and other accoutrements were still going to cost six percent more than the previous year (24 May 2008). While it was suggested that the Staycation was a cost-saving option, it is clear Staycations were for the well-enough off and would likely cost more or as much as an actual vacation. To put this in context with US vacation policies and practices, a recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research called No-Vacation Nation found that the US is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation (Ray and Schmidt 3). Subsequently, without government standards 25% of Americans have neither paid vacation nor paid holidays. The Staycation was not for the working poor who were having difficulty even getting to work in the first place, nor were they for the unemployed, recently job-less, or the foreclosed. No, the Staycationers were middle class suburbanites who had backyards and enough acreage for swimming pools and tents. These were people who were going to be ‘stuck’ at home for the first time and a new grill could make that palatable. The Staycation would be exciting enough to include in their vacation history repertoire.All of the families profiled on the major networks were white Americans and in most cases nuclear families. For them, unattainable motion is an affront to the privilege of their white middle class mobility which is usually easy and unencumbered, in comparison to raced mobilities. Doreen Massey’s theory of “power geometry” which argues that different people have differential and inequitable relationships to mobility is relevant here. The lack of racial representation in Staycation stories reinforces the reality that has already been well documented in the works of bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Lynn Spigel in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, and Jeremy Packer in Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars and Citizenship. All of these critical works suggest that taking easily to the great open road is not the experience of all Americans. Freedom of mobility is in fact a great American fiction.The proprietors for the Great American Staycation were finding all sorts of dark corners in the American psyche to extol the virtues of staying at home. The Staycation capitalised on latent xenophobic tendencies of the insular family. Encountering cultural difference along the way could become taxing and an impediment to the fully deserved relaxation that is the stuff of dream vacations. CNN.com ran an article soon after their Weekend Report mentioned above quoting a life coach who argued Staycations were more fitting for many Americans because the “strangeness of different cultures or languages, figuring out foreign currencies or worrying about lost luggage can take a toll” (12 June 2008). The Staycation sustains a culture of insularity, consumption, distraction, and fear, but in doing so serves the national economic interests quite well. Stay at home, shop, grill, watch TV and movies, these were the economic directives programmed by mass media and retail giants. As such it was a cultural phenomenon commensurable to the mundane everyday life of the suburbs.The popular version of the Staycation is a highly managed and purified event that reflects the resort style/compound tourism of ‘Club Meds’ and cruise ships. The Staycation as a new form of domestication bears a significant resemblance to the contemporary spatial formations that Marc Augé refers to as non-places – contemporary forms of homogeneous architecture that are scattered across disparate locales. The nuclear family home becomes another point of transfer in the global circulation of capital, information, and goods. The chain hotels and big box stores that are invested in the Staycation are touted as part of the local economy but instead devalue the local by making it harder for independent restaurants, grocers, farmers’ markets and bed and breakfasts to thrive. In this regard the Staycation excludes the local economy and the community. It includes backyards not balconies, hot-dogs not ‘other’ types of food, and Wal-Mart rather than then a local café or deli. Playing on the American democratic ideals of freedom of mobility and activating one’s identity as a consumer left little room to re-think how life in constant motion (moving capital, moving people, moving information, and moving goods) was partially responsible for the energy crisis in the first place. Instead, staying at home became a way for the American citizen to support the floundering economy while waiting for gas prices to go back down. And, one wouldn’t have to look that much further to see that the Staycation slips discursively into a renewed mission for a just cause – the environment. For example, ABC launched at the end of the summer a ruse of a national holiday, “National Stay at Home Week” with the tag line: “With gas prices so high, the economy taking a nosedive and global warming, it's just better to stay in and enjoy great ABC TV.” It comes as no shock that none of the major networks covered this as an environmental issue or an important moment for transformation. In fact, the air conditioning units in backyard tents attest to quite the opposite. Instead, the overwhelming sense was of a nation waiting at home for it all to be over. Soon real life would resume and everyone could get moving again. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are examples of the breakdown and failure of capitalism. In a sense, a potential opened up in this breakdown for Stillness to become an alternative to life in constant and unrequited motion. That is, for the practice of non-movement and non-circulation to take on new political and cultural forms especially in the sprawling suburbs where the car moves individuals between the trifecta of home, box store, and work. The economic crisis is also a temporary stoppage of the flows. If the individual couldn’t move, global corporate capital would find a way to set the house in motion, to reinsert it back into the machinery that is now almost fully equated with freedom.The reinvention of the home into a campground or drive-in theatre makes the house a moving entity, an inverted mobile home that is both sedentary and in motion. Paul Virilio’s concept of “polar inertia” is important here. He argues, since the advent of transportation individuals live in a state of “resident polar inertia” wherein “people don’t move, even when they’re in a high speed train. They don’t move when they travel in their jet. They are residents in absolute motion” (Crepuscular 71). Lynn Spigel has written extensively about these dynamics, including the home as mobile home, in Make Room for TV and Welcome to the Dreamhouse. She examines how the introduction of the television into domestic space is worked through the tension between the private space of the home and the public world outside. Spigel refers to the dual emergence of portable television and mobile homes. Her work shows how domestic space is constantly imagined and longed for “as a vehicle of transport through which they (families) could imaginatively travel to an illicit place of passion while remaining in the safe space of the family home” (Welcome 60-61). But similarly to what Virilio has inferred Spigel points out that these mobile homes stayed parked and the portable TVs were often stationary as well. The Staycation exists as an addendum to what Spigel captures about the relationship between domestic space and the television set. It provides another example of advertisers’ attempts to play off the suburban tension between domestic space and the world “out there.” The Staycation exacerbates the role of the domestic space as a site of production, distribution, and consumption. The gendered dynamics of the Staycation include redecorating possibilities targeted at women and the backyard beer and grill culture aimed at men. In fact, ‘Mom’ might suffer the most during a Staycation, but that is another topic. The point is the whole family can get involved in a way that sustains the configurations of power but with an element of novelty.The Staycation is both a cultural phenomenon that feeds off the cultural anxieties of the middle class and an economic directive. It has been constructed to maintain movement at a time when the crisis of capital contains seeds for an alternative, for Stillness to become politically and culturally transformative. But life feels dull when the passenger is stuck and the virtues of Stillness are quite difficult to locate in this cultural context. As Illich argues, “the passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolised by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control” (45). When the passenger is the mode of identification, immobility becomes unbearable. In this context a form of “still mobility” such as the Staycation might be satisfying enough. ConclusionThe still citizen is a threatening figure for capital. In Politics of the Very Worst Virilio argues at the heart of capitalism is a state of permanent mobility, a condition to which polar inertia attests. The Staycation fits completely within this context of this form of mobile immobility. The flow needs to keep flowing. When people are stationary, still, and calm the market suffers. It has often been argued that the advertising industries construct dissatisfaction while also marginally eliminating it through the promises of various products, yet ultimately leaving the individual in a constant state of almost satisfied but never really. The fact that the Staycation is a mode of waiting attests to this complacent dissatisfaction.The subjective and experiential dimensions of living in a capitalist society are experienced through one’s relationship to time and staying on the right path. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are also crises in pace, energy, and time. The mobility and tempo, the pace and path that capital relies on, has become unhinged and vulnerable to a resistant re-shaping. The Staycation re-sets the tempo of suburbia to meet the new needs of an economic slowdown and financial crisis. Following the directive to staycate is not necessarily a new form of false consciousness, but an intensified technological and economic mode of subjection that depends on already established cultural anxieties. But what makes the Staycation unique and worthy of consideration is that capitalists and other disciplinary institutions of power, in this case big media, construct new and innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space. The Staycation is a particular re-territorialisation of the temporal and spatial dimensions of home, work, and leisure. In sum, Staycation and the staging of National Stay at Home Week reveals a systemic mobilising and control of a population’s pace and path. As Bernard Stiegler writes in Technics and Time: “Deceleration remains a figure of speed, just as immobility is a figure of movement” (133). These processes are inexorably tied to one another. Thinking back to the opening quote from Illich, we could ask how we might stop imagining ourselves as passengers – ushered along, falling in line, or complacently floating past. To be still in the flows could be a form of ultimate resistance. In fact, Stillness has the possibility of becoming an autonomous practice of refusal. It is after all this threatening potentiality that created the frenzied invention of the Staycation in the first place. To end where I began, Illich states that “the habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world” (25-26). The horizon of political possibility is uniformly limited for the passenger. Whether people actually did follow these directives during the summer of 2008 is hard to determine. The point is that the energy crisis and economic slowdown offered a potential to vacate capital’s premises, both its pace and path. But corporate capital is doing its best to make sure that people wait, staycate, and see it through. The Staycation is not just about staying at home for vacation. It is about staying within reach, being accounted for, at a time when departing global corporate capital seems to be the best option. ReferencesAlban, Debra. “Staycations: Alternative to Pricey, Stressful Travel.” CNN News 12 June 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://edition.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/06/12/balance.staycation/index.html›.Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, London, 1995.hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Perennial Library, 1974.Leamy, Elisabeth. “Tips for Planning a Great 'Staycation'.” ABC News 23 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/story?id=4919211›.Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: Minnesota U P, 1994.Packer, Jeremy. Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2008.Ray, Rebecca and John Schmitt. No-Vacation Nation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 2007.Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: Chicago U P, 1992.———. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2001.Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker. California: Stanford University Press, 2009.USA Today. “Retailers Promote 'Staycation' Sales.” 24 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2008-05-24-staycations_N.htm›.Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.———. In James der Derian, ed. The Virilio Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998.———. Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999.———. Crepuscular Dawn. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002.

I knew all about places like the Hotel Tremaine…they are flops where you find the cheap ones, the sniffers and the gowed-up runts who shoot you before you can say hello Raymond Chandler, Mandarin's Jade. It is in such a city, of the derelict and the displaced, that film-goers once encountered the private eye. And while we recognise the private eye as naturally urban, the 'hard-boiled' guys of Chandler, David Goodis and their imitators rarely appeal as urbane. Dictionary advice offers a neatly-plotted resolution to such a puzzle, informing us that 'urbane' is dependent on 'urban' in the manner that 'humane' is connected unavoidably to 'human'. As with much of the information scattered across a mystery narrative, such deduction may be too neat. The varying linkages of 'urban' and 'urbane' can be queried in that classic tale of the twentieth-century city, the detective story. In what sense is the detective, as urbane male hero, dependent on the urban world in which he moves? Some years before the emergence of Chandler's Philip Marlowe as the classic 'dick', the private detective inhabited an urban setting and was, in his set of personal attributes, urbane. Sherlock Holmes, the most filmed character in the history of cinema did set out for the moors to entrap the Baskerville hound, but kept coming back to his bolt-hole in central London, right in the heart of the world's great empire. From here he explored London in all its complexity, moving effortlessly between contrasting milieus. He brought with him a mastery of codes and a charm in dealing with especially, female, clients. So proficient was Holmes in reading the city, that he perfected almost any disguise, penetrating in at least one tale, the opium-smokers' flophouses of the East End. In his character, urbane style emerged as a privilege of the educated and wealthy male, a distinguishing mark which somehow seemed to justify all the evasions required in his detection. Holmes's urbanity is thoroughly of London, the huge imperial city. As is that of his law-breaking alter ego, Raffles. E.W. Hornung's character, a gentleman turned thief, who came to the screen in silent films and later under Sam Wood's direction in the 1940 Raffles, with the impeccably urbane David Niven as hero. It is not immediately clear that this urbanity survived displacement from London to Southern California. The first noir era in crime film, claimed Mike Davis, exposed 'the epic dereliction of Downtown's Bunker Hill, which symbolized the rot at the heart of the expanding metropolis' (1992, 41). Davis recognised the class-conscious construction of the 'hard-boiled' detective, in which the tropes of aristocratic style were passed down from Raffles to Philip Marlowe. The detective, a representative of the threatened post-Depression urban middle class, employed stylistic markers to hold himself aloof from the poor, the working class and the marginal. In defending himself from their 'epic dereliction', the private eye depended on traces of the urbane inherited from a cycle of movies, which intervened between the Holmes stories and those of wartime noir, especially the first Saint and Falcon movies with George Sanders as hero. Indeed, that most urbane of all male stars of the 1940s, George Sanders ousted Philip Marlowe from his own mystery in The Falcon takes over [1942], a Chandler adaptation for which director Irving Reis inserted the urbane Falcon [Sanders]. Yet as the Falcon series wore on, crimes had to be set in distant and cosmopolitan locations, as if the city of the 1930s and '40s could not sustain the urbanity of the detective. In the later Falcon movies, the detective resorts to globe-trotting around fashionably exotic locations, as if his urbanity can no longer be demonstrated by imaginative daring but requires the prop of the cosmopolitan backdrop. While the subsequent noir cycle relied on fears of personal entrapment, the detective as urbane, was able to overcome dislocation. The solution of the crime is in effect an exteriorisation of inner order. The detective's languidness and characteristic dress, the male formal attire dissembled slightly for the rain-slicked street, has produced its own markers of the urbane, even if drawn from Casablanca rather than Los Angeles. The stylish detective, through dress, movement, and words, was able to remain aloof from the sufferings of the Hotel Tremaine. As Frank Kutnik pointed out, 'the impact of the American private-eye as a culturally iconized fantasy male derives from his role as a perpetually liminal self who can move freely among the diverse social worlds thrown up by the city, while existing on their margins' (1997, 90). What of the city in which the private eye resolves crime? In the transition from novel to movie, cities are regularly collapsed into a sequence of standard settings: night club, lounge, bar, office and most frequently, interior of the automobile. The city itself in its dissipation and disorder recedes into abstraction. A familiar range of shots and lighting, characteristic of noir, oblique angles, formalist patterning, low-key lights and extreme close-up, displaces the city of the written stories. In this first noir cycle, the detective-hero traverses an emerging urban disorder which, although he finds it despicable and degraded, remains a place in which he is at home. The urbanity of Holmes and the Saint has its terminal reflection in this command of localised and underworld codes and space. The private eye is defending a sense of self and self-worth from the degradation of urban life. Many of the noir films exaggerated this apartness by their use of low-key lighting to create an abstract order, redolent of psychological imbalance but nonetheless masking the jumbled city of the written detective fiction. To observe Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes in Polanski's Chinatown [1974] is to see simultaneously the dissolving of the urbane self-containment of the detective and the fakery of his city. In Chinatown, Gittes is sleazy and foul mouthed and his attempts at wit fall short. He can't understand the crime narrative into which he has stumbled. Symbolically his nose is slit by a villain [he can't sniff out crime] and the mnemonic Chinatown is a model of the city as beyond knowledge; in which there are bad memories but no grasp of how the future might unfold. Perhaps even more removed from the urban and urbane is Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby, private eye as victim, in Arthur Penn's Night Moves [1975]. Like Jake he fails to rescue the female victim, his wit is rough rather than urbane, he dresses badly and has an unsuave background as professional sportsman . The old public school brigade in which the Saint, Raffles, the Falcon and indeed Chandler himself were all conjoined, had foresworn professional games in defence of the gifted amateur. Moseby drifts from the city to the Florida coast and then out to sea, the detective well and truly out of his depth. The first detectives took from the city an urbaneness parallel to the genteel detection of a country house whodunnit. In the neo-noir, the city is, despite Polanski's too careful reproduction [a simulacrum in itself] essentially uncoded and emptied. There is no milieu into which the detective can insinuate himself. Reservoir Dogs [1992] has characters with no names and is set in vacant industrial storage blocks. The best the characters can do for urbane conversation is to deconstruct Madonna. In Pulp Fiction, [1994] Tarantino's characters from the outset are presented to us as even more unsuave. They eat, crudely, in tinny diners and their understanding of the cosmopolitan is limited to European translations of 'Big Mac'. The urban world in which the languidly suave detective moved with ease and wit has degenerated into predictability. There are no codes to understand, no subject to remain self-contained. The detecting figure has in consequence come to be shaped more by Harry Callahan than by Holmes. No longer a knight errant struggling to maintain morality, Dirty Harry is barely distinguishable from the murderers he guns down. He hates urban diversity and the setting of the first film, in the monumental civic locations and tourism landscapes of San Francisco, ridicules any notion of architectural urbanity. In Dirty Harry [1971] the detective's nemesis is not the killer but the Mayor, who plays with urbanity, but in his foppish dress, over-tidy room and gold-embossed phone is a culpably weak fool. Harry in contrast is deliberately far from urbane. In the final scenes he even leaves the city itself for a Western-style setting of creek and antiquated machinery. With the urbane detective now a rarity on the screen, Los Angeles can be resurrected in urban theory as a crass land of simulacra, of theme parks and drive-in diners. Such hyper-reality would drive Marlowe to cynical disgust and Harry Callahan to wreak bloody revenge on both property developers and cultural theorists. Urbane, even cool, have come down it seems to, at best, 'street smart'. In the process, the urbanity inherited from a turn-of-the century aristocracy and passed down in cruder form to the declining middle class of Marlowe's California, has no significance. The people of the Hotel Tremaine have outlasted the detective. We don't have to see Los Angeles as the prototype of the 21st century city, even though a few geographers continue to insist that this is the case. But in the film story of detection, the urban of the twentieth- century city is a vacuum and urbane style means little. The male detective hero has dropped his guard. As dictionary detectives might have suspected, in these movies, humane is now absent from the human. References Davis, Mike (1992) City of Quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles. Vintage. Krutnik, Frank (1997) 'Something more than night: tales of the noir city', in David B Clarke, ed., The cinematic city, Routledge. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McConville, Chris. "The private eye as urbane" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/private_eye.php>. Chicago Style McConville, Chris, "The private eye as urbane" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/private_eye.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style McConville, Chris. (2002) The private eye as urbane. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/private_eye.php> ([your date of access]).

