Journal articles on the topic 'Landscape photography Australia'

Repeat photography is a technique of detecting changes in the landscape by comparing old and more recent photographs taken at the same place. Information gained is used to detect landscape change as one component of historical ecology. Understanding the causes of any change detected requires additional information. The technique was pioneered in vegetation ecology in Arizona and has since been applied in many other parts of the United States. After a description of the technique, the American experience is reviewed and the problems of detecting change and assigning cause are discussed. The relatively few Australian examples are briefly summarised. There are many limitations of repeat photography, but these can be controlled through a careful approach. Although repeat photography has rarely been used in Australia, it has significant applications in education, in understanding past changes and in helping to help predict future changes in vegetation.

Agricultural landscapes in southern Australia were once dominated by temperate eucalypt woodlands of which only fragmented patches and scattered trees in paddocks remain. This study focuses on the decline of scattered trees in the Mount Lofty Ranges and South East agricultural regions of South Australia. A combination of digitized aerial photography and satellite imagery was used to extend a previous assessment of decline undertaken in the early 1980s and increase the period over which decline was assessed to 58–72 years. A total of 17 049 scattered trees were counted from the earliest time period assessed over 11 sites of which 6 185 trees were lost by 2008 — a 36 % decline. Recruitment of 2 179 trees during this period was evident. Imagery indicates that clearing for agricultural intensification is the primary cause of the decline. A range of management options and policy settings are required to reverse the decline notwithstanding the challenges of implementation at a landscape scale across privately owned land.

Stratified ground-truthing was undertaken within an area of approximately 30 km2 of tropical savanna across an abrupt sandstone escarpment in the monsoon tropics of Australia. Comparison of aerial photographs from 1941 and 1994 had previously revealed a landscape-wide expansion of closed forest and contraction of grassland patches. Good congruence between field measurements and the vegetation classifications from the 1994 aerial photography supported the authenticity of the vegetation changes. The relative abundance of rainforest and non-rainforest tree species also concurred with mapped vegetation transitions. Changes in individual size classes of rainforest species, which are relatively fire sensitive, were consistent with the primacy of fire in controlling the distribution of the closed-forest formation. Fire scars previously mapped from satellite imagery were used to derive a fire activity index for contrasting vegetation transitions. Savannas that had converted to closed forest had lower fire activity than did stable savannas. Conversely, closed forests that converted to savanna had the highest fire activity index. The landscape-wide expansion of rainforest is associated with the cessation of Aboriginal fire management, possibly in conjunction with elevated CO2 and increasing annual rainfall.

Allosyncarpia ternata S.T.Blake is a large tree endemic to the rugged western edge of the Arnhem Land Plateau, northern Australia, with most of the species conserved in Kakadu National Park (KNP). A. ternata stems suffer substantial mortality following wildfire but the species resprouts prolifically from root stocks. Nonetheless, there is concern about the persistence of A. ternata rainforest patches following breakdown of traditional Aboriginal landscape burning that generated a mosaic of burnt and unburnt areas. Generalised linear modelling was used to identify the landscape features associated with the fragmentary distribution of A. ternata rainforest. We randomly sampled 12 areas that together made up 12.6% of the total coverage of A. ternata in KNP (12 191 ha) that spanned the geographic range of this vegetation type within the Park. The modelling of these data showed that A. ternata forests were most likely to occur at sites with fire protection, as inferred from the small number of fire scars apparent on sequences of satellite imagery, steep slope angles and proximity to drainage lines. Analysis of historical aerial photography revealed that, despite considerable negative and positive variation, there has been a 21% expansion of A. ternata forests over the last 50 years. Expansion occurred by incremental growth from existing forest boundaries and not by nucleation, reflecting the poor seed dispersal of the tree. The forest expansion was negatively correlated with fire activity. A regionally wetter climate since the mid-20th century may be an important cause of the expansion despite currently unfavourable fire regimes.

Alligator weed (Alternanthera philoxeroides (Mart.) Griseb) forms dense infestations in aquatic environments and is the focus of intensive management programs in many jurisdictions within Australia, including Victoria. A critical component of weed biosecurity programs is surveillance to find the location and extent of the target weed so that control strategies can be implemented. Current approaches within Victoria rely heavily on ground surveys and community reporting. However, these methods do not provide a systematic approach to surveillance across landscapes, resulting in undiscovered infestations. The aim of this study was to detect alligator weed from aerial photography and demonstrate the potential use of remote sensing data to support existing ground surveys and monitoring programs. Two random forest algorithms were trained based on data from 2010 and 2016. Both classifiers had high levels of accuracy, with an overall pixel-based classification accuracy of 96.8% in 2010 and 98.2% in 2016. The trained classifiers were then applied to imagery acquired annually between 2010 and 2016. The classification outputs were combined with class probability and water proximity data to produce a weighted, normalised alligator weed likelihood data layer. These datasets were evaluated by assessing alligator weed patch detection rates, using manually delineated areas of weed for each year. The patch detection rates for each year ranged from 76.5% to 100%. The results also demonstrate the use of this approach for monitoring alligator weed infestations at a site over time. The key outcome of the study is an approach to support existing biosecurity monitoring and surveillance efforts at a landscape scale and at known infested localised sites.

