Journal articles on the topic 'Historic sites Victoria'

Once widespread throughout Victoria, the Eastern Barred Bandicoot Perameles gunnii has declined to near extinction on the Australian mainland due to habitat loss and predation by exotic predators. The last remaining wild population occurs in Hamilton, western Victoria. Founders for a captive breeding program were taken from this population in 1988, which has persisted without predator control or supplementation from captive-bred animals. The species was reintroduced to eight sites from 1989: Woodlands Historic Park, Hamilton Community Parklands, Mooramong, Floating Islands Nature Reserve, Lake Goldsmith, Lanark, Cobra Killuc, and Mount Rothwell. Although all reintroduced populations initially increased, declines were observed during the mid- to late 1990s, from which they have never recovered. A combination of drought and predation by Red Foxes Vulpes vulpes and Cats Felis catus is thought to be responsible. Currently, management techniques focus on intensive control of Red Foxes by poison baiting and shooting, and by construction and maintenance of predator barrier-fences at some sites. Understanding which characteristics lead to the success or failure of a reintroduction site is paramount to the success of the recovery programme for this species. This paper reviews the status of all reintroduction sites, and examines characteristics that could account for the performance of their populations.

On mainland Australia, eastern barred bandicoots (Perameles gunnii) are now restricted to a single wild population at Hamilton in western Victoria, and recovery efforts are focussed on establishing new populations at reintroduction sites. The success in founding these populations has been variable, and post-release survival has not been accurately quantified. It is believed that predation by the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is largely responsible for post-release loss of P. gunnii, despite the implementation of predator control programs at release sites. An intensive fox control program was established to protect 10 released P. gunnii at Woodlands Historic Park, near Melbourne. Monitoring of fox activity was undertaken prior to and after the release in an attempt to better understand the effectiveness of control operations. Seven bandicoots were known to be alive at the conclusion of the study five weeks after their release (and an additional animal was trapped four months later), with weight loss appearing to be an important factor in determining post-release survival. Despite constant levels of bait-take by V. vulpes, fox activity measured from sand-pads remained high. We hypothesise that the presence of suitable refugia is allowing the persistence of a low-density bandicoot population at Woodlands despite constant, high levels of fox activity.

AbstractThe fossil remains of 43 bowhead whales were mapped on the raised beaches of western Wollaston Peninsula, Victoria Island, Canadian Arctic, near the historic summer range limit of the Bering Sea stock in the Beaufort Sea. The elevations and radiocarbon ages of the remains demonstrate that the bowhead ranged commonly into the region following the submergence of Bering Strait at ca. 10,000 14C yr B.P. until ca. 8500 14C yr B.P. During the same interval, bowheads ranged widely from the Beaufort Sea to Baffin Bay. Subsequently, no whales reached Wollaston Peninsula until ca. 1500 14C yr B.P. Late Holocene populations evidently were small, or occupations were brief, in comparison to those of the early Holocene. Although the late Holocene recurrence may relate to the expansion of pioneering Thule whalers eastward from Alaska, there are few Thule sites and limited evidence of Thule whaling in the area surveyed to support this suggestion.

The current diet of the sooty owl (Tyto tenebricosa) was determined by analysing freshly regurgitated pellets collected beneath their roosting sites in East Gippsland, Victoria. Comparisons were then made with: (i) prehistoric and historic diet from bone deposits found in cave roosts, and (ii) diet of a sympatric owl species, the powerful owl (Ninox strenua). Sooty owls consumed a large array of terrestrial mammal species before European settlement, but only three terrestrial species were detected in their current diet, a reduction of at least eight species since European settlement. To compensate, sooty owls have increased their consumption of arboreal prey from 55% to 81% of their diet. Arboreal species are also a major component of the powerful owl diet and this prey shift by sooty owls has increased dietary overlap between these two species. Predation by foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and other feral species is likely to have reduced the amount of terrestrial prey available to sooty owls since European settlement. Investigation of changes in the diet of sooty owls may offer a unique monitoring system for evaluating the ability of fox-control strategies to influence increases in numbers of critical-weight-range mammals.

Overabundant populations of kangaroos pose substantial management problems in small parks on the fringe of urban areas in Australia. Translocation is impractical and culling is often not publicly acceptable, but fertility control offers an acceptable alternative. One potential contraceptive is levonorgestrel, which provides effective long-term contraception in women, and prevents births in some marsupials for up to five years. We evaluated the long-term efficacy of levonorgestrel in free-ranging eastern grey kangaroos (M. giganteus) at two sites in Victoria, Australia. We trapped 25 adult females at one site (Portland Aluminium), treating 18 with two subcutaneous 70-mg levonorgestrel implants and seven with control (inert) implants. We darted 25 adult females at the other site (Woodlands Historic Park), treating all with two 70-mg levonorgestrel implants. We monitored the reproductive status of the kangaroos, as indicated by the obvious presence of a pouch young, in spring each year for up to seven years. In the first three years at Portland, 81–86% of levonorgestrel-treated females were infertile, compared with 12–29% in the control group, but the effectiveness of fertility control declined over time. At this site, the proportions of treated females breeding in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh years of the trial were 36%, 50%, 67% and 100% respectively. Fecundity at Woodlands was similar. Although this protocol achieved fertility control for several years, it was likely that more than one treatment or a higher dose rate would be required for effective fertility control in this long-lived species.

Abstract This article is a preliminary inquiry into the selection process used by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC) in making its recommendations for the national historic significance of sites, events and individuals between 1919 and 1950. It argues that, while the HSMBC was composed of dedicated and leading figures in the field of Canadian history, Board members operated for its first 30 years almost exclusively as a Victorian gentlemen’s club, without a system of checks and balances. The ideological dominance of the British imperial mindset influenced Board members’ field of historical interests as well as their recommendation for national historic designations of sites, events or individuals. These points will be illustrated by examining the origins and the operations of the HSMBC between 1919 and 1950, and the recommendations for national historic designation presented to the HSMBC by two prominent Board members: Brigadier General Ernest Cruikshank and Dr. John Clarence Webster.

The British heritage industry has long been a subject for debate in the UK, with critics arguing that heritage invests history with a nostalgic idealism that sanitizes and simplifies the nation’s past. This article examines Blists Hill Victorian Town, a British living history museum that purports to re-create everyday industrial life of the 1890s, within the context of these debates, arguing that Blists Hill portrays the late-Victorian period with more complexity than many critics would allow. Shifting the lens of how such sites have typically been evaluated—away from questions of authenticity, to instead focus on how living history museums engage visitors in meaningful play—I consider the ways that Blists Hill promotes creative learning through an imaginative, visceral engagement with history.

It takes a few millimetres of rainfall to cause the 34 most polluting combined sewer overflows (CSOs) to discharge into the River Thames. Currently, in a typical year, spillages to the tidal reaches of the River Thames occur about 60 times, with an estimated spill volume of 39 million cubic metres. Both the UK Government and the European Union have determined that the CSO discharges have an adverse environmental impact on fish species, introduce unacceptable aesthetics and elevate the health risks for recreational users of the Thames, with a frequency of discharge which is in breach of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive. Studies have established that the environmental objectives can be fully met on the most cost-effective basis by completing both quality improvements to treatment works and by the provision of a storage and transfer tunnel to intercept unsatisfactory CSOs. Extensive modelling has been undertaken to develop an optimised solution. In parallel with the design development a rigorous and comprehensive site selection methodology has been established to select sites and consult stakeholders and the public on the preferred sites and scheme, with the first stage of public consultation planned for later in 2010. The London Tideway Tunnels are an essential part of the delivery of improvements to the water quality of the tidal River Thames, and this ambitious, historic scheme represents a vital strategic investment in London’s infrastructure.

Could country house museums be indispensable sites for learning about both science as well as history? Given current logistical constraints, would it be worthwhile for school teachers to arrange student visits to such places to learn about STEM subjects? At first sight such epitomes of British heritage do not appear to offer much to such audiences. However, recent research shows that some country houses were once key sites of technological innovation, especially in the Victorian invention of electric lighting. Our collaborative work with staff at Cragside, Lotherton Hall and Standen demonstrates their capacity and enthusiasm to use such insights to present more STEM-related content to visitors within the context of their existing historical offers. Drawing on the results of an AHRC-funded impact and engagement project, we show how co-produced stories of household electrification can supply fresh inter-disciplinary ways of engaging STEM audiences with the historic country house.

With the dust settling on Operation Iraqi Freedom in the spring of 2003, the U.S. Army 4th Psychological Operations Group developed for the occupation forces a special deck of playing cards that featured head shots of the most wanted Iraqi regime officials. Saddam Hussein figures prominently as the Ace of Spades. The experiment was repeated in the autumn of 2007, but this time the cards represented some of Iraq's and Afghanistan's archaeological sites (Figure 1).

Acute Oak Decline (AOD) is complex syndrome affecting Britain’s keystone native oak species, (Quercus robur L. and Q. petraea L. (Matt.) Liebl.), in some cases causing mortality within five years of symptom development. The most distinguishable symptom is weeping stem lesions, from which four species of bacteria have been isolated: Brenneria goodwinii, Gibbsiella quercinecans, Lonsdalea britannica and Rahnella victoriana. We do not yet know where else these bacteria exist, and little is known about the relationship of the wider oak leaf microbiome (phyllosphere) to acute oak decline. Here we investigate whether incidental evidence from a large oak genome re-sequencing dataset could be used to detect these bacteria in oak foliage, and whether bacterial incidence co-varied with AOD status or location. Oak leaves and buds were sampled from 421 trees at five sites in England. Whole genomic DNA from these samples was shot-gun sequenced with short reads. Non-oak reads were extracted from these data and queried to microbial databases. Reads uniquely matching AOD-associated bacterial genomes were found to be present on trees from all five sites and included trees with active lesions, trees with historic lesions and trees without AOD symptoms. The abundance of the AOD-associated bacteria did not differ between tree health categories but did differ among sites. We conclude that the AOD-associated bacteria may be members of the normal oak microbiome, whose presence on a tree is not sufficient to cause AOD symptoms.

Edinburgh's architecturally magnificent and much-admired historic school buildings, often set in opulent grounds, have come to symbolize the city's ongoing dichotomy between ‘normal’ state schools and ‘elite’ private schools. These schools are conspicuously sited in the most culturally prestigious locations in Edinburgh — the New Town, Old Town and Victorian bourgeois suburbs — and their architecture powerfully underpins their ideologies of longevity and tradition. The solidity of the built ‘heritage’ of these schools, however, obscures a story of great educational complexity and change. Many of the historic buildings are no longer used by the present school institutions; some now have alternative uses. Others have changed fundamentally their social and educational status (several, ironically, were originally built by wealthy donors as charitable orphanages for the ‘deserving poor’ and later converted to fee-paying day schools for the middle classes).The complex history of these schools cannot be understood adequately without reference to the early history of their buildings. This article is intended as an initial exploration of these complexities. It focuses on two key Edinburgh case studies: the Edinburgh Academy (‘the Academy’), built to William Burn's design of 1823 and opened in 1824 (Fig. 1); and the Royal High School of Edinburgh (the ‘Royal High’), built to Thomas Hamilton's design of 1825 and opened in 1829 (Fig. 2). It examines the educational origins, brief, architectural design, and early use of these surviving purpose-built schools and, in particular, the associated negotiations and debate of 1822–23 that occurred at a municipal level, which links their controversial pre-histories.

Edinburgh has long been recognized as one important place where early glacial theory was promoted and debated. This paper, rather than attend to the longer-term development of glacial theory, focuses on the ways in which the theory was assessed, disseminated and received in and through the scientific culture of early Victorian Edinburgh. Edinburgh's scientific and educational societies, science journals, newspapers and field sites are brought to view through examining their engagement with, and use of, early glacial theory. Tracking the theory's passage across a range of spaces bound up with the promotion of geology in mid-nineteenth-century Edinburgh signals relations between local geological endeavour and other sorts of scientific and cultural work. Particular, though not exclusive, attention is given to practices more readily defined as ‘popular’.

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in scholarship on Latino educational history and a new nonbinary umbrella term, Latinx, that a younger generation prefers. Many of historian Victoria-María MacDonald's astute observations in 2001 presaged the growth of the field. Focus has increased on Spanish-surnamed teachers and discussions have grown about the Latino experience in higher education, especially around student activism on campus. Great strides are being made in studying the history of Spanish-speaking regions with long ties to the United States, either as colonies or as sites of large-scale immigration, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Historical inquiry into the place of Latinos in the US educational system has also developed in ways that MacDonald did not anticipate. The growth of the comparative race and ethnicity field in and of itself has encouraged cross-ethnic and cross-racial studies, which often also tie together larger themes of colonialism, language instruction, legal cases, and civil rights or activism.

Although Hindenburg and Pétain emerged from very different historical traditions, one monarchical and authoritarian, the other democratic and republican, their trajectories and cults in the twentieth century in fact had much in common. Both emerged as military heroes, saving the fatherland in 1914 in iconic victories, and both were subsequently called back as political saviours as the Weimar and Third Republics ran into difficulties and collapsed. The status and reputation of each was enhanced by a cult that was both manufactured and spontaneous, ranging widely across the political spectrum and reaching deep into the body politic. The cults drew on powerful images of solidity and ancient heroes. Both leaders were, however, flawed, compromising with Nazi power, and they were buried far from the sites of their victories. In spite of these flaws, however, the cults of Hindenburg and Pétain have been remarkably adaptable and enduring.

This study confirms the persistence of five major breeding colonies of Australian fur seals (Arctocephalus pusillus doriferus) in Tasmanian Bass Strait waters. Incidental births also occasionally occur in very low numbers at other sites. Data collected between 1989 and 1999 shows that estimates of the minimum number of pups born at the major colonies varies considerably between sites and years. No colony has shown a consistent trend in pup production over the last 11 seasons. The most recent count for all Tasmanian colonies for the 1999 breeding season provided a minimum estimate of 3254 pups produced, similar to the estimate of 3373 in 1989. The highest estimate was recorded in 1995 when at least 6024 pups were born. Combining the most recent counts with the numbers estimated for the four Victorian colonies (13 872) gives a minimum pup production of 17 126 for the species, with only one-fifth of all pups being born on Tasmanian islands. Application of population estimators to translate pup numbers to population size for the species results in a conservative estimate of 68 500 individuals with upper and lower bounds of 60 000 and 77 000 Australian fur seals. Numbers of Australian fur seals remain low relative to other fur seal populations, with Australian fur seals being less numerous by an order of magnitude compared with their South African counterpart (A. p. pusillus). The current estimate of the total population of Australian fur seals is approximately half that of pre-sealing levels. The current number of breeding colonies in Tasmania indicates that the population of Australian fur seals breeding in Tasmanian waters has stabilised at well below their historic pre-sealing levels, with at least four sites remaining vacant. The species remains vulnerable due to its small population size, with Tasmanian breeding colonies being particularly vulnerable because of low numbers and due to the profound influence of weather events on pup survival.

In the 1850s, at St. Mark's training college in Chelsea, London, ten students regularly violated the “lights out” rule in the evening at the end of long, exhausting days. Desirous of increasing their culture and general knowledge, they gave over half an hour every evening before sleep to what they styled, after the working-class clubs of the same name, “a mutual improvement society” in which they took turns giving lectures on a wide range of topics. They were not alone: throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, teachers-in-training across Britain supplemented their already daunting workload by writing poetry, reading novels, discussing Shakespeare, and holding debates about pressing social and political questions. From the perspective of many Victorian observers and historians today, this anecdote is an anomaly, an aberration that carries little weight in telling the story of the training colleges in which the majority of teachers in Victorian Britain eventually came to receive an education. For them, training colleges were the sites of rote memorization and pedagogical learning. Though some educationalists called for a more liberal curriculum for teachers, according to this view, teachers' education only began to emphasize expansive reading, original thinking, the cultivation of the individual, and general curiosity beginning in the 1890s with the rise of day training colleges affiliated with universities.

Purpose Public health authorities have long regarded schools as important sites for improving children and young people’s health. In Australia, and elsewhere, lessons on health have been an integral component of public health’s strategy mix. Historical accounts of schools’ involvement in public health lack discussion of the role of health education curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to redress this silence and illustrate the ways health education functioned as a key governmental apparatus in Victoria in the 1980s. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on governmentality studies to consider the explicit governmental role of official health education curriculum in the 1980s in Victoria, Australia. The authors conduct a discourse analysis of the three official curriculum texts that were released during this period to consider the main governmental rationalities and techniques that were assembled together by curriculum writers. Findings School health education functions as a key governmental apparatus of governmentality. One of its major functions is to provide opportunities to responsibilise young people with an aim to ensure that that they can perform their duty to be well. The authors demonstrate the central role of policy events in the 1970s and how they contributed to conditions of possibility that shaped versions of health education throughout the 1980s and beyond. Despite challenges posed by the critical turn in health education in the late 1980s, the governmental forces that shape health education are strong and have remained difficult to displace. Originality/value Many public health and schooling histories fail to take into account insights from the history of education and curriculum studies. The authors argue that in order to grasp the complexities of school health education, we need to consider insights afforded by curriculum histories. Historical insights can provide us with an understanding of the changing approaches to governing health in schools.

What sort of activities took place in the academic laboratories developed for teaching the natural sciences in Britain between the 1860s and 1880s? What kind of social and instrumental regimes were implemented to make them meaningful and efficient venues of experimental instruction? As humanly constructed sites of experiment how were the metropolitan institutional contexts of these laboratories engineered to make them legitimate places to study ‘Nature’? Previous studies have documented chemists' effective use of regimented quantitative analysis in their laboratory teaching from the 1820s, but less is known about how Victorian academics made other sorts of laboratories unproblematic pedagogical spaces. This paper will examine the literary, disciplinary and instrumental technologies of microscopy deployed by T. H. Huxley at his South Kensington laboratory during the early 1870s to render his biology teaching legitimate, meaningful and efficient. As such it is a response to Pickstone's recent call for a broader account of microscopy teaching in late nineteenth-century academic life science, and one localized answer to Bennett's enquiries as to what the appearance of a microscope in laboratories and other domestic settings betokened to historical actors, and how such tokens changed over time.

ABSTRACT:Civic pride is rarely studied at the individual level. The journals of Dr John Deakin Heaton provide a unique insight into the motivations of a man linked to many institutions and civic sites of Leeds, celebrated by historians as a progenitor of its famous town hall and the city's first university. This article uses those journals to investigate the matrix of family honour, Anglicanism and professional identity, tempered by self-interest, underpinning Heaton's desire to improve his native town. Its conclusions further justify the recent historiographical emphasis on associational culture and ritual in the study of urban governance.

A research excavation was commenced on the site of the basilica which forms the western side of the forum of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester, Hants) in IQ80. Its aim is to examine the Late Iron Age and early Roman occupation which, despite extensive Victorian excavations, was preserved beneath the masonry basilica. So far there is evidence of the Iron Age sequence dating back to the last quarter of the first century B.C.; it ends with the construction of a palisade dating to about the time of the Roman conquest. Two major phases of Roman timber building have been recorded, of which the later consists of a large basilica, interpreted as part of a forum-basilica and of Flavian date. The masonry basilica dates to the early second century. From the mid third until the later fourth century the basilica was given over to metalworking. The amphitheatre, with its well-preserved earthen seating banks, was first constructed during the third quarter of the first century A.D., when the seating, arena wall and entrance passages were built of timber. After several phases of repair the arena wall and entrance passages were rebuilt in stone in the first half of the third century. The full plan of this phase has been recovered; it consists of two opposing entrances on the long axis and two apsidal recesses on the short axis. The monument enjoyed a brief period of reuse in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

As one drives westward toward Geneva from the small city of Thonon-les-bains, with its stately perch on the Southern shore of Lac Leman, its fading Victorian-era hotel spas and 17th century château, and its remarkable views of the French Alps, one comes upon a stretch of road that, to an American, appears perfectly familiar and thus seems completely "foreign" in its French context. Quite suddenly, from both sides of the road, one's view is seized by the intrusion of brightly-colored placards, dazzling neon signs and coarse structures that signal a steady string of auto dealerships, gas stations, furniture outlets, garden supply stores, a kitchen appliance store, a bowling alley and a sprawling supermarket complex.

This essay examines the interplay between the meetings and publications of learned scientific societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when journals were an established but not yet dominant form of scholarly communication. The ‘making public’ of research at meetings, long before actual ‘publication’ in society periodicals, enabled a complex of more or less formal sites of communication and discussion ahead of print. Using two case studies from the Royal Society of London—Jan Ingen-Housz in 1782 and John Tyndall in 1857 to 1858—we reveal how different individuals navigated and exploited the power structures, social activities and seasonal rhythms of learned societies, all necessary precursors to gaining admission to the editorial processes of society journals, and trace the shifting significance of meetings in the increasingly competitive and diverse realm of Victorian scientific publishing. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these historical perspectives for current discussions of the ‘ends’ of the scientific journal.