Depending on your perspective, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artworks are inaugurating an exciting new chapter in the history of art, or a dangerous new chapter in the history of online market bubbles. NFTs index artworks, and are typically strings of characters stored on a blockchain such as Ethereum. NFTs are not exclusively used to index artworks, and have been used to index a range of collectibles, but it is the sale of NFTs associated with artworks that has launched the phenomenon into public consciousness. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the digital artist Beeple’s sale of an NFT for the equivalent of $69 million (Krastrenakes). For some, such staggering prices suggest NFTs are poised to become the next Beanie Babies—i.e., commodities without utility that sell at vastly inflated prices. Despite such cynicism, some argue that NFTs have revolutionary technical import, such that they could overturn many common and unequal practices within the contemporary art market (Rennie et al.). Chief among these is the supposed disposability of digital artworks, which are viewed as difficult to sell, resell, and protect from piracy. Such issues are thought to be ameliorated by NFTs, since they function as a token that is understood to stand as a “definitive indicator of ownership” of digital artworks (Mackenzie and Bērziņa 2). Or, as Rachel O’Dwyer has summarised, NFT art auctions like the Ethereal Summit held in New York in 2018 allow individuals to bid for the “ownership and provenance details of the works of art encrypted in the Ethereum blockchain and represented by a token” (O’Dwyer). Unlike a more conventional artwork, such as a painting, NFT artworks typically take the form of JPEGs or GIFs, and therefore circulate the Internet widely, regardless of who owns the token that designates ownership. While reproductions and printed documentations of traditional artworks are commonplace—e.g., art gallery giftshops will often sell relatively low-cost posters of masterpieces like Picasso’s Guernica, or coffee table books showcasing the masterworks of influential movements like post-impressionism—there are obvious material differences between the reproduction and the original. In the case of the typically digital NFT artworks, this distinction does not apply. Accordingly, the academic and popular discussions that surround NFT artworks have reignited theoretical questions around the ontological status of artworks, and the source of their economic value. For some, the NFT market is a financial bubble and the prices attracted by particular NFT-linked artworks have no underlying value (BBC News). For others, the value of NFTs can be explained through an appeal to the value subjectively attributed to the image or animation by the purchaser (Nguyen), while for others the value of NFTs should be understood in terms of digital scarcity and provenance (Rennie et al.; Joselit) or as a technological means for artists to maintain a greater share of their artwork’s value (Kugler). While the NFT market is novel, and is worthy of study in terms of its specific technological and economic forms, this article will argue that NFTs can be placed in a longer history of the emergence of what Luc Boltanski and Arnauld Esquerre have called the “enrichment economy”. In their Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, Boltanski and Esquerre argue that, since at least the last quarter of the twentieth century, a new site of valorisation has emerged in post-industrial economies. According to Boltanski and Esquerre, globalisation and deindustrialisation provoked many economies to embrace tourism, luxury good production, and the commodification of heritage and culture as new sites of extraction. As the viability of the mass production of commodities has receded, the production of unique commodities and transient yet “unforgettable” experiences have become more economically significant. For Boltanski and Esquerre, enrichment refers both to the often-discursive refining and redefining of existing commodities—such that they fetch greater prices—and a greater emphasis on an economy for those with disposable income—such as tourists, art collectors, and the wealthy more generally (3-4). Often, Boltanski and Esquerre argue, the enrichment economies of art and luxury tend to mine and exploit the “underlying substratum that is purely and simply the past” (2). For this reason, the enrichment economy requires the production of new forms of authenticity, “aura”, and belief, such that the overlooked or taken-for-granted objects of the past can be reframed as unique and worthy of investment or consumption. The interesting question, then, is not necessarily that of why someone would pay a large sum of money to own a piece of code on a blockchain, but, instead, that of how a particular piece of contemporary art or an NFT comes to be “enriched” with authenticity and aura. While a thoroughgoing discussion of this topic would require a longer piece, this article will nevertheless attempt to open up connections between art history, debates around the production of artistic value during and after Modernism, and the newly emerging NFT art market. While many have declared that NFTs are “disrupting the art market” (Tripathi)—supposedly evinced by the staggering growth of the NFT market, and emerging institutional recognition, such as ArtReview’s decision to place an NFT at the top of their Power 100 List for 2021—this article seeks to locate the NFT explosion within a slightly longer timeframe, one in which NFTs would feature as a continuation—albeit a non-linear one—rather than a disruption of ongoing cultural and economic logics. Value and Void Despite the incredulity that commonly meets NFT artworks, the contemporary art market similarly flaunts conventional understandings of aesthetic and economic value. While many would surely agree with journalist Amy Castor’s claim that “it’s hard to justify that a Bored Ape NFT is worth $300,000 based on the art” (quoted in Artnet), almost identical criticisms have been raised around the contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 work Comedian. Released in an edition of three, Comedian consisted of a banana duct-taped to a wall, with two of the three selling for $120,000 each. As Sara Callahan puts it, works like Comedian reignited debates around “what makes something a high-priced artwork when another, seemingly identical, object is not?” (Callahan). While NFTs are reawakening interest in the question of artistic value, the financialisation of cheaply made and mass-produced artworks has a much longer history. Indeed, by the 1960s, a booming secondary art market that traded in increasingly expensive, yet cheap-to-produce avant-garde works—often requiring relatively small amounts of time and inexpensive materials—raised suspicions that art was becoming indistinguishable from more traditional financial assets. In response, in 1968 the influential art critic Leo Steinberg argued that, “avant-garde art, lately Americanized, is for the first time associated with big money. … Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults” (quoted in Beech 300). As Dave Beech has shown, in the ensuing period, “art’s relationship to finance capital has outstripped Steinberg’s worst fears” (Beech 301). By the 1980s, banks allowed individuals to borrow large sums of money against the value of their art collections, and investment in artworks became a normal practice of portfolio diversification (Beech 299–300). When interest rates are low, investments in productive capital offer low levels of liquidity, and international markets appear vulnerable to shocks, artworks—whether physical or in the form of an NFT—offer a means of hedging against future losses. Furthermore, in both the contemporary art market and the NFT market, purchases of artworks at inflated prices often allow an individual to prevent “the bottom from falling out of a market they have already invested in” (O’Dwyer). The fact that artworks could hold a value well in excess of the cost of the materials or labour time required to produce them, was not solely recognised by art collectors and investors. Instead, this period saw a great number of artists explicitly playing with the aporia that had emerged around art’s economic value—insofar as ready-made artworks could now fetch prices typically reserved for laboriously produced and unique masterpieces. Take, for example, Yves Klein’s project Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which he developed over the late 1950s and early 1960s. In these works, Klein offered collectors the opportunity to purchase a void or “immaterial zone” for varying quantities of gold, with “20 grams (3/4 ounce) of pure gold for the Zones of series no. 1, the least expensive, to 1,280 grams (27/8 pounds) for those of series no. 7, the most expensive” (Cras 24). In exchange for the gold, the void-owner would receive a receipt as proof of purchase. However, for the work to be completed, Klein requested that the receipt be burned by the collector, and in response Klein would throw half of the received gold into the river Seine (Cras 24). By destroying the proof of purchase, and by releasing some of the gold into the river, the collector would receive “the full authentic immaterial value of the work” (Klein quoted in Cras 24). We see some resemblances here between Klein’s Zones and NFTs—and here Klein is no exception, since, as Cras has documented, the 1960s were replete with artists experimenting with the production of artworks as novel financial assets. For Cras, it was a time in which “the problem of attaching a price to works of art and offering them for sale, traditionally considered to be external to creation in this domain, was now incorporated in artistic practice” (Cras 3). If artists were increasingly embracing the artwork’s status as an asset, and if the price of artworks became divorced from luxurious materials or skilled production, how were artworks able to assert themselves as valuable and worthy of collection and investment? How is that, rather than the decoupling of artworks from some secure material base of value diminishing their market value, such decoupling has instead led to immense growth in the art market? In order to pursue this question, in the next section we will turn to Beech’s rethinking of the Marxist labour theory of value in the context of the art market. Value and Labour Here, it is worthwhile to turn to Beech’s distinction between the price of the artwork and the value of the artwork. For Beech, an artwork’s price is whatever sum of money it can be exchanged for in the market. Most neoclassical economists treat price and value as being synonymous, and, from this position, it makes no sense to ask if an artwork is worth—or if its value is equivalent—to its current price. As Beech writes, “neoclassical economics claims to be able to treat the sale of artworks as a standard transaction with prices determined entirely by demand and the subjective perception of utility by wealthy purchasers” (Beech 291). Against this view, Beech offers a Marxist interpretation of artistic value, one that emphasises labour-time in the production of artistic reputation. Reputation is key here, as Beech dismisses the notion that an increase in artistic labour-time increases the value of an artwork. Against neoclassical economists, Beech (311) writes that “the increase or decrease in the price of artworks is not ‘a floating crap game’, but is determined by the changing circumstances of the artwork itself vis-à-vis the esteem it is held in by the art community”. Accordingly, Beech states that the prices of artworks are seriously affected—perhaps even driven—by the non-purchasing “consumers” of art, namely academics, commentators, and other artists, who determine the general reputation of artworks. Accordingly, if we want to understand the prices of artworks at the marketplace, we need to focus our attention on art’s evaluative discourses, the production of knowledge, and the practices of producing objects that provide an assessment and legacy for a work or body of work, such as photographic reproductions and monographs. Artistic value as reputation is not only expressed through the economic consumption of products, but in the activities of learning from them, asking questions of them, reconfiguring them in new products, combining them and rejecting them. The high prices of art derive from the high status of the work within the discourses of art (Beech 312). Whereas the conventional Marxist labour theory of value focusses on the socially necessary labour time for the production of a commodity, Beech emphasises the labour of the consumer rather than that of the producer. As we have shown, an artwork that takes very little time to produce—such as Cattelan’s Comedian—can attract a much larger price than a painting by a lesser-known artist who spends months in the studio. Nevertheless, Beech argues that the greater the labour time of the non-purchasing consumers of art, the greater the artwork’s value. By maintaining a distinction between price—the quantity of money an artwork can be exchanged for—and value—the total of labour-time expended in discussing, viewing, and reproducing an artwork—Beech provides us with a framework for understanding how prices emerge, without exaggerating the predictive powers of such a framework. If an artist’s work is priced relatively low, but the discourse around their work is expanding rapidly, there is the potential to make a purchase below value, even if this investment is still speculative. By contrast, the neoclassical perspective renders this approach to the price/value relationship unthinkable. What, then, distinguishes artistic—or artworld—discourse from marketing? Beyond the simple observation that marketing teams are directly employed by capitalists in order to push a message that is directly related to increasing surplus-value, Beech argues that “it is a condition of the contribution of art discourse to the inflation of the value of art that it is independent from the economic interests at stake” (Beech 313). Though Beech does not put it this way, we could argue that the gap between artistic discourse and those who stand to financially benefit from the inflation of an artwork’s value produces the “aura” of the artwork. Coca-Cola’s marketing team is unlikely to change its opinion about its famous product, whereas art discourse is produced—for the most part—by a decentralised “artworld” of curators, critics, museologists, historians, philosophers, artists, and viewers, all of whom gravitate towards certain works at certain times—and it is arguably the uncertainty and uncoordinated nature of these shifts in reputational favour that make certain works feel miraculous. While, in the short term, a Bored Ape, and an artwork like Comedian, can attract a high price, it is unlikely that these artworks will maintain that price overtime—for this to happen, one would have to imagine an ongoing process of enrichment, one that would find new conversations to have about such works beyond the novelty of their unlikely price tags. Enriching the Blockchain While recent years have seen the publication of impressive and sophisticated quantitative studies of the NFT market, such studies have focussed on the quantifiable aspects of value and reputation (Vasan et al.; Nadini et al.). While such research has shown that connection to prominent collectors, and visibility on popular crypto-platforms, is an indicator of the expected price of an NFT, Beech’s research suggests that a range of difficult-to-quantify factors must be taken into consideration. While quantifiable forms of influence are of course important, the capacity for