Variations of naturally emitted gamma radiation have been used in geological prospecting for over 20 years to detect anomalies associated with exploitable ore deposits. We examined their ability to detect spatial variation of soil material by comparing simultaneous ground and airborne measurements of gamma emissions with ground observations over a catchment in south-western Australia. Measurements were taken in the spectral windows for 40K, 238Uand 232Th. Variations of gamma radiation corresponded with the distribution of soil-forming materials over the landscape, and were used to distinguish between highly weathered residuum and fresh material from granitic outcrops. Gamma radiometric data also discriminated clearly between doleritic, lateritic and granitic soil parent materials. Airborne data indicated the distribution of these materials through the catchment, with the exception of dolerite dikes, which were too narrow to be detected using pixels greater than 20 m wide. It is concluded that gamma radiometric data can provide valuable insights into the spatial distribution of soil-forming materials but, given their limitations to provide direct information of pedological alteration, such data are likely to prove most valuable to soil survey when considered jointly with other information such as terrain models or aerial photography.

The spatial distribution of Phytophthora cinnamomi Rands at seven dieback sites in the jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata Donn. ex Smith) forest of Western Australia was determined by the following two baiting techniques: in situ baiting with live Banksia grandis Willd. seedlings and ex situ baiting of sampled soil and root material. Four areas within each site were sampled, reflecting dieback age and position in the landscape. Approximate dieback ages of 50, 20 and 5 years were determined by aerial photography. The 50-year-old age class was divided into wet valley floor and dry gravelly slope. Phytophthora cinnamomi was recovered most frequently from the 5-year-old (dieback fronts) and wet 50-year-old areas by both baiting techniques. It was recovered from more than twice as many areas and about five times as many samples when in situ B. grandis baits were used compared with ex situ soil and root baiting. Almost all recoveries from in situ baits were made between October and December. From both methods, it appears that P. cinnamomi has a patchy distribution within dieback sites in the northern jarrah forest. It is easily detected only on dieback fronts and wet valley floors. On dry gravelly sites affected 20 years or more ago, P. cinnamomi is rare and may even be absent at some sites. This makes confident detection of the pathogen difficult. In situ baiting at least allows a temporal component to the sampling and will be a useful method of detection in areas where P. cinnamomi is rare or transient.

Gendered meanings, particularly around sentiment and attachment, shape hierarchies of value that organize our understandings of the creation, reproduction, and circulation of landscape photography. To explore these ideas, this article considers Australian wilderness diaries and calendars, which began to emerge in the late 1970s. Popular landscape photography is often derided as merely showing pristine, repetitive scenes: technically perfect shots of sunsets or snowy mountain peaks. Such images in mass-market print culture have been critiqued for presenting wilderness as separate from human intervention. Yet despite their limitations, diaries and calendars, as they move into gendered domestic spaces, do important work. Images of wilderness in everyday use provoke the question of how sentimental attachments toward landscapes might prompt environmental awareness and action.

To understand how newcomers and established immigrants perceive cultural landscapes that have been imbued with a nationality’s cultural meanings and heritage, exploring the cultural background and landscape myths and values of that immigrants’ community can be a starting point. Examining whether immigrants perceive or prefer those values in a new landscape setting requires a wider understanding of immigrants’ activities, preferences, and expectations.The present paper aims to investigate how Australian urban park landscape settings may be perceived by Iranian immigrants in terms of having aesthetic attributes, and how they use these spaces. It approaches the issue of immigration and park experiences through seeking the links between park settings and the way immigrants see and interpret them based on their cultural, social, and geographical backgrounds. It particularly focuses on Iranian immigrants and Iran’s cultural landscape to explore different views of constructed natural landscapes and their effects on park usage and aesthetic preferences. This study explores how the icons of Iranian cultural landscape (Persian garden), urban park design, and past park use patterns of these immigrants may mediate interactions with new park environments, and how they may contribute to evoke a ‘sense of aesthetic’. It applies survey questionnaire, semi-structured indepth individual interview, and Q methodology with photographs as research methods, and employs theories of ‘place’ and ‘landscape visual characters’ to explore park usage and aesthetic preferences in both contexts: Iran and Australia.Findings of this study highlight the preference of undertaking ‘passive activities’ in urban park landscapes by Iranian research participants and demonstrate that they highly admire the aesthetic and picturesque aspects of Australian park landscapes. However, they miss the characteristics of Iran’s parks as well as the recreational, social, and sporting activities they used to carry out there.

This visual essay charts a series of relational, immersive engagements made between myself and the landscape of the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges in South Australia as part of my practice-led Ph.D. titled ‘Subtle bodies: Corporeal and material becoming in threshold landscapes’. Within my research I consider this remote environment as a threshold between the earth and its atmosphere and engage with it as a way of exploring the lesser trodden territories of sensed experience and the ways in which knowing and being may unfold here. In this essay I will discuss these encounters with reference to Elizabeth Grosz’s thinking regarding the concepts of affect, becoming and sensation, alongside photographic images of my performative encounters with material in the landscape.

Models to calibrate tree and shrub cover assessed from aerial photography with field measurements were developed for a range of vegetation types in north-western Australia. The models verify previous studies indicating that woody cover can be successfully determined from aerial photography. The calibration models were applied to estimates of woody vegetation cover determined for 279 randomly located sample areas in the Ord–Victoria Rivers region using aerial photography from 1948 to 1950 and 1988 to 1997. Overstorey cover increased from a regional average of 11.5% to 13.5% and understorey cover increased from 1.3% to 2.0%. Downs, Limestone Hills and Alluvia land-types showed the most substantial increases in overstorey cover while overstorey cover in the Limestone plains land-type decreased. Relatively open structured vegetation is most susceptible to thickening. Rainfall records reveal an extreme multi-year rainfall deficit in the study area in the 1930s and relatively wet times in the 1970s and 1980s. Interpretation of a limited set of aerial photographs taken between 1964 and 1972 suggests that most of the increases in cover have occurred since this time. The study highlights the possibility that the average trend of vegetation thickening represents recovery during the relatively wet times after the 1970s. There was no relationship between structural change and a grazing intensity surrogate (distance of sample points to stock watering-points). However, the causes of structural change are undoubtedly multi-factored and the relative contributions of climate, fire and grazing vary for different landscapes and tree species.