Biography and geography do not always sit easily together in historical narrative. With a few notable exceptions, due weight is rarely given to the significance of territorial features in tales of talented individuals. Biographers perhaps play down the untidy contingencies of civic, institutional and domestic spaces in order to present a historiographically coherent portrait of their subject. However, once the vicissitudes of environment and everyday life are taken into account, the identity and accomplishments of the ‘great individual’ begin to merge inextricably with the vagaries of local politics and fluid socio-cultural alliances. For a figure with as formidable a posthumous reputation as T. H. Huxley, such a deconstruction might, at first, seem mundane and of little scholarly value. Yet there is considerable evidence that Huxley was not always successful in his efforts to gain power and influence within the many and varied sites of his working environments. Careful scrutiny of such evidence will show new perspectives on Huxley's complex career in Victorian London. It will also document problems in the construction of the South Kensington suburb as a credible site and fruitful resource for Huxley's remarkably diverse activities in education and science.

One of the most persistent debates in the archaeology of the North American Arctic relates to thirteenth-century AD population distributions and movements. Around this time, the final culture of the long-lived Paleo-Inuit tradition, known as Late Dorset, was replaced by Thule Inuit, who migrated from Alaska to the Eastern Arctic. Due to the almost complete lack of evidence for direct interaction between Dorset and Thule, there are currently two contrasting models for this transitional period. The first proposes a temporal hiatus between Late Dorset and Thule during which the Eastern Arctic was unoccupied. The second proposes that Late Dorset persisted to at least the late thirteenth century and still occupied some regions of the Eastern Arctic when Thule arrived. Resolution of this question depends largely on radiocarbon dates, particularly for the poorly understood Late Dorset period. This article presents 56 new AMS radiocarbon dates from three Late Dorset sites in the Iqaluktuuq region of southeastern Victoria Island in the Central Arctic. They resolve a significant part of the debate by confirming that Dorset settlement continued in this region later than AD 1300, thus overlapping with Thule settlement in adjacent regions for decades, and perhaps as much as a century.

Public lecturing on astronomy was prevalent in Britain throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Many lecturers were private entrepreneurs operating lecturing businesses without institutional affiliations. Private lecturers enjoyed popularity in various places and sites ranging from metropolitan theatres to provincial town halls. By focusing on private lecturers, including Deane Franklin Walker (1778–1865), John Bird (d. 1840) and Robert Children, this paper explores the private astronomy lecturing trade and compares it with public lectures that took place inside scientific institutions. The careers of two London-based institutional lecturers, John Wallis (1788–1852) and George Henry Bachhoffner (1810–1879), are analysed as a comparison. Despite the trend towards institutionalized science, the activities of private astronomy lecturers had not been undermined by institutional competitors until the early 1860s. Astronomy remained largely an amateur practice in early Victorian Britain; public lecturing on astronomy was also far from a profession. Many astronomical lecturers, whether private or institutional, were not scientific practitioners working on original research or observational tasks. Some of their lecturing, and particularly their Lenten astronomical lectures, purveyed a distinctive kind of popular astronomy, which was a blend of instruction, amusement and religious sentiments. They indicate complex features of performance and showmanship beyond simply conveying popularized scientific knowledge.

Between 1856 and 1858, a group of entrepreneurs and engineers led by the American Cyrus Field and the Englishmen J. W. Brett, Charles Bright and E. O. Wildman Whitehouse sought to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland. Their projected cable would be far longer, far more expensive, and far more difficult to lay than any previously attempted; that such an ambitious undertaking was launched and quickly drew financial backing was testimony to the technological enthusiasm of the mid-Victorian era. After many setbacks, the cable was successfully completed early in August 1858. The first messages it carried were met with rapturous excitement on both sides of the Atlantic – making its failure after just a few weeks of fitful service all the more humiliating. Identifying the causes of that failure, and assigning blame for them, became crucial to ensuring the future of transoceanic cable telegraphy. Were the causes of the failure intrinsic to the enterprise, and the vision of a network of transoceanic cables no more than an unrealistic dream? Or did the collapse of the cable result simply from a series of unfortunate and correctable errors? How those questions were answered in the autumn of 1858 would go far toward determining the prospects not only for renewing the Atlantic project, but also for any attempt to extend submarine cables more widely around the world.

Abstract In Victorian England poachers and dogs were subject to increasing levels of public interest and engagement. This article considers how their various interactions were represented across a range of printed and visual media and suggests that in establishing the poacher as a largely positive figure the dog had a vital role to play. If a number of other factors worked in favour of the poacher, not least the widespread dislike of the Game Laws, important in this process of legitimation was the poacher’s active link to the canine world. Though ambiguity always surrounded the poacher, and the dog was not always to be found on his side, more often than not it was. The development of this association casts an interesting light on the framing of human-animal relations in the nineteenth century, a critical moment for those concerned with the ‘animal turn’ and notions of non-human agency, and reveals how the dog was more than just the poacher’s ally in the un-official hunting field. As an urban-centred culture acquired a distinctly ruralist orientation, within the popular knowledge economy the idea of the poacher and his dog resonated across boundaries of class and geography. This in turn provides new evidence of how, at the level of culture, the more disreputable sides of life could be accommodated within a society that ostensibly prized respectability.

John Neville Keynes is best known for being the father of John Maynard Keynes and for writing The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891). The lesser of these achievements was widely accepted as the definitive methodological tract in the field of political economy in the late-Victorian period. In this publication Keynes shed new light on many of the pressing methodological and epistemological problems of the day; he supplied the methodological underpinnings to Alfred Marshall's majestic synthesis of late-Victorian theoretical opinion, as articulated in his Principles of Economics (1890); and, whatis of paramount concern to me in this paper, he employed some deft rhetoric to hasten the end of the long and acrimonious methodological debate between the orthodox and historical economists that is now generally referred to as the English Methodenstreit or “battle of methods.” Keynes consciously strove to provide a solution to the “battle of methods” that would be acceptable to both the orthodox and historical economists and, for this reason, The Scope and Method is understandably characterized by a conciliatory tone and repeated, almost desperate, attempts to see value in arguments from both sides of the conceptual divide. Keynes nonetheless failed in his quest to be even-handed. He was a logician of the first order who was extremely impressed by the neat logical lines of the orthodox framework, and hence, for all his intellectual honesty and obvious good will, he could not help but interpret the debate through orthodox spectacles. The chief rhetorical ploy he drew upon to achieve this orthodox-leaning settlement between the principal antagonists was the unconscious one of the “passive-aggressive” in which the advocate repeatedly makes the outward motions of conceding ground while, in effect, conceding little. The specific mechanics of this strategy entailed reformulating each precept from the historicist conceptual framework so that it would not be in conflict with its nearest orthodox opposite (itself carefully reinterpreted by Keynes), either by showing that it was identical to this orthodox opposite or by arguing that different precepts were appropriate in different situations, and then dismissing the entire methodological debate—which was then in its third decade—as one long and lamentable misunderstanding. Keynes was ably assisted in executing this strategy by his Cambridge colleagues and, for this reason, the quest to settle the debate by providing orthodox interpretations of the precepts then at stake may be termed the “Cambridge solution.” Marshall and Henry Sidgwick played particularly important roles in carrying this rhetorical assault, as the former's more genuine sympathy for many of the historicist ideas and the latter's celebrated honesty made the Cambridge quest appear sincere.

A gift to VeledaThe large finds of military equipment in Southern Scandinavian bogs (the so-called war booty sacrifices) have long comprised a central aspect of research into the Iron Age. During recent decades, research has focused on the chronology and origin of these find assemblages, the hierarchical structure of Iron Age armies and their military strategic organisation and logistics. Comparably little attention has, on the other hand, been paid to the finds in their primary sense, i.e. as votive offerings and, accordingly, expressions of ritual acts with ideological and religious connotations. Our knowledge concerning the character of the acts performed before and during the actual depositions, and the religious background for these acts, is very limited. An historical account of which there has, until now, been little awareness in this respect, is the history of Veleda. According to Tacitus’ Historiae, Veleda was a prophetess of the German tribes north of the Lower Rhine. Tacitus’ account may serve as a source of inspiration towards a better understanding of these war booty offerings. The aim of this article is to draw attention to the ritual and sacral dimension of the Southern Scandinavian war-booty sacrifices and to paint a picture of the possible background and religious connotations for these finds.About the South Scandinavian war booty sacrificesThe Southern Scandinavian war booty sacrifices typically contain various types of weapons and elements of the personal equipment of individual warriors, as well as tools and other elements belonging to an army’s logistical apparatus. The find sites are concentrated geographically relative to the eastern coast of Jutland and on the island of Funen. The majority dates from the Late Roman Iron Age and the beginning of the Migration Period. It is generally accepted that the war booty offerings represent the equipment belonging to defeated armies, deposited by the victors of the conflicts. Recent debate has focussed on the question of whether the sites mirror offensive or defensive military actions. With regard to the ritual background and religious connotations of the sites, discussions have traditionally been based on descriptions by Classical writers of the sacrificial rituals of Celtic or Germanic tribes. These traditionally form the explanatory framework for the interpretation of the sites as representing votive offerings of a victorious army to some war god or other.The sacrificial sites as a ritual sceneCommon features of the war booty offerings are their location in a wetland environment, originally a lake or bog, and the intensive destruction of the artefacts previous to their deposition. Analyses indicate that this destruction was conducted very intentionally and according to a firmly structured pattern of ritual behaviour. The sacrifices thus represent considerable organisational and logistical investment(s), involving the participation of large groups of people. Through an association with high steep moraine hillsides, the topography of some of the offering sites resembles that of a natural amphitheatre. The localities seem to have been intentionally chosen to allow a large audience to witness the performance of the offering. The offerings can thus be seen as highly performative and dramatic spectacles, which, drawing on both additive and visual effects, can be expected to have left a lasting impression in the memories both of individuals and of the community.Tacitus’ account of VeledaTacitus’ account of Veleda forms part of his report in books IV and V of Historiae, on the revolt of the tribes of the Batavi and the Bructeri against Roman administration, which took place around 70 AD in the province of Germania Inferior. The prophetess is introduced in the context of the siege and destruction of Castra Vetera, near modern Xanten, in 69/70 AD. According to Tacitus, she had foretold the victory of the alliance of Germanic tribes; one of the legionaries of the defeated legions was sent to her along with other gifts. She is described as a woman of the tribe of the Bructeri. Furthermore she is told to have had enormous authority, due to her prophetical and even divine power. Shortly after the siege of Castra Vetera, the Germans are reported to have succeeded in capturing the flagship of the Roman Rhine fleet, which again was brought as a present to Veleda.Veleda and her giftsVeleda is described more elaborately as being one of many prophetesses worshipped by the Germanic tribes, and who even may have achieved divine status. She was said to dwell in a tall tower of some kind, and direct contact with her was prohibited. Against the background of Veleda’s divine status, and her role as a mediator between gods and humans, the gifts which were brought to her after the Germans’ two victories can be seen as offerings. The Roman legate, said to have been killed on his way to Veleda, corresponds to the presentation and execution of the enemy commander in the context of the Roman triumph, or the killing of the Roman officers in the aftermath of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. The trireme, the largest type of contemporary military vessel, cannot be expected to have been intended for military use but as an obvious expression of Roman military power, and hence clear proof for the Germans’ triumph.From Castra Vetera to IllerupThe range of gifts which, according to Tacitus, were brought to Veleda, correlates with some of the elements of the war booty offerings. With regard to the Roman officer, it was especially weapons and personal equipment, presumably those of the leading commanders of the defeated armies, that were deposited at several sites. These probably received special attention during preparation of the offerings. Tacitus’ account on the captured trireme is reminiscent of the finds of either complete or parts of what can be assumed to have been specialised military vessels seen in a number of war booty offerings. The similarities between the example of Veleda and the war booty offerings are not limited to the respective gifts/offerings. In both cases, the giving of gifts/offerings is in the context of a military campaign. The vessels, in particular, can be characterised as very spectacular items, and in both cases the victor of the military conflict was responsible for the giving of gifts/offerings.Veleda and her sisters in the NorthTacitus’ description of Veleda, and other references to Germanic prophetesses in Classical writings, shows parallels to the description of the Völva in much later Old Norse written sources from the medieval period. Fulfilling a role as a mediator between the gods and humans, these female prophetesses seem not only to have been part of actual society, but also an element of contemporary mythology. The Völva can be perceived as being associated with the mythological concept of the Norns, which again relate to other mythological figures, such as the Valkyries, Disir and a number of minor deities. Like Veleda, these religious specialists and mythological beings all relate to the general concept of fate, and in particular to warriors and war. Several mythological beings and female deities that appear in the Old Norse written sources, presumably representing an old stratum within the mythological narrative, show close links to a wetland environment, in the form of lakes, wells or bogs.The goddess in the lakeEven though both the various historical sources and the archaeological evidence are characterised by considerable variation in terms of space and time they nevertheless open up far-reaching perspectives and can be used as source of inspiration for a better understanding of war booty offerings. This applies not least to the question of whether these phenomena result from unsuccessful invasions or successful raids abroad. The latter hypothesis has been promoted more recently with reference to the Roman Triumph. The example of Veleda shows that the tribe of the Bructeri celebrated a version of the Triumph, indicating a similar practice in a Germanic context. This supports the above hypothesis that at least some of the war booty offerings may result from the showing off to the native community of war booty acquired abroad. The story of Veleda is of particular interest with reference to the nature of the ritual and religious dimension of the finds. Tacitus’ account of Veleda resembles the Southern Scandinavian war booty offerings on several counts. Additionally, there are obvious parallels between Veleda and the other Germanic prophetesses, on the one hand, and a large number of female characters in Old Norse written sources on Pre-Christian mythology, on the other. These similarities may be rooted in a shared conceptualisation of the influence of the divine powers on the outcome of a battle, of the predictability of the will of these powers and how appreciation could be expressed to such powers or to the ones who had communicated their will. The example of Veleda can be seen, like the later written accounts of Vølvas, Norns, Valkyries and other mythological beings, as a distant echo of this concept; it presumably belongs to the oldest strata of Pre- Christian cosmology reflected in our written sources. The historical sources can be seen as mirroring a past cognitive reality and religious world view; according to which female beings, both as religious specialists and as mythological characters, fulfilled a crucial role in the context of coercion, war and death. Against this background, one may ask whether the war booty offerings can be interpreted as reflecting votive offerings relating to religious specialists who were incorporated into preparation of the military campaign. Additionally, one may ask whether the nameless war god, to whom the war booty offerings are traditionally thought to have been dedicated, may also be sought among the various female beings mentioned in Classical and later Old Norse sources. These sources mirror a mythological conceptualisation of wells, lakes and bogs as not merely transitional zones or entrances to the supernatural, but as the very dwelling place of various mythological beings. Against this background, the changing context of votive activities in Scandinavia, practised in both wetland environments and in the context of settlements, may have been rooted in the dualism of a female and masculine sphere in religious and military practice.Andres Sieg fried DobatMoesgård Museum/Aarhus Universitet

Las ciudades mesopotámicas estaban amuralladas desde sus orígenes. Muralla y ciudad, símbolo de civilización, eran dos conceptos inseparables. Por mandato de los dioses, el rey era el responsable de la fundación de las ciudades y de la construcción de sus sistemas de defensa, que fueron evolucionando como respuesta a los cambios producidos en el arte de la guerra en el Próximo Oriente antiguo. En este artículo se analiza, en particular, la documentación arqueológica y textual de dos modelos de ciudad fortificada: Mari (III-II milenio a. C.), en el norte, y Babilonia (II-I milenio a. C.), en el sur. Se realiza una nueva propuesta de interpretación del recinto defensivo interior de Babilonia. Palabras clave: Ciudades mesopotámicas, fortificacionesTopónimos: Habuba Kabira, Mari, BabiloniaPeríodo: IV-I milenio a. C. ABSTRACTMesopotamian cities were walled from their origins. Wall and city, a symbol of civilisation, were two inseparable concepts. By mandate of the gods, the king was responsible for the foundation of the cities and the construction of their defence systems, which evolved in response to changes in the art of warfare in the ancient Near East. This article analyses, in particular, the archaeological and textual documentation of two models of fortified cities: Mari (3rd-2nd millennium B.C.), in the north, and Babylon (2nd-1st millennium B.C.), in the south. A new approach to the interpretation of the inner wall of Babylon is proposed. Keywords: Mesopotamian cities, fortificationsPlace names: Habuba Kabira, Mari, BabylonPeriod: IVth-Ist millennium B. C. REFERENCIASAbrahami, Ph. (1997), L’armée à Mari, tesis doctoral, Université de Paris I (inédita).al-Rawi, F.N.H. (1985), “Nabopolassar’s Restoration Work on the Wall Imgur-Enlil at Babylon”, Iraq, 47, pp. 1-9.Aurenche, O. (dir.) (1977), Dictionnaire illustré multilingue de l’architecture du Proche Orient Ancien, Lyon, MOM.Azara, P. (dir.) (2000), La fundación de la ciudad. Mesopotamia, Grecia y Roma, Barcelona, CCCB.Battini, L. (1996), “Un exemple de propagande néoassyrienne: les défenses de Dur-Sharrukin”, CMAO, 6, pp. 215-234.— (1997), “Les sytèmes défensifs à Babylone”, Akkadica, 104-105, pp. 24-55.Becker, H., van Ess, M., Fassbinder, J. (2019), “Uruk: Urban Structures in Magnetic and Satellite Images”, en Uruk. First City of the Ancient World, Los Angeles, Getty Museum.Burke, A. A. (2008), “Walled up to Heaven”. The Evolution of Middle Bronze Age Fortifications Strategies in the Levant, Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns.Butterlin, P. (2016), “Villes de Mésopotamie, D’Uruk à Babylone”, en L’histoire commence en Mésopotamie, París, Louvre, pp. 166-171.— (2020), “Mari, une ville circulaire ordinaire?”, en Circular Cities of Early Bronze Age Syria, Turnhout, Breplos, pp. 265-273.Chavalas, M. (ed.) (2006), Historical Sources in Translation. The Ancient Near East, Malden, Blackwell.Childe, V. G. (1992), Los orígenes de la civilización, México DF, FCE (1ª edición de 1936).Collon, D. (2008), “Le développement de l’arc en Mésopotamie”, en Les armées du Proche-Orient ancien (IIIe et Ier mil. av. J.-C.), Oxford, BAR.Durand, J. M. (1997), Les documents épistolaires du palais de Mari, tome I, Paris, Éditions du Cerf.— (1998), Les documents épistolaires du palais de Mari, tome II, Paris, Éditions du Cerf.George, A. R. (1992), Babylonian Topographical Texts, Leuven, Peeters.Herzog, Z. (1997), “Fortifications”, en The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, New York-Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 319-326.Hnaihen, K. H. (2020), The Defensive Brick Architecture in Mesopotamia from the end of Early Bronze Age to th end of Early Iron Age, tesis doctoral, Universidad de Almería (inédita).Houben, H. y Guillaud, H. (2006), Traité de construction en terre, Marseille, Éditions Parenthèses.Kenyon, K. M. (1963), Arqueología en Tierra Santa, Barcelona, Ediciones Garriga.Lackenbacher, S. (2001), “Fondations assyriennes”, en Mites de fundació de ciutats al món antic (Mesopotàmia, Grècia i Roma), Barcelona, MAC, pp. 69-74.Liverani, M. (2006), Uruk. La primera ciudad, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra.— (2014), Imaginar Babel. Dos siglos de estudios sobre la ciudad oriental antigua, Barcelona, Edicions Bellaterra.Ludwig (1980), “Mass, Sitte und Technik des Bauens in Habuba-Kabira Süd”, en Le Moyen Euphrate, zone de contactes et d’échanges, Leyden, Brill, pp. 63-74.Margueron, J. C. (2000), “Nacimiento y fundación de ciudades en Mesopotamia”, en La fundación de la ciudad. Mesopotamia, Grecia y Roma, Barcelona, CCCB, pp. 33-48.— (2004), Mari. Métropole de l’Euphrate au IIIe et au Début du IIe millénaire av. J.-C., Paris, Picard-ERC.— (2009), “La fondation de Mari. Première aproche d’une technologie de fondation”, Estudos Orientais, 10, pp. 13-33.— (2011), “Aux origines de l’architecture militaire en Mésopotamie”, en Stratégies de défense, de conquête ou de victoire en Méditerranée des textes aux architectures et à l’aménagement, Tlemcen, pp. 11-45.— (2012), “Du village à la ville: continuité ou rupture?”, en Du village néolithique à la ville syro-mésopotamienne, Ferrol, PAMES-UDC, pp. 67-97.— (2013), Cités invisibles. La naissance de l’urbanisme au Proche-Orient ancien, París, Paul Geuthner— (2014), Mari. Capital of Northern Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium, Oxford-Philadelphia, Oxbow Books.Mazar, A. (1995), “The Fortification of Cities in the Ancient Near East”, en Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, volumes III-IV, Peabody, Hendrickson Publishers, pp. 1523-1537.Mielke, D. P. (2012), “Fortifications and Fortification Strategies of Mega-Cities in the Ancient Near East”, en Mega-cities Mega-sites, the Archaeology of Consumption Disposal, Landscape, Transport Communication, 7th ICAANE vol. 1, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 74-91.Montero Fenollós, J. L. (2004), “Revisando a Gordon Childe, el concepto de Revolución Metalúrgica en los albores de la historia de Mesopotamia”, en Miscelánea en homenaje a Emiliano Aguirre, Alcalá de Henares, Museo Arqueológico Regional, pp. 312-319.— (2017), “Bronze Metallurgy in the Times of Earliest Cities. New Data on the City I of Mari”, Ash-Sharq, 1, pp. 48-54.— (2019), “La frontera noroccidental del reino de Mari a comienzos del II milenio a. C. a la luz de los textos y la arqueología. Reflexiones sobre la localización de Dur-Yahdun-Lim”, Claroscuro, 18, pp. 1-21.Nadali, D. (2007), “Ashurbanipal against Elam. Figurative Patterns and Architectural Location of Elamite Wars”, Historiae, 4, pp. 57-91Nigro, L. (2015), “Tell es-Sultan 2015. A Pilot Project for Archaeology in Palestine”, Near Eastern Archaeology, 79, pp. 4-17.Pedersén, O. (2011), “Excavated and Unexcavated Libraries un Babylon”, en Babylon. Wissenskultur in Orient und Okzident, Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, pp. 47-67.— (2021), Babylon. The Great City, Münster, Zaphon.Reade J. E. (2008), “Early Travellers on the Wonders: Suggested Sites”, en Babylon: Myth and Reality, London, British Museum, pp, 112-118.Rey, S. (2012), Poliorcétique au Proche-Orient à l’âge du Bronze. Fortifications urbaines, procédés de siège et systèmes défensifs, Beyrouth, IFPO.Sanmartín, J. (2018), Gilgamesh, rey de Uruk, Madrid, Trotta.Sasson, J.M. (1969), The Military Establishments at Mari, Roma, Pontifical Biblical Institute.Sollberger, E., Kupper, J. R. (1971), Inscriptions royales sumériennes et akkadiennes, Paris, Éditions du Cerf.Thomas, A. (dir.) (2016), L’histoire commence en Mésopotamie, París, Louvre.Van Ess, M. (2008), “Koldewey, Pionier systematicher Ausgrabungen im Orient”, en Auf dem weg nach Babylon. Robert Koldewey. Ein Archäologenleben, Mainz, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, pp. 91-103.Vidal, J. (2012), “La guerra de asedio en el período paleobabilónico según los textos de Mari”, en Fortificaciones y guerra de asedio en el mundo antiguo, Zaragoza, Libros Pórtico, pp. 21-35.Wetzel, F. (1969), Stadtmauer von Babylon, Osnabrück, Otto Zellen.Yadin, Y. (1963), The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands, 2 vols., New York-Toronto-Londres, McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Abstract From 1935 to 1939, audiences on both sides of the Atlantic thronged theatres to see Laurence Housman’s play Victoria Regina, a series of vignettes about the life of Queen Victoria. Those unable to purchase tickets were able to read about the show in magazines and newspapers, listen to a radio production, and purchase clothing and home furnishings that reflected the revival of interest in the Victorian era. Yet to the extent that scholars have discussed this incredibly popular play and the Victorian revival that it spawned, they tend to ascribe its success to a nostalgic impulse, or what Alison Light has described as the phenomenon of ‘conservative modernity’. This article reframes Victoria Regina, by treating it as a site of provocation and meaning-making in a charged transatlantic context. As I show, Housman (1865–1959)—a free speech advocate, Quaker pacifist, committed internationalist, anti-imperialist, feminist, and nascent gay rights activist—wanted to use Victoria to goad, intentionally so. His Victoria may have been romantic and feminine, but she was still intended as a vehicle of dissent. Housman wrote Victoria Regina primarily to protest censorship laws in Britain, but also to provide a more woman-centered version of the nation’s past, and to promote conciliation over the conflict between Germany and Britain. It was in its capacity as a cultural bridge between the UK and the USA, however, that Victoria Regina ended up making its most sizeable impact. This article thus offers an important meditation not only on the relationship between theatre and politics in the interwar period but also on the Victorian inheritance and its continuing and sometimes surprising applications in the twentieth century—especially in facilitating the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.