an artwork—linked to an NFT or not—to be discursively enriched, such that its status as historically and culturally significant appears independent from the testimony of those who would financially benefit from its revaluation, appears vital for its long-term enrichment and accrual of value. Some have attempted to articulate the emerging value of the NFT market in such terms. For example, Paul Dylan-Ennis claims that in order to understand CryptoPunks—one of the older artistic series to be linked to NFTs, and which can sell for up to $1.6 million—we must appreciate that they “are sought after because of their age, like blockchain antiques” (Dylan-Ennis). For Dylan-Ennis, NFTs like Cryptopunks are valuable insofar as they are “the oldest NFTs”, and, accordingly, it is “their ‘metadata’” or their “longevity on the blockchain” that is desired (Dylan-Ennis). In Dylan-Ennis’s account, NFTs are worth investing in because their past will one day be historically significant, hence his injunction for us to “look past the art and look at the medium to get what is going on” (Dylan-Ennis). But rather than looking at the medium, perhaps it is more fruitful to look to the institutional forms that nurture, generate, and circulate the reputational discourses that modify artistic value. In doing so, we will not only avoid the conservative move of denouncing NFT artworks on the basis of an arbitrary aesthetic standard, but also the utopian move of associating NFTs with the fantasy of a future “in which the subject is free from coercive mediating institutions, the state chief among them, wielding data certainty as a means of freedom and social transformation” (Jutel 4). Rather than NFTs freeing the digital artist from the problems imposed by ease of reproduction, we can see that the reputational value of the artwork linked to a non-fungible token requires the fungibility of reproduction, circulation, commentary, and discussion. NFT boosters have been quick to critique the institutions that have traditionally provided the training that fosters such discourse and expertise—in the form of the non-purchasing consumers discussed by Beech— as gatekeepers that exploit artists. While we should acknowledge the gross inequities of the artworld and academia, such institutions have nevertheless been relatively historically successful in their attempt to produce large audiences that can participate in the enrichment of past objects, and the connection of new objects to that past. The challenge that the cryptoworld will face, is whether, like the artworld, it can marshal similar long-term discursive labour in the process of enrichment. If it cannot, we may ironically see the same “gatekeeping” institutions of the artworld invoked to bolster the value of the NFT market. References Artnet. “‘They’ve Created Perceived Value Out of Thin Air’: The Whole Bored Ape Yacht Club Phenomenon, Explained.” 8 April 2022 <https://news.artnet.com/multimedia/the-art-angle-podcast-bored-ape-yacht-club-2094073>. BBC News. “What Are NFTs and Why Are Some Worth Millions?” 23 Sep. 2021. <https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56371912>. Beech, Dave. Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Boltanski, Christian, and Arnauld Esquerre. Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Trans. Catherine Porter. London: Polity, 2020. Callahan, Sara. “The Value of a Banana: Understanding Absurd and Ephemeral Artwork.” The Conversation 8 Oct. 2020. <https://theconversation.com/the-value-of-a-banana-understanding-absurd-and-ephemeral-artwork-147689>. Cras, Sophie. The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s. Trans. Malcolm DeBevoise. Massachusetts: Yale UP, 2019. Dylan-Ennis, Paul. “NFT Art: The Bizarre World Where Burning a Banksy Can Make It More Valuable.” The Conversation 6 Mar. 2021. <https://theconversation.com/nft-art-the-bizarre-world-where-burning-a-banksy-can-make-it-more-valuable-156605>. Krastrenakes, Jacob. “Beeple Sold an NFT for $69 Million.” The Verge 11 Mar. 2021. <https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million>. Kugler, Logan. “Non-Fungible Tokens and the Future of Art.” Communications of the ACM 64.9 (2021). DOI: 10.1145/3474355. Mackenzie, Simon, and Diāna Bērziņa. “NFTs: Digital Things and Their Criminal Lives.” Crime Media Culture (2021). DOI: 10.1177/17416590211039797. Nadini, Matthieu, et al. “Mapping the NFT Revolution: Market Trends, Trade Networks, and Visual Features.” Scientific Reports 11.20902 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598021000538. Nguyen, Terry. “The Value of NFTs, Explained by an Expert: How Emotional Attachment to Certain Items and Gifts Could Affect Our Understanding of Value.” Vox 31 Mar. 2021. <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22358262/value-of-nfts-behavioral-expert>. O’Dwyer, Rachel. “A Celestial Cyberdimension: Art Tokens and the Artwork as Derivative.” Circa Art Magazine 3 Dec. 2018. <https://circaartmagazine.net/a-celestial-cyberdimension-art-tokens-and-the-artwork-as-derivative/#_ftn21>. Joselit, David. “NFTs, or the Readymade Reversed.” October 175 (2021): 3–4. Jutel, Olivier. “Blockchain Imperialism in the Pacific.” Big Data & Society (2021). DOI: 10.1177/2053951720985249. Rennie, Ellie, et al. “Provocation Paper: Blockchain and the Creative Industries.” RMIT, 2019. <https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2019-11/apo-nid267131.pdf>. Tripathi, Smita. “How NFTs Are Disrupting the Art World.” Business Today 20 Feb. 2022. <https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/luxury-lifestyle/story/how-nfts-are-disrupting-the-art-world-321706-2022-02-15>. Vasan, Kishore, et al. “Quantifying NFT-Driven Networks in Crypto Art.” Scientific Reports 12.2769 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-05146-6.

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

Entre les mondes arabe (Irak, États du Golfe…), turc (Turquie, Azerbaïjan, Turkmenistan) et européen (par la trouée du Caucase et de la mer Caspienne), l’Iran forme un ensemble distinct dont la population est fortement attachée à sa spécificité. Cette forte originalité au sein du Moyen-Orient, les Iraniens la doivent à leurs origines symbolisées par leur langue, le persan, une langue indo-européenne, à la doctrine religieuse qu’ils professent en majorité, le chiisme, qui s’oppose au principal courant de l’islam, le sunnisme, enfin, paradoxalement, à leur forte occidentalisation due à un courant d’échanges continus depuis la fin du XIXème siècle et que n’a pas interrompu la Révolution islamique. Ces trois constituants de l’identité iranienne sont contrebalancés par des facteurs de division de la société, plus ou moins accusés selon les époques. Le premier constituant de l’identité iranienne, revendiquée par la population, c’est l’ancrage du pays dans une histoire plurimillénaire, la conscience d’appartenir à un des plus anciens États du monde, de la continuité d’une civilisation qui a su assimiler les envahisseurs successifs. Les Iraniens sont d’origine aryenne. Irân-vej, en langue pehlevi, l’ancienne langue iranienne parlée sous les Sassanides (224-651 ap. J.-C.), c’est le pays des Aryens. Les occidentaux ont préféré, à travers l’histoire, le nom qu’avaient donné les Grecs au pays, « Perse », du nom de la grande tribu qui avait fondé l’Empire achéménide au VIème siècle avant J.-C. Diplomates et voyageurs utilisèrent le mot « Perse » jusqu’en 1935 quand l’empereur Reza chah imposa le nom officiel d’Iran, déjà utilisé dans la population, et récusa le nom de Perse qui connotait des légendes anciennes et ancrait le pays dans un passé folklorique. Encore aujourd’hui les occidentaux ont tendance à utiliser « Perse » quand ils se réfèrent à des aspects valorisants (archéologie, cuisine, poésie…), réservant « Iran » pour évoquer des thématiques plus inquiétantes (Révolution, terrorisme). Venus des steppes froides d’Asie intérieure, les Iraniens sont, à l’origine, des nomades indo-européens qui se sont fixés, aux IIème et au Ier millénaires avant J.-C sur le haut plateau( entre 800 et 1000 mètres) entouré de montagnes qui constitue la majeure partie de l’actuel Iran. Le genre de vie qui a dominé jusqu’aux invasions turco-mongoles (XIème-XIIIème siècles) était celui d’agriculteurs sédentaires pratiquant de courts déplacements pastoraux à l’intérieur des vallées. Les invasions médiévales ont entraîné la « bédouinisation » (X. de Planhol) de populations jusque là sédentaires si bien que l’Iran est devenu le plus grand foyer mondial de pastoralisme nomade. Ces bouleversements au fil de l’histoire, précédés par la conquête arabe au VIIème siècle, n’ont pas fait disparaître pour autant la langue persane ni fait refluer un folklore spécifiquement iranien. La nouvelle année (noruz) que célèbre la population est une année solaire qui débute à l’équinoxe de printemps et compte 365 jours. La vie en Iran est ainsi rythmée par deux calendriers antagonistes, le calendrier solaire pour le quotidien et le calendrier lunaire musulman pour les cérémonies religieuses. Noruz est aussi fêté dans les anciennes possessions et l’aire d’influence de l’Iran (sarzamin-e Iran : le « territoire » de l’Iran, Iran-e bozorg : le grand Iran) où le persan, sous l’appellation dari en Afghanistan et tajik au Tajikistan, est une langue officielle. La prise en considération de l’unité et du fort sentiment national iraniens ne doit pas masquer l’hétérogénéité et les facteurs de division au sein du pays. Et tout d’abord la diversité ethno-linguistique. Si environ 85% de la population parle le persan, ce n’est la langue maternelle que de 50% des locuteurs. D’importantes minorités occupent les marges du pays : au nord-ouest, les Turcs azeri, qui forment environ 20% de la population iranienne ; à l’ouest les Kurdes ; au sud, des Arabes ; au sud-est les Baloutches. Cette diversité ethno-linguistique se double d’une diversité religieuse, chez les Baloutches, une partie des Kurdes et une partie des Arabes qui sont sunnites. Les revendications identitaires de ces minorités se déclinent avec une intensité très variable, se bornant tantôt à des manifestations culturelles, prenant parfois un tour plus politique avec des demandes d’autonomie ou encore s’accompagnant d’actions violentes (ainsi au Baloutchestan et dans une moindre mesure au Kurdistan). S’ajoutent à ces différences culturelles et à ces revendications identitaires de forts contrastes en matière de genre de vie. La vie paysanne, en net déclin (on ne compte plus que 26% de population rurale selon le recensement de 2016), se caractérise par de fortes traditions communautaires, notamment pour la gestion de l’eau amenée traditionnellement des piémonts par des galeries drainantes souterraines (les qanât). Les pasteurs nomades forment de grandes tribus (tels, au sud de l’Iran, les Bakhtyâri et les Qashqa’i) qui se singularisent par rapport aux Bédouins des déserts du Moyen-Orient par les traits suivants : il s’agit d’un nomadisme montagnard menant les pasteurs et leurs troupeaux des plaines vers les sommets au printemps et inversement à l’automne ; les tribus regroupent des centaines de milliers d’individus soumis à des « chefferies centralisées » (J.-P. Digard) et ont formé des états dans l’État rigoureusement hiérarchisés. Mais c’est le mode de vie urbain qui est depuis une quarantaine d’années majoritaire. La ville avec son bâzâr, sa grande mosquée, ses services est particulièrement valorisée. La population de Téhéran (9 millions d’habitants) et de son agglomération (15 millions) a crû considérablement depuis le début du XXème siècle (environ 200 000 habitants en 1900). Banlieues et cités périphériques regroupent des « paysans dépaysannés » (P. Vieille) (pour un exemple de ces cités périphériques voir S. Parsapajouh). La ville elle-même est fortement stratifiée socialement. Ainsi, à Téhéran, s’opposent un nord riche où réside une bourgeoisie occidentalisée et les quartiers populaires et pauvres du sud de la ville. Le second constituant de l’identité iranienne, c’est le chiisme. Ce courant religieux remonte aux premiers temps de l’islam quand il fallut choisir un successeur au prophète. Les chiites, contrairement aux sunnites, optèrent pour le principe généalogique et choisirent pour diriger la communauté le gendre et cousin de Mohammed, Ali (shi’a signifie partisan - de Ali). Selon les dogmes du chiisme duodécimain, la version du chiisme dominante en Iran, seuls les 12 imam-s (Ali et ses descendants) ont pu exercer un pouvoir juste et légitime. Le douzième imam a disparu en 874 et dans l’attente de la parousie de cet « imam caché » toute forme de gouvernement est nécessairement imparfaite. Ce dogme prédispose à une vision critique du pouvoir. Au cours de l’histoire certains ont préféré cultiver de l’indifférence à l’égard de la vie politique et se réfugier dans la spiritualité, d’autres au contraire faisant fond sur les virtualités contestataires du chiisme ont prôné une opposition au pouvoir, voire un gouvernement dirigé par les clercs, comme l’ayatollah Khomeyni et ses partisans le firent lors de la révolution islamique (1979-1980) – ce qui est une innovation dans le chiisme duodécimain. La constitution de la République islamique a entériné cette position doctrinale en institutionnalisant le velayat-e faqih « la souveraineté du docte ». C’est lui, le « guide », qui exerce le pouvoir suprême et auquel sont subordonnés le Président de la République et le gouvernement. Un autre trait original du chiisme duodécimain est l’exaltation du martyre ; celle-ci trouve son origine dans l’ « histoire-mythe » de la passion du troisième imam, Hoseyn, tué, avec la plupart des membres de sa famille, dans des circonstances atroces par les troupes du calife omeyyade (sunnite), Yazid, en 680 à Kerbala, dans l’actuel Irak. La commémoration de ce supplice s’exprime à travers des rituels dolorisants qui atteignent leur paroxysme le 10 moharram (premier mois de l’année musulmane), jour de achoura (anniversaire de la mort de Hoseyn) : processions de pénitents se flagellant, prônes, cantiques et mystères rappellent ce drame. Cette tradition martyriste et les rituels qui lui correspondent sont un véritable ciment de la culture populaire. Le mythe de Kerbala, opposant bourreaux et victimes, exaltant le sacrifice de soi a été, dans l’histoire de l’Iran moderne et singulièrement lors de la révolution islamique, une grille de lecture de la réalité socio-politique et un modèle d’action pour la lutte. Un troisième composant de l’identité iranienne, c’est l’occidentalisation, entretenue par une diaspora de deux à trois millions d’individus installés, pour la plupart, aux Etats-Unis. Le sport est un des révélateurs les plus vifs de cette occidentalisation, voire de la mondialisation de la société iranienne. Le sport traditionnel en Iran, c’est la lutte qui s’adosse à la pratique coutumière du zourkhane (littéralement maison de force) où l'on s'adonne, dans un cadre de sociabilité conviviale, à divers exercices athlétiques. Or, aujourd’hui, le football détrône la lutte ; des joueurs sont recrutés par des clubs européens, des entraîneurs étrangers sont appelés à diriger l’équipe nationale qui brille dans les compétitions internationales et suscite un engouement sans pareil. Des revendications s’expriment dans les stades ou autour des matchs de football. Il en est ainsi des revendications féminines. Contraintes à une tenue stricte, soumises à des inégalités de droits (en matière d’héritage, de divorce, de voyage, etc.), les femmes sont aussi interdites dans les stades où se déroulent des compétitions d’hommes, en particulier lors des matchs de football. La contestation de cette interdiction est devenue un leitmotive des revendications féminines et à chaque grand match des femmes tentent de s’introduire dans le stade. Le football est sans doute un des domaines où la tension est la plus vive entre le régime islamique, soucieux de la séparation des sexes, de la discipline et de la bienséance prude, et la « société civile » urbaine plus ouverte aux modes de vie occidentaux. Les rituels de moharram tels qu’ils sont pratiqués par les jeunes dans les grandes villes d’Iran témoignent aussi de cette quête de modernité. L’évocation du drame de Karbala suscite une sincère affliction chez ces jeunes mais ils l’expriment à travers des attitudes et des moyens nouveaux : le matériel utilisé, la retransmission du rituel sur un écran géant, les manifestations juvéniles torse nu, qui rappellent celles des jeunes supporters dans les stades de football européen ou encore des adeptes de rave parties, le chantre s’apparentant à un DJ spectaculaire… tout cela emprunte à une culture mondialisée, et parfois underground. Ces exemples, parmi bien d’autres, montrent la complexité des manières d’être dans le monde iranien tiraillées entre modèles nationaux, religieux et mondiaux