Models to calibrate tree and shrub cover assessed from aerial photography with field measurements were developed for a range of vegetation types in north-western Australia. The models verify previous studies indicating that woody cover can be successfully determined from aerial photography. The calibration models were applied to estimates of woody vegetation cover determined for 279 randomly located sample areas in the Ord–Victoria Rivers region using aerial photography from 1948 to 1950 and 1988 to 1997. Overstorey cover increased from a regional average of 11.5% to 13.5% and understorey cover increased from 1.3% to 2.0%. Downs, Limestone Hills and Alluvia land-types showed the most substantial increases in overstorey cover while overstorey cover in the Limestone plains land-type decreased. Relatively open structured vegetation is most susceptible to thickening. Rainfall records reveal an extreme multi-year rainfall deficit in the study area in the 1930s and relatively wet times in the 1970s and 1980s. Interpretation of a limited set of aerial photographs taken between 1964 and 1972 suggests that most of the increases in cover have occurred since this time. The study highlights the possibility that the average trend of vegetation thickening represents recovery during the relatively wet times after the 1970s. There was no relationship between structural change and a grazing intensity surrogate (distance of sample points to stock watering-points). However, the causes of structural change are undoubtedly multi-factored and the relative contributions of climate, fire and grazing vary for different landscapes and tree species.

The objectives of this study were to develop a systematic approach to identify important soil morphological and vegetation field indicators to better target land management in degraded landscapes in a specific region. The authors were able to link the soil-landscape features to the main soil and water processes operating within the landscape. This information was used to develop a set of field indicators (e.g. soil colour) within a user-friendly soil classification key that is linked to land use options to form the basis of a manual. It was shown that information written in this format helped farmers and regional advisers to identify options for remediation of waterlogged and saline areas and to improve planning at property and catchment scales. The authors identified a series of steps to be taken in producing the manual. Steps 1–5 describe the soil layers and construct them in toposequences, which are then used to map soil types in key surrounding areas. Steps 6–9 involve the local community in developing the manual.The paper provides an account of how manuals have been produced for 2 badly degraded areas in southern Australia (Mount Lofty Ranges, South Australia; and western Victoria) and promotes the methodologies for other regions. Descriptive soil information is pictorially integrated along toposequences and applied to identify key soil features. Complex scientific processes and terminology are more simply communicated to local groups using coloured cross-sectional diagrams and photographs of soil and vegetation to overcome some of the perceived barriers to adoption of best management practices. We consider the approach should have generic application.

In the mid-1950s Western Desert of Australia, Aboriginal populations were in decline as families left for ration depots, cattle stations, and mission settlements. In the context of reduced population density, an ideal free-distribution model predicts landscape use should contract to the most productive habitats, and people should avoid areas that show more signs of extensive prior use. However, ecological or social facilitation due to Allee effects (positive density dependence) would predict that the intensity of past habitat use should correlate positively with habitat use. We analyzed fire footprints and fire mosaics from the accumulation of several years of landscape use visible on a 35,300-km2mosaic of aerial photographs covering much of contemporary Indigenous Martu Native Title Lands imaged between May and August 1953. Structural equation modeling revealed that, consistent with an Allee ideal free distribution, there was a positive relationship between the extent of fire mosaics and the intensity of recent use, and this was consistent across habitats regardless of their quality. Fire mosaics build up in regions with low cost of access to water, high intrinsic food availability, and good access to trade opportunities; these mosaics (constrained by water access during the winter) then draw people back in subsequent years or seasons, largely independent of intrinsic habitat quality. Our results suggest that the positive feedback effects of landscape burning can substantially change the way people value landscapes, affecting mobility and settlement by increasing sedentism and local population density.

Abstract This paper investigates the Linguistic Landscape of Chinese restaurants in Hurstville, a Chinese-concentrated suburb in Sydney, Australia. It draws on Blommaert and Maly’s (2016) Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis (ELLA) and Scollon and Scollon’s geosemiotics (2003). Our data set consists of photographs, Google Street View archives, and ethnographic fieldwork, in particular in-depth interviews with restaurant owners. This paper adopts a diachronic perspective to compare the restaurant scape between 2009 and 2019 and presents an ELLA case study of a long-standing Chinese restaurant. It aims to unveil the temporal and spatial relationships between signs, agents, and place, that demonstrate how a social and historical perspective in Linguistic Landscape studies of diasporic communities can shed light on the changes in the broader social context.

Aerial photographs were used to assess changes in woody vegetation cover at 122 locations within a sandstone-plateau savanna woodland in the Victoria River region, Northern Territory, Australia. Despite locally variable vegetation responses, there has been little change in total woody vegetation cover since 1948. Thirty-three locations were also surveyed on the ground. It was found that sites for which vegetation cover had changed over the 50-y period were not significantly different from stable sites in terms of floristic composition, recent fire history, demographic stability among the dominant tree species, or edaphic setting. However, two of the dominant overstorey tree species – Eucalyptus tetrodonta and Eucalyptus phoenicea – showed significantly higher mortality on sites that had experienced vegetation cover decline since 1948. We suggest that observed changes in woody vegetation cover are a consequence of natural cycles of die-back and recovery of at least these two species in response to spatially heterogenous variables such as dry-season moisture stress. Although the widespread decline of fire-sensitive Callitris intratropica populations clearly indicates a historical shift from lower- to higher-intensity burning conditions within the study area, we reject the hypothesis of a landscape-wide process such as changing fire regimes or climatic change as the driving factor behind large-scale vegetation changes detected by aerial photographic analysis.