Sticky, messy and nauseatingly saccharine, the sensory properties of jam may be a long way from the stylized corporate polish of Australia’s multi-billion dollar film exhibition industry, yet the history of Australian cinema space will be forever indebted to the Victoria Preserving Company; one-time producer of the humblest of sweet treats. Through an analysis of Melbourne’s Jam Factory cinema complex, this article explores the unusual intersection of jam, sensory gratification and contemporary Australian cinema-going at the dawn of the 21st century. Encompassing the historic architecture of the former Victoria Preserving Company, South Yarra’s Jam Factory complex provides a gentrified gloss to an inner suburban precinct historically renowned for the manufacturing of jam and preserves. Nestled in the heart of Chapel Street, less than two blocks down from Toorak road and a stone’s throw from the nightclub precinct of Commercial road, the Jam Factory occupies an important part of Melbourne’s cultural heritage; functioning as a quintessential signifier of the city’s traversal from wholesale manufacturing during the early 1900s into the service vectors of digital media technologies and mixed-use retail entertainment destinations at the start of the new millennium. Established in 1876, the Victoria Preserving Company, AKA the ‘Jam Factory’, hosts an array of diverse retail and leisure outlets. Included amongst its tenants are Borders Books, Villa & Hut, TGI Fridays, The Pancake Parlour, a Virgin Music Mega-store, an elaborate Village Cinema megaplex, and a range of ancillary restaurants, fashion stores and cafes. According to the venue’s promotional material, “The Jam Factory of today is, in short, ‘jam packed’ with entertainment” (Chapel St Precinct, n.pag.). With the original building’s façade and cooling store still intact, the architectural remnants of the Victoria Preserving Factory provide a culturally significant backdrop for what is ostensibly Australia’s most noteworthy cinema venture; Village Roadshow’s megaplex cinema flagship. Replete with fifteen large format screens, including two Gold Class cinemas, a Cinema Europa enclave and an interactive games alcove, The Village Jam Factory signifies Australia’s first foray into cinema-based retail entertainment destinations. In commenting on the opening of the Jam Factory megaplex in 1998, Village Roadshow’s general manager Mr. David Herman said, “The objective was to create Australia’s first non-gambling cinema and lifestyle complex” (Catalano 6). More than any other cinema venue, the Village Jam Factory played a key role in pushing Australian film exhibition standards into the new millennium. In an era marked by competing home theatre technologies and diversified sites of media consumption, the Jam Factory’s shift from suburban cinema to lifestyle complex dramatically altered both the business and social practice of movie-going in Australia. Central to this shift was a tripartite marketing strategy which sought to capitalize on: protracted movie-going experiences; sensory stimulation; and, venue promotion. Experiential Jam The promotion of a protracted movie-going experience has been essential to the continued success of the Village Jam Factory. As I have argued elsewhere, the Australian cinema industry of the mid 1990s faced a number of significant incentives for extending the movie going experience beyond the auditorium; not the least being the steady decline of box office takings that occurred during the late 1980s (Downing). In the face of new media technologies such as the internet, DVD and Pay TV, many cinema operators were forced to look beyond the box office as a primary source of profits. To this end Village Roadshow effectively used the Jam Factory as a testing ground for the generation of ancillary leisure and retail income streams. During the mid 1990s Village actively promoted the Jam Factory as a space in which audiences could not only see a film, but also engage in a series of expanded retail activities such as shopping, dining and video-game playing. Discussing the development of multi-use cinema venues during the 1990s, Charles Acland has commented that such spaces “…do not situate conditions of spectatorship alone; they also construct relations between public and cinematic practices” (Acland 119). Sensory Jam Far from being a traditional site of film consumption, the Jam Factory set an industry precedent by becoming the nation’s first cinema venue in which audiences were encouraged to engage in an entertainment experience that was, above all, aimed at stimulating the senses. In keeping with the ‘lifestyle destination’ mantra, the Village Jam Factory provided a new generation of Australians with a multi-sensory entertainment experience that could not be emulated by home theatre technologies. Wide sweeping foyers and elaborate ticket and merchandising counters greet the eye; ‘luxury’ stadium seating with wide aisles and broad armrests offer the ‘ultimate’ in tactile comfort; digital surround sound facilities pleasure the ears and a plethora of food and beverage novelties work to gratify the senses of taste and smell. More than any other Village cinema outlet, the Jam Factory venue smacks of sugar-coated commerce. With a revenue contribution of over 18%, the Village Roadshow candy bar is the undisputed cash-cow of the enterprise (Australian Film Commission 143). Colloquially known as ‘Lollywood’, the Village confectionary counter is an over-priced explosion of colour and candy that sustains industry revenue through a deliberate appeal to the audience’s sense of taste. This sugar dependency synchronistically mirrors the former success of Henry Jones, the entrepreneur behind Australia’s IXL jam brand, who operated his famous preserving company on the site between 1895 and 1926 (Chapel St Precinct, n.pag.). Venue Jam Village Roadshow’s promotion of the Jam Factory venue over the actual films being screened is indicative of Australia’s primary shift towards retail entertainment based cinema complexes. Unlike the homogenous multiplex venues of the 1970s and 1980s, the Village Jam Factory Complex has been aggressively marketed as a Melbourne icon, capable of offering a unique entertainment experience. This agenda is clearly documented in the 1999 Village Roadshow annual report which, pointing towards a perceived threat of home theatre technologies, proclaimed: [In] broadening the cinema going experience … [Village] aims to create an environment of quality entertainment theming and ancillary lifestyle retailing, thus providing a consistently high level of incentive for people to leave their homes for cinema anchored destinations. (Village Roadshow 19) To this end, the Jam Factory became the physical embodiment of Village Cinemas’ corporate tagline “Where Movies Live” (Village Cinemas, n.pag.). Throughout the late 1990s, a number of similar sites proliferated across Europe, the United States and Canada. Two noteworthy examples of this trend are the Manchester Times building in the UK (initially managed by a short lived Village-Warner synergy) and the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin; previous home to the Third Reich and later, the Berlin Wall. In both of these examples a similar venue-promotion agenda is clearly at work. In reflecting the cultural specificities of their host cities, each of these venues pays a semiotic homage to the previous occupants of their space. The Manchester Times building, for example, retains much of its former architecture and reflects the nocturnal vibrancy of 19th century printing plant. Similarly, the Sony Centre offers an architectural reflection on the complexities of Berlin history and German cinema. In Melbourne, the Jam Factory’s history of jam and jam making are equally preserved. Drawing heavily on postmodern architectural styles, the Jam Factory’s interior uses South Yarra’s local history as a backdrop for a schizophrenic collage of seemingly incommensurate time/place references. From the distinctive red-brick cooling tower (located in the centre of the building) one encounters a hybrid fusion of Mediterranean pasta courts, European coffee lounges, Romanesque artwork and columns (complete with weathered-look paint and ‘crumbling’ tops), statues of Hollywood stars, as well as a dazzling gaming alcove and a series of subdued ‘luxury’ (Gold Class) cinemas. Such eclectic displays of visual hyperbole have been prefigured by Umberto Eco, whose discussion on hyperreality addresses an imagination which “… demands the real thing, and in order to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (Eco 8). As a relatively recent contributor to Australian cinema history, the Village Jam Factory has achieved little sustained academic attention, yet its significance must not be undervalued. As Australia’s first cinema-oriented retail entertainment destination, the Village Jam Factory has been crucial in placing Australia into the global film exhibition arena. While the pungent aromas of ripened fruit, vinegar and boiling sugar have long since been replaced by the scent of popcorn and recycled air, the legacy and architecture of jam-making has played a key role in propelling Australian film exhibition into the new millennium. References Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Australian Film Commission. Get the Picture. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 2001. Catalano, Anthony. “Village to Extend Jam Factory to 14 Cinemas.” The Age 5 Aug. 1998. Chapel St Precinct. General History of Chapel Street & Surrounds. 2006. 30 Dec. 2006 http://www.chapelstreet.com.au/default.asp?mode=history>. Downing, Leanne. “More than Meets the Eye: The Suburban Cinema Megaplex as Sensory Heterotopia.” Refractory: Journal of Media and Culture 8 (2005). http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/journalissues/vol8/downing.html>. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality. Orlando Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Village Cinemas. 2006. 30 Dec. 2006. http://www.villagecinemas.com.au/>. Village Roadshow. Annual Report. Melbourne: Village Roadshow, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Downing, Leanne. "Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/05-downing.php>. APA Style Downing, L. (Dec. 2006) "Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/05-downing.php>.

Abstract Kansyore pottery-using groups of the northeastern Lake Victoria Basin represent one of only a few examples of ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers in Africa. Archaeologists link evidence of specialized fishing, a seasonal land-use cycle between lake and riverine sites, and intensive investment in ceramic production to behavioral complexity after 9 thousand years ago (ka). However, a gap in the Kansyore radiocarbon record of the region between ~7 and 4.4 cal ka limits explanations of when and why social and economic changes occurred. This study provides the first evidence of lakeshore occupation during this temporal break at the only well-studied Kansyore site in eastern Uganda, Namundiri A. Within the context of other sites in nearby western Kenya, radiometric and faunal data from the site indicate a move from the lake to a greater reliance on riverine habitats with middle Holocene aridity ~5–4 cal ka and the arrival of food producers to the region after ~3 cal ka.

Abstract This essay traces Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s use of the bower as a visual space in relation to musical subject matter. Following the increasing popularity of instrumental music and musical discourse in the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of art music and its expressive abilities had become a pervasive discourse for painters. Through an examination of Rossetti’s images of bowers with a musical subject – specifically The Blue Bower (1865), Veronica Veronese (1872), and La Ghirlandata (1873) – this essay explores ideas of musical temporality and artistic spatiality, tonal relations between colour and music, and Rossetti’s emphasis on subjective experience in these images. The bower became a crucial feature in this exploration of music and painting, signalling a visual space characterized by ideas of immersion, artistic correspondences, and the abstracting of colour and form. This essay proposes that Rossetti’s bowers were sites of visual immersion for its viewers, alluding and appealing to the sensuous impact music could have on a listener by mimicking listening behaviour in a visual format. My discussion uncovers new contexts for Rossetti’s musical images and draws parallels between listening and viewing behaviour for both the Victorian and current public. The essay concludes that visual sites alluding to music can act as immersive spaces, contending that abstraction and temporality are drawn out in painting by virtue of an appeal to music.