The Digital TurnMuch of the 19th century disappeared from public view during the 20th century. Historians recovered what they could from archives and libraries, with the easy pickings-the famous and the fortunate-coming first. Latterly, social and political historians of different hues determinedly sought out the more hidden, forgotten, and marginalised. However, there were always limitations to resources-time, money, location, as well as purpose, opportunity, and permission. 'History' was principally a professionalised and privileged activity dominated by academics who had preferential access to, and significant control over, the resources, technologies and skills required, as well as the social, economic and cultural framework within which history was recovered, interpreted, approved and disseminated.Digitisation and the broader development of new communication technologies has, however, transformed historical research processes and practice dramatically, removing many constraints, opening up many opportunities, and allowing many others than the professional historian to trace and track what would have remained hidden, forgotten, or difficult to find, as well as verify (or otherwise), what has already been claimed and concluded. In the 21st century, the SEARCH button has become a dominant tool of research. This, along with other technological and media developments, has altered the practice of historians-professional or 'public'-who can now range deep and wide in the collection, portrayal and dissemination of historical information, in and out of the confines of the traditional institutional walls of retained information, academia, location, and national boundaries.This incorporation of digital technologies into academic historical practice generally, has raised, as Cohen and Rosenzweig, in their book Digital History, identified a decade ago, not just promises, but perils. For the historian, there has been the move, through digitisation, from the relative scarcity and inaccessibility of historical material to its (over) abundance, but also the emerging acceptance that, out of both necessity and preference, a hybridity of sources will be the foreseeable way forward. There has also been a significant shift, as De Groot notes in his book Consuming History, in the often conflicted relationship between popular/public history and academic history, and the professional and the 'amateur' historian. This has brought a potentially beneficial democratization of historical practice but also an associated set of concerns around the loss of control of both practice and product of the professional historian. Additionally, the development of digital tools for the collection and dissemination of 'history' has raised fears around the commercialised development of the subject's brand, products and commodities. This article considers the significance and implications of some of these changes through one protracted act of recovery and reclamation in which the digital made the difference: the life of a notorious 19th century professional agitator on both sides of the Atlantic, John De Morgan. A man thought lost, but now found."Who Is John De Morgan?" The search began in 1981, linked to the study of contemporary "race riots" in South East London. The initial purpose was to determine whether there was a history of rioting in the area. In the Local History Library, a calm and dusty backwater, an early find was a fading, but evocative and puzzling, photograph of "The Plumstead Common Riots" of 1876. It showed a group of men and women, posing for the photographer on a hillside-the technology required stillness, even in the middle of a riot-spades in hand, filling in a Mr. Jacob's sandpits, illegally dug from what was supposed to be common land. The leader of this, and other similar riots around England, was John De Morgan. A local journalist who covered the riots commented: "Of Mr. De Morgan little is known before or since the period in which he flashed meteorlike through our section of the atmosphere, but he was indisputably a remarkable man" (Vincent 588). Thus began a trek, much interrupted, sometimes unmapped and haphazard, to discover more about this 'remarkable man'. "Who is John De Morgan" was a question frequently asked by his many contemporary antagonists, and by subsequent historians, and one to which De Morgan deliberately gave few answers. The obvious place to start the search was the British Museum Reading Room, resplendent in its Victorian grandeur, the huge card catalogue still in the 1980s the dominating technology. Together with the Library's newspaper branch at Colindale, this was likely to be the repository of all that might then easily be known about De Morgan.From 1869, at the age of 21, it appeared that De Morgan had embarked on a life of radical politics that took him through the UK, made him notorious, lead to accusations of treasonable activities, sent him to jail twice, before he departed unexpectedly to the USA in 1880. During that period, he was involved with virtually every imaginable radical cause, at various times a temperance advocate, a spiritualist, a First Internationalist, a Republican, a Tichbornite, a Commoner, an anti-vaccinator, an advanced Liberal, a parliamentary candidate, a Home Ruler. As a radical, he, like many radicals of the period, "zigzagged nomadically through the mayhem of nineteenth century politics fighting various foes in the press, the clubs, the halls, the pulpit and on the street" (Kazin 202). He promoted himself as the "People's Advocate, Champion and Friend" (Allen). Never a joiner or follower, he established a variety of organizations, became a professional agitator and orator, and supported himself and his politics through lecturing and journalism. Able to attract huge crowds to "monster meetings", he achieved fame, or more correctly notoriety. And then, in 1880, broke and in despair, he disappeared from public view by emigrating to the USA.LostThe view of De Morgan as a "flashing meteor" was held by many in the 1870s. Historians of the 20th century took a similar position and, while considering him intriguing and culturally interesting, normally dispatched him to the footnotes. By the latter part of the 20th century, he was described as "one of the most notorious radicals of the 1870s yet remains a shadowy figure" and was generally dismissed as "a swashbuckling demagogue," a "democratic messiah," and" if not a bandit … at least an adventurer" (Allen 684). His politics were deemed to be reactionary, peripheral, and, worst of all, populist. He was certainly not of sufficient interest to pursue across the Atlantic. In this dismissal, he fell foul of the highly politicised professional culture of mid-to-late 20th-century academic historians. In particular, the lack of any significant direct linkage to the story of the rise of a working class, and specifically the British Labour party, left individuals like De Morgan in the margins and footnotes. However, in terms of historical practice, it was also the case that his mysterious entry into public life, his rapid rise to brief notability and notoriety, and his sudden disappearance, made the investigation of his career too technically difficult to be worthwhile.The footprints of the forgotten may occasionally turn up in the archived papers of the important, or in distant public archives and records, but the primary sources are the newspapers of the time. De Morgan was a regular, almost daily, visitor to the pages of the multitude of newspapers, local and national, that were published in Victorian Britain and Gilded Age USA. He also published his own, usually short-lived and sometimes eponymous, newspapers: De Morgan's Monthly and De Morgan's Weekly as well as the splendidly titled People's Advocate and National Vindicator of Right versus Wrong and the deceptively titled, highly radical, House and Home. He was highly mobile: he noted, without too much hyperbole, that in the 404 days between his English prison sentences in the mid-1870s, he had 465 meetings, travelled 32,000 miles, and addressed 500,000 people. Thus the newspapers of the time are littered with often detailed and vibrant accounts of his speeches, demonstrations, and riots.Nonetheless, the 20th-century technologies of access and retrieval continued to limit discovery. The white gloves, cradles, pencils and paper of the library or archive, sometimes supplemented by the century-old 'new' technology of the microfilm, all enveloped in a culture of hallowed (and pleasurable) silence, restricted the researcher looking to move into the lesser known and certainly the unknown. The fact that most of De Morgan's life was spent, it was thought, outside of England, and outside the purview of the British Library, only exacerbated the problem. At a time when a historian had to travel to the sources and then work directly on them, pencil in hand, it needed more than curiosity to keep searching. Even as many historians in the late part of the century shifted their centre of gravity from the known to the unknown and from the great to the ordinary, in any form of intellectual or resource cost-benefit analysis, De Morgan was a non-starter.UnknownOn the subject of his early life, De Morgan was tantalisingly and deliberately vague. In his speeches and newspapers, he often leaked his personal and emotional struggles as well as his political battles. However, when it came to his biographical story, he veered between the untruthful, the denial, and the obscure. To the twentieth century observer, his life began in 1869 at the age of 21 and ended at the age of 32. His various political campaign "biographies" gave some hints, but what little he did give away was often vague, coy and/or unlikely. His name was actually John Francis Morgan, but he never formally acknowledged it. He claimed, and was very proud, to be Irish and to have been educated in London and at Cambridge University (possible but untrue), and also to have been "for the first twenty years of his life directly or indirectly a railway servant," and to have been a "boy orator" from the age of ten (unlikely but true). He promised that "Some day-nay any day-that the public desire it, I am ready to tell the story of my strange life from earliest recollection to the present time" (St. Clair 4). He never did and the 20th century could unearth little evidence in relation to any of his claims.The blend of the vague, the unlikely and the unverifiable-combined with an inclination to self-glorification and hyperbole-surrounded De Morgan with an aura, for historians as well as contemporaries, of the self-seeking, untrustworthy charlatan with something to hide and little to say. Therefore, as the 20th century moved to closure, the search for John De Morgan did so as well. Though interesting, he gave most value in contextualising the lives of Victorian radicals more generally. He headed back to the footnotes.Now FoundMeanwhile, the technologies underpinning academic practice generally, and history specifically, had changed. The photocopier, personal computer, Internet, and mobile device, had arrived. They formed the basis for both resistance and revolution in academic practices. For a while, the analytical skills of the academic community were concentrated on the perils as much as the promises of a "digital history" (Cohen and Rosenzweig Digital).But as the Millennium turned, and the academic community itself spawned, inter alia, Google, the practical advantages of digitisation for history forced themselves on people. Google enabled the confident searching from a neutral place for things known and unknown; information moved to the user more easily in both time and space. The culture and technologies of gathering, retrieval, analysis, presentation and preservation altered dramatically and, as a result, the traditional powers of gatekeepers, institutions and professional historians was redistributed (De Groot). Access and abundance, arguably over-abundance, became the platform for the management of historical information. For the search for De Morgan, the door reopened. The increased global electronic access to extensive databases, catalogues, archives, and public records, as well as people who knew, or wanted to know, something, opened up opportunities that have been rapidly utilised and expanded over the last decade. Both professional and "amateur" historians moved into a space that made the previously difficult to know or unknowable now accessible.Inevitably, the development of digital newspaper archives was particularly crucial to seeking and finding John De Morgan. After some faulty starts in the early 2000s, characterised as a "wild west" and a "gold rush" (Fyfe 566), comprehensive digitised newspaper archives became available. While still not perfect, in terms of coverage and quality, it is a transforming technology. In the UK, the British Newspaper Archive (BNA)-in pursuit of the goal of the digitising of all UK newspapers-now has over 20 million pages. Each month presents some more of De Morgan. Similarly, in the US, Fulton History, a free newspaper archive run by retired computer engineer Tom Tryniski, now has nearly 40 million pages of New York newspapers. The almost daily footprints of De Morgan's radical life can now be seen, and the lives of the social networks within which he worked on both sides of the Atlantic, come easily into view even from a desk in New Zealand.The Internet also allows connections between researchers, both academic and 'public', bringing into reach resources not otherwise knowable: a Scottish genealogist with a mass of data on De Morgan's family; a Californian with the historian's pot of gold, a collection of over 200 letters received by De Morgan over a 50 year period; a Leeds Public Library blogger uncovering spectacular, but rarely seen, Victorian electoral cartoons which explain De Morgan's precipitate departure to the USA. These discoveries would not have happened without the infrastructure of the Internet, web site, blog, and e-mail. Just how different searching is can be seen in the following recent scenario, one of many now occurring. An addition in 2017 to the BNA shows a Master J.F. Morgan, aged 13, giving lectures on temperance in Ledbury in 1861, luckily a census year. A check of the census through Ancestry shows that Master Morgan was born in Lincolnshire in England, and a quick look at the 1851 census shows him living on an isolated blustery hill in Yorkshire in a railway encampment, along with 250 navvies, as his father, James, works on the construction of a tunnel. Suddenly, literally within the hour, the 20-year search for the childhood of John De Morgan, the supposedly Irish-born "gentleman who repudiated his class," has taken