There has been growing interest in engaging citizen scientists in the collection of environmental data to inform conservation efforts and decision making, and to augment formal monitoring programmes. Citizen scientists can collect data across large spatial and temporal scales that cannot be feasibly covered through traditional research and monitoring programmes. The ‘Porcupine Ray Hunt’ was a pilot study that engaged the Australian recreational SCUBA diving community in collecting information on the porcupine ray Urogymnus asperrimus, an easily identifiable but rare and poorly understood species. ‘Crowd sourcing’ of recreational divers was achieved by advertising the programme through diving publications, the internet, e-mail lists and social media (facebook and blogs). Dive clubs, dive shops and research stations also advertised the project. Recreational divers were required to submit photographs and observations for verification and 29 new valid records were received. Submissions also included video footage of foraging and mating behaviour. The submissions received doubled the number of existing records on the species in Australia, identified distribution ‘hot spots’, provided a depth range for the species and extended the species’ range. In doing so, the project demonstrated the potential for citizen scientists to contribute valuable knowledge about rare species, addressing some of the knowledge gaps concerning the porcupine ray and providing preliminary data for future research.

Abstract Increased attention to urban diversity as a site of study has fostered the recent development of linguistic landscape studies. To date, however, much of the research in this area has concerned the use and spread of English to the exclusion of other global languages. In a case study situated in Box Hill, a large suburb of Melbourne, we adopted a layered approach to investigate the role of Chinese language in Australia. Our data set consisted of hundreds of photographs of street signage in one square block area of the shopping district. Results of our analyses show that signage portrays a variety of code preferences and semiotic choices that in turn reveal insights into the identities, ideologies, and strategies that help to structure the urban environment. As demonstrated in our study, such complexity requires a renewed and situated understanding of key principles of linguistic landscape research (Ben-Rafael & Ben-Rafael, 2015).

Studies attempting to calibrate vegetation attributes from aerial photography with field data are reviewed in detail. It is concluded that aerial photography has considerable advantages over satellite-based data because of its capacity to assess the vertical dimension of vegetation and the longer time period the record spans. Limitations of using the aerial photo record as digital data include standardising image contrast and rectification. Some of these problems can be circumvented by manual techniques, but problems of crown exaggeration that varies with photo scale and variation in contrast between the textures of tree crowns and the ground remain. Applications of aerial photography for assessing vegetation change are also reviewed and include deforestation, reforestation, changes in vegetation boundaries, tree density, community composition and crown dieback. These changes have been assessed at scales ranging from individual tree crowns to regional landscapes. In Australia, aerial photography has provided a clear demonstration of deforestation rates and the expansion and contraction of forest and woodland, which is generally attributed to changes in grazing and fire regimes. It is suggested that manual techniques with point-based sampling, digital processing of data for complete spatial coverages and the application of photogrammetric measurements with stereo-plotters are all techniques with great promise for utilising this underrated medium for assessment of vegetation dynamics.

SUMMARYVolunteer-collected data have become widely used, largely because of a perception of cost efficiency, however, the quality of these data is often questioned. This paper analyses the quality of visual estimates of seagrass cover collected by trained volunteers in Moreton Bay (Australia) which has c. 25 000 ha of seagrass habitat. Seagrass was routinely monitored by trained volunteers at 51 sites (50 × 50 m area of intertidal flat) using standardized protocols. Volunteers walked three transects at low tide and assessed the percentage of substrate covered by seagrass within quadrats (50 × 50 cm in area) using photographic guides. Of 33 samples (quadrats) taken at each site, nine (27%) were photographed and later scored by coordinating scientists. The visual estimation of per cent seagrass cover by volunteers was highly correlated with that of scientists and can therefore be used as a reliable source of base-line information about seagrasses in Moreton Bay. The qualities of this successful community-based monitoring programme include expert scientific and multi-organizational involvement, simple methods and result dissemination.

A series of photographs, mostly taken between 1952 and 1990 at three sites on the lower Ord River, Kimberley Region, Western Australia, was used to demonstrate that photographs can be used to describe environmental change in situations where there are no documented records. This study examined changes to riparian vegetation caused by the construction of two dams. The study has important implications for development of water allocation plans. In the post-dam era, relative hydrological stability brought about by curtailment of large floods and provision of perpetual flow in a once-seasonal river has allowed extensive development of emergent aquatic and fringing woodland communities throughout the study reach. The emergent aquatic communities and most of their component species were previously absent but the tree component of fringing woodland communities comprises species that were present before the dams were constructed, albeit in isolated, sheltered pockets. Limitations to the use of photographs included absence of any images through the first 50 years of pastoral use of the area, limited number of sites that attracted photographers and limits to the discernible detail (e.g. identity of species, even most trees, in landscape images).