IntroductionAustralia is at a particular point in its history where there is a noticeable diaspora of artists and creative practitioners away from the major capitals of Sydney and Melbourne (in particular), driven in no small part by ballooning house prices of the last eight years. This has meant big changes for some regional spaces, and in turn, for the face of Australian cultural life. Regional cultural precincts are forming with tourist flows, funding attention and cultural economies. Likewise, there appears to be growing consciousness in the ‘art centres’ of Melbourne and Sydney of interesting and relevant activities outside their limits. This research draws on my experience as an art practitioner, curator and social researcher in one such region (Castlemaine in Central Victoria), and particularly from a recent interview series I have conducted in collaboration with art space in that region, Wide Open Road Art. In this, 23 regional and city-based artists were asked about the social, economic and local conditions that can and have supported their art practices. Drawing from these conversations and Bourdieu’s ideas around cultural production, the article suggests that authentic, diverse, interesting and disruptive creative practices in Australian cultural life involve the increasingly pressing need for security while existing outside the modern imperative of high consumption; of finding alternative ways to live well while entering into the shared space of cultural production. Indeed, it is argued that often it is the capacity to defy key economic paradigms, for example of ‘rational (economic) self-interest’, that allows creative life to flourish (Bourdieu Field; Ley “Artists”). While regional spaces present new opportunities for this, there are pitfalls and nuances worth exploring.Changes in Regional AustraliaAustralia has long been an urbanising nation. Since Federation our cities have increased from a third to now constituting two-thirds of the country’s total population (Gray and Lawrence 6; ABS), making us one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Indeed, as machines replaced manual labour on farms; as Australia’s manufacturing industry began its decline; and as young people in particular left the country for city universities (Gray and Lawrence), the post-war industrial-economic boom drove this widespread demographic and economic shift. In the 1980s closures of regional town facilities like banks, schools and hospitals propelled widespread belief that regional Australia was in crisis and would be increasingly difficult to sustain (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; Gray and Lawrence 2; Barr et al.; ABS). However, the late 1990s and early 21st century saw a turnaround that has been referred to by some as the rise of the ‘sea change’. That is, widespread renewed interest and idealisation of not just coastal areas but anywhere outside the city (Murphy). It was a simultaneous pursuit of “a small ‘a’ alternative lifestyle” and escape from rising living costs in urban areas, especially for the unemployed, single parents and those with disabilities (Murphy). This renewed interest has been sustained. The latest wave, or series of waves, have coincided with the post-GFC house price spike, of cheap credit and lenient lending designed to stimulate the economy. This initiative in part led to Sydney and Melbourne median dwelling prices rising by up to 114% in eight years (Scutt 2017), which alone had a huge influence on who was able to afford to live in city areas and who was not. Rapid population increases and diminished social networks and familial support are also considered drivers that sent a wave of people (a million since 2011) towards the outer fringes of the cities and to ‘commuter belt’ country towns (Docherty; Murphy). While the underprivileged are clearly most disadvantaged in what has actually been a global development process (see Jayne on this, and on the city as a consumer itself), artists and creatives are also a unique category who haven’t fared well with hyper-urbanisation (Ley “Artists”). Despite the class privilege that often accompanies such a career choice, the economic disadvantage art professions often involve has seen a diaspora of artists moving to regional areas, particularly those in the hinterlands around and train lines to major centres. We see the recent ‘rise of a regional bohemia’ (Regional Australia Institute): towns like Toowoomba, Byron Bay, Surf Coast, Gold Coast-Tweed, Kangaroo Valley, Wollongong, Warburton, Bendigo, Tooyday, New Norfolk, and countless more being re-identified as arts towns and precincts. In Australia in 2016–17, 1 in 6 professional artists, and 1 in 4 visual artists, were living in a regional town (Throsby and Petetskaya). Creative arts in regional Australia makes up a quarter of the nation’s creative output and is a $2.8 billion industry; and our regions particularly draw in creative practitioners in their prime productive years (aged 24 to 44) (Regional Australia Institute).WORA Conservation SeriesIn 2018 artist and curator Helen Mathwin and myself received a local shire grant to record a conversation series with 23 artists who were based in the Central Goldfields region of Victoria as well as further afield, but who had a connection to the regional arts space we run, WideOpenRoadArt (WORA). In videoed, in-depth, approximately hour-long, semi-structured interviews conducted throughout 2018, we spoke to artists (16 women and 7 men) about the relocation phenomenon we were witnessing in our own growing arts town. Most were interviewed in WORA’s roving art float, but we seized any ad hoc opportunity we had to have genuine discussions with people. Focal points were around sustainability of practice and the social conditions that supported artists’ professional pursuits. This included accessing an arts community, circles of cultural production, and the ‘art centre’; the capacity to exhibit; but also, social factors such as affordable housing and the ability to live on a low-income while having dependants; and so on. The conversations were rich with lived experiences and insights on these issues.Financial ImperativesIn line with the discussion above, the most prominent factor we noticed in the interviews was the inescapable importance of being able to live cheaply. The consistent message that all of the interviewees, both regional- and city-based, conveyed was that a career in art-making required an important independence from the need to earn a substantial income. One interviewee commented: “I do run my art as a business, I have an ABN […] it makes a healthy loss! I don’t think I’ve ever made a profit […].” Another put it: “now that I’m in [this] town and I have a house and stuff I do feel like there is maybe a bit more security around those daily things that will hopefully give me space to [make artworks].”Much has been said on the pervasive inability to monetise art careers, notably Bourdieu’s observations that art exists on an interdependent field of cultural capital, determining for itself an autonomous conception of value separate to economics (Bourdieu, Field 39). This is somewhat similar to the idea of art as a sacred phenomenon irreducible to dollar terms (Abbing 38; see also Benjamin’s “aura”; “The Work of Art”). Art’s difficult relationship with commodification is part of its heroism that Benjamin described (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79), its potential to sanctify mainstream society by staying separate to the lowly aspirations of commerce (Ley “Artists” 2529). However, it is understood, artists still need to attain professional education and capacities, yet they remain at the bottom of the income ladder not only professionally, but in the case of visual artists, they remain at the bottom of the creative income hierarchies as well. Further to this, within visual arts, only a tiny proportion achieve financially backed success (Menger 277). “Artistic labour markets are characterised by high risk of failure, excess supply of recruits, low artistic income level, skewed income distribution and multiple jobholding” (Mangset, Torvik Heian, Kleppe, and Løyland; Menger). Mangset et al. point to ideas that have long surrounded the “charismatic artist myth,” of a quasi-metaphysical calling to be an artist that can lead one to overlook the profession’s vast pitfalls in terms of economic sustainability. One interviewee described it as follows: “From a very young age I wanted to be an artist […] so there’s never been a time that I’ve thought that’s not what I’m doing.” A 1% rule seems widely acknowledged in how the profession manages the financial winners against those who miss out; the tiny proportion of megastar artists versus a vast struggling remainder.As even successful artists often dip below the poverty line between paid engagements, housing costs can make the difference between being able to live in an area and not (Turnbull and Whitford). One artist described:[the reason we moved here from Melbourne] was financial, yes definitely. We wouldn’t have been able to purchase a property […] in Melbourne, we would not have been able to live in place that we wanted to live, and to do what we wanted to do […]. It was never an option for us to get a big mortgage.Another said:It partly came about as a financial practicality to move out here. My partner […] wanted to be in the bush, but I was resistant at first, we were in Melbourne but we just couldn’t afford Melbourne in the end, we had an apartment, we had a studio. My partner was a cabinet maker then. You know, just every month all our money went to rent and we just couldn’t manage anymore. So we thought, well maybe if we come out to the bush […] It was just by a happy accident that we found a property […] that we could afford, that was off-grid so it cut the bills down for us [...] that had a little studio and already had a little cottage on there that we could rent that out to get money.For a prominent artist we spoke to this issue was starkly reflected. Despite large exhibitions at some of the highest profile galleries in regional Victoria, the commissions offered for these shows were so insubstantial that the artist and their family had to take on staggering sums of personal debt to execute the ambitious and critically acclaimed shows. Another very successful artist we interviewed who had shown widely at ‘A-list’ international arts institutions and received several substantial grants, spoke of their dismay and pessimism at the idea of financial survival. For all artists we spoke to, pursuing their arts practice was in constant tension with economic imperatives, and their lives had all been shaped by the need to make shrewd decisions to continue practising. There were two artists out of the 23 we interviewed who considered their artwork able to provide full-time income, although this still relied on living costs remaining extremely low. “We are very lucky to have bought a very cheap property [in the country] that I can [also] have my workshop on, so I’m not paying for two properties in Melbourne […] So that certainly takes a fair bit of pressure off financially.” Their co-interviewee described this as “pretty luxurious!” Notably, the two who thought they could live off their art practices were both men, mid-career, whose works were large, spectacular festival items, which alongside the artists’ skill and hard work was also a factor in the type of remuneration received.Decongested LivingBeyond more affordable real estate and rental spaces, life outside our cities offers other benefits that have particular relevance to creative practitioners. Opera and festival director Lindy Hume described her move to the NSW South Coast in terms of space to think and be creative. “The abundance of time, space and silence makes living in places like [Hume’s town] ideal for creating new work” (Brown). And certainly, this was a theme that arose frequently in our interviews. Many of our regionally based artists were in part choosing the de-pressurised space of non-metro areas, and also seeking an embedded, daily connection to nature for themselves, their art-making process and their families. In one interview this was described as “dreamtime”. “Some of my more creative moments are out walking in the forest with the dog, that sort of semi-daydreamy thing where your mind is taken away by the place you’re in.”Creative HubsAll of our regional interviewees mentioned the value of the local community, as a general exchange, social support and like-minded connection, but also specifically of an arts community. Whether a tree change by choice or a more reactive move, the diaspora of artists, among others, has led to a type of rural renaissance in certain popular areas. Creative hubs located around the country, often in close proximity to the urban centres, are creating tremendous opportunities to network with other talented people doing interesting things, living in close proximity and often open to cross-fertilisation. One said: “[Castlemaine] is the best place in Australia, it has this insane cultural richness in a tiny town, you can’t go out and not meet people on the street […] For someone who has not had community in their life that is so gorgeous.” Another said:[Being an artist here] is kind of easy! Lots of people around to connect—with […] other artists but also creatively minded people [...] So it means you can just bump into someone from down the street and have an amazing conversation in five minutes about some amazing thing! […] There’s a concentration here that works.With these hubs, regional spaces are entering into a new relevance in the sphere of cultural production. They are generating unique and interesting local creative scenes for people to live amongst or visit, and generating strong local arts economies, tourist economies, and funding opportunities (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans). Victoria in particular has burgeoned, with tourist flows to its regions increasing 13 per cent in 5 years and generating tourism worth $10 billion (Tourism Victoria). Victoria’s Greater Bendigo is Australia’s most popularly searched tourist destination on Trip Advisor, with tourism increasing 52% in 10 years (Boland). Simultaneously, funding flows have increased to regional zones, as governments seek to promote development outside Australia’s urban centres and are confident in the arts as a key strategy in boosting health, economies and overall wellbeing (see Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; see also the 2018 Regional Centre for Culture initiative, Boland). The regions are also an increasingly relevant participant in national cultural life (Turnbull and Whitford; Mitchell; Simpson; Woodhead). Opportunities for an openness to productive exchange between regional and metropolitan sites appear to be growing, with regional festivals and art events gaining importance and unique attributes in the consciousness of the arts ‘centre’ (see for example Fairley; Simpson; Farrelly; Woodhead).Difficulties of Regional LocationDespite this, our interviews still brought to light the difficulties and barriers experienced living as a regional artist. For some, living in regional Victoria was an accepted set-back in their ambitions, something to be concealed and counteracted with education in reputable metropolitan art schools or city-based jobs. For others there was difficulty accessing a sympathetic arts community—although arts towns had vibrant cultures, certain types of creativity were preferred (often craft-based and more community-oriented). Practitioners who were active in maintaining their links to a metropolitan art scene voiced more difficulty in fitting in and successfully exhibiting their (often more conceptual or boundary-pushing) work in regional locations.The Gentrification ProblemThe other increasingly obvious issue in the revivification of some non-metropolitan areas is that they can and are already showing signs of being victims of their own success. That is, some regional arts precincts are attracting so many new residents that they are ceasing to be the low-cost, hospitable environments for artists they once were. Geographer David Ley has given attention to this particular pattern of gentrification that trails behind artists (Ley “Artists”). Ley draws from Florida’s ideas of late capitalism’s ascendency of creativity over the brute utilitarianism of the industrial era. This has got to the point that artists and creative professionals have an increasing capacity to shape and generate value in areas of life that were previous overlooked, especially with built environments (2529). Now more than ever, there is the “urbane middle-class” pursuing ‘the swirling milieu of artists, bohemians and immigrants” (Florida) as they create new, desirable landscapes with the “refuse of society” (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79; Ley New Middle Class). With Australia’s historic shifts in affordability in our major cities, this pattern that Ley identified in urban built environments can be seen across our states and regions as well.But with gentrification comes increased costs of living, as housing, shops and infrastructure all alter for an affluent consumer-resident. This diminishes what Bourdieu describes as “the suspension and removal of economic necessity” fundamental to the avant-garde (Bourdieu Distinction 54). That is to say, its relief from heavy pressure to materially survive is arguably critical to the reflexive, imaginative, and truly new offerings that art can provide. And as argued earlier, there seems an inbuilt economic irrationality in artmaking as a vocation—of dedicating one’s energy, time and resources to a pursuit that is notoriously impoverishing. But this irrationality may at the same time be critical to setting forth new ideas, perspectives, reflections and disruptions of taken-for-granted social assumptions, and why art is so indispensable in the first place (Bourdieu Field 39; Ley New Middle Class 2531; Weber on irrationality and the Enlightenment Project; also Adorno’s the ‘primitive’ in art). Australia’s cities, like those of most developed nations, increasingly demand we busy ourselves with the high-consumption of modern life that makes certain activities that sit outside this almost impossible. As gentrification unfolds from the metropolis to the regions, Australia faces a new level of far-reaching social inequality that has real consequences for who is able to participate in art-making, where these people can live, and ultimately what kind of diversity of ideas and voices participate in the generation of our national cultural life. ConclusionThe revival of some of Australia’s more popular regional towns has brought new life to some regional areas, particularly in reshaping their identities as cultural hubs worth experiencing, living amongst or supporting their development. Our interviews brought to life the significant benefits artists have experienced in relocating to country towns, whether by choice or necessity, as well as some setbacks. It was clear that economics played a major role in the demographic shift that took place in the area being examined; more specifically, that the general reorientation of social life towards consumption activities are having dramatic spatial consequences that we are currently seeing transform our major centres. The ability of art and creative practices to breathe new life into forgotten and devalued ideas and spaces is a foundational attribute but one that also creates a gentrification problem. Indeed, this is possibly the key drawback to the revivification of certain regional areas, alongside other prejudices and clashes between metro and regional cultures. It is argued that the transformative and redemptive actions art can perform need to involve the modern irrationality of not being transfixed by matters of economic materialism, so as to sit outside taken-for-granted value structures. This emphasises the importance of equality and open access in our spaces and landscapes if we are to pursue a vibrant, diverse and progressive national cultural sphere.ReferencesAbbing, Hans. Why Artists Are Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2002.Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge, 1983.Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Population Growth: Capital City Growth and Development.” 4102.0—Australian Social Trends. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Sttaistics, 1996. <http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/924739f180990e34ca2570ec0073cdf7!OpenDocument>.Barr, Neil, Kushan Karunaratne, and Roger Wilkinson. Australia’s Farmers: Past, Present and Future. Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation, 2005. 1 Mar. 2019 <http://inform.regionalaustralia.org.au/industry/agriculture-forestry-and-fisheries/item/australia-s-farmers-past-present-and-future>.Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: NLB, 1973.———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.Boland, Brooke. “What It Takes to Be a Leading Regional Centre of Culture.” Arts Hub 18 July 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.artshub.com.au/festival/news-article/sponsored-content/festivals/brooke-boland/what-it-takes-to-be-a-leading-regional-centre-of-culture-256110>.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984.———. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.Brown, Bill. “‘Restless Giant’ Lures Queensland Opera’s Artistic Director Lindy Hume to the Regional Art Movement.” ABC News 13 Sep. 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-12/regional-creative-industries-on-the-rise/8895842>.Docherty, Glenn. “Why 5 Million Australians Can’t Get to Work, Home or School on Time.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Feb. 2019. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-5-million-australians-can-t-get-to-work-home-or-school-on-time-20190215-p50y1x.html>.Fairley, Gina. “Big Hit Exhibitions to See These Summer Holidays.” Arts Hub 14 Dec. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/visual-arts/gina-fairley/big-hit-exhibitions-to-see-these-summer-holidays-257016>.Farrelly, Kate. “Bendigo: The Regional City That’s Transformed into a Foodie and Cultural Hub.” Domain 9 Apr. 2019. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.domain.com.au/news/bendigo-the-regional-city-you-didnt-expect-to-become-a-foodie-and-cultural-hub-813317/>.Florida, Richard. “A Creative, Dynamic City Is an Open, Tolerant City.” The Globe and Mail 24 Jun. 2002: T8.Gray, Ian, and Geoffrey Lawrence. A Future For Regional Australia: Escaping Global Misfortune. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Hume, Lindy. Restless Giant: Changing Cultural Values in Regional Australia. Strawberry Hills: Currency House, 2017.Jayne, Mark. Cities and Consumption. London: Routledge, 2005.Ley, David. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.———. “Artists, Aestheticisation and Gentrification.” Urban Studies 40.12 (2003): 2527–44.Menger, Pierre-Michel. “Artistic Labor Markets: Contingent Works, Excess Supply and Occupational Risk Management.” Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. Eds. Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006. 766–811.Mangset, Per, Mari Torvik Heian, Bard Kleppe and Knut Løyland. “Why Are Artists Getting Poorer: About the Reproduction of Low Income among Artists.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 24.4 (2018): 539-58.Mitchell, Scott. “Want to Start Collecting Art But Don’t Know Where to Begin? Trust Your Own Taste, plus More Tips.” ABC Life, 31 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/life/tips-for-buying-art-starting-collection/10084036>.Murphy, Peter. “Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia.” Transformations 2 (March 2002).Regional Australia Institute. “The Rise of the Regional Bohemians.” Regional Australia Institute 24 May. 2017. 1 Mar. 2019 <http://www.regionalaustralia.org.au/home/2017/05/rise-regional-bohemians-painting-new-picture-arts-culture-regional-australia/>.Rentschler, Ruth, Kerrie Bridson, and Jody Evans. Regional Arts Australia Stats and Stories: The Impact of the Arts in Regional Australia. Regional Arts Australia [n.d.]. <https://www.cacwa.org.au/documents/item/477>.Simpson, Andrea. “The Regions: Delivering Exceptional Arts Experiences to the Community.” ArtsHub 11 Apr. 2019. <https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/sponsored-content/visual-arts/andrea-simpson/the-regions-delivering-exceptional-arts-experiences-to-the-community-257752>.