a significant turn.At the end of the 20th century, despite many efforts, John De Morgan was therefore a partial character bounded by what he said and didn't say, what others believed, and the intellectual and historiographical priorities, technologies, tools and processes of that century. In effect, he "lived" historically for a less than a quarter of his life. Without digitisation, much would have remained hidden; with it there has been, and will still be, much to find. De Morgan hid himself and the 20th century forgot him. But as the technologies have changed, and with it the structures of historical practice, the question that even De Morgan himself posed – "Who is John De Morgan?" – can now be addressed.SearchingDigitisation brings undoubted benefits, but its impact goes a long way beyond the improved search and detection capabilities, into a range of technological developments of communication and media that impact on practice, practitioners, institutions, and 'history' itself. A dominant issue for the academic community is the control of "history." De Groot, in his book Consuming History, considers how history now works in contemporary popular culture and, in particular, examines the development of the sometimes conflicted relationship between popular/public history and academic history, and the professional and the 'amateur' historian.The traditional legitimacy of professional historians has, many argue, been eroded by shifts in technology and access with the power of traditional cultural gatekeepers being undermined, bypassing the established control of institutions and professional historian. While most academics now embrace the primary tools of so-called "digital history," they remain, De Groot argues, worried that "history" is in danger of becoming part of a discourse of leisure, not a professionalized arena (18). An additional concern is the role of the global capitalist market, which is developing, or even taking over, 'history' as a brand, product and commodity with overt fiscal value. Here the huge impact of newspaper archives and genealogical software (sometimes owned in tandem) is of particular concern.There is also the new challenge of "navigating the chaos of abundance in online resources" (De Groot 68). By 2005, it had become clear that:the digital era seems likely to confront historians-who were more likely in the past to worry about the scarcity of surviving evidence from the past-with a new 'problem' of abundance. A much deeper and denser historical record, especially one in digital form seems like an incredible opportunity and a gift. But its overwhelming size means that we will have to spend a lot of time looking at this particular gift horse in mouth. (Cohen and Rosenzweig, Web).This easily accessible abundance imposes much higher standards of evidence on the historian. The acceptance within the traditional model that much could simply not be done or known with the resources available meant that there was a greater allowance for not knowing. But with a search button and public access, democratizing the process, the consumer as well as the producer can see, and find, for themselves.Taking on some of these challenges, Zaagsma, having reminded us that the history of digital humanities goes back at least 60 years, notes the need to get rid of the "myth that historical practice can be uncoupled from technological, and thus methodological developments, and that going digital is a choice, which, I cannot emphasis strongly enough, it is not" (14). There is no longer a digital history which is separate from history, and with digital technologies that are now ubiquitous and pervasive, historians have accepted or must quickly face a fundamental break with past practices. However, also noting that the great majority of archival material is not digitised and is unlikely to be so, Zaagsma concludes that hybridity will be the "new normal," combining "traditional/analogue and new/digital practices at least in information gathering" (17).ConclusionA decade on from Cohen and Rozenzweig's "Perils and Promises," the digital is a given. Both historical practice and historians have changed, though it is a work in progress. An early pioneer of the use of computers in the humanities, Robert Busa wrote in 1980 that "the principal aim is the enhancement of the quality, depth and extension of research and not merely the lessening of human effort and time" (89). Twenty years later, as Google was launched, Jordanov, taking on those who would dismiss public history as "mere" popularization, entertainment or propaganda, argued for the "need to develop coherent positions on the relationships between academic history, the media, institutions…and popular culture" (149). As the digital turn continues, and the SEARCH button is just one part of that, all historians-professional or "amateur"-will take advantage of opportunities that technologies have opened up. Looking across the whole range of transformations in recent decades, De Groot concludes: "Increasingly users of history are accessing the past through complex and innovative media and this is reconfiguring their sense of themselves, the world they live in and what history itself might be about" (310). ReferencesAllen, Rob. "'The People's Advocate, Champion and Friend': The Transatlantic Career of Citizen John De Morgan (1848-1926)." Historical Research 86.234 (2013): 684-711.Busa, Roberto. "The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus." Computers and the Humanities 14.2 (1980): 83-90.Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia, PA: U Pennsylvania P, 2005.———. "Web of Lies? Historical Knowledge on the Internet." First Monday 10.12 (2005).De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.De Morgan, John. Who Is John De Morgan? A Few Words of Explanation, with Portrait. By a Free and Independent Elector of Leicester. London, 1877.Fyfe, Paul. "An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers." Victorian Periodicals Review 49.4 (2016): 546-77."Interchange: The Promise of Digital History." Journal of American History 95.2 (2008): 452-91.Johnston, Leslie. "Before You Were Born, We Were Digitizing Texts." The Signal 9 Dec. 2012, Library of Congress. <https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/292/12/before-you-were-born-we-were-digitizing-texts>.Jordanova, Ludmilla. History in Practice. 2nd ed. London: Arnold, 2000.Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.Saint-Clair, Sylvester. Sketch of the Life and Labours of J. De Morgan, Elocutionist, and Tribune of the People. Leeds: De Morgan & Co., 1880.Vincent, William T. The Records of the Woolwich District, Vol. II. Woolwich: J.P. Jackson, 1890.Zaagsma, Gerban. "On Digital History." BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 128.4 (2013): 3-29.

IntroductionBallarat’s Theatre Royal was the first permanent theatre built in inland Australia. Upon opening in 1858, it was acclaimed as having “the handsomest theatrical exterior in the colony” (Star, “Editorial” 7 Dec. 1889) and later acknowledged as “the grandest playhouse in all Australia” (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 1 160). Born of Gold Rush optimism, the Royal was loved by many, yet the over-arching story of its ill-fated existence has failed to surface, in any coherent fashion, in official history. This article takes some first steps toward retrieving lost knowledge from fragmented archival records, and piecing together the story of why this purpose-built theatre ceased operation within a twenty-year period. A short history of the venue will be provided, to develop context. It will be argued that while a combination of factors, most of which were symptomatic of unfortunate timing, destroyed the longevity of the Royal, the principal problem was one of stigmatisation. This was an era in which the societal pressure to visibly conform to conservative values was intense and competition in the pursuit of profits was fierce.The cultural silence that befell the story of the Royal, after its demise, is explicable in relation to history being written by the victors and a loss of spokespeople since that time. As theatre arts historiographer McConachie (131) highlights, “Theatres, like places for worship and spectator sports, hold memories of the past in addition to providing a practical and cognitive framework for performance events in the present.” When that place, “a bounded area denoted by human agency and memory” (131), is lost in time, so too may be the socio-cultural lessons from the period, if not actively recalled and reconsidered. The purpose of this article is to present the beginning of an investigation into the disjointed narrative of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal. Its ultimate failure demonstrates how dominant community based entertainment became in Ballarat from the 1860s onwards, effectively crushing prospects for mid-range professional theatre. There is value in considering the evolution of the theatre’s lifespan and its possible legacy effects. The connection between historical consciousness and the performing arts culture of by-gone days offers potential to reveal specks of cross-relevance for regional Australian theatrical offerings today.In the BeginningThe proliferation of entertainment venues in Ballarat East during the 1850s was a consequence of the initial discovery of surface alluvial gold and the ongoing success of deep-lead mining activities in the immediate area. This attracted extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world who hoped to strike it rich. Given the tough nature of life on the early gold diggings, most disposable income was spent on evening entertainment. As a result, numerous venues sprang into operation to cater for demand. All were either canvas tents or makeshift wooden structures: vibrant in socio-cultural activity, however humble the presentation values. It is widely agreed (Withers, Bate and Brereton) that noteworthy improvements occurred from 1856 onwards in the artistry of the performers, audience tastes, the quality of theatrical structures and living standards in general. Residents began to make their exit from flood and fire prone Ballarat East, moving to Ballarat West. The Royal was the first substantial entertainment venture to be established in this new, affluent, government surveyed township area. Although the initial idea was to draw in some of the patronage which had flourished in Ballarat East, Brereton (14) believed “There can be no doubt that it was [primarily] intended to attract those with good taste and culture”. This article will contend that how society defined ‘good taste’ turned out to be problematic for the Royal.The tumultuous mid-1850s have attracted extensive academic and popular attention, primarily because they were colourful and politically significant times. The period thereafter has attracted little scholarly interest, unless tied to the history of surviving organisations. Four significant structures designed to incorporate theatrical entertainment were erected and opened in Ballarat from 1858 onwards: The Royal was swiftly followed by the Mechanics Institute 1859, Alfred Hall 1867 and Academy of Music 1874-75. As philosopher Albert Borgmann (41) highlighted, the erection of “magnificent settings in which the public could gather and enjoy itself” was the dominant urban aspiration for cultural consumption in the nineteenth century. Men of influence in Victorian cities believed strongly in progress and grand investments as a conscious demonstration of power, combined with Puritan vales, teetotalism and aggressive self-assertiveness (Briggs 287-88). At the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone for the Royal on 20 January 1858, eminent tragedian, Gustavos Brooke, announced “… may there be raised a superstructure perfect in all its parts, and honourable to the builder.” He proclaimed the memorial bottle to be “a lasting memento of the greatness of Ballarat in erecting such a theatre” and philosophised that “the stage not only refines the manners, but it is the best teacher of morals, for it is the truest and most intelligible picture of life. It stamps the image of virtue on the mind …” (Star, “Laying” 21 Jan. 1858). These initial aspirations seem somewhat ambitious when viewed with the benefit of hindsight. Ballarat’s Theatre Royal opened in December 1858, ironically with Jerrold’s comedy ‘Time Works Wonders’. The large auditorium holding around 1500 people “was crowded to overflowing and was considered altogether brilliant in its newness and beauty” by all in attendance (Star, “Local and General” 30 Dec. 1858). Generous descriptions abound of how splendid it was, in architectural terms, but also in relation to scenery, decorations and all appointments. Underneath the theatre were two shops, four bars, elegant dining rooms, a kitchen and 24 bedrooms. A large saloon was planned to be attached soon-after. The overall cost of the build was estimated at a substantial 10,000 pounds.The First Act: 1858-1864In the early years, the Royal was deemed a success. The pleasure-seeking public of Ballarat came en masse and the glory days seemed like they might continue unabated. By the early 1860s, Ballarat was known as a great theatrical centre for performing arts, its population was famous both nationally and internationally for an appreciation of good acting, and the Royal was considered the home of the best dramatic art in Ballarat (Withers 260). Like other theatres of the 1850s diggings, it had its own resident company of actors, musicians, scenic artists and backstage crew. Numerous acclaimed performers came to visit and these were prosperous and happy times for the Royal’s lively theatrical community. As early as 1859, however, there was evident rivalry between the Royal and the Mechanics Institute, as suggested on numerous occasions in the Ballarat Star. As a multi-purpose venue for education and the betterment of the working classes, the latter venue had the distinct advantage of holding the moral high ground. Over time this competition increased as audiences decreased. As people shifted to family-focussed entertainments, these absorbed their time and attention. The transformation of a transient population into a township of families ultimately suffocated prospects for professional entertainment in Ballarat. Consumer interest turned to the growth of strong amateur societies with the establishment of the Welsh Eisteddfod 1863; Harmonic Society 1864; Bell Ringers’ Club 1866 and Glee and Madrigal Union 1867 (Brereton 38). By 1863, the Royal was reported to have “scanty patronage” and Proprietor Symonds was in financial trouble (Star, “News and Notes” 15 Sep. 1864). It was announced that the theatre would open for the last time on Saturday, 29 October 1864 (Australasian). On that same date, the Royal was purchased by Rowlands & Lewis, the cordial makers. They promptly on-sold it to the Ballarat Temperance League, who soon discovered that there was a contract in place with Bouchier, the previous owner, who still held the hotel next door, stating that “all proprietors … were bound to keep it open as a theatre” (Withers 260-61). Having invested immense energy into the quest to purchase it, the Temperance League backed out of the deal. Prominent Hotelier Walter Craig bought it for less than 3,000 pounds. It is possible that this stymied effort to quell the distribution of liquor in the heart of the city evoked the ire of the Protestant community, who were on a dedicated mission “to attack widespread drunkenness, profligacy, licentiousness and agnosticism,” and forming an interdenominational Bible and Tract Society in 1866 (Bate 176). This caused a segment of the population to consider the Royal a ‘lost cause’ and steer clear