A Review of: Lloyd, A., & Wilkinson, J. (2017). Tapping into the information landscape: Refugee youth enactment of information literacy in everyday spaces. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0961000617709058 Abstract Objective – To describe the ways in which refugee youth use everyday information to support their learning. Design – Photo voice technique, a process by which the population under consideration is provided with cameras and asked to visually document an aspect of their experience. Setting – Social agency in New South Wales, Australia Subjects – Fifteen 16-25 year old refugees resettled from South Sudan or Afghanistan Methods – Three workshops were conducted. In the first, participants learned how to use the cameras and the protocols for participation. Between the first and second workshops, participants took several photographs of places, sources and types of information that were personally meaningful. In the second workshop, participants were first split into small groups to share and discuss the five images that they selected as their most important information sources and later reconvened as a large group in which participants again shared and discussed their images. In the third and final workshop, the authors shared their findings and analysis with the participants and invited discussion. The authors analyzed both photos and group transcripts from the workshops using Charmaz’s constant comparative method. Main Results – Refugee youth use digital, vernacular, meditational, and visual literacies in everyday settings in to order to understand and create their new information landscapes. Information literacy enactment is agile and responsive to context. Conclusion – Engaging with digital, vernacular, and visual information in a variety of contexts is central to how young refugees (re)form their information landscapes.

The capeweed (Arctotheca calendula) content of pastures in the agricultural areas of Western Australia was estimated from coloured aerial photographs taken during flowering. Linear regressions were obtained between a visual score for capeweed content based on colour and the actual capeweed content of calibration sites. Surveys in 1972, 1973 and 1975 showed that 1973 was a year of high capeweed content in all areas compared with 1972 and 1975. The content was higher in lower-rainfall wheatbelt areas, where it averaged about 50% of pasture dry matter in 1973, than in the high-rainfall grazing areas, where the average was 37%. Fluctuations from year to year were followed on fixed sites between 1973 and 1977. The high rainfall sites varied more from year to year in capeweed content than did the low-rainfall sites. A detailed survey of one farm was made between 1972 and 1976 and this confirmed the indications from the other broadscale surveys that 1973 and 1976 were years that favoured capeweed. They were years when germination was followed by a 4-5 week dry period. Soil type and position in the landscape were also shown to influence the capeweed content of pastures.

Prior to this study, isolated trees were largely isolated from research. This study has provided a methodology, rigorous assessment of isolated tree density and distribution, and identified the potential ecological, social and economic importance of isolated trees, in a relatively small, but probably typical area of the wheat-sheep zone of eastern Australia. The abundance and decline of isolated native trees was measured by line-intersect sampling in the highly fragmented agricultural landscapes of the mid-Lachlan Valley of central New South Wales, Australia. A total of 7 000 trees were sampled along 5 678 km of transect on 441 aerial photographs. An isolated tree was defined as having no neighbouring tree within 25 m. The density of trees outside of remnants patches is low (0.3/ha) and has generally declined by 20% since the 1960s. The 1990s density of isolated trees equates to 275 000 trees across 830 000 ha of agricultural land not occupied by remnant vegetation patches larger than about 10 ha. The density of isolated trees was found to vary with land use with consistently fewer trees in cultivated areas compared to areas with no traces of cultivation. The isolated trees that remain within the agricultural landscape are not uniformly scattered. They exist as widely spaced clusters of isolated trees with 50% of trees having a nearest neighbouring tree within 25-49 m and less than 10% of trees had a nearest neighbour within a distance class greater than 100 m. Compared to the 1960s, isolated trees are now more isolated - the nearest neighbour distance has increased. The mean diameter of isolated tree crowns has significantly increased from 15 m in the 1960s to 18 m in the 1990s. The total canopy cover of isolated trees from the 1990s samples was 0.8% of the total study area below 400 m asl. A reversal in isolated tree decline will only occur if trees are replanted, or existing trees fenced to promote regeneration. Otherwise, isolated trees are dieing relicts of 150 years of clearing and intensive agriculture. This is of concern considering that we do not fully understand their value. We speculate on some of the ecological, economic and social values of these trees.

Automated monitoring of vegetation health in a landscape is often attributed to calculating values of various vegetation indexes over a period of time. However, such approaches suffer from an inaccurate estimation of vegetational change due to the over-reliance of index values on vegetation’s colour attributes and the availability of multi-spectral bands. One common observation is the sensitivity of colour attributes to seasonal variations and imaging devices, thus leading to false and inaccurate change detection and monitoring. In addition, these are very strong assumptions in a citizen science project. In this article, we build upon our previous work on developing a Semantic Vegetation Index (SVI) and expand it to introduce a semantic vegetation health monitoring platform to monitor vegetation health in a large landscape. However, unlike our previous work, we use RGB images of the Australian landscape for a quarterly series of images over six years (2015–2020). This Semantic Vegetation Index (SVI) is based on deep semantic segmentation to integrate it with a citizen science project (Fluker Post) for automated environmental monitoring. It has collected thousands of vegetation images shared by various visitors from around 168 different points located in Australian regions over six years. This paper first uses a deep learning-based semantic segmentation model to classify vegetation in repeated photographs. A semantic vegetation index is then calculated and plotted in a time series to reflect seasonal variations and environmental impacts. The results show variational trends of vegetation cover for each year, and the semantic segmentation model performed well in calculating vegetation cover based on semantic pixels (overall accuracy = 97.7%). This work has solved a number of problems related to changes in viewpoint, scale, zoom, and seasonal changes in order to normalise RGB image data collected from different image devices.