IntroductionIn regional Australia and New Zealand, museums and art galleries are increasingly becoming primary sites of cultural engagement. They are one of the key tourist attractions for regional towns and expected to generate much needed tourism revenue. In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were three million visitors to regional galleries and museums (MGNSW 13). However, apart from those (partially) funded by local councils, they are often run on donations, good will, and the enthusiasm of volunteers. Regional museums and galleries provide some paid, and more unpaid, employment for ageing populations. While two-thirds of Australia’s population lives in capital cities, the remainder who live in regional towns are likely to be in the 60+ age cohort because people are choosing to retire away from the bustling, growing cities (ABS). At last count, there were about 3000 museums and galleries in Australia with about 80% of them located in regional areas (Scott). Over the last 40 years, this figure has tripled from the 1000 regional and provincial museums estimated by Peter Piggott in his 1975 report (24). According to a 2014 survey (Shaw and Davidson), New Zealand has about 470 museums and galleries and about 70% are located outside capital cities. The vast majority, 85%, have less than five, full-time paid staff, and more than half of these were run entirely by ageing volunteers. They are entrusted with managing the vast majority of the history and heritage collections of Australia and New Zealand. These ageing volunteers need a diverse range of skills and experience to care for and interpret collections. How do you find the time and budget for professional development for both paid staff and volunteers? Many professional development events are held in capital cities, which are often a significant distance from the regional museum—this adds substantially to the costs of attending and the time commitment required to get there. In addition, it is not uncommon for people working in regional museums to be responsible for everything—from security, collection management, conservation, research, interpretation and public programs to changing the light bulbs. While there are a large number of resources available online, following a manual is often more difficult than learning from other colleagues or learning in a more formal educational or vocational environment where you can receive timely feedback on your work. Further, a foundational level of prior knowledge and experience is often required to follow written instructions. This article will suggest some strategies for low cost professional development and networking. It involves planning, thinking strategically and forming partnerships with others in the region. It is time to harness the power of modern communications technology and use it as a tool for professional development. Some models of professional development in regional areas that have been implemented in the past will also be reviewed. The focus for this article is on training and professional development for workers in regional museums, heritage sites and keeping places. Regional art galleries have not been included because they tend to have separate regional networks and training opportunities. For example, there are professional development opportunities provided through the Art Galleries Association of Australia and their state branches. Regional galleries are also far more likely to have one or more paid staff members (Winkworth, “Fixing the Slums” 2). Regional Museums, Volunteers, and Social CapitalIt is widely accepted that regional museums and galleries enhance social capital and reduce social isolation (Kelly 32; Burton and Griffin 328). However, while working in a regional museum or gallery can help to build friendship networks, it can also be professionally isolating. How do you benchmark what you do against other places if you are two or more hours drive from those places? How do you learn from other colleagues if all your colleagues are also isolated by the ‘tyranny of distance’ and struggling with the same lack of access to training? In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were 8,629 active volunteers working in regional museums and galleries giving almost five million hours, which Museums and Galleries NSW calculated was worth over $150 million per annum in unpaid labour (MGNSW 1). Providing training and professional development to this group is an investment in Australia’s social and cultural capital.Unlike other community-run groups, the museums and heritage places which have emerged in regional Australia and New Zealand are not part of a national or state branch network. Volunteers who work for the Red Cross, Scouts or Landcare benefit from being part of a national organisation which provides funding, support workers, a website, governance structure, marketing, political advocacy and training (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 11). In Australia and New Zealand, this role is undertaken by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association AMaGA (formerly Museums Australia) and Museums Aotearoa respectively. However, both of these groups operate at the macro policy level, for example organising annual conferences, publishing a journal and developing Indigenous policy frameworks, rather than the local, practical level. In 1995, due to their advocacy work, Landcare Australia received $500 million over five years from the federal government to fund 5000 Landcare groups, which are run by 120,000 volunteers (Oppenheimer 177). They argued successfully that the sustainable development of land resources started at the local level. What do we need to do to convince government of the need for sustainable development of our local and regional museum and heritage resources?Training for Volunteers Working in Regional Museums: The Current SituationAnother barrier to training for regional museum workers is the assumption that the 70:20:10 model of professional development should apply. That is, 70% of one’s professional development is done ‘on the job’ by completing tasks and problem-solving; 20% is achieved by learning from mentors, coaches and role models and 10% is learnt from attending conferences and symposia and enrolling in formal courses of study. However, this model pre-supposes that there are people in your workplace whom you can learn from and who can show you how to complete a task, and that you are not destroying or damaging a precious, unique object if you happen to make a mistake.Some museum volunteers come with skills in research, marketing, administration, customer service or photography, but very few come with specific museum skills like writing exhibition text, registering an acquisition or conserving artefacts. These skills need to be taught. As Kylie Winkworth has written, museum management now requires a [...] skills set, which is not so readily found in small communities, and which in many ways is less rewarding for the available volunteers, who may have left school at 15. We do not expect volunteer librarians to catalogue books, which are in any case of low intrinsic value, but we still expect volunteers in their 70s and 80s to catalogue irreplaceable heritage collections and meet ever more onerous museum standards. That so many volunteers manage to do this is extraordinary. (“Let a Thousand Flowers” 13)Workers in regional museums are constantly required to step outside their comfort zones and learn new skills with minimal professional support. While these challenging experiences can be very rewarding, they are also potentially damaging for our irreplaceable material cultural heritage.Training for museum professionals has been on the agenda of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) since 1947 (Boylan 62). However, until 1996, their work focused on recommending curricula for new museum professionals and did not include life-long learning and on-going professional development. ICOM’s International Committee for the Training of Personnel (ICTOP) and the ICOM Executive has responded to this in their new curricula—ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development, but this does not address the difficulties staff or volunteers working in regional areas face in accessing training.In some parts of Australia, there are regional support and professional development programs in place. For example, in Queensland, there is the Museum Development Officer (MDO) network. However, because of the geographic size of the state and the spread of the museums, these five regionally based staff often have 60-80 museums or keeping places in their region needing support and so their time and expertise is spread very thinly. It is also predominantly a fee-for-service arrangement. That is, the museums have to pay for the MDO to come and deliver training. Usually this is done by the MDO working with a local museum to apply for a Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) grant. In Victoria there is a roving curator program where eligible regional museums can apply to have a professional curator come and work with them for a few days to help the volunteers curate exhibitions. The roving curator can also provide advice on “develop[ing] high quality exhibitions for diverse audiences” via email, telephone and networking events. Tasmania operates a similar scheme but their two roving curators are available for up to 25 days of work each year with eligible museums, provided the local council makes a financial contribution. The New South Wales government supports the museum advisor program through which a museum professional will come to your museum for up to 20 days/year to give advice and hands-on training—provided your local council pays $7000, an amount that is matched by the state government—for this service. In 2010, in response to recommendations in the Dunn Report (2007), the Collections Council of Australia (CCA) established a pilot project with the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia and $120,000 in funding from the Myer Foundation to trial the provision of a paid Collections Care Coordinator who would provide free training, expertise and support to local museums in the region. Tragically, CCA was de-funded by the Cultural Ministers Council the same year and the roll-out of a hub and spoke regional model was not supported by government due to the lack of an evidence base (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 18). An evaluation of the trial project would have tested a different model of regional training and added to the evidence base.All these state-based models (except the aborted Collections Care hub in Western Australia) require small regional museums to compete with each other for access to a museum professional and to successfully apply for funding, usually from their local council or state government. If they are successful, the training that is delivered is a one-off, as they are unlikely to get a second slice of the regional pie.An alternative to this competitive, fly-in fly-out, one-off model of professional development is to harness the technology and resources of local libraries and other cultural facilities in regional areas. This is what the Sydney Opera House Trust did in March 2019 to deliver their All about Women program of speakers via live streaming to 37 satellite sites throughout Australia and New Zealand.Harnessing Technology and Using Regional Library Infrastructure to Provide Training: ScenarioImagine the following scenario. It is a Monday morning in a regional library in Dubbo, New South Wales. Dubbo is 391 km or five hours drive by car from the nearest capital city (Sydney) and there are 50 regional museums within a 100 km radius. Ten people are gathered in a meeting room at the library watching a live stream of the keynote speakers who are presenting at their national museums conference. They are from five regional museums where they work as volunteers or part-time paid staff. They cannot afford to pay $2000, or more, to attend the conference, but they are happy to self-fund to drive for an hour or two to link up with other colleagues to listen to the presentations. They make notes and tweet in their questions using the conference twitter handle and hashtag. They have not been exposed to international speakers in the industry before and the ideas presented are fresh and stimulating. When the conference breaks for morning tea, they take a break too and get to know each other over a cuppa (provided free of charge by the library). Just as the networking sessions at conferences are vitally important for the delegates, they are even more important to address social isolation amongst this group. When they reconvene, they discuss their questions and agree to email the presenters with the questions that are unresolved. After the conference keynote sessions finish, the main conference (in the capital city) disperses into parallel sessions, which are no longer available via live stream.To make the two-hour drive more worthwhile and continue their professional development, they have arranged to hold a significance assessment workshop as well. Each museum worker has brought along photographs of one item in their collection that they want to do more research on. Some of them have also brought the object, if it is small and robust enough to travel. They have downloaded copies of Significance 2.0 and read it before they arrived. They started to write significance reports but could not fully understand how to apply some of the criteria. They cannot afford to pay for professional workshop facilitators, but they have arranged for the local studies librarian to give them an hour of free training on using the library’s resources (online and onsite) to do research on the local area and local families. They learn more about Trove, Papers Past and other research tools which are available online. This is hands-on and computer-based skills training using their own laptops/tablets or the ones provided by the library. After the training with the librarian, they break into two groups and read each other’s significance reports and make suggestions. The day finishes with a cuppa at 2.30pm giving them time to drive home before the sun sets. They agree to exchange email addresses so they can keep in touch. All the volunteers and staff who attended these sessions in regional areas feel energised after these meetings. They no longer feel so isolated and like they are working in the dark. They feel supported just knowing that there are other people who are struggling with the same issues and constraints as they are. They are sick of talking about the lack of budget, expertise, training and resources and want to do something with what they have.Bert (fictional name) decides that it is worth capitalising on this success. He emails the people who came to the session in Dubbo to ask them if they would like to do it again but focus on some different training needs. He asks them to choose two of the following three professional development options. First, they can choose to watch and discuss a recording of the keynote presentations from day two of the recent national conference. The conference organisers have uploaded digital recordings of the speakers’ presentations and the question time to the AMaGA website. This is an option for local libraries that do not have sufficient bandwidth to live stream video. The local library technician will help them cast the videos to a large screen. Second, they can each bring an object from their museum collection that they think needs conservation work. If the item is too fragile or big to move, they will bring digital photographs of it instead. Bert consulted their state-based museum and found some specialist conservators who have agreed to Skype or Facetime them in Dubbo free of charge, to give them expert advice about how to care for their objects, and most importantly, what not to do. The IT technician at Dubbo Library can set up their meeting room so that they can cast the Skype session onto a large smart screen TV. One week before the event, they will send a list of their objects and photographs of them to the conservator so that she can prepare, and they can make best use of her time. After this session, they will feel more confident about undertaking small cleaning and flattening treatments and know when they should not attempt a treatment themselves and need to call on the experts. Third, they could choose to have a training session with the council’s grants officer on writing grant applications. As he assesses grant applications, he can tell them what local councils look for in a successful grant application. He can also inform them about some of the grants that might be relevant to them. After the formal training, there will be an opportunity for them to exchange information about the grants they have applied for in the past—sometimes finding out what’s available can be difficult—and work in small groups to critique each other’s grant applications.The group chooses options two and three, as they want more practical skills development. They take a break in the middle of the day for lunch, which gives them the opportunity to exchange anecdotes from their volunteer work and listen to and support each other. They feel validated and affirmed. They have gained new skills and don’t feel so isolated. Before they leave, Alice agrees to get in touch with everyone to organise their next regional training day.Harnessing Technology and Using Regional Library Infrastructure to Provide Training: BenefitsThese scenarios need not be futuristic. The training needs are real, as is the desire to learn and the capacity of libraries to support regional groups. While funding for regional museums has stagnated or declined in recent years, libraries have been surging ahead. In August 2018, the New South Wales Government announced an “historic investment” of $60 million into all 370 public libraries that would “transform the way NSW’s public libraries deliver much-needed services, especially in regional areas” (Smith). Libraries are equipped and charged with the responsibility of enabling local community groups to make best use of their resources. Most state and national museum workers are keen to share their expertise with their regional colleagues: funding and distance are often the only barriers. These scenarios allow national conference keynote speakers to reach a much larger audience than the conference attendees. While this strategy might reduce the number of workers from regional areas who pay to attend conferences, the reality is that due to distance, other volunteer commitments, expense and family responsibilities, they probably would not attend anyway. Most regional museums and galleries and their staff might be asset-rich, but they are cash-poor, and the only way their workers get to attend conferences is if they win a bursary or grant. In 2005, Winkworth said: “the future for community museums is to locate them within local government as an integral part of the cultural, educational and economic infrastructure of the community, just like libraries and galleries” (“Fixing the Slums” 7). Fourteen years on, very little progress has been made in this direction. Those museums which have been integrated into the local council infrastructure, such as at Orange and Wagga Wagga in western New South Wales, are doing much better than those that are still stuck in ‘cultural poverty’ and trying to operate independently.However, the co-location and convergence of museums, libraries and archives is only successful if it is well managed. Helena Robinson has examined the impact on museum collection management and interpretation of five local government funded, converged collecting institutions in Australia and New Zealand and found that the process is complex and does not necessarily result in “optimal” cross-disciplinary expertise or best practice outcomes (14158).ConclusionRobinson’s research, however, did not consider community-based collecting institutions using regional libraries as sites for training and networking. By harnessing local library resources and making better use of existing communications technology it is possible to create regional hubs for professional development and collegiate support, which are not reliant on grants. If the current competitive, fly-in fly-out, self-funded model of providing professional development and support to regional museums continues, then the future for our cultural heritage collections and the dedicated volunteers who care for them is bleak. Alternatively, the scenarios I have described give regional museum workers agency to address their own professional development needs. This in no way removes the need for leadership, advocacy and coordination by national representative bodies such as AMaGA and Museums Aotearoa. If AMaGA partnered with the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) to stream their conference keynote sessions to strategically located regional libraries and used some of their annual funding from the Department of Communication and the Arts to pay for museum professionals to travel to some of those sites to deliver training, they would be investing in the nation’s social and cultural capital and addressing the professional development needs of regional museum workers. This would also increase the sustainability of our cultural heritage collections, which are valuable economic assets.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. “2071.0—Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia—Snapshot of Australia, 2016”. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Snapshot%20of%20Australia,%202016~2>.Boylan, Patrick. “The Intangible Heritage: A Challenge and an Opportunity for Museums and Museum Professional Training.” International Journal of Intangible Heritage 1 (2006): 53–65.Burton, Christine, and Jane Griffin. “More than a Museum? Understanding How Small Museums Contribute to Social Capital in Regional Communities.” Asia Pacific Journal of Arts & Cultural Management 5.1 (2008): 314–32. 17 Mar. 2019 <http://apjacm.arts.unimelb.edu.au/article/view/32>.Dunn, Anne. The Dunn Report: A Report on the Concept of Regional Collections Jobs. Adelaide: Collections Council of Australia, 2007.ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development. 2000. <http://museumstudies.si.edu/ICOM-ICTOP/comp.htm>.Kelly, Lynda. “Measuring the Impact of Museums on Their Communities: The Role of the 21st Century Museum.” New Roles and Issues of Museums INTERCOM Symposium (2006): 25–34. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://media.australianmuseum.net.au/media/dd/Uploads/Documents/9355/impact+paper+INTERCOM+2006.bb50ba1.pdf>.Museums and Galleries New South Wales (MGNSW). 2018 NSW Museums and Galleries Sector Census. Museums and Galleries of New South Wales. Data and Insights—Culture Counts. Sydney: MGNSW, 2019. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2018-NSW-Museum-Gallery-Sector-Census.pdf>Oppenheimer, Melanie. Volunteering: Why We Can’t Survive without It. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2008.Pigott, Peter. Museums in Australia 1975. Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections Including the Report of the Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Printing Service, 1975. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://apo.org.au/node/35268>.Public Sector Commission, Western Australia. 70:20:10 Framework Learning Philosophy. Perth: Government of Western Australia, 2018. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://publicsector.wa.gov.au/centre-public-sector-excellence/about-centre/702010-framework>.Robinson, Helena. “‘A Lot of People Going That Extra Mile’: Professional Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinarity in Converged Collecting Institutions.” Museum Management and Curatorship 31 (2016): 141–58.Scott, Lee. National Operations Manager, Museums Australia, Personal Communication. 22 Oct. 2018.Shaw, Iain, and Lee Davidson, Museums Aotearoa 2014 Sector Survey Report. Wellington: Victoria U, 2014. 17 Mar. 2019 <http://www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz/sites/default/files/documents/museums_aotearoa_sector_survey_2014_report_-_final_draft_oct_2015.pdf>.Smith, Alexandra. “NSW Libraries to Benefit from $60 Million Boost.” Sydney Morning Herald 24 Aug. 2018. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/nsw-libraries-to-benefit-from-60-million-boost-20180823-p4zzdj.html>. Winkworth, Kylie. “Fixing the Slums of Australian Museums; or Sustaining Heritage Collections in Regional Australia.” Museums Australia Conference Paper. Canberra: Museums Australia, 2005. ———. “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: Museums in Regional Australia.” Understanding Museums—Australian Museums and Museology. Eds. Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2011. 17 Mar. 2019 <https://nma.gov.au/research/understanding-museums/KWinkworth_2011.html>.

To Remember‘The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenisation and cultural heterogenisation.’ (Appadurai 49)While this statement has been made more than twenty years, it remains more relevant than ever. The current age is one of widespread global migrations and dis-placement. The phenomenon of globalisation is the first and major factor for this newly created shift of ground, of transmigration as defined by its etymological meaning. However, a growing number of migrations also result from social or political oppression and war as we witness the current flow of refugees from Africa or Syria to Europe and with growing momentum, from climate change, the people of Tokelau or Nauru migrating as a result of the rise of sea levels in their South Pacific homeland. Such global migrations lead to an intense co-habitation of various cultures, ethnicities and religions in host societies. In late twentieth century Giddens explains this complexity and discusses how globalisation requires a re-organisation of time and space in social and cultural life of both the host and the migrant (Giddens 14). In the host country, Appadurai terms the physical consequences of this phenomenon as the new ‘ethnoscape’ (Appadurai 51). This fact is particularly relevant to New Zealand, a country that is currently seeing an unprecedented level of immigration from various and numerous ethnic groups which is evidently influencing the makeup of its entire population.For the migrant, according to Xavier & Rosaldo, social life following migration re-establishes itself on two fronts: the first is the pre-modern manner of being present through participation in localised activities at specific locales; the second is about fostering relationships with absent others through media and across the world. These “settings for distanced relations – for relations at a distance, [are] stretched out across time and space” (Xavier & Rosaldo 8). Throughout the world, people in dis-placement reorganise their societies in both of these fronts.Dis-placement is ‘a potentially traumatic event that is collectively experienced" (Norris 128). Disaster and trauma related dis-placement as stressors happen to entire communities, not just individuals, families and neighbourhoods. Members are exposed together and it has been argued, must, therefore, recover together, (Norris 145). On one hand, in the situation of collective trauma some attachment to a new space ‘increases the likelihood that a community as a whole has the will to rebuild’ (Norris 145). On the other, it is suggested that for the individual, place attachment makes the necessary relocation much harder. It is in re-location however that the will to recreate or reproduce will emerge. Indeed part of the recovery in the case of relocation can be the reconstruction of place. The places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad. The will and ability to reimagine and re-materialise (Gupta & Ferguson 70) the lost heritage is motivational and defines resilience.This is something a great deal of communities such as the displaced Coptic community in New Zealand look to achieve, re-constructing a familiar space, where rituals and meaning can reaffirm their ideal existence, the only form of existence they have ever known before relocation. In this instance it is the reconstruction and reinterpretation of a traditional Coptic Orthodox church. Resilience can be examined as a ‘sense of community’, a concept that binds people with shared values. Concern for community and respect for others can transcend the physical and can bind disparate individuals in ways that otherwise might require more formal organisations. It has been noted that trauma due to displacement and relocation can enhance a sense of closeness and stronger belonging (Norris 139). Indeed citizen participation is fundamental to community resilience (Norris 139) and it entails the engagement of community members in formal organisations, including religious congregations (Perkins et al. 2002; Norris 139) and collective gatherings around cultural rituals. However, the displacement also strengthens the emotional ties at the individual level to the homeland, to kinfolk and to the more abstract cultural mores and ideas.Commitment and AttachmentRecalling places of collective events and rituals such as assembly halls and spaces of worship is crucially important for dis-placed communities. The attachment to place exposes the challenges and opportunities for recollecting the spirit of space in the situation of a people abroad. This in turn, raises the question of memory and its representation in re-creating the architectural qualities of the cultural space from its original context. This article offers the employ of visual representation (drawings) as a strategy of recall. To explore these ideas further, the situation of the Egyptian community of Coptic Orthodox faith, relocated, displaced and living ‘abroad’ in New Zealand is being considered. This small community that emigrated to New Zealand firstly in the 1950s then in the 1970s represents in many ways the various ethnicities and religious beliefs found in New Zealand.Rituals and congregations are held in collective spaces and while the attachment to the collective is essential, the question to be addressed here relates to the role of the physical community space in forming or maintaining the attachment to community (Pretty, Chipuer, and Bramston 78). Groups or societies use systems of shared meanings to interpret and make sense of the world. However, shared meanings have traditionally been tied to the idea of a fixed territory (Manzo & Devine-Wright 335, Xavier & Rosaldo 10). Manzo and Perkins further suggest that place attachments provide stability and are integral to self-definitions (335-350). Image by Vioula Said.Stability and self-definition and ultimately identity are in turn, placed in jeopardy with the process of displacement and de-territorilisation. Shared meanings are shifted and potentially lost when the resultant instability occurs. Norris finds that in the strongest cases, individuals, neighbourhoods and communities lose their sense of identity and self-definition when displaced due to the destruction of natural and built environments (Norris 139). This comment is particularly relevant to people who are emigrating to New Zealand as refugees from climate change such as Pasifika or from wars and oppression such as the Coptic community. This loss strengthens the requirement for something greater than just a common space of congregation, something that transcends the physical. The sense of belonging and identity in the complexity of potential cultural heterogenisation is at issue. The role of architecture in dis-placement is thereby brought into question seeking answers to how it should facilitate a space of attachment for resilience, for identity and for belonging.A unity of place and people has long been assumed in the anthropological concept of culture (Gupta & Ferguson: 75). According to Xavier & Rosaldo the historical tendency has been to connect the realm of constructing meaning to the particularities of place (Xavier & Rosaldo 10). Thereby, cultural meanings are intrinsically linked to place. Therefore, place attachment to the reproduced or re-interpreted place is crucially important for dis-placed societies in re-establishing social and cultural content. Architectural spaces are the obvious holders of cultural, social and spiritual content for such enterprises. Hillier suggests that all "architecture is, in essence, the application of speculative and abstract thought to the non-discursive aspects of building, and because it is so, it is also its application to the social and cultural contents of buildings” (Hillier 3).To Re-ImagineAn attempt to reflect the history, stories and the cultural mores of the Coptic community in exile by privileging material and design authenticity, merits attention. An important aspect of the Coptic faith lies within its adherence to symbolism and rituals and strict adherence to the traditional forms and configurations of space may reflect some authenticity of the customary qualities of the space (Said 109). However, the original space is itself in flux, changing with time and environmental conditions; as are the memories of those travelling abroad as they come from different moments in time. Experience has shown that a communities’ will to re-establish social and cultural content through their traditional architecture on new sites has not always resurrected their history and reignited their original spirit. The impact of the new context’s reality on the reproduction or re interpretation of place may not fully enable its entire community’s attachment to it. There are significant implications from the displacement of site that lead to a disassociation from the former architectural language. Consequently there is a cultural imperative for an approach that entails the engagement of community in the re-making of a cultural space before responding to the demands of site. Cultures come into conflict when the new ways of knowing and acting are at odds with the old. Recreating a place without acknowledging these tensions may lead to non-attachment. Facing cultural paradox and searching for authenticity explains in part, the value of intangible heritage and the need to privilege it over its tangible counterpart.Intangible HeritageThe intangible qualities of place and the memory of them are anchors for a dis-placed community to reimagine and re-materialise its lost heritage and to recreate a new place for attachment. This brings about the notion of the authenticity of cultural heritage, it exposes the uncertain value of reconstruction and it exhibits the struggles associated with de-territorilisation in such a process.In dealing with cultural heritage and contemporary conservation practice with today’s wider understanding of the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies, several authors discuss the relevance and applicability of the 1964 Venice Charter on architectural heritage. Glendinning argues that today’s heritage practices exploit the physical remains of the past for useful modern and aesthetic purposes as they are less concerned with the history they once served (Glendinning 3). For example, the act of modernising and restoring a historic museum is counterbalanced by its ancient exhibits thereby highlighting modern progress. Others support this position by arguing that relationships, associations and meanings that contribute to the value of a site should not be dismissed in favour of physical remains (Hill 21). Smith notes that the less tangible approaches struggle to gain leverage within conventional practice, and therefore lack authenticity. This can be evidenced in so many of our reconstructed heritage sites. This leads to the importance of the intangible when dealing with architectural heritage. Image by Vioula Said.In practice, a number of different methods and approaches are employed to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. In order to provide a common platform for considering intangible heritage, UNESCO developed the 2003 ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’. Rather than simply addressing physical heritage, this convention helped to define the intangible and served to promote its recognition. Intangible cultural heritage is defined as expressions, representations, practices, skills and knowledge that an individual a community or group recognise as their cultural heritage.Safeguarding intangible heritage requires a form of translation, for example, from the oral form into a material form, e.g. archives, inventories, museums and audio or film records. This ‘freezing’ of intangible heritage requires thoughtfulness and care in the choosing of the appropriate methods and materials. At the same time, the ephemeral aspects of intangible heritage make it vulnerable to being absorbed by the typecast cultural models predominant at any particular time. This less tangible characteristic of history and the pivotal role it plays in conveying a dialogue between the past and the present demands alternative methods. At a time when the identity of dis-placed people is in danger of being diminished by dominant host societies, the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage is critically important in re-establishing social and cultural content.Recent news has shown the destruction of many Coptic churches in Egypt, through fire at increasing rates since 2011 or by bombings such as the ones witnessed in April 2017. For this particular problem of the Coptic Community, the authors propose that visual representation of spiritual spaces may aid in recollecting and re-establishing such heritage. The illustrations in this article present the personal journey of an artist of Egyptian Copt descent drawing from her memories of a place and time within the sphere of religious rituals. As Treib suggests, “Our recollections are situational and spatialised memories; they are memories attached to places and events” (Treib 22). The intertwining of real and imagined memory navigates to define the spirit of place of a lost time and community.The act of remembering is a societal ritual and in and of itself is part of the globalised world we live in today. The memories lodged in physical places range from incidents of personal biography to the highly refined and extensively interpreted segments of cultural lore (Treib 63). The act of remembering allows for our sense of identity and reflective cultural distinctiveness as well as shaping our present lives from that of our past. To remember is to celebrate or to commemorate the past (Treib 25).Memory has the aptitude to generate resilient links between self and environment, self and culture, as well as self and collective. “Our access to the past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness or a narrator, or by the eye of a photographer. We will not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it” (van Alphen 11). This statement aligns with Smith’s critical analysis of heritage and identity, not as a set of guidelines but as a performance experienced through the imagination, “experienced within a layering of performative qualities that embody remembrance and commemoration and aim to construct a sense of place and understanding within the present”(van Alphen 11). Heritage is hereby investigated as a re-constructed experience; attempting to identify a palette of memory-informed qualities that can be applied to the re-establishing of the heritage lost. Here memory will be defined as Aristotle’s Anamnesis, to identify the capacity to stimulate a range of physical and sensory experiences in the retrieval of heritage that may otherwise be forgotten (Cubitt 75; Huyssen 80). In architectural terms, Anamnesis, refers to the process of retrieval associated with intangible heritage, as a performance aimed at the recovery of memory, experienced through the imagination (Said 143). Unfortunately, when constructing an experience aimed at the recovery of memory, the conditions of a particular moment do not, once passed, move into a state of retirement from which they can be retrieved at a later date. Likewise, the conditions and occurrences of one moment can never be precisely recaptured, Treib describes memory as an interventionist:it magnifies, diminishes, adjusts, darkens, or illuminates places that are no longer extant, transforming the past anew every time it is called to mind, shorn or undesirable reminiscence embellished by wishful thinking, coloured by present concerns. (Treib 188)To remember them, Cubitt argues, we must reconstruct them; “not in the sense of reassembling something that has been taken to pieces and carefully stored, but in the sense of imaginatively configuring something that can no longer have the character of actuality” (Cubitt 77). Image by Vioula Said.Traditionally, history and past events have been put in writing to preserve their memory within the present. However, as argued by Treib, this mode of representation is inherently linear and static; contributing to a flattening of history. Similarly, Nelson states; “I consider how a visual mode of representation – as opposed to textual or oral – helps to shape memory” (Nelson 37). The unflattening of past events can occur by actively engaging with culture and tradition through the mechanism of reconstruction and representation of the intangible heritage (Said 145). As memory becomes crucial in affirming collective identity, place also becomes crucial in anchoring such experience. Interactive exhibition facilitates this act using imagery, interpretation and physical engagement while architectural place gives distinctiveness to cultural products and practices. Architectural space is always intrinsically bound with cultural practice. Appadurai says that where a groups’ past increasingly becomes part of museums, exhibits and collection, its culture becomes less a realm of reproducible practices and more an arena of choices and cultural reproduction (59). When place is shifted (de-territorilisation in migration) the loss of territorial roots brings “an erosion of the cultural distinctiveness of places, a de-territorilisation of identity” (Gupta & Ferguson 68). According to Gupta & Ferguson, “remembered places have …. often served as symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people” (Gupta & Ferguson 69).To Re-MakeIn the context of de-territorialisation the intangible qualities of the original space offer an avenue for the creation and experience of a new space in the spirit of its source. Simply reproducing a traditional building layout in the new territory or recollecting artefacts does not suffice in recalling the essence of place, nor does descriptive writing no matter how compelling. Issues of authenticity and identity underpin both of these strategies. Accepting the historical tendency to reconnect the realm of constructing meaning to the particularities of place requires an investigation on those ‘particularities of place’. Intangible heritage can bridge the problems of being out of one’s country, overseas, or ‘abroad’. While architecture can be as Hillier suggests, “in essence, the application of speculative and abstract thought to the non-discursive aspects of building” (Hillier 3). Architecture should not be reproduced but rather re-constructed as a holder or facilitator of recollection and collective performance. It is within the performance of intangible heritage in the ‘new’ architecture that a sense of belonging, identity and reconnection with home can be experienced abroad. Its visual representation takes centre stage in the process. The situation of the Egyptian community of Coptic faith in New Zealand is here looked at as an illustration. The intangibility of architectural heritage is created through one of the author’s graphic work here presented. Image by Vioula Said.The concept of drawing as an anchor for memory and drawing as a method to inhabit space is exposed and this presents a situation where drawing has an experiential nature in itself.It has been argued that a drawing is simply an image that compresses an entire experience of temporality. Pallasmaa suggests that “every drawing is an excavation into the past and memory of its creator” (Pallasmaa 91). The drawing is considered as a process of both observation and expression, of receiving and giving. The imagined or the remembered space turns real and becomes part of the experiential reality of the viewer and of the image maker. The drawing as a visual representation of the remembered experience within the embrace of an interior space is drawn from the image maker’s personal experience. It is the expression of their own recollection and not necessarily the precise realityor qualities perceived or remembered by others. This does not suggest that such drawing has a limited value. This article promotes the idea that such visual representation has potentially a shared transformative role. The development of drawings in this realm of intangible heritage exposes the fact that the act of drawing memory may provide an intimate relationship between architecture, past events within the space, the beholder of the memory and eventually the viewer of the drawing. The drawings can be considered a reminder of moments past, and an alternative method to the physical reproduction or preservation of the built form. It is a way to recollect, express and give new value to the understanding of intangible heritage, and constructs meaning.From the development of a personal spatial and intuitive recall to produce visual expressions of a remembered space and time, the image author optimistically seeks others to deeply engage with these images of layered memories. They invite the viewer to re-create their own memory by engaging with the author’s own perception. Simply put, drawings of a personal memory are offered as a convincing representation of intangible heritage and as an authentic expression of the character or essence of place to its audience. This is offered as a method of reconstructing what is re-membered, as a manifestation of symbolic anchor and as a first step towards attachment to place. The relevance of which may be pertinent for people in exile in a foreign land.ReferencesAppadurai, A. “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography.” The Geography of Identity. Ed. Patricia Yaeger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997. 40–58. Brown, R.H., and B. Brown. “The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museum in the Construction of National Consciousness.” History of Human Sciences 11.4 (1993): 17–32.Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. London: Oxford UP, 2013.Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants. Ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006.Glendinning, Miles. The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation: Antiquity to Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013.Hill, Jennifer. The Double Dimension: Heritage and Innovation. Canberra: The Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 2004.Hillier, Bill, Space Is the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge UP, 1996.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Lira, Sergio, and Rogerio Amoeda. Constructing Intangible Heritage. Barcelos, Portugal: Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development, 2010.Manzo, Lynne C., and Douglas Perkins. “Finding Common Ground: The Importance of Place Attachment to Community Participation and Planning.” Journal of Planning Literature 20 (2006): 335–350. Manzo, Lynne C., and Patrick Devine-Wright. Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. London: Routledge. 2013.Nelson, Robert S., and Margaret Olin. Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003.Norris, F.H., S.P. Stevens, B. Pfefferbaum, KF. Wyche, and R.L. Pfefferbaum. “Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities and Strategy for Disaster Readiness.” American Journal of Community Psychology 41 (2008): 127–150.Perkins, D.D., J. Hughey, and P.W. Speer. “Community Psychology Perspectives on Social Capital Theory and Community Development Practice.” Journal of the Community Development Society 33.1 (2002): 33–52.Pretty, Grace, Heather H. Chipuer, and Paul Bramston. “Sense of Place Amongst Adolescents and Adults in Two Rural Australian Towns: The Discriminating Features of Place Attachment, Sense of Community and Place Dependence in Relation to Place Identity.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 23.3 (2003): 273–87.Said, Vioula. Coptic Ruins Reincarnated. Thesis. Master of Interior Architecture. Victoria University of Wellington, 2014.Smith, Laura Jane. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2006.Treib, Marc. Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2013.UNESCO. “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Human Heritage.” 2003. 15 Aug. 2017 <http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention>.Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.Xavier, Jonathan, and Renato Rosaldo. “Thinking the Global.” The Anthropology of Globalisation. Eds. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo. Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2002.