of it, advising ‘respectable’ families to do the same, and so the stigma grew. Social solidarity of this type had significant impact in an era in which people openly demonstrated their morality by way of unified public actions.The Second Act: 1865-1868The Royal closed for renovations until May 1865. Of the various alterations made to the interior and its fittings, the most telling was the effort to separate the ladies from the ‘town women’, presumably to reassure ‘respectable’ female patrons. To this end, a ladies’ retiring room was added, in a position convenient to the dress circle. The architectural rejuvenation of the Royal was cited as an illustration of great progress in Sturt Street (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 27 May 1865). Soon after, the Royal hosted the Italian Opera Company.However, by 1866 there was speculation that the Royal may be converted into a dry goods store. References to what sort of impression the failing of theatre would convey to the “old folks at home” in relation to “progress in civilisation'' and "social habits" indicated the distress of loyal theatre-goers. Impassioned pleas were written to the press to help preserve the “Temple of Thespus” for the legitimate use for which it was intended (Ballarat Star, “Messenger” and “Letters to the Editor” 30 Aug. 1866). By late 1867, a third venue materialised. The Alfred Hall was built for the reception of Ballarat’s first Royal visitor, the Duke of Edinburgh. On the night prior to the grand day at the Alfred, following a private dinner at Craig’s Hotel, Prince Alfred was led by an escorted torchlight procession to a gala performance at Craig’s very own Theatre Royal. The Prince’s arrival caused a sensation that completely disrupted the show (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 1 165). While visiting Ballarat, the Prince laid the stone for the new Temperance Hall (Bate 159). This would not have been required had the League secured the Royal for their use three years earlier.Thereafter, the Royal was unable to reach the heights of what Brereton (15) calls the “Golden Age of Ballarat Theatre” from 1855 to 1865. Notably, the Mechanics Institute also experienced financial constraints during the 1860s and these challenges were magnified during the 1870s (Hazelwood 89). The late sixties saw the Royal reduced to the ‘ordinary’ in terms of the calibre of productions (Brereton 15). Having done his best to improve the physical attributes and prestige of the venue, Craig may have realised he was up against a growing stigma and considerable competition. He sold the Royal to R.S. Mitchell for 5,500 pounds in 1868.Another New Owner: 1869-1873For the Saturday performance of Richard III in 1869, under the new Proprietor, it was reported that “From pit to gallery every seat was full” and for many it was standing room only (Ballarat Star, “Theatre Royal” 1 Feb. 1869). Later that year, Othello attracted people with “a critical appreciation of histrionic matters” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 19 July 1869). The situation appeared briefly promising. Unfortunately, larger economic factors were soon at play. During 1869, Ballarat went ‘mad’ with mine share gambling. In 1870 the economic bubble burst, and hundreds of people in Ballarat were financially ruined. Over the next ten years the population fell from 60,000 to less than 40,000 (Spielvogel, Papers Vol. 3 39). The last surviving theatre in Ballarat East, the much-loved Charles Napier, put on its final show in September 1869 (Brereton 15). By 1870 the Royal was referred to as a “second-class theatre” and was said to be such bad repute that “it would be most difficult to draw respectable classes” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 17 Jan. 1870). It seems the remaining theatre patrons from the East swung over to support the Royal, which wasn’t necessarily in the best interests of its reputation. During this same period, family-oriented crowds of “the pleasure-seeking public of Ballarat” were attending events at the newly fashionable Alfred Hall (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” June 1870). There were occasional high points still to come for the Royal. In 1872, opera drew a crowded house “even to the last night of the season” which according to the press, “gave proof, if proof were wanting, that the people of Ballarat not only appreciate, but are willing to patronise to the full any high-class entertainment” (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” 26 Aug. 1872). The difficulty, however, lay in the deterioration of the Royal’s reputation. It had developed negative connotations among local temperance and morality movements, along with their extensive family, friendship and business networks. Regarding collective consumption, sociologist John Urry wrote “for those engaged in the collective tourist gaze … congregation is paramount” (140). Applying this socio-cultural principle to the behaviour of Victorian theatre-going audiences of the 1870s, it was compelling for audiences to move with the masses and support popular events at the fresh Alfred Hall rather than the fading Royal. Large crowds jostling for elbow room was perceived as the hallmark of a successful event back then, as is most often the case now.The Third Act: 1874-1878An additional complication faced by the Royal was the long-term effect of the application of straw across the ceiling. Acoustics were initially poor, and straw was intended to rectify the problem. This caused the venue to develop a reputation for being stuffy and led to the further indignity of the Royal suffering an infestation of fleas (Jenkins 22); a misfortune which caused some to label it “The Royal Bug House” (Reid 117). Considering how much food was thrown at the stage in this era, it is not surprising that rotten debris attracted insects. In 1873, the Royal closed for another round of renovations. The interior was redesigned, and the front demolished and rebuilt. This was primarily to create retail store frontage to supplement income (Reid 117). It was reported that the best theatrical frontage in Australasia was lost, and in its place was “a modestly handsome elevation” for which all play-goers of Ballarat should be thankful, as the miracle required of the rebuild was that of “exorcising the foul smells from the old theatre and making it bright and pretty and sweet” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 26 Jan. 1874). The effort at rejuvenation seemed effective for a period. A “large and respectable audience” turned out to see the Fakir of Oolu, master of the weird, mystical, and strange. The magician’s show “was received with cheers from all parts of the house, and is certainly a very attractive novelty” (Ballarat Courier, “Theatre Royal” 29 Mar. 1875). That same day, the Combination Star Company gave a concert at the Mechanics Institute. Indicating the competitive tussle, the press stated: “The attendance, however, doubtless owing to attractions elsewhere, was only moderately large” (Courier, “Concert at the Mechanics’” 29 Mar. 1875). In the early 1870s, there had been calls from sectors of society for a new venue to be built in Ballarat, consistent with its status. The developer and proprietor, Sir William Clarke, intended to offer a “higher class” of entertainment for up to 1700 people, superior to the “broad farces” at the Royal (Freund n.p.) In 1875, the Academy of Music opened, at a cost of twelve thousand pounds, just one block away from the Royal.As the decade of decreasing population wore on, it is intriguing to consider an unprecedented “riotous” incident in 1877. Levity's Original Royal Marionettes opened at the Royal with ‘Beauty and the Beast’ to calamitous response. The Company Managers, Wittington & Lovell made clear that the performance had scarcely commenced when the “storm” arose and they believed “the assault to be premeditated” (Wittington and Lovell in Argus, “The Riot” 6 Apr. 1877). Paid thuggery, with the intent of spooking regular patrons, was the implication. They pointed out that “It is evident that the ringleaders of the riot came into the theatre ready armed with every variety of missiles calculated to get a good hit at the figures and scenery, and thereby create a disturbance.” The mob assaulted the stage with “head-breaking” lemonade bottles, causing costly damage, then chased the frightened puppeteers down Sturt Street (Mount Alexander Mail, “Items of News” 4 Apr. 1877). The following night’s performance, by contrast, was perfectly calm (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 7 Apr. 1877). Just three months later, Webb’s Royal Marionette pantomimes appeared at the Mechanics’ Institute. The press wrote “this is not to be confounded, with the exhibition which created something like a riot at the Theatre Royal last Easter” (Ballarat Star, “News and Notes” 5 July 1877).The final performance at the Royal was the American Rockerfellers’ Minstrel Company. The last newspaper references to the Royal were placed in the context of other “treats in store” at The Academy of Music, and forthcoming offerings at the Mechanics Institute (Star, “Advertising” 3 July 1878). The Royal had experienced three re-openings and a series of short-term managements, often ending in loss or even bankruptcy. When it wound up, investors were left to cover the losses, while the owner was forced to find more profitable uses for the building (Freund n.p.). At face value, it seemed that four performing arts venues was one too many for Ballarat audiences to support. By August 1878 the Royal’s two shop fronts were up for lease. Thereafter, the building was given over entirely to retail drapery sales (Withers 260). ReflectionsThe Royal was erected, at enormous expense, in a moment of unbridled optimism, after several popular theatres in Ballarat East had burned to the ground. Ultimately the timing for such a lavish investment was poor. It suffered an inflexible old-fashioned structure, high overheads, ongoing staffing costs, changing demographics, economic crisis, increased competition, decreased population, the growth of local community-based theatre, temperance agitation and the impact of negative rumour and hear-say.The struggles endured by the various owners and managers of, and investors in, the Royal reflected broader changes within the larger community. The tension between the fixed nature of the place and the fluid needs of the public was problematic. Shifting demographics meant the Royal was negatively affected by conservative values, altered tastes and competing entertainment options. Built in the 1850s, it was sound, but structurally rigid, dated and polluted with the bacterial irritations of the times. “Resident professional companies could not compete with those touring from Melbourne” by whom it was considered “… hard to use and did not satisfy the needs of touring companies who required facilities equivalent to those in the metropolitan theatres” (Freund n.p.). Meanwhile, the prevalence of fund-raising concerts, created by charitable groups and member based community organisations, detracted from people’s interest in supporting professional performances. After-all, amateur concerts enabled families to “embrace the values of British middle class morality” (Doggett 295) at a safe distance from grog shops and saloons. Children aged 5-14 constituted only ten percent of the Ballarat population in 1857, but by 1871 settler families had created a population in which school aged children comprised twenty-five of the whole (Bate 146). This had significant ramifications for the type of theatrical entertainments required. By the late sixties, as many as 2000 children would perform at a time, and therefore entrance fees were able to be kept at affordable levels for extended family members. Just one year after the demise of the Royal, a new secular improvement society became active, holding amateur events and expanding over time to become what we now know as the Royal South Street Society. This showed that the appetite for home-grown entertainment was indeed sizeable. It was a function that the Royal was unable to service, despite several ardent attempts. Conclusion The greatest misfortune of the Royal was that it became stigmatised, from the mid 1860s onwards. In an era when people were either attempting to be pure of manners or were considered socially undesirable, it was hard for a cultural venue to survive which occupied the commercial middle ground, as the Royal did. It is also conceivable that the Royal was ‘framed’, by one or two of its competitor venues, or their allies, just one year before its closure. The Theatre Royal’s negative stigma as a venue for rough and intemperate human remnants of early Ballarat East had proven insurmountable. The Royal’s awkward position between high-class entrepreneurial culture and wholesome family-based community values, both of which were considered tasteful, left it out-of-step with the times and vulnerable to the judgement of those with either vested interests or social commitments elsewhere. This had long-term resonance for the subsequent development of entertainment options within Ballarat, placing the pendulum of favour either on elite theatre or accessible community based entertainments. The cultural middle-ground was sparse. The eventual loss of the building, the physical place of so much dramatic energy and emotion, as fondly recalled by Withers (260), inevitably contributed to the Royal fading from intergenerational memory. The telling of the ‘real story’ behind the rise and fall of the Ballarat Theatre Royal requires further exploration. If contemporary cultural industries are genuinely concerned “with the re-presentation of the supposed history and culture of a place”, as Urry believed (154), then untold stories such as that of Ballarat’s Theatre Royal require scholarly attention. This article represents the first attempt to examine its troubled history in a holistic fashion and locate it within a context ripe for cultural analysis.ReferencesBate, Weston. Lucky City: The First Generation at Ballarat 1851–1901. Carlton South: Melbourne UP, 1978.Brereton, Roslyn. Entertainment and Recreation on the Victorian Goldfields in the 1850s. BA (Honours) Thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1967.Borgmann, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Briggs, Asa. Victorian Cities: Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Melbourne. London: Penguin, 1968.Doggett, Anne. “And for Harmony Most Ardently We Long”: Musical Life in Ballarat, 1851-187. PhD Thesis. Ballarat: Ballarat University, 2006.Freund, Peter. Her Maj: A History of Her Majesty's Theatre. Ballarat: Currency Press, 2007.Hazelwood, Jennifer. A Public Want and a Public Duty: The Role of the Mechanics Institute in the Cultural, Social and Educational Development of Ballarat from 1851 to 1880. PhD Thesis. Ballarat: University of Ballarat 2007.Jenkins, Lloyd. Another Five Ballarat Cameos. Ballarat: Lloyd Jenkins, 1989.McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.Reide, John, and John Chisholm. Ballarat Golden City: A Pictorial History. Bacchus Marsh: Joval Publications, 1989.Spielvogel, Nathan. Spielvogel Papers, Volume 1. 4th ed. Bakery Hill: Ballarat Historical Society, 2016.Spielvogel, Nathan. Spielvogel Papers, Volume 3. 4th ed. Bakery Hill: Ballarat Historical Society, 2016.Urry, John. Consuming Places. London: Routledge, 1995.Withers, William. History of Ballarat (1870) and some Ballarat Reminiscences (1895/96). Ballarat: Ballarat Heritage Services, 1999.NewspapersThe Age.The Argus (Melbourne).The Australasian.The Ballarat Courier.The Ballarat Star.Coolgardie Miner.The Malcolm Chronicle and Leonora Advertiser.Mount Alexander Mail.The Star (Ballarat).