This study provides an interpretive perspective on the linguistic landscape (LL) of ethnic Persian shops in the city of Sydney, Australia. Photographic data and ethnographic observations demonstrate how linguistic and cultural displays on ethnic Persian shops are organized in different frames which are driven by local symbolic markets. These frames are investigated through an analysis of linguistic and semiotic resources drawn on these ethnic premises. The study also illustrates that the trajectory of the Persian language and its semiotic resources as mediational tools frame the collective identity of the sign producers (social actors) and symbolic and cultural means that are activated in the LL of such ethnic shops. These framing devices promote minority languages, Persian in specific, as valuable resources and commodities in the multicultural context of Sydney, and point to the possible impact of those resources on the local political economy of language. In addition, the findings reinforce the view that patterns of multilingualism are not static and are influenced by a number of factors such as cultural, economic and linguistic resources which individuals and officials use in the public space.

The abundant dinosaurian tracksites of the Lower Cretaceous (Valanginian–Barremian) Broome Sandstone of the Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia, form an important part of the West Kimberley National Heritage Place. Previous attempts to document these tracksites using traditional mapping techniques (e.g., surface overlays, transects and gridlines combined with conventional photography) have been hindered by the non-trivial challenges associated with working in this area, including, but not limited to: (1) the remoteness of many of the tracksites; (2) the occurrence of the majority of the tracksites in the intertidal zone; (3) the size and complexity of many of the tracksites, with some extending over several square kilometres. Using the historically significant and well-known dinosaurian tracksites at Minyirr (Gantheaume Point), we show how these issues can be overcome through the use of an integrated array of remote sensing tools. A combination of high-resolution aerial photography with both manned and unmanned aircraft, airborne and handheld high-resolution lidar imaging and handheld photography enabled the collection of large amounts of digital data from which 3D models of the tracksites at varying resolutions were constructed. The acquired data encompasses a very broad scale, from the sub-millimetre level that details individual tracks, to the multiple-kilometre level, which encompasses discontinuous tracksite exposures and large swathes of coastline. The former are useful for detailed ichnological work, while the latter are being employed to better understand the stratigraphic and temporal relationship between tracksites in a broader geological and palaeoecological context. These approaches and the data they can generate now provide a means through which digital conservation and temporal monitoring of the Dampier Peninsula’s dinosaurian tracksites can occur. As plans for the on-going management of the tracks in this area progress, analysis of the 3D data and 3D visualization will also likely provide an important means through which the broader public can experience these spectacular National Heritage listed landscapes.

Unlike other magazines, few people subscribe to wedding magazines and, as most are annual publications, their presence on the publishing landscape is relatively intermittent and unobtrusive. Nevertheless, these publications provide a rich context for examining intersections between advertisements and editorials. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic and textual analysis of wedding magazines produced in Australia. I argue that the distinction between advertisement and editorial is not a useful analytical tool in this context. This is because the vast majority of advertisements and editorial pages in a wedding magazine appear almost identical: page after page of glossy photographs of wedding dresses. Rather, what is striking is the manner in which the magazine editors and advertising clients, in their discussions as each magazine issue is produced, negotiate the fine distinctions they perceive between advertising and editorial content. At stake in these negotiations is not just the economic success of both editor and client, but also their reputations as expert manipulators of symbolic representations.

Understanding the causes of savanna–forest dynamics is vital as small but widespread changes in the extent of tropical forests can have major impacts on global climate, biodiversity and human well-being. Comparison of aerial photographs for 50 rain-forest patches in Kakadu National Park had previously revealed a landscape-wide monotonic expansion of rain-forest boundaries between 1964 and 2004. Here floristic, structural, environmental and disturbance attributes of the changes were investigated by sampling 588 plots across 30 rain-forest patches. Areas that had changed from savanna to rain forest were associated with a significantly higher abundance of rain-forest trees and less grasses, relative to stable savanna areas. Ordination analyses showed that overall floristic composition was not significantly different between newly established rain forest and longer established rain forest. Generalized linear models also indicated that contemporary levels of disturbance (fire and feral animal impact) and environmental variables (slope and soil texture) were poor predictors of historical vegetation change. We concluded that (1) the rain-forest boundaries are highly dynamic at the decadal scale; (2) rain-forest expansion is consistent with having been driven by global environmental change phenomena such as increases in rainfall and atmospheric CO2; and (3) expansion will continue if current climatic trends and management conditions persist.

This report examines the recovery rates of 3D seismic lines in the Cooper Basin, SA, 1992–2015. There are now more than 70,103 km of 3D seismic line in the Cooper Basin. There are a variety of impacts caused by seismic exploration, with the visual impact being the prime concern raised by stakeholders. The recovery rates of 3D seismic lines vary between differing land systems. Some land systems, such as dune and floodplain, are dynamic, while others, such as gibber plain, are less so. A historical database consisting of 2,018 videos and photographs was used to score the visibility of seismic lines at various locations and times. A new methodology of visually scoring this data was created, using a scale ranging from 1 (the survey dominates the landscape) to 5 (the survey is no longer visible). Data analysis showed that seismic lines in dune land systems are likely to recover within seven years, seismic lines in floodplain land systems are likely to recover within eight years, and seismic lines in gibber plain land systems are likely to take 10–20 years to recover to a visibility score of 4 or 5. To arrive at a more accurate determination of seismic line recovery in salt lake, wetland and tableland land systems, more extensive data collection is recommended.