This article reflects on part of a three-year battle over the redevelopment of an iconic Melbourne music venue, the Palace-Metro Nightclub (the Palace), involving the tactical use of Facebook Page data at trial. We were invited by the Save the Palace group, Melbourne City Council and the National Trust of Australia to provide Facebook Page data analysis as evidence of the social value of the venue at an appeals trial heard at the Victorian Civil Administration Tribunal (VCAT) in 2016. We take a reflexive ethnographic approach here to explore the data production, collection and analysis processes as these represent and constitute a “data public”.Although the developers won the appeal and were able to re-develop the site, the court accepted the validity of social media data as evidence of the building’s social value (Jinshan Investment Group Pty Ltd v Melbourne CC [2016] VCAT 626, 117; see also Victorian Planning Reports). Through the case, we elaborate on the concept of data publics by considering the “affordising” (Pollock) processes at play when extracting, analysing and visualising social media data. Affordising refers to the designed, deliberate and incidental effects of datafication and highlights the need to attend to the capacities for data collection and processing as they produce particular analytical outcomes. These processes foreground the compositional character of data publics, and the unevenness of data literacies (McCosker “Data Literacies”; Gray et al.) as a factor of the interpersonal and institutional capacity to read and mobilise data for social outcomes.We begin by reconsidering the often-assumed connection between social media data and their publics. Taking onboard theoretical accounts of publics as problem-oriented (Dewey) and dynamically constituted (Kelty), we conceptualise data publics through the key elements of a) consequentiality, b) sufficient connection over time, c) affective or emotional qualities of connection and interaction with the events. We note that while social data analytics may be a powerful tool for public protest, it equally affords use against public interests and introduces risks in relation to a lack of transparency, access or adequate data literacy.Urban Protest and Data Publics There are many examples globally of the use of social media to engage publics in battles over urban development or similar issues (e.g. Fredericks and Foth). Some have asked how social media might be better used by neighborhood organisations to mobilise protest and save historic buildings, cultural landmarks or urban sites (Johnson and Halegoua). And we can only note here the wealth of research literature on social movements, protest and social media. To emphasise Gerbaudo’s point, drawing on Mattoni, we “need to account for how exactly the use of these media reshapes the ‘repertoire of communication’ of contemporary movements and affects the experience of participants” (2). For us, this also means better understanding the role that social data plays in both aiding and reshaping urban protest or arming third sector groups with evidence useful in social institutions such as the courts.New modes of digital engagement enable forms of distributed digital citizenship, which Meikle sees as the creative political relationships that form through exercising rights and responsibilities. Associated with these practices is the transition from sanctioned, simple discursive forms of social protest in petitions, to new indicators of social engagement in more nuanced social media data and the more interactive forms of online petition platforms like change.org or GetUp (Halpin et al.). These technical forms code publics in specific ways that have implications for contemporary protest action. That is, they provide the operational systems and instructions that shape social actions and relationships for protest purposes (McCosker and Milne).All protest and social movements are underwritten by explicit or implicit concepts of participatory publics as these are shaped, enhanced, or threatened by communication technologies. But participatory protest publics are uneven, and as Kelty asks: “What about all the people who are neither protesters nor Twitter users? In the broadest possible sense this ‘General Public’ cannot be said to exist as an actual entity, but only as a kind of virtual entity” (27). Kelty is pointing to the porous boundary between a general public and an organised public, or formal enterprise, as a reminder that we cannot take for granted representations of a public, or the public as a given, in relation to Like or follower data for instance.If carefully gauged, the concept of data publics can be useful. To start with, the notions of publics and publicness are notoriously slippery. Baym and boyd explore the differences between these two terms, and the way social media reconfigures what “public” is. Does a Comment or a Like on a Facebook Page connect an individual sufficiently to an issues-public? As far back as the 1930s, John Dewey was seeking a pragmatic approach to similar questions regarding human association and the pluralistic space of “the public”. For Dewey, “the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences [of human association] that the resultant public cannot identify itself” (157). To what extent, then, can we use data to constitute a public in relation to social protest in the age of data analytics?There are numerous well formulated approaches to studying publics in relation to social media and social networks. Social network analysis (SNA) determines publics, or communities, through links, ties and clustering, by measuring and mapping those connections and to an extent assuming that they constitute some form of sociality. Networked publics (Ito, 6) are understood as an outcome of social media platforms and practices in the use of new digital media authoring and distribution tools or platforms and the particular actions, relationships or modes of communication they afford, to use James Gibson’s sense of that term. “Publics can be reactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception” (Ito 6). Hashtags, for example, facilitate connectivity and visibility and aid in the formation and “coordination of ad hoc issue publics” (Bruns and Burgess 3). Gray et al., following Ruppert, argue that “data publics are constituted by dynamic, heterogeneous arrangements of actors mobilised around data infrastructures, sometimes figuring as part of them, sometimes emerging as their effect”. The individuals of data publics are neither subjugated by the logics and metrics of digital platforms and data structures, nor simply sovereign agents empowered by the expressive potential of aggregated data (Gray et al.).Data publics are more than just aggregates of individual data points or connections. They are inherently unstable, dynamic (despite static analysis and visualisations), or vibrant, and ephemeral. We emphasise three key elements of active data publics. First, to be more than an aggregate of individual items, a data public needs to be consequential (in Dewey’s sense of issues or problem-oriented). Second, sufficient connection is visible over time. Third, affective or emotional activity is apparent in relation to events that lend coherence to the public and its prevailing sentiment. To these, we add critical attention to the affordising processes – or the deliberate and incidental effects of datafication and analysis, in the capacities for data collection and processing in order to produce particular analytical outcomes, and the data literacies these require. We return to the latter after elaborating on the Save the Palace case.Visualising Publics: Highlighting Engagement and IntensityThe Palace theatre was built in 1912 and served as a venue for theatre, cinema, live performance, musical acts and as a nightclub. In 2014 the Heritage Council decided not to include the Palace on Victoria’s heritage register and hence opened the door for developers, but Melbourne City Council and the National Trust of Australia opposed the redevelopment on the grounds of the building’s social significance as a music venue. Similarly, the Save the Palace group saw the proposed redevelopment as affecting the capacity of Melbourne CBD to host medium size live performances, and therefore impacting deeply on the social fabric of the local music scene. The Save the Palace group, chaired by Rebecca Leslie and Michael Raymond, maintained a 36,000+ strong Facebook Page and mobilised local members through regular public street protests, and participated in court proceedings in 2015 and February 2016 with Melbourne City Council and National Trust Australia. Joining the protesters in the lead up to the 2016 appeals trial, we aimed to use social media engagement data to measure, analyse and present evidence of the extent and intensity of a sustained protest public. The evidence we submitted had to satisfy VCAT’s need to establish the social value of the building and the significance of its redevelopment, and to explain: a) how social media works; b) the meaning of the number of Facebook Likes on the Save The Palace Page and the timing of those Likes, highlighting how the reach and Likes pick up at significant events; and c) whether or not a representative sample of Comments are supportive of the group and the Palace Theatre (McCosker “Statement”). As noted in the case (Jinshan, 117), where courts have traditionally relied on one simple measure for contemporary social value – the petition – our aim was to make use of the richer measures available through social media data, to better represent sustained engagement with the issues over time.Visualising a protest public in this way raises two significant problems for a workable concept of data publics. The first involves the “affordising” (Pollock) work of both the platform and our data analysis. This concerns the role played by data access and platform affordances for data capture, along with methodological choices made to best realise or draw out the affordances of the data for our purposes. The second concerns the issue of digital and data literacies in both the social acts that help to constitute a data public in the first place, and the capacity to read and write public data to represent those activities meaningfully. That is, Facebook and our analysis constitutes a data public in certain ways that includes potentially opaque decisions or processes. And citizens (protesters or casual Facebook commenters alike) along with social institutions (like the courts) have certain uneven capacity to effectively produce or read public protest-oriented data. The risk here, which we return to in the final section, lies in the potential for misrepresentation of publics through data, exclusions of access and ownership of data, and the uneven digital literacies at each stage of data production, analysis and sensemaking.Facebook captures data about individuals in intricate detail. Its data capture strategies are geared toward targeting for the purposes of marketing, although only a small subset of the data is publicly available through the Facebook Application Programming Interface (API), which is a kind of data “gateway”. The visible page data tells only part of the story. The total Page Likes in February 2016 was 36,828, representing a sizeable number of followers, mainly located in Melbourne but including 45 countries in total and 38 different languages. We extracted a data set of 268,211 engagements with the Page between February 2013 and August 2015. This included 45,393 post Likes and 9,139 Comments. Our strategy was to demarcate a structurally defined “community” (in the SNA sense of that term as delineating clusters of people, activities and links within a broader network), by visualising the interactions of Facebook users with Posts over time, and then examine elements of intensity of engagement. In other words, we “affordised” the network data using SNA techniques to most clearly convey the social value of the networked public.We used a combination of API access and Facebook’s native Insights data and analytics to extract use-data from that Page between June 2013 and December 2015. Analysis of a two-mode or bipartite network consisting of users and Posts was compiled using vosonSML, a package in the R programming language created at Australian National University (Graham and Ackland) and visualised with Gephi software. In this network, the nodes (or vertices) represent Facebook users and Facebook Posts submitted on the Page, and ties (or edges) between nodes represent whether a user has commented on and/or liked a post. For example, a user U might have liked Post A and commented on Post B. Additionally, a weight value is assigned for the Comments ties, indicating how many times a user commented on a particular post (note that users can only like Posts once). We took these actions as demonstrating sufficient connection over time in relation to an issue of common concern.Figure 1: Network visualisation of activity on the Save the Palace Facebook Page, June 2013 to December 2015. The colour of the nodes denotes which ‘community’ cluster they belong to (computed via the Infomap algorithm) and nodes are sized by out-degree (number of Likes/Comments made by users to Posts). The graph layout is computed via the Force Atlas 2 algorithm.Community detection was performed on the network using the Infomap algorithm (Rosvall and Bergstrom), which is suited to large-scale weighted and directed networks (Henman et al.). This analysis reveals two large and two smaller clusters or groups represented by colour differences (Fig. 1). Broadly, this suggests the presence of several clusters amongst a sustained network engaging with the page over the three years. Beyond this, a range of other colours denoting smaller clusters indicates a diversity of activity and actors co-participating in the network as part of a broader community.The positioning of nodes within the network is not random – the visualisation is generated by the Force Atlas 2 algorithm (Jacomy et al.) that spatially sorts the nodes through processes of attraction and repulsion according to the observed patterns of connectivity. As we would expect, the two-dimensional spatial arrangement of nodes conforms to the community clustering, helping us to visualise the network in the form of a networked public, and build a narrative interpretation of “what is going on” in this online social space.Social value for VCAT was loosely defined as a sense of connection, sentiment and attachment to the venue. While we could illustrate the extent of the active connections of those engaging with the Page, the network map does not in itself reveal much about the sentiment, or the emotional attachment to the Save the Palace cause. This kind of affect can be understood as “the energy that drives, neutralizes, or entraps networked publics” (Papacharissi 7), and its measure presents a particular challenge, but also interest, for understanding a data public. It is often measured through sentiment analysis of content, but we targeted reach and engagement events – particular moments that indicated intense interaction with the Page and associated events.Figure 2: Save the Palace Facebook Page: Organic post reach November—December 2014The affective connection and orientation could be demonstrated through two dimensions of post “reach”: average reach across the lifespan of the Page, and specific “reach-events”. Average reach illustrates the sustained engagement with the Page over time. Average un-paid reach for Posts with links (primarily news and legal updates), was 12,015 or 33% of the total follower base – a figure well above the standard for Community Page reach at that time. Reach-events indicated particular points of intensity and illustrates the Page’s ability to resonate publicly. Figure 2 points to one such event in November 2015, when news circulated that the developers were defying stop-work orders and demolishing parts of The Palace. The 100k reach indicated intense and widespread activity – Likes, Shares, Comments – in a short timeframe. We examined Comment activity in relation to specific reach events to qualify this reach event and illustrate the sense of outrage directed toward the developers, and expressions of solidarity toward those attempting to stop the redevelopment. Affordising Data Publics and the Transformative Work of AnalyticsEach stage of deriving evidence of social value through Page data, from building public visibility and online activity to analysis and presentation at VCAT, was affected by the affordising work of the protesters involved (particularly the Page Admins), civil society groups, platform features and data structures and our choices in analysis and presentation. The notion of affordising is useful here because, as Pollock defines the term, it draws attention to the transformative work of metrics, analytics, platform features and other devices that re-package social activity through modes of datafication and analysis. The Save the Palace group mobilised in a particular way so as to channel their activities, make them visible and archival, to capture the resonant effects of their public protest through a platform that would best make that public visible to itself. The growth of the interest in the Facebook Page feeds back on itself reflexively as more people encounter it and participate. Contrary to critiques of “clicktivism”, these acts combine digital-material events and activities that were to become consequential for the public protest – such as the engagement activities around the November 2015 event described in Figure 2.In addition, presenting the research in court introduced particular hurdles, in finding “the meaningful data” appropriate to the needs of the case, “visualizing social data for social purposes”, and the need to be “evocative as well as accurate” (Donath, 16). The visualisation and presentation of the data needed to afford a valid and meaningful expression of the social significance the Palace. Which layout algorithm to use? What scale do we want to use? Which community detection algorithm and colour scheme for nodes? These choices involve challenges regarding legibility of visualisations of public data (McCosker and Wilken; Kennedy et al.).The transformative actions at play in these tactics of public data analysis can inform other instances of data-driven protest or social participation, but also leave room for misuse. The interests of developers, for example, could equally be served by monitoring protesters’ actions through the same data, or by targeting disagreement or ambiguity in the data. Similarly, moves by Facebook to restrict access to Page data will disproportionately affect those without the means to pay for access. These tactics call for further work in ethical principles of open data, standardisation and data literacies for the courts and those who would benefit from use of their own public data in this way.ConclusionsWe have argued through the case of the Save the Palace protest that in order to make use of public social media data to define a data public, multiple levels of data literacy, access and affordising are required. Rather than assuming that public data simply constitutes a data public, we have emphasised: a) the consequentiality of the movement; b) sufficient connection over time; and c) affective or emotional qualities of connection and interaction with public events. This includes the activities of the core members of the Save the Palace protest group, and the tens of thousands who engaged in some way with the Page. It also involves Facebook’s data affordances as these allow for the extraction of public data, alongside our choices in analysis and visualisation, and the court’s capacity and openness to accept all of this as indicative of the social value (connections, sentiment, attachment) it sought for the case. The Senior Member and Member presiding over the case had little knowledge of Facebook or other social media platforms, did not use them, and hence themselves had limited capacity to recognise the social and cultural nuances of activities that took place through the Facebook Page. This does not exclude the use of the data but made it more difficult to present a picture of the relevance and consequence of the data for understanding the social value evident in the contested building. While the court’s acceptance of the analysis as evidence is a significant starting point, further work is required to ensure openness, standardisation and ethical treatment of public data within public institutions like the courts. ReferencesBruns, A., and J. Burgess. “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics.” 6th European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, 25-27 August 2011. 1 Aug. 2018 <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/46515/>.Baym, N.K., and d. boyd. “Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56.3 (2012): 320-329.Dewey, J. The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry. Athens, Ohio: Swallow P, 2016 [1927].Donath, J. The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online. Cambridge: MIT P, 2014.Fredericks, J., and M. Foth. “Augmenting Public Participation: Enhancing Planning Outcomes through the Use of Social Media and Web 2.0.” Australian Planner 50.3 (2013): 244-256.Gerbaudo, P. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. New York: Pluto P, 2012.Gibson, J.J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1979.Graham, T., and R. Ackland. “SocialMediaLab: Tools for Collecting Social Media Data and Generating Networks for Analysis.” CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network). 2018. 1 Aug. 2018 <https://cran.r- project.org/web/packages/SocialMediaLab/SocialMediaLab.pdf>.Gray J., C. Gerlitz, and L. Bounegru. “Data Infrastructure Literacy.” Big Data & Society 5.2 (2018). 1 Aug. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718786316>.Halpin, T., A. Vromen, M. Vaughan, and M. Raissi. “Online Petitioning and Politics: The Development of Change.org in Australia.” Australian Journal of Political Science (2018). 1 Aug. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2018.1499010>.Henman, P., R. Ackland, and T. Graham. “Community Structure in e-Government Hyperlink Networks.” Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on e-Government (ECEG ’14), 12-13 June 2014, Brasov, Romania.Ito, M. “Introduction.” Networked Publics. Ed. K. Varnelis. Cambridge, MA.: MIT P, 2008. 1-14.Jacomy M., T. Venturini, S. Heymann, and M. Bastian. “ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software.” PLoS ONE 9.6 (2014): e98679. 1 Aug. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098679>.Jinshan Investment Group Pty Ltd v Melbourne CC [2016] VCAT 626, 117. 2016. 1 Aug. 2018 <https://bit.ly/2JGRnde>.Johnson, B., and G. Halegoua. “Can Social Media Save a Neighbourhood Organization?” Planning, Practice & Research 30.3 (2015): 248-269.Kennedy, H., R.L. Hill, G. Aiello, and W. Allen. “The Work That Visualisation Conventions Do.” Information, Communication & Society, 19.6 (2016): 715-735.Mattoni, A. Media Practices and Protest Politics: How Precarious Workers Mobilise. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.McCosker, A. “Data Literacies for the Postdemographic Social Media Self.” First Monday 22.10 (2017). 1 Aug. 2018 <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7307/6550>.McCosker, A. “Statement of Evidence: Palace Theatre Facebook Page Analysis.” Submitted to the Victorian Civil Administration Tribunal, 7 Dec. 2015. 1 Aug. 2018 <https://www.academia.edu/37130238/Evidence_Statement_Save_the_Palace_Facebook_Page_Analysis_VCAT_2015_>.McCosker, A., and M. Esther. "Coding Labour." Cultural Studies Review 20.1 (2014): 4-29.McCosker, A., and R. Wilken. “Rethinking ‘Big Data’ as Visual Knowledge: The Sublime and the Diagrammatic in Data Visualisation.” Visual Studies 29.2 (2014): 155-164.Meikle, G. Social Media: Communication, Sharing and Visibility. New York: Routledge, 2016.Papacharissi, Z. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.Pollock, N. “Ranking Devices: The Socio-Materiality of Ratings.” Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World. Eds. P.M. Leonardi, Bonnie A. Nardi, and J. Kallinikos. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 91-114.Rosvall, M., and C.T. Bergstrom. “Maps of Random Walks on Complex Networks Reveal Community Structure.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105.4 (2008): 1118-1123.Ruppert E. “Doing the Transparent State: Open Government Data as Performance Indicators.” A World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification. Eds. R. Rottenburg S.E. Merry, S.J. Park, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 1–18.Smith, N., and T. Graham. “Mapping the Anti-Vaccination Movement on Facebook.” Information, Communication & Society (2017). 1 Aug. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1418406>.Victorian Planning Reports. “Editorial Comment.” VCAT 3.16 (2016). 1 Aug. 2018 <https://www.vprs.com.au/394-past-editorials/vcat/1595-vcat-volume-3-no-16>.