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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‘Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence.’ (Brian Massumi) The critical reception to British writer Iain Sinclair’s most recent novel Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground) frequently focused on the British writer’s predilection for intertextual quotation and allusion, and more specifically, on his proclivity for integrating material from his own backlist. A survey of Dining on Stones reveals the following textual duplication: an entire short story, “View from My Window”, which was published in 2003; excerpts from a 2002 collection of poetry and prose, White Goods; material from his 1999 collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Room; a paragraph lifted from Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z, also from 1999; and scenes from 1971’s The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Moreover, the name of the narrator, Andrew Norton, is copied from an earlier Sinclair work, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Of the six aforementioned inter-texts, only Rodinsky’s Room has had wide commercial release. The remainder are small press publications, often limited edition, difficult to find and read, which leads to the charge that Sinclair is relying on the inaccessibility of earlier texts to obscure his acts of autoplagiarism in the mass market Dining on Stones. Whatever Sinclair’s motives, his textual methodology locates a point of departure for an interrogation of textual doubling within the context of late era capitalism. At first approximation, Dining on Stones appears to belong to a postmodern literature which treats a text’s confluence, or dissonance of innumerable signifiers and systems of signification as axiomatic and intra-textually draws attention to this circumstance. Thematically, the heteroglot narrative of Dining on Stones frequently returns to the duplication of textual material. The book’s primary narrator is haunted by doubles, not least because Andrew Norton periodically functions as a textual doppelganger for Sinclair. Norton’s biography constitutes a cut-up of episodes copied from Sinclair’s personal history and experience as it is presented in his non-fiction and quasi-autobiographical poetry and prose like Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital. Like his creator, Norton is ontologically troubled by a fetch, or two, who may or may not be the products of his writer’s imagination. He claims that someone is ‘stealing my material. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster.’ (218) A ‘disturbing’ encounter with ‘Grays’, an uncannily familiar short story by another writer Marina Fountain, reveals a second textual poacher copying Norton’s work. She hadn’t written it without help, obviously. The tone was masculine, sure of itself, its pretensions; grammatically suspect, lexicologically challenged, topographically slapdash. A slash-and-burn stylist. But haunted: by missing fathers – Bram Stoker, S. Freud and Joseph Conrad. Clunky hints… about writing and stalking, literary bloodsucking, gender, disguise. … But it was the Conrad aspect that pricked me. Fountain had somehow got wind of my researched (incomplete, unpublished) essay on Conrad in Hackney. Her exaggerated prose, its shotgun sarcasm, jump-cuts, psychotic syntax, was an offensive parody of a manner of composition I’d left behind. (167) When ‘Grays’ is later reprinted in full in the novel (141-65), it is a renamed double of a previous Sinclair piece, ‘In Train for the Estuary’ (Sinclair, White Goods, 57-75). This doubling is replicated with another Sinclair story ‘View from My Window’ also being attributed to Fountain (313-341). Neither the style, nor the content of Sinclair’s previous works have been discarded: they have been reproduced and incorporated in Dining on Stones’ retrospective of Sinclair’s earlier work. Thus, Norton’s review of Fountain’s writing as ‘a manner of composition I’d left behind’ doubles as Sinclair’s self-conscious recognition of the text as an artefact produced from diverse inter-texts – including his own. In contrast to Sinclair’s dialogic doubling, Fountain’s double is of a monologic disposition. It is mechanical ‘echopraxis,’ a neologism coined in Dining on Stones which is defined as the ‘mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures.’ (192) Its mercenary dimension, enacted without regard for the integrity of the inter-text, is underscored with the epithet ‘slash-and-burn stylist.’ The monologic double possesses the text, drains it of its vitality. It entails necrosis, mortification. Fountain’s appropriation of Norton’s story is close to Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of pastiche which, he says, shuts down communication between texts (202). For Jameson, pastiche is the exemplary postmodern literary ‘style’. It is inert, static, a textual aporia. Jameson’s verdict is harsh: pastiche is cannibalism, text devouring text with an appetite that corresponds to the cupidity of consumer culture. Textual cannibalism vanquishes dialogism. It is the negation of the textual Other because cannibalism is only possible when the Other no longer exists. So how does Sinclair distinguish his doubling of his own text from Fountain’s monologic doubling as it is depicted in the novel’s narrative? A clue can be detected in one of the stories stolen by Fountain. ‘In Train for the Estuary’ is a re-writing of Dracula, and takes its cue from Karl Marx’s famous analogy between capitalism and vampirism: ‘capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ (342) Sinclair’s vampire doubles as an academic (or is it the other way round?) who obsessively and compulsively stalks her quarry/object of study, Joseph Conrad. First, she had learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and initiated the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled. Validated herself. Being alone in an unknown city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. She initiated correspondence with people she never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. (Sinclair, White Goods, 58) The woman’s identity is leeched from the work of Conrad. Sinclair describes unethical activity in appropriating text: lying, stealing, sucking the blood from the corpus of Conrad. A compulsive need to maintain the ‘validation’ of this poached identity emerges, manifesting itself as addiction. The addict is an extreme embodiment of the (ir)rationality of consumption: consumed by the need to consume. The woman’s lust for text is commensurate with the twin desires—blood and real estate—of her precursor, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sinclair’s narrative of addiction doubles as a meta-critique on the compulsive desire to reproduce text and image that characterizes postmodern textualities as well as the apparatuses that produce them. The textual doubling in Dining on Stones, which is published by the multinational Penguin, seems to enact a reterritorialisation of a deterritorialised minor literature. However, Sinclair’s allegorical rewriting of the vampire legend and its subsequent inclusion in the mainstream novel’s narrative, reveal that capitalism’s doubles are simulacra in the Aristotelian sense because they are copies for which there is no original. The ostensible ‘original’ is the product of different material conditions and thus cannot be duplicated by the machinery of capitalism. The capitalist reproduction of text produced within an alternative cultural economy is an uncanny double (with an infinite capacity to be doubled over and over again) whose existence, like that of Sinclair’s academic in White Goods, is parasitical. The capitalist simulacrum necessitates that the original be destroyed, or at the very least, theorised out of existence so that restrictions based on its own premise of individual property rights can be circumvented. Postmodernism’s attendant theory is an over-determined repetition of poststructuralist tenets such as the instability of texts, the polysemous signifier and the impossibility of self as empirical subject. Images and meaning are no longer anchored, and free to be reproduced. Paradoxically, this proliferation of signification has the effect of constricting the originary text, compressing it under the burden of competing meanings, so that it is almost undetectable. Writes Brian Massumi (doubling Jean Baudrillard), ‘postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.’ The postmodern project’s effacement of the centred subject and the self has as its consequence, according to Jameson, a ‘waning of affect’ which is superseded ‘by a peculiar kind of euphoria.’ (200) The euphoria to which Jameson refers is not that of the poststructuralist textasy. Instead, it is postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, a euphoria achieved from the fusion of contradictions. Postmodernism’s doubles are a utopian attempt to synthesize antinomy and unity in a simultaneity that assimilates the fragmentation of modernity and the modern subject, with the cohesion of the commodity and its closed system of cultural logic. As such, the postmodern double is a rejection of modernist engagements with technical reproducibility. Modernism’s literary assemblages are, in Victor Shlovsky’s words, the laying bare of the device, an exposition of the seams through techniques such as collage, bricolage and montage. These linguistic (and at times visual) conjunctures of disparate elements do not attempt to elide material and thematic disjuncture. As Walter Benjamin stresses, this type of textual methodology has the potential, through the disruption of spatial and temporal logic and the creation of anachrony, to rupture the linear representations and formations of order favoured by capitalist political economies (Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’). Postmodernism, which doubles (following Jameson’s formulation) as the cultural logic of late capitalism, reiterates that texts can be undone, and then reassembled, rearticulated anew, rendered useful to a commodity culture over and over again. Consequently, postmodernism’s copies are analogous, at the level of cultural production, to capitalism’s ceaseless appropriation of discourse, practice, and production. This is the alchemical project of capitalism. It strives to transform everything that it has doubled into the gold of the commodity. The inherent dangers of unrestrained reproduction are for Jameson exemplified in the treatment of Van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes (1885): If this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. (194) Jameson’s reading of Van Gogh’s shoes reminds us of the fate of Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara. Appropriated by the media, inscribed on T-shirts, mugs, even door mats, Che’s portrait is an emblem of the degradation Jameson describes. Like Van Gogh’s painting, Korda’s photograph was once a ‘symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production,’ saturated with the potential and spirit of revolution. Over time, the iconic image has leaked meaning. The signifying chain that anchored it to its original significance is broken each time it is reproduced and decontextualised through the process of commodification, until Che’s image is unrecognisable, a mere ornament. Refuting Benjamin’s concerns in ‘The Work of Art in its Age of Technical Reproducibility’ postmodern theory argues that technologies enabling reproducibility have led to a democratisation of text and textual production, and by extension, have liberated the multitude from a hierarchy of value that privileges the singular. Mass reproduction and the accompanying pressure for texts to be accessible results in altered attitudes regarding the preservation of intellectual property rights and ‘fair use’. In an economy of signs where use-value has become synonymous with exchange-value, then the text which has no exchange value due to it being ‘freely’ available—‘free’ in its double sense, as something exempt from restriction, or cost—can be copied without economic or ethical restraint, without permission. The quotation marks can be scrapped. According to postmodern logic, the double is a transposition with a legitimacy equalling, even rivalling the original. Clearly, Jameson’s lament that postmodernism represents ‘the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)’ cannot escape an association with elitism because technical reproducibility indubitably enables greater access. However, the utility of technologies of reproduction to the capitalist empire of structures and signs cannot be underestimated. It enables the ceaseless reproduction of ideologemes inscribed with the logic of capitalism; in other words, it enables capitalism to reproduce itself relentlessly. Postmodern cultural production is self-aware; it acknowledges its role as commodity and reproduces the ideology of the commodity form in its material form. In this manner, it functions as an ideologeme. Sinclair’s doubles cannot be understood according to the schema of postmodernism because he subverts postmodernism’s political and aesthetic symbiosis with capitalism. Moreover, the double in Sinclair travels beyond rehearsing a self-conscious hyphology (Barthes, 39). He defies postmodernism’s occultation of the author through his reiteration of the author’s authority over their own work. In contrast to the reductive manner postmodern texts duplicate other texts, Sinclair’s texts propose a typology of the double which advocates a dialogic duplication. Sinclair’s doubling refuses postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, and its synthesis of contradictions in the service of its unified material and aesthetic program: the commodification of literature. Consequently, Dining on Stones’ textual doubling is a critique of the epistemic shift to the monologic double which Jameson claims typifies a large portion of contemporary textual duplication. References Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. ––– . “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility.” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Massumi, Brian. “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari.” 12 May 2005. http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm>. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Vintage Books edition. New York: Random House, 1976. Sinclair, Iain. Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A-Z. ––– . Dining on Stones. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. ––– . Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta 1997. ––– . London Orbital. London: Granta, 2002. ––– . Rodinsky’s Room. London: Granta, 1998. ––– . View from My Window. Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003. ––– . White Goods. Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002. Sinclair, Iain, and Dave McKean. Slow Chocolate Autopsy. London: Phoenix, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seale, Kirsten. "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>. APA Style Seale, K. (Jul. 2005) "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>.

Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. This perhaps gives some insight as to why themes of personal suffering and instability are increasingly evident across formats.On an ethical level, unlike the knowledge transferred through complex television plots, or in coming of age films (as cited above) about the ways tradition is handed down, and the ways true mentors provide altruistic help in human experience; in reality television we take away the knowledge that life, under neoliberalism, is most remarkable when one is handpicked to undertake a televised journey featuring their desire for upward mobility. The value of the mentoring in these cases is directly proportionate to the financial objectives of the creative elite.ReferencesAggarwal, Sirpa. “WWE, A&E Networks, and Simplynew Share Benefits of White-Label Social TV Solutions at the Social TV Summit.” Arktan 25 July 2012. 1 August 2014 <http://arktan.com/wwe-ae-networks-and-simplynew-share-benefits-of-white-label-social-tv-solutions-at-the-social-tv-summit/>. 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Introduction: At the Crossroad Well, I’ve been an important pawn [in regeneration], for instance, changing doors and windows, enlarging them, eliminating shutters and thus having big open windows, light […] Then came the florist, through a common friend, who was the second huge pawn who trusted in this […] then came the pastry shop. (Alberto, 54, shop owner). Alberto is the owner of Pleasure Factory, one of two upmarket restaurants in a gentrifying crossroads area in northern Milan. He started buying apartments and empty stores in the 1980s, later becoming property manager of the building where he still lives. He also opened two restaurants, and then set up a neighbourhood commercial organisation. Alberto’s activities, and those of people like him, have been able to reverse the image and the usage of this public crossroad. This is something of which all of the involved actors are well aware. They have “bet,” as they say, and somehow “won” by changing people’s common understanding of, and approach to, this zone. This paper argues for the necessity of a closer look at the ways that place is produced through the multiple activities of small entrepreneurs and social actors, such as Alberto. This is because these activities represent the softer side of gentrification, and can create zones of pleasure and authenticity. Whilst market forces and multiple public interventions of gentrification’s “hard” side can lead to the displacement of people and uneven development, these softer zones of authenticity and pleasure have the power to shape the general neighbourhood brand (Atkinson 1830). Speaking rhetorically, these zones act as synecdoche for the surrounding environment. Places are in part built through the “atmosphere” that consumers seek throughout their daily routines. Following Gernot Böhme’s approach to spatial aesthetics, atmosphere can be viewed as the “relation between environmental qualities and human states” (114) and this relation is worked out daily in gentrified neighbourhoods. Not only do the passer-bys, local entrepreneurs, and sociologists contribute to the local making of atmosphere, but so does the production of the environmental qualities. These are the private and public interventions aimed at refurbishing, and somehow sanitising, specific zones of central neighbourhoods in order to make them suitable for middle class tastes (Julier 875). Not all gentrification processes are similar however, because of the unique influence of each city’s scalar rearrangements. The following section therefore briefly describes the changes in Milan in recent times. The paper will then describe the making of a zone of authentic pleasure at the Isola crossroads. I will show that soft gentrification happens through the making of specific zones where supply and demand match in ways that make for pleasant living. Milan, from Global to Local and Back Milan has a peculiar role in both the Italian and European contexts. Its metropolitan area, of 7.4 million inhabitants on a 12 000 km² surface, makes it the largest in Italy and the fifth in Europe (following Ruhr, Moscow, Paris and London). The municipal power has been pushing for a long-term strategy of population growth that would make Milan the “downtown” of the overall metropolitan area (Bricocoli and Savoldi 19), and take advantage of scalar rearrangements, such as State reconfigurations and setbacks. The overall goal of the government of Milan has been to increase the tax base and the local government’s political power. Milan also demonstrates the entrepreneurial turn adopted by many global cities, evident in the amount of project-based interventions, the involvement of international architecture studios (“La città della Moda” by Cesar Pelli; “Santa Giulia” by Norman Foster; “City-Life” and “the Fair” by Zaha Hadid and David Libeskind), and the hosting of mega-events, such as the Expo 2015. The Milan growth machine works then at different scales (global, national, city-region, neighbourhood) with several organisational actors involved, enormous investments and heavy political struggles to decide which coalition of winning actors will ride the tiger of uneven development. However, when we look at those transformations through the lens of the neighbourhood what we see is the making of zones within the larger texture of its streets and squares. This zone-making is similar to leopard’s spots within a contained urban space, it works for some time in specific streets and crossroads, then moves throughout the neighbourhood, as the process of gentrification goes on. The neighbourhood, which the zone of authentic pleasure I’m describing occurs, is called Isola (Island) because of its clustered shape between a railroad on the southern border and three major roads on the others. Isola was, until the 1980s, a working-class residential space with a strong tradition of left-wing political activism, with some small manufacturing businesses and minor commercial activities. This area remained quite removed from the overall urban development that radically shifted Milan towards a service economy in the 1960s and 1970s. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, the land price impacts of private activities and public policies in surrounding neighbourhoods increasingly pushed people and activities in the direction of Isola. Alberto explains this drift through the example of his first apartment: Just look at the evolution of my apartment. I bought it [in the 1980s] for 57 million lira, I remember, then sold it in 1992 for 160, then it was sold again for 200 000 euros, then four years ago for 250 000 and you have to understand that we’re talking about 47 square metres. If you consider the last price, 250 000, I’ll tell you that when I first came to the neighbourhood you could easily buy an entire building with that money. The building at number five in this street was entirely sold for 550 millions lira—you understand now why Isola is a huge real estate investment, people like it, its central, well served by the underground—well it still has to grow from a commercial standpoint… This evolution in land prices is clear when translated into the price for square metre: 2.4 euros for square meter in 1985, 3.4 in 1992, 4.2 in 2000 and 5.3 in 2006. The ratio increase is 120% in 20 years, demonstrating both the general boost in the economy of the area and also what is at stake within uneven development. What this paper argues is that parallel to this political economy dimension, which may be called the “hard side” of gentrification, there is also a “soft side” that deserves a closer attention. Pastry shops, cafés, bars, restaurants are as strategic as real estate investments (Zukin, Landscapes 195). The spatial concept that best captures the rationale of these activities is the zone, meaning a small and localised cluster of activities. I chose to add the features of pleasure and authenticity because of the role they play in ordinary consumption practices. In order to illustrate the specific relevance of soft gentrification I will now turn to the description of the Isola crossroad, a place that has been re-created through the interventions of several actors, such as Alberto above, and also Franca and her pastry shop. A Zone of Authentic Pleasure: Franca’s Pleasure Corner We’re walking through a small residential street and arrive at a crossroad. We turn to look to the four corners, one is occupied by a public school building, the second and the third by upmarket restaurants, and the last by a “typical” Sicilian pastry shop and café. We decide to enter here, find a seat and order a coffee together with a small cassata, a cake made with sweet cheese, almonds, pistachios and candied fruit. While we are experiencing this southern Italian breakfast at some thousand miles of spatial distance from its original site, a short man enters. He’s a well renowned TV comedian, best known for his would-be-magician gags. Everybody in the café recognises him but pretends to ignore his presence, he buys some pastries and leaves. Other customers come and go. The shop owner, an Italian lady in her forties called Franca, approaches to me and declares: “as you can see for yourself, we see elegant people here.” In this kind of neighbourhood it is common to see and share space with such “elegant” and well-known people, and to feel that a pleasant atmosphere is created through this public display. Franca opened the pastry shop three years ago, a short time after the upmarket restaurants on the other corners. However, when we interviewed her she wasn’t yet satisfied with the atmosphere: “when I go downtown and come back, I feel depressed … it’s developing but still has not grown enough … Isn’t one of the classic rich places in Milan—it’s kind of a weird place.” Through these and other similar statements she expressed a feeling of delusion toward the neighbourhood—a feeling on which she’s building her tale—that emerged in contrast to the kind of environment Franca would consider more apt for her shop. Franca’s a newcomer, but knows that the neighbourhood has been “sanitised.” “It really was a criminal area” she states, using overtly derogatory terms just like they were neutral: “riffraff” for the customers of ordinary bars, “dull” for the northern part of the neighbourhood where “there even are kebab shops.” In contrast she lists her beloved customers: journalists, architects, two tenors, people working at the theatre nearby, and the local TV celebrity described earlier. When she refers to the crossroad she speaks of it as, “maybe the gem of the neighbourhood.” At some point she declares what makes her proud: A place like this regenerates the neighbourhood—to be sure, if I ever open a harbour bar I’d attract riffraff who would discredit the place. In short it’s not, to make an example, a club where you play cards, that bring in the underworld, noise, nuisance—here the customer is the typical middle class, all right people. The term “all right people” reoccurs in several of Franca’s statements. Her initial economic sacrifices, relative though if, as she says, she’s able to open another shop in a more central place (“we would like to become a chain-store”), are now compensated by the recognition she gets from her more polished clients. She also expresses a personal satisfaction in the role she has played in the changes in Isola: “until now it’s just a matter of personal satisfaction—of seeing, I’ve built this stuff.” Franca’s story demonstrates that the soft side of gentrification is also produced by individuals that have little in common with the huge capital investment that is at stake in real estate development, or the chain stores that are also opening in the neighbourhood. In one way, Franca is alone in her quest for regeneration, as most entrepreneurs are. In another way, though, she is not. Not only is she participating in the “upgrading” together with other small business owners and consumers who all agree on the direction to follow, thus building together a zone of authentic pleasure, but she can also rely on a “critical infrastructure” of architects, designers and consultants (Zukin, Landscapes 202) that knows perfectly how to do the job. With much pride in her interior design choices, Franca pointed out how her café mixes chic with classic and opposing them to a flashy and folk décor. She showed us the black-and-white pictures at the wall depicting Paris in the 1960s, the unique design coffee machine model she owns, and the flower vases conceived by a famous designer and filled by her neighbour florist. The colours chosen for the interior are orange, tied to oranges—a typical product of Sicily, whereas the brown colour relates to the land, and the gold is linked to elegance. The mixing of warm colours, Franca explained, makes the atmosphere cosy. Where did this owner get all these idea(l)s? Franca relied on an Italian interior design studio, which works at a global scale furnishing hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, bathing establishments, and airports in New York, Barcelona, Paris, and Milan. The architect with whom she dealt with let her “work together” in order to have an autonomous set of choices that match the brand’s offer. Authenticity thus becomes part of the décor in a systematic way, and the feeling of a pleasant atmosphere is constantly reproduced through the daily routines of consumption. Again, not alone in the regeneration process but feeling as if she is “on her own,” Franca struggles daily to protect the atmosphere she’s building: “My point is avoiding having kids or tramps as customers—I don’t want an indiscriminate presence, like people coming here for a glass of wine and maybe getting drunk. I mean, this is not the place to come and have a bianchino [cheap white wine]. People coming here have a spumante, and behave in a completely different fashion.” The opposition between a bianchino, the cheap white wine, and the spumante is one that clarifies the moral boundary between the targets of soft gentrification. In Italian popular culture, and especially in the past, it was a common male habit to have bianchino from late morning onwards. Bars therefore served as gendered public spaces where common people would rest from working activities and the family sphere. Franca, together with many new bars and cafes that construct zones of authentic pleasure in gentrifying neighbourhoods, is trying to update this cultural practice. The spumante adds a sparkling element to consumption and is branded as a trendy aperitif wine, which appeals to younger tastes and lifestyles. By utilising a global design studio, Franca connects to global patterns of urban development and the homogenising of local atmospheres. Furthermore, by preferencing different consumption behaviours she contributes to the social transformation of the neighbourhood by selecting customers. This tendency towards segregation, rather than mixing, is a relevant feature here, since the Franca’s favourite clientele are clearly “people like us” (Butler 2469). Zones like the one described above are thus places where uneven development shows its social, interactive and public façade. Pleasure and Authenticity in Soft Gentrification The production of “atmosphere” in a gentrifying neighbourhood goes together with customers’ taste and preferences. The supply-side of building the environmental landscape for a “pleasant” zone needs a demand-side, consumers buying, supporting, and appreciating the outcome of the activities of business people like Franca. The two are one, most of the time, because tastes and preferences are linked to class, gender, and ethnicity, which makes a sort of mutual redundancy. To put it abruptly: similar people, spending their time in the same places and in a similar way. As I have shown above, the pastry shop owner Franca went for mixing chic and classic in her interior design. That is distinctiveness and familiarity, individualisation and commonality in one unique environment. Seen from the consumer’s perspective, this leads to what has been depicted by Sharon Zukin in her account of the crisis of authenticity in New York. People, she says, are yearning for authenticity because this: reflects the separation between our experience of space and our sense of self that is so much a part of modern mentalities. Though we think authenticity refers to a neighbourhood’s innate qualities, it really expresses our own anxieties about how places change. The idea of authenticity is important because it connects our individual yearning to root ourselves in a singular time and place to a cosmic grasp or larger social forces that remake our world from many small and often invisible actions. (220) Among the “many small and invisible actions” are the ones made by Franca and the global interior design firm she hired, but also those done daily by her customers. For instance, Christian a young advertising executive who lives two blocks away from the pastry shop. He defines himself an “executive creative director” [in English, while the interview was in Italian]. Asked on cooking practices and the presentation he makes to his guests, he declares that the main effort is on: The mise en place—the mise en place with no doubt. The mise en place must be appropriate to what you’re doing. Sometimes you get the mise en place simply serving a plateau, when you correctly couple cheese and salami, even better when you couple fresh cheese with vegetables or you give a slightly creative touch with some fruit salad, like seitan with avocado, no? They become beautiful to see and the mise en place saves it, the aesthetics does its job …Do you feel there are foods, beverages or consumption occasions you consider not worth giving up at all? The only thing I wouldn’t give up is going out in the morning, and having a cappuccino down there in the tiny pastry shop and having some brioches while I’m at the bar. Those that are not frozen beforehand but cooked just in time and have a breakfast, for just two euros, two euros and ten […] cappuccino and fresh brioche, baked just then, otherwise I cannot even think—if I’m in Milan I hardly think correctly—I mean I can’t wake up really without a good cappuccino and a good brioche. Christian is one of the new residents that was attracted to this neighbourhood because of the benefits of its uneven development: relatively affordable rent prices, services, and atmosphere. Commonality is among them, but also distinctiveness. Each morning he can have his “good cappuccino and good brioche” freshly baked to suit his taste and that allows him to differentiate between other brioches, namely the industrialised ones, those “frozen beforehand.” More importantly, he can do this by simply crossing the street and entering one of the pleasure zones that are making Isola, there and now, the new gentrified Milanese neighbourhood. Zones of Authentic Pleasure In this paper I have argued that a closer attention to the softer side of gentrification can help to understand how taste and uneven development mesh together, to produce the common shape we find in gentrified neighbourhoods. These typical urban spaces are made of streets, sidewalks, squares, and walls, but also shop windows and signs, pavement cafés, planters, and the street-life that turns around all of this. Both built environment and interaction produces the atmosphere of authentic pleasure, which is offered by local entrepreneurs and sought by the people who go there. Pleasure is a central feature because of the increasing role of consumption activities in the city and the role of individual consumption practices. I f we observe closely the local scale where all of these practices take place, we can clearly distinguish one zone from another because of their localised effervescence. Neighbourhoods are not equally affected by gentrification. Internally specific zones emerge as those having the capacity to subsume the entire process. These are the ones I have described in this paper—zones of authentic pleasure, where the supply and demand for an authentic distinctive and communal atmosphere takes place. Ephemeral spaces; if one looks at the political economy of place through a macro lens. But if the aim is to understand why certain zones prove to be successful and others not, then exploring how soft gentrification is daily produced and consumed is fundamental.Acknowledgments This article draws on data produced by the research team for the CSS project ‘Middle Class and Consumption: Boundaries, Standards and Discourses’. The team comprised Marco Santoro, Roberta Sassatelli and Giovanni Semi (Coordinators), Davide Caselli, Federica Davolio, Paolo Magaudda, Chiara Marchetti, Federico Montanari and Francesca Pozzi (Research Fellows). The ethnographic data on Milan were mainly produced by Davide Caselli and by the Author. The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees for wise and kind remarks and Michelle Hall for editing and suggestions. References Atkinson, Rowland. “Domestication by Cappuccino or a Revenge on Urban Space? 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