Fire intensity affects ecological and geophysical processes in fire-prone landscapes. We examined the potential for satellite imagery (Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre [SPOT2] and Landsat7) to detect and map fire severity patterns in a rugged landscape with variable vegetation near Sydney, Australia. A post-fire, vegetation-based indicator of fire intensity (burnt shrub branch tip diameters, representing the size of fuel consumed) was also used to explore whether fire severity patterns can be used to retrospectively infer patterns of fire intensity. Six severity classes (ranging from unburnt to complete crown consumption) were defined using aerial photograph interpretation and a field assessment across five vegetation types of varying height and complexity (sedge-swamp, heath, woodland, open forest, and tall forest). Using established Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) differencing methodology, SPOT2 and Landsat7 imagery yielded similar broad-scale severity patterns across the study area. This was despite differences in image resolution (10 m and 30 m, respectively) and capture dates (2 months and 9 months apart, respectively). However, differences in the total areas mapped for some severity classes were found. In particular, there was reduced differentiation between unburnt and low-severity areas and between crown-scorched and crown-consumed areas when using the Landsat7 data. These differences were caused by fine-scale classification anomalies and were most likely associated with seasonal differences in vegetation condition (associated with time of image capture), post-fire movement of ash, resprouting of vegetation, and low sun elevation. Relationships between field severity class and NDVIdifference values revealed that vegetation type does influence the detection of fire severity using these types of satellite data: regression slopes were greater for woodland, forest, and tall forest data than for sedge-swamp and heath data. The effect of vegetation type on areas mapped in each fire severity class was examined but found to be minimal in the present study due to the uneven distribution of vegetation types in the study area (woodland and open forest cover 86% of the landscape). Field observations of burnt shrub branch tips, which were used as a surrogate for fire intensity, revealed that relationships between fire severity and fire intensity are confounded by vegetation type (mainly height). A method for inferring fire intensity from remotely sensed patterns of fire severity was proposed in which patterns of fire severity and vegetation type are combined.

Humpback whales Megaptera novaeangliae were severely depleted by commercial whaling. Understanding key factors in their recovery is a crucial step for their conservation worldwide. In Oceania, the Chesterfield-Bellona archipelago was a primary whaling site in the 19th century, yet has been left almost unaffected by anthropogenic activities since. We present the results of the first multidisciplinary dedicated surveys in the archipelago assessing humpback whale populations 2 centuries post-whaling. We encountered 57 groups during 24 survey days (2016-2017), among which 35 whales were identified using photographs of natural markings (photo-ID), 38 using genotyping and 22 using both. Humpback whales were sparsely distributed (0.041 whales km-1): most sightings concentrated in shallow inner-reef waters and neighbouring offshore shallow banks. The recently created marine protected area covers most of the areas of high predicted habitat suitability and high residence time from satellite-tracked whales. Surprisingly for a breeding area, sex ratios skewed towards females (1:2.4), and 45% of females were with calf. Connectivity was established with the New Caledonia breeding area to the east (mtDNA FST = 0.001, p > 0.05, 12 photo-ID and 10 genotype matches) and with the Australian Great Barrier Reef breeding area to the west (mtDNA FST = 0.006, p > 0.05). Movement of satellite-tracked whales and photo-ID matches also suggest connections with the east Australian migratory corridor. This study confirms that humpback whales still inhabit the Chesterfield-Bellona archipelago 2 centuries post whaling, and that this pristine area potentially plays a role in facilitating migratory interchange among breeding grounds of the western South Pacific.

After nearly 450 years of colonial administration, Portugal returned the territory of Macao to the People's Republic of China in 1999. Following the handover, Macao's postcolonial government dismantled the forty-year-old local gambling monopoly and opened Macao to investment by gaming companies from North America, Australia, and Hong Kong. These companies are collectively spending $25 billion to tap the increasingly affluent and mobile market of tourists just across the border in mainland China. This investment has prompted remarkable economic development in the tiny city as well as a phantasmagoric transformation of the cityscape and a concomitant transmutation of Macao's social landscape. Understanding contemporary Macao requires attending to how the legacies of Portuguese colonialism and fascism and Chinese communism and market socialism merge in the spaces of the city today. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin's dialectical analysis of the obsolete commodities of mass culture, this paper meditates through text and photographs on four copresent moments of Macao—socialist fossil, colonial ruin, capitalist dream, and Utopian wish. A form of physiognomic urban ‘dream analysis’ rescues these multiple contradictory meanings of Macau and investigates the city's crucial role in both China's economic reforms and its Utopian desires.

Tropical Cyclone ‘Rona’ crossed the coast of the Daintree lowlands of northeastern Australia in 1999. This study reports on its impact on forest canopy openness at six lowland rain forest sites with contrasting management histories (old-growth, selectively logged and regrowth). Percentage canopy openness was calculated from individual hemispherical photographs taken from marked points below the forest canopy at nine plots per site 3–4 mo before the cyclone, and at the same points a month afterwards. Before the cyclone, when nine sites were visited, canopy openness in old-growth and logged sites was similar, but significantly higher in regrowth forest. After the cyclone, all six revisited sites showed an increase in canopy openness, but the increase was very patchy amongst plots and sites and varied from insignificant to severe. The most severely impacted site was an old-growth one, the least impacted a logged one. Although proneness to impact was apparently related to forest management history (old-growth being the most impacted), underlying local topography may have had an equally strong influence in this case. It was concluded that the likelihood of severe impact may be determined at the landscape-scale by the interaction of anthropogenic with meteorological, physiographic and biotic factors. In the long term, such interactions may caution against pursuing forest management in cyclone-prone areas.