Introduction Many people’s knowledge of history is gleaned through popular culture. As a result there is likely a blurring of history with myth. This is one of the criticisms of historical romance novels, which blur historical details with fictional representations. As a result of this the genre is often dismissed from serious academic scholarship. The other reason for its disregard may be that it is largely seen as women’s fiction. As ‘women’s fiction’ it is largely relegated to that of ‘low culture’ and considered to have little literary value. Yet the romance genre remains popular and lucrative. Research by the Romance Writers of America in 2016 found that the genre represents 23% of the US fiction market and generates in excess of US$1 billion per year (Romance Writers of America). Since the onset of COVID-19, sales of romance novels in the US have soared, increasing by 17% between January and May 2020. The most popular genre was the historical romance genre. In total during that period, 16.2 million romance e-books were purchased by consumers (NPD). Yet despite its popularity, romance fiction remains stuck in the pulp fiction bubble. This article draws upon an international survey conducted in June 2020 by the authors. The study aimed to understand how readers of historical romance novels (n=813) engage with historical representations in popular culture, and how they navigate issues of authenticity. Consuming History through Popular Culture: “Historical Romance Novels Bring History to Life” Popular culture presents a tangible way in which audiences can engage with history and historical practices. “The spaces scholars have no idea about – the gaps between verifiable fact – are the territory for the writer of fictional history” (de Groot 217). Historical romance writer Georgette Heyer, for example, was influenced by her father’s conviction that “the historical novel was a worthy medium for learning about the past” (Kloester 102), and readers of historical romance often echo this view. One participant in this study considered the genre a way to “learn about history, the mores and customs, the food and clothing of that particular era … and how it contrasts to modern times”. For another participant, “most historical romances are set in countries other than my own. I like learning about these other countries and cultures”. The historical romance genre, in some instances, was not the reason for reading the novel: it was the historical setting. The romance itself was often incidental: “I am more interested in the history than the romance, but if the romance is done well … [then] the tensions of the romance illustrate and highlight historical divisions”. While a focus on history rather than romance, it posits that authors are including historically accurate details, and this is recognised by readers of the genre. In fact, one contributor to the survey argued that as a member of a writers’ group they were aware of that the “majority of the writers of that genre were voracious researchers, so much so that writers of other genres (male western writers for one) were going to them for information”. While fiction provides entertainment and relaxation, reading historical romance provides an avenue for accessing history without engaging it in a scholarly environment. Participants offered examples of this, saying “I like learning about the past and novels are an easy and relaxing way to do it” and “I enjoy historical facts but don’t necessarily need to read huge historical texts about Elizabeth Woodville when I can read The White Queen.” Social and political aspects of an era were gleaned from historical romance novels that may be less evident in historical texts. For one respondent, “I enjoy the description of the attire … behaviours … the social strata, politics, behaviours toward women and women who were ahead of their time”. Yet at the same time, historical fiction provides a way for readers to learn about historical events and places that spurred them to access more factual historical sources: “when I read a novel that involves actual historic happenings, it drives me to learn if the author is representing them correctly and to learn more about the topics”. For another, the historical romance “makes me want to do some more research”. Hence, historical fiction can provide new ways of seeing the past: “I enjoy seeing the similarities between people of the past and present. Hist[orical] Fic[tion] brings us hope that we can learn and survive our present.” A consciousness of how ancestors “survived and thrived” was evident among many participants. For one, history is best learned through the eyes of the people who lived through the era. School doesn’t teach history in a way that I can grasp, but putting myself into the shoes of the ordinary people who experienced, I have a better understanding of the time. Being able to access different perspectives on history and historical events and make an emotional connection with the past allowed readers to better understand the lived experiences of those from the past. This didn’t mean that readers were ignoring the fictional nature of the genre; rather, readers were clearly aware that the author was often taking liberties with history in order to advance the plot. Yet they still enjoyed the “glimpses of history that is included in the story”, adding that the “fictional details makes the history come alive”. The Past Represents a Different Society For some, historical romances presented a different society, and in some ways a nostalgia for the past. This from one participant: I like the attention to eloquence, to good speech, to manners, to responsibility toward each other, to close personal relationships, to value for education and history, to an older, more leisurely, more thoughtful way of life. A similar view was offered by another participant: “I like the language. I like the slowness, the courtship. I like the olden time social rules of honour and respect. I like worlds in which things like sword fights might occur”. For these respondents, there is a nostalgia where things were better then than now (Davis 18). Readers clearly identified with the different social and moral behaviours that they experienced in the novels they are reading, with one identifying more with the “historical morals, ethics, and way of life than I do modern ones”. Representations of a more respectful past were one aspect that appealed to readers: “people are civil to each other”, they are “generally kinder” and have a “more traditional moral code”. An aspect of escapism is also evident: “I enjoy leaving the present day for a while”. It is a past where readers find “time and manners [that are] now lost to us”. The genre reflects time that “seemed simpler” but “of course it helps if you are in the upper class”. Many historical romance novels are set within the social sphere of the elites of a society. And these readers’ views clearly indicate this: honestly, the characters are either wealthy or will be by the end, which releases from the day to day drudgeries and to the extent possible ensures an economic “happily ever after” as well as a romantic one … . I know the reality of even the elite wasn’t as lovely as portrayed in the books. But they are a charming and sometimes thrilling fantasy to escape inside … It is in the elite social setting that a view emerges in historical romance novels that “things are simpler and you don’t have today’s social issues to deal with”. No one period of history appears to reflect this narrative; rather, it is a theme across historical periods. The intrigue is in how the storyline develops to cope with social mores. “I enjoy reading about characters who wind their way around rules and the obstacles of their society … . Nothing in a historical romance can be fixed with a quick phone call”. The historical setting is actually an advantage because history places constrictions upon a plot: “no mobile phones, no internet, no fast cars. Many a plot would be over before it began if the hero and heroine had a phone”. Hence history and social mores “limit the access of characters and allow for interesting situations”. Yet another perspective is how readers draw parallels to the historic pasts they read about: “I love being swept away into a different era and being able to see how relevant some social issues are today”. There are however aspects that readers are less enamoured with, namely the lack of sex. While wholesome, particularly in the case of Christian authors, other characters are heroines who are virgins until after marriage, but even then may be virgins for “months or years after the wedding”. Similarly, “I deplore the class system and hate the inequalities of the past, yet I love stories where dukes and earls behave astonishingly well and marry interesting women and where all the nastiness is overcome”. The Problem with Authenticity The results of the international historical romance survey that forms the basis of this research indicate that most readers and writers alike were concerned with authenticity. Writers of historical romance novels often go to great lengths to ensure that their stories are imbued with historically accurate details. For readers, this “brings the characters and locales to life”. For readers, “characters can be fictional, but major events and ways of living should be authentic … dress, diet, dances, customs, historic characters”. Portraying historical accuracy is appreciated by readers: “I appreciate the time and effort the author takes to research subjects and people from a particular time period to make their work seem more authentic and believable”. Georgette Heyer, whose works were produced between 1921 and 1974, is considered as the doyenne of regency romance novels (Thurston 37), with a reputation for exacting historical research (Kloester 209). Heyer’s sway is such that 88 (10.8%) of the respondents to the romance survey cited her when asked who their favourite author is, with some also noting that she is a standard for other authors to aspire to. For one participant, I only read one writer of historical romance: Georgette Heyer. Why? Sublime writing skills, characterisation, delicious Wodehousian humour and impeccable accurate and research into the Regency period. Despite this prevailing view, “Heyer’s Regency is a selective one, and much of the broader history of the period is excluded from it” (Kloester 210). Heyer’s approach to history is coloured by the various approaches and developments to historiography that occurred throughout the period in which she was writing (Kloester 103). There is little evidence that she approached her sources with a critical eye and it appears that she often accepted her sources as historical fact (Kloester 112). Heyer’s works are devoid of information as to what is based in history and what was drawn from her imagination (Kloester 110). Despite the omissions above, Heyer has a reputation for undertaking meticulous research for her novels. This, however, is problematic in itself, as Alexandra Stirling argues: “in trying to recreate Regency patterns of speech by applying her knowledge of historical colloquialism, she essentially created her own dialect” that has come to “dominate the modern genre” (Stirling). Heyer is also highly criticised for both her racism (particularly anti-Semitism), which is reflected in her characterisation of Regency London as a society of “extreme whiteness”, which served to erase “the reality of Regency London as a cosmopolitan city with people of every skin colour and origin, including among the upper classes” (Duvezin-Caubet 249). Thus Heyer’s Regency London is arguably a fantasy world that has little grounding in truth, despite her passion for historical research. Historical romance author Felicia Grossman argues that this paradox occurs as “mixed in with [Heyer’s] research is a lot of pure fiction done to fit her personal political views” (Grossman), where she deliberately ignores historical facts that do not suit her narrative, such as the sociological implications of the slave trade and the very public debate about it that occurred during the regency. The legacy of these omissions can be found in contemporary romances set in that period. By focussing on, and intensifying, a narrow selection of historical facts, “the authentic is simultaneously inauthentic” (Hackett 38). For one participant, “I don’t really put much stock into “historical accuracy” as a concept, when I read a historical romance, I read it almost in the way that one would read a genre fantasy novel, where each book has its own rules and conventions”. Diversifying the Bubble The intertwining of history and narrative posits how readers separate fact from fiction. Historical romance novels have often been accused by both readers and critics of providing a skewed view on the past. In October 2019 the All about Romance blog asked its readers: “Does Historical Romance have a quality problem?”, leading to a strong debate with many contributors noting how limited the genre had developed, with the lack of diversity being a particular strain of discussion. Just a few weeks later, the peak industry body, the Romance Writers Association of America, became embroiled in a racism controversy. Cultural products such as romance novels are products of a wider white heteronormative paradigm which has been increasingly challenged by movements such as the LGBTQI+, Me Too, and Black Lives Matter, which have sought to address the evident racial imbalance. The lack of racial representation and racial equality in historical novels also provides an opportunity to consider contemporary ideals. Historical romance novels for one participant provided a lens through which to understand the “challenges for women and queers”. Being a genre that is dominated by both female writers and readers (the Romance Writers Association claims that 82% of readers are female), it is perhaps no surprise that many respondents were concerned with female issues. For one reader, the genre provides a way to “appreciate the freedom that women have today”. Yet it remains that the genre is fictional, allowing readers to fantasise about different social and racial circumstances: “I love the modern take on historical novels with fearless heroines living lives (they maybe couldn’t have) in a time period that intrigues me”. Including strong women and people of colour in the genre means those once excluded or marginalised are centralised, suggesting historical romance novels provide a way of fictionally going some way to re-addressing gender and racial imbalances. Coupled with romance’s guarantee of a happy ending, the reader is assured that the heroine has a positive outcome, and can “have it all”, surely a mantra that should appeal to feminists. “Historical romance offers not just escape, but a journey – emotional, physical or character change”; in this view, readers positively respond to a narrative in which plots engage with both the positive and negative sides of history. One participant put it this way: “I love history especially African American history. Even though our history is painful it is still ours and we loved just like we suffered”. Expanding the Bubble Bridgerton (2020–), the popular Netflix show based upon Julia Quinn’s bestselling historical romance series, challenges the whitewashing of history by presenting an alternative history. Choosing a colour-blind cast and an alternate reality where racism was dispelled when the King marries a woman of colour and bestowed honours on citizens of all colours, Bridgerton’s depiction of race has generally been met with positive reviews. The author of the series of books that Bridgerton is adapted from addressed this point: previously, I’ve gotten dinged by the historical accuracy police. So in some ways, I was fearful – if you do that, are you denying real things that happened? But you know what? This is already romantic fantasy, and I think it’s more important to show that as many people as possible deserve this type of happiness and dignity. So I think they made the absolutely right choice, bringing in all this inclusivity (Quinn cited in Flood). Despite the critics, and there have been some, Netflix claims that the show has placed “number one in 83 countries including the US, UK, Brazil, France, India and South Africa”, which they credited partly to audiences who “want to see themselves reflected on the screen” (Howe). There is no claim to accuracy, as Howe argues that the show’s “Regency reimagined isn’t meant to be history. It’s designed to be more lavish, sexier and funnier than the standard period drama”. As with the readers surveyed above, this is a knowing audience who are willing to embrace an alternate vision of the past. Yet there are aspects which need to remain, such as costume, class structure, technology, which serve to signify the past. As one participant remarked, “I love history. I love reading what is essentially a fantasy-realism setting. I read for escapism and it’s certainly that”. “The Dance of History and Fiction” What is evident in this discussion is what Griffiths calls the “dance of history and fiction”, where “history and fiction … are a tag team, sometimes taking turns, sometimes working in tandem, to deepen our understanding and extend our imagination” (Griffiths). He reminds us that “historians and novelists do not constitute inviolable, impermeable categories of writers. Some historians are also novelists and many novelists are also historians. Historians write fiction and novelists write history”. More so, “history doesn’t own truth, and fiction doesn’t own imagination”. Amongst other analysis of the intersections and juxtaposition of history and fiction, Griffiths provides one poignant discussion, that of Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River (2006). According to the author's own Website, The Secret River caused controversy when it first appeared, and become a pawn in the “history wars” that continues to this day. How should a nation tell its foundation story, when that story involves the dispossession of other people? Is there a path between the “black armband” and the “white blindfold” versions of a history like ours? In response to the controversy Grenville made an interesting if confusing argument that she does not make a distinction between “story-telling history” and “the discipline of History”, and between “writing true stories” and “writing History” (Griffiths). The same may be said for romance novelists; however, it is in their pages that they are writing a history. The question is if it is an authentic history, and does that really matter? References Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. Free Press, 1979. De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. Florence Taylor and Francis, 2009. Duvezin-Caubet, Caroline. "Gaily Ever After: Neo-Victorian M/M Genre Romance for the Twenty-First Century." Neo-Victorian Studies 13.1 (2020). Flood, Alison. "Bridgerton Author Julia Quinn: 'I've Been Dinged by the Accuracy Police – but It's Fantasy!'." The Guardian 12 Jan. 2021. 15 Jan. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/12/bridgerton-author-julia-quinn-accuracy-fantasy-feisty-rakish-artistocrats-jane-austen>. Griffiths, Tom. "The Intriguing Dance of History and Fiction." TEXT 28 (2015). Grossman, Felicia. "Guest Post: Georgette Heyer Was an Antisemite and Her Work Is Not Foundational Historical Romance." Romance Daily News 2021 (2020). <https://romancedailynews.medium.com/guest-post-georgette-heyer-was-an-antisemite-and-her-work-is-not-foundational-historical-romance-fc00bfc7c26>. Hackett, Lisa J. "Curves & a-Lines: Why Contemporary Women Choose to Wear Nostalgic 1950s Style Clothing." Sociology. Doctor of Philosophy, University of New England, 2020. 320. Howe, Jinny. "'Bridgerton': How a Bold Bet Turned into Our Biggest Series Ever." Netflix, 27 Jan. 2021. <https://about.netflix.com/en/news/bridgerton-biggest-series-ever>. Kloester, Jennifer V. "Georgette Heyer: Writing the Regency: History in Fiction from Regency Buck to Lady of Quality 1935-1972." 2004. NPD. "Covid-19 Lockdown Gives Romance a Lift, the NPD Group Says." NPD Group, 2020. 2 Feb. 2021 <https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/2020/covid-19-lockdown-gives-romance-a-lift--the-npd-group-says/>. Romance Writers of America. "About the Romance Genre." 2016. 2 Feb. 2021 <https://www.rwa.org/Online/Romance_Genre/About_Romance_Genre.aspx>. Stirling, Alexandra. "Love in the Ton: Georgette Heyer's Legacy in Regency Romance World-Building." Nursing Clio. Ed. Jacqueline Antonovich. 13 Feb. 2020. <https://nursingclio.org/2020/02/13/love-in-the-ton-georgette-heyers-legacy-in-regency-romance-world-building/>. Thurston, Carol. The Romance Revolution : Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM.Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is possibly the best known cinematic example of HM, and this film version of the 1986 novel by Winston Groom particularly excels in seamlessly inserting images of a fictional character into verified history, as represented by well-known television newsreel footage. In Zemeckis’s adaptation, gaps were created in the celluloid artefact and filled digitally with images of the actor, Tom Hanks, playing the eponymous role. Words are often deemed less trustworthy than images, however, and fiction is considered particularly unreliable--although there are some exceptions conceded. In addition to Gregory’s novel; Midnight’s Children (1980) by Salman Rushdie; The Name of the Rose (1983) by Umberto Eco; and The Flashman Papers (1969-2005) by George MacDonald Fraser, are three well-known, loved and lauded examples of literary HM, which even if they fail to convince the reader of their bona fides, nevertheless win a place in many hearts. But despite the genre’s popularity, there is nevertheless a conceptual gap in the literary theory of Hutcheon given her (perfectly understandable) inability in 1988 to predict the future of e-publishing. This article will attempt to address that shortcoming by exploring the potential for authors of HM e-novels to use hyperlinks which immediately direct the reader to fact providing webpages such as those available at the website Wikipedia, like a much speedier (and more independent) version of the footnotes in Fraser’s Flashman novels.Of course, as Roland Barthes declared in 1977, “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” (146) and, as per any academic work that attempts to contribute to knowledge, a text’s sources--its “quotations”--must be properly identified and acknowledged via checkable references if credibility is to be securely established. Hence, in explaining the way claims to fact in the HM novel can be confirmed by independently published experts on the Internet, this article will also address the problem Hutcheon identifies, in that for many readers the entirety of the HM novel assumes questionable authenticity, that is, the novel’s “meta-fictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3). This article (and the PhD in creative writing I am presently working on at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia) will possibly develop the concept of HM to a new level: one at which the Internet-connected reader of the hyperlinked e-novel is made fully (and even instantly) aware of those literary elements of the narrative that are legitimate and factual as distinct from those that are fictional, that is, illegitimate. Furthermore, utilising examples from my own (yet-to-be published) hyperlinked HM e-novel, this article demonstrates that such hyperlinking can add an ironic sub-text to a fictional character’s thoughts and utterances, through highlighting the reality concerning their mistaken or naïve beliefs, thus creating HM narratives that serve an entertainingly complex yet nevertheless truly educational purpose.As a relatively new and under-researched genre of historical writing, HM differs dramatically from the better known style of standard historical or biographical narrative, which typically tends to emphasise mimesis, the cataloguing of major “players” in historical events and encyclopaedic accuracy of dates, deaths and places. Instead, HM involves the re-contextualisation of real-life figures from the past, incorporating the lives of entirely (or, as in the case of Gregory’s Mary Boleyn, at least partly) fictitious characters into their generally accepted famous and factual activities, and/or the invention of scenarios that gel realistically--but entertainingly--within a landscape of well-known and well-documented events. As Hutcheon herself states: “The formal linking of history and fiction through the common denominators of intertextuality and narrativity is usually offered not as a reduction, as a shrinking of the scope and value of fiction, but rather as an expansion of these” ("Intertextuality", 11). Similarly, Gregory emphasises the need for authors of HM to extend themselves beyond the encyclopaedic archive: “Archives are not history. The trouble with archives is that the material is often random and atypical. To have history, you have to have a narrative” (University of Sussex). Functionally then, HM is an intertextual narrative genre which serves to communicate to a contemporary audience an expanded story or stories of the past which present an ultimately more self-reflective, personal and unpredictable authorship: it is a distinctly auteurial mode of biographical history writing for it places the postmodern author’s imaginative “signature” front and foremost.Hutcheon later clarified that the quest for historical truth in fiction cannot possibly hold up to the persuasive powers of a master novelist, as per the following rationale: “Fact is discourse-defined: an event is not” ("Historiographic Metafiction", 843). This means, in a rather simplistic nutshell, that the new breed of HM novel writer is not constrained by what others may call fact: s/he knows that the alleged “fact” can be renegotiated and redefined by an inventive discourse. An event, on the other hand, is responsible for too many incontrovertible consequences for it to be contested by her/his mere discourse. So-called facts are much easier for the HM writer to play with than world changing events. This notion was further popularised by Ansgar Nunning when he claimed the overtly explicit work of HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). HM authors can radically alter, it seems, the way the reader perceives the facts of history especially when entertaining, engaging and believable characters are deliberately devised and manipulated into the narrative by the writer. Little wonder, then, that Hutcheon bemoans the unfortunate reality that for many readers the entirety of a HM work assumes questionable “veracity” due to its author’s insertion of imaginary and therefore illegitimate personages.But there is an advantage to be found in this, the digital era, and that is the Internet’s hyperlink. In our ubiquitously networked electronic information age, novels written for publication as e-books may, I propose, include clickable links on the names of actual people and events to Wikipedia entries or the like, thus strengthening the reception of the work as being based on real history (the occasional unreliability of Wikipedia notwithstanding). If picked up for hard copy publication this function of the HM e-novel can be replicated with the inclusion of icons in the printed margins that can be scanned by smartphones or similar gadgets. This small but significant element of the production reinforces the e-novel’s potential status as a new form of HM and addresses Hutcheon’s concern that for HM novels, their imaginative but illegitimate invention of characters “renders their claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic, to say the least” ("Historiographic Metafiction: Parody", 3).Some historic scenarios are so little researched or so misunderstood and discoloured by the muddy waters of time and/or rumour that such hyperlinking will be a boon to HM writers. Where an obscure facet of Australian history is being fictionalised, for example, these edifying hyperlinks can provide additional background information, as Glenda Banks and Martin Andrew might have wished for when they wrote regarding Bank’s Victorian goldfields based HM novel A Respectable Married Woman. This 2012 printed work explores the lives of several under-researched and under-represented minorities, such as settler women and Aboriginal Australians, and the author Banks lamented the dearth of public awareness regarding these peoples. Indeed, HM seems tailor-made for exposing the subaltern lives of those repressed individuals who form the human “backdrop” to the lives of more famous personages. Banks and Andrew explain:To echo the writings of Homi K. Bhaba (1990), this sets up a creative site for interrogating the dominant, hegemonic, ‘normalised’ master narratives about the Victorian goldfields and ‘re-membering’ a marginalised group - the women of the goldfields, the indigenous [sic], the Chinese - and their culture (2013).In my own hyperlinked short story (presently under consideration for publishing elsewhere), which is actually a standalone version of the first chapter of a full-length HM e-novel about Aboriginal Australian activists Eddie Mabo and Chicka Dixon and the history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, entitled The Bullroarers, I have focussed on a similarly under-represented minority, that being light-complexioned, mixed race Aboriginal Australians. My second novel to deal with Indigenous Australian issues (see Starrs, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance), it is my first attempt at writing HM. Hopefully avoiding overkill whilst alerting readers to those Wikipedia pages with relevance to the narrative theme of non-Indigenous attitudes towards light-complexioned Indigenous Australians, I have inserted a total of only six hyperlinks in this 2200-word piece, plus the explanatory foreword stating: “Note, except where they are well-known place names or are indicated as factual by the insertion of Internet hyperlinks verifying such, all persons, organisations, businesses and places named in this text are entirely fictitious.”The hyperlinks in my short story all take the reader not to stubs but to well-established Wikipedia pages, and provide for the uninformed audience the following near-unassailable facts (i.e. events):The TV program, A Current Affair, which the racist character of the short story taken from The Bullroarers, Mrs Poulter, relies on for her prejudicial opinions linking Aborigines with the dealing of illegal drugs, is a long-running, prime-time Channel Nine production. Of particular relevance in the Wikipedia entry is the comment: “Like its main rival broadcast on the Seven Network, Today Tonight, A Current Affair is often considered by media critics and the public at large to use sensationalist journalism” (Wikipedia, “A Current Affair”).The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, located on the lawns opposite the Old Parliament House in Canberra, was established in 1972 and ever since has been the focus of Aboriginal Australian land rights activism and political agitation. In 1995 the Australian Register of the National Estate listed it as the only Aboriginal site in Australia that is recognised nationally for representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their political struggles (Wikipedia, “The Aboriginal Tent Embassy”).In 1992, during an Aboriginal land rights case known as Mabo, the High Court of Australia issued a judgment constituting a direct overturning of terra nullius, which is a Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one”, and which had previously formed the legal rationale and justification for the British invasion and colonisation of Aboriginal Australia (Wikipedia, “Terra Nullius”).Aboriginal rights activist and Torres Strait Islander, Eddie Koiki Mabo (1936 to 1992), was instrumental in the High Court decision to overturn the doctrine of terra nullius in 1992. In that same year, Eddie Mabo was posthumously awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Awards (Wikipedia, “Eddie Mabo”).The full name of what Mrs Poulter blithely refers to as “the Department of Families and that” is the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (Wikipedia, “The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs”).The British colonisation of Australia was a bloody, murderous affair: “continuous Aboriginal resistance for well over a century belies the ‘myth’ of peaceful settlement in Australia. Settlers in turn often reacted to Aboriginal resistance with great violence, resulting in numerous indiscriminate massacres by whites of Aboriginal men, women and children” (Wikipedia, “History of Australia (1788 - 1850)”).Basically, what is not evidenced empirically with regard to the subject matter of my text, that is, the egregious attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians towards Indigenous Australians, can be extrapolated thanks to the hyperlinks. This resonates strongly with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s assertion in 2012 that those under-represented by mainstream, patriarchal epistemologies need to be engaged in acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” (143) so as to be re-presented as authentic identities in these HM artefacts of literary research.Exerting auteurial power as an Aboriginal Australian author myself, I have sought to imprint on my writing a multi-levelled signature pertaining to my people’s under-representation: there is not just the text I have created but another level to be considered by the reader, that being my careful choice of Wikipedia pages to hyperlink certain aspects of the creative writing to. These electronic footnotes serve as politically charged acts of “reclaiming, reformulating and reconstituting” Aboriginal Australian history, to reuse the words of Smith, for when we Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away from the colonising overseers, our readers witness the Other writing back, critically. As I have stated previously (see Starrs, "Writing"), receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed rational, enlightened and civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately eroded and made into the Other: s/he is rendered the villainous, predatory savage by the auteurial signatures in revisionist histories such as The Bullroarers.Whilst the benefit in these hyperlinks as electronic educational footnotes in my short story is fairly obvious, what may not be so obvious is the ironic commentary they can make, when read in conjunction with the rest of The Bullroarers. Although one must reluctantly agree with Wayne C. Booth’s comment in his classic 1974 study A Rhetoric of Irony that, in some regards, “the very spirit and value [of irony] are violated by the effort to be clear about it” (ix), I will nevertheless strive for clarity and understanding by utilizing Booth’s definition of irony “as something that under-mines clarities, opens up vistas of chaos, and either liberates by destroying all dogmas or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (ix). The reader of The Bullroarers is not expecting the main character, Mrs Poulter, to be the subject of erosive criticism that destroys her “dogmas” about Aboriginal Australians--certainly not so early in the narrative when it is unclear if she is or is not the protagonist of the story--and yet that’s exactly what the hyperlinks do. They expose her as hopelessly unreliable, laughably misinformed and yes, unforgivably stupid. They reveal the illegitimacy of her beliefs. Perhaps the most personally excoriating of these revelations is provided by the link to the Wikipedia entry on the Australian Government’s Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, which is where her own daughter, Roxy, works, but which Mrs Poulter knows, gormlessly, as “the Department of Families and that”. The ignorant woman spouts racist diatribes against Aboriginal Australians without even realising how inextricably linked she and her family, who live at the deliberately named Boomerang Crescent, really are. Therein lies the irony I am trying to create with my use of hyperlinks: an independent, expert adjudication reveals my character, Mrs Poulter, and her opinions, are hiding an “inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation” (Booth ix), despite the air of easy confidence she projects.Is the novel-reading public ready for these HM hyperlinked e-novels and their potentially ironic sub-texts? Indeed, the question must be asked: can the e-book ever compete with the tactile sensations a finely crafted, perfectly bound hardcover publication provides? Perhaps, if the economics of book buying comes into consideration. E-novels are cheap to publish and cheap to purchase, hence they are becoming hugely popular with the book buying public. Writes Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, a successful online publisher and distributor of e-books: “We incorporated in 2007, and we officially launched the business in May 2008. In our first year, we published 140 books from 90 authors. Our catalog reached 6,000 books in 2009, 28,800 in 2010, 92,000 in 2011, 191,000 in 2012 and as of this writing (November 2013) stands at over 250,000 titles” (Coker 2013). Coker divulged more about his company’s success in an interview with Forbes online magazine: “‘It costs essentially the same to pump 10,000 new books a month through our network as it will cost to do 100,000 a month,’ he reasons. Smashwords book retails, on average, for just above $3; 15,000 titles are free” (Colao 2012).In such a burgeoning environment of technological progress in publishing I am tempted to say that yes, the time of the hyperlinked e-novel has come, and to even predict that HM will be a big part of this new wave of postmodern literature. The hyperlinked HM e-novel’s strategy invites the reader to reflect on the legitimacy and illegitimacy of different forms of narrative, possibly concluding, thanks to ironic electronic footnoting, that not all the novel’s characters and their commentary are to be trusted. Perhaps my HM e-novel will, with its untrustworthy Mrs Poulter and its little-known history of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy addressed by gap-filling hyperlinks, establish a legitimising narrative for a people who have traditionally in white Australian society been deemed the Other and illegitimate. Perhaps The Bullroarers will someday alter attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians to the history and political activities of this country’s first peoples, to the point even, that as Nunning warns, we witness a change in the “hegemonic discourse of history” (353). If that happens we must be thankful for our Internet-enabled information age and its concomitant possibilities for hyperlinked e-publications, for technology may be separated from the world of art, but it can nevertheless be effectively used to recreate, enhance and access that world, to the extent texts previously considered illegitimate achieve authenticity and veracity.ReferencesBanks, Glenda. A Respectable Married Woman. Melbourne: Lacuna, 2012.Banks, Glenda, and Martin Andrew. “Populating a Historical Novel: A Case Study of a Practice-led Research Approach to Historiographic Metafiction.” Bukker Tillibul 7 (2013). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://bukkertillibul.net/Text.html?VOL=7&INDEX=2›.Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977.Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.Colao, J.J. “Apple’s Biggest (Unknown) Supplier of E-books.” Forbes 7 June 2012. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/06/07/apples-biggest-unknown-supplier-of-e-books/›.Coker, Mark. “Q & A with Smashwords Founder, Mark Coker.” About Smashwords 2013. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹https://www.smashwords.com/about›.Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver, San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.Forrest Gump. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Paramount Pictures, 1994.Fraser, George MacDonald. The Flashman Papers. Various publishers, 1969-2005.Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. NY: Doubleday, 1986.Gregory, Philippa. The Other Boleyn Girl. UK: Scribner, 2001.Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 1988.---. “Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History: A Poetics of Postmodernism History, Theory, Fiction.” 1988. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_3553.pdf›.---. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” Eds. P. O’Donnell and R.C. Davis, Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins UP, 1989. 3-32.---. “Historiographic Metafiction.” Ed. Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 830-50.Nunning, Ansgar. “Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet.” Style 38.3 (2004): 352-75.Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012.---. “Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?” M/C Journal 17.4 (2014). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/834›.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. London & New York: Zed Books, 2012.University of Sussex. “Philippa Gregory Fills the Historical Gaps.” University of Sussex Alumni Magazine 51 (2012). 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.scribd.com/doc/136033913/University-of-Sussex-Alumni-Magazine-Falmer-issue-51›.Wikipedia. “A Current Affair.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Current_Affair›.---. “Aboriginal Tent Embassy.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tent_Embassy›.---. “Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Families,_Housing,_Community_Services_and_Indigenous_Affairs›.---. “Eddie Mabo.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Mabo›.---. “History of Australia (1788 – 1850).” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Australia_(1788%E2%80%931850)#Aboriginal_resistance›.---. “Terra Nullius.” 2014. 19 Sep. 2014 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius›.

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. 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. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. By sharing knowledge publicly, through this article and other means such as an online wiki, we advocate for a city that is open to multimodal readings, makes space for sharing, and is owned by those who live in it. References Armstrong, Helen. “Post-Urban/Suburban Landscapes: Design and Planning the Centre, Edge and In-Between.” After Sprawl: Post Suburban Sydney: E-Proceedings of Post-Suburban Sydney: The City in Transformation Conference, 22-23 November 2005, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, Sydney. 2006.Bendiner-Viani, Gabrielle. “Walking, Emotion, and Dwelling.” Space and Culture 8.4 (2005): 459-71. Berry, Vanessa. Mirror Sydney. Sydney: Giramondo, 2017.Castles, Stephen, Jock Collins, Katherine Gibson, David Tait, and Caroline Alorsco. “The Global Milkbar and the Local Sweatshop: Ethnic Small Business and the Economic Restructuring of Sydney.” Centre for Multicultural Studies, University of Wollongong, Working Paper 2 (1991).Crosby, Alexandra, and Kirsten Seale. “Counting on Carrington Road: Street Numbers as Metonyms of the Urban.” Visual Communication 17.4 (2018): 1-18. Crosby, Alexandra. “Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance.” Mapping Edges, 2018. 25 Jun. 2018 <http://www.mappingedges.org/news/marrickville-maps-tropical-imaginaries-abundance/>.Cook, Nicole. “Performing Housing Affordability: The Case of Sydney’s Green Bans.” Housing and Home Unbound: Intersections in Economics, Environment and Politics in Australia. Eds. Nicole Cook, Aidan Davidson, and Louise Crabtree. London: Routledge, 2016. 190-203.Davidson, Mark, and Kurt Iveson. “Recovering the Politics of the City: From the ‘Post-Political City’ to a ‘Method of Equality’ for Critical Urban Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 39.5 (2015): 543-59. De Certeau, Michel. “Spatial Stories.” What Is Architecture? Ed. Andrew Ballantyne. London: Routledge, 2002. 72-87.Dobson, Stephen. “Sustaining Place through Community Walking Initiatives.” Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development 1.2 (2011): 109-21. Garrett, Bradley. “Picturing Urban Subterranea: Embodied Aesthetics of London’s Sewers.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 48.10 (2016): 1948-66. Gibson, Chris, and Shane Homan. “Urban Redevelopment, Live Music, and Public Space: Cultural Performance and the Re-Making of Marrickville.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 10.1 (2004): 67-84. Gibson, Chris, Carl Grodach, Craig Lyons, Alexandra Crosby, and Chris Brennan-Horley. Made in Marrickville: Enterprise and Cluster Dynamics at the Creative Industries-Manufacturing Interface, Carrington Road Precinct. Report DP17010455-2017/2, Australian Research Council Discovery Project: Urban Cultural Policy and the Changing Dynamics of Cultural Production. QUT, University of Wollongong, and Monash University, 2017.Glazman, Evan. “‘Ghetto Tours’ Are the Latest Cringeworthy Gentrification Trend in NYC”. Konbini, n.d. 5 June 2017 <http://www.konbini.com/us/lifestyle/ghetto-tours-latest-cringeworthy-gentrification-trend-nyc/>. Graham, Sonia, and John Connell. “Nurturing Relationships: the Gardens of Greek and Vietnamese Migrants in Marrickville, Sydney.” Australian Geographer 37.3 (2006): 375-93. Gros, Frédéric. A Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso Books, 2014.Hall, Tom. “Footwork: Moving and Knowing in Local Space(s).” Qualitative Research 9.5 (2009): 571-85. Heddon, Dierdre, and Misha Myers. “Stories from the Walking Library.” Cultural Geographies 21.4 (2014): 1-17. Iveson, Kurt. “Building a City for ‘The People’: The Politics of Alliance-Building in the Sydney Green Ban Movement.” Antipode 46.4 (2014): 992-1013. Iveson, Kurt, Craig Lyons, Stephanie Clark, and Sara Weir. “The Informal Australian City.” Australian Geographer (2018): 1-17. Jones, Phil, and James Evans. “Rescue Geography: Place Making, Affect and Regeneration.” Urban Studies 49.11 (2011): 2315-30. Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly. Gentrification. New York: Routledge, 2008.Legacy, Crystal, Nicole Cook, Dallas Rogers, and Kristian Ruming. “Planning the Post‐Political City: Exploring Public Participation in the Contemporary Australian City.” Geographical Research 56.2 (2018): 176-80. Lovink, Geert, and David Garcia. “The ABC of Tactical Media.” Nettime, 1997. 3 Oct. 2018 <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html>.Mitchell, Don. “New Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Paying Attention to Political Economy and Social Justice.” Political Economies of Landscape Change. Eds. James L. Wescoat Jr. and Douglas M. Johnson. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008. 29-50.Morris, Brian. “What We Talk about When We Talk about ‘Walking in the City.’” Cultural Studies 18.5 (2004): 675-97. Mudie, Ella. “Unbuilding the City: Writing Demolition.” M/C Journal 20.2 (2017).Phillips, Andrea. “Cultural Geographies in Practice: Walking and Looking.” Cultural Geographies 12.4 (2005): 507-13. Pink, Sarah. “An Urban Tour: The Sensory Sociality of Ethnographic Place-Making.”Ethnography 9.2 (2008): 175-96. Pink, Sarah, Phil Hubbard, Maggie O’Neill, and Alan Radley. “Walking across Disciplines: From Ethnography to Arts Practice.” Visual Studies 25.1 (2010): 1-7. Quiggin, John. “Blogs, Wikis and Creative Innovation.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.4 (2006): 481-96. Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. Vol. 28. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.Ruming, Kristian. “Post-Political Planning and Community Opposition: Asserting and Challenging Consensus in Planning Urban Regeneration in Newcastle, New South Wales.” Geographical Research 56.2 (2018): 181-95. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.Steinbrink, Malte. “‘We Did the Slum!’ – Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective.” Tourism Geographies 14.2 (2012): 213-34. Tissot, Sylvie. Good Neighbours: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End. London: Verso, 2015.