Foredunes are important features within coastal landscapes, yet there are relatively few medium to long-term studies on how they evolve and change over time. This study of Australia’s New South Wales (NSW) foredunes has used 70 years of aerial photographs (or photogrammetry) and recent Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) datasets to assess multi-decadal fluctuations in foredune morphology. It was shown that over the past 70 years NSW foredunes have exhibited considerable spatial variation, ranging from accretion/aggradation to recession. Those sites that accreted predominantly extended seaward as new incipient dunes, gaining a maximum of 235 m3 m−1 in sand volume over the study period (for the entire dune system). These sites were commonly found in the north of the state, within closed sediment compartments, and with strong onshore (and alongshore) wind climates present (increasing the potential for aeolian sand transport). Stable foredunes were those that remained within +/− 50 m3 m−1 of their initial volume and managed to recover from the various storm impacts over the study period. The majority of these sites were found within the central to southern half of the state, behind embayed beaches, and within leaky sediment compartments, or those that have estuarine sinks. Finally, those foredunes in recession have retreated landwards and/or have reduced in height or width, and lost up to 437 m3 m−1 of sand volume over the study period. There was no clear spatial trend for these sites; however, generally they were found in compartments that had unusual orientations, had disruptions in longshore drift/cross shore sand delivery (i.e., rocky reefs), or were being impacted by humans (i.e., the installation of river training walls, sand bypassing systems, or coastal management programs). This study has shown that NSW foredunes have undergone substantial recent changes and, by understanding their past history, will provide better insight into how they can be managed into the future.

The selection of optimal target species to define and manage protected marine areas (MPAs) has generated a great scientific discussion during the past decades. Benthic invertebrates are commonly less considered as important target species, despite their pivotal role in marine ecosystems. To address this issue, we determined target species among benthic marine organisms using a multi-criteria approach. For this purpose, we used a data base from the Katalalixar National Reserve (RNK) in central Patagonia, Chile. The data were obtained through underwater photography and quantitative sampling by means of scuba diving during three expeditions between 2017 and 2019. Based on the total taxonomical inventory from both methods, a SIMPER analysis was used to determine 10 candidate species, and the Landscape Selection Species program was used for the selection of target species. Finally, eight target species were selected. The black snail Tegula atra, the hermit crab Pagurus comptus, the gastropod Crepipatella dilatata, and the polychaete Platynereis australis were selected among errant species. Among sessile species, the encrusting coralline algae Lithothamnium sp., the sea anemone Actinostola chilensis, the parchment worm Chaetopterus variopedatus, and the encrusting ascidia Didemnum sp. were the selected species. Based on our results we expect that these species will be included as target species in future management plans to improve protection of the marine environment of the Katalalixar National Reserve, one of the most pristine areas of the Chilean fjord region. Keywords: macroinvertebrates, macroalgae, biodiversity, Patagonia.

Outdoor and indoor environments impact older people’s mobility, independence, quality of life, and ability to “age in place”. Considerable evidence suggests that not only the amount, but also the quality, of public green spaces in the living environment is important. The quality of public green spaces is mostly measured through expert assessments by planners, designers and developers. A disadvantage of this expert-determined approach is that it often does not consider the appraisals or perceptions of residents. Daily experience, often over long periods of time, means older residents have acquired insider knowledge of their neighbourhood, and thus, may be more qualified to assess these spaces, including measuring what makes a valued or quality public green space. The aim of this Australian pilot study on public green spaces for ageing well was to test an innovative citizen science approach to data collection using smart phones. “Senior” citizen scientists trialed the smart phone audit tool over a three-month period, recording and auditing public green spaces in their neighbourhoods. Data collected included geocoded location data, photographs, and qualitative comments along with survey data. While citizen science research is already well established in the natural sciences, it remains underutilised in the social sciences. This paper focuses on the use of citizen science with older participants highlighting the potential for this methodology in the fields of environmental gerontology, urban planning and landscape architecture.

Coastal dolphin populations are highly vulnerable due to their proximity to major urban centres and exposure to cumulative threats from anthropogenic activities. As bioindicators of environmental condition, it is crucial to understand and monitor the health of these coastal dolphin populations. Visual assessments of skin lesions on dolphins can provide useful insights into the health of these populations and exposure to environmental stressors. We examined the prevalence of skin lesions in Australian humpback dolphins (Sousa sahulensis) and Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) of different age classes inhabiting the near-urban embayment of Moreton Bay, Queensland. The prevalence and extent of nontraumatic and traumatic skin lesions on individual dolphins were assessed using photographs taken during 103 boat-based surveys completed between 2014 and 2016. A total of 15 primary skin lesion categories were identified from 126 humpback and 100 bottlenose dolphins. Differences in the prevalence of skin lesions were evident between age classes and species. Nontraumatic skin lesions were prevalent in 48.4% of the humpback and 61.0% of the bottlenose dolphins. Comparatively, traumatic lesions were evident in almost all humpback (92.3%) and bottlenose (99.0%) dolphins. Anthropogenic-related injuries from entanglement in fishing gear and vessel strikes were substantial and significantly differed between species (p < 0.05). Injuries from fishing and vessel activities affected 11.0% of humpback dolphins and 30.0% of bottlenose dolphins, suggesting that these activities pose a major threat to these populations. Findings from this study provide an important baseline to inform ongoing health monitoring and conservation efforts of these vulnerable dolphin populations inhabiting a near-urban embayment.

The rate and mechanism of the spread of Phytophthora cinnamomi in Banksia woodland of the Bassendean Dune system north of Perth, Western Australia was studied. Aerial photographs were used to measure the spread of disease in fronts longer than 5 km over 35 years. Fronts in upper slope positions moved downhill and uphill at 1.01 and 1.13 m year-1, respectively, while fronts in low-lying positions moved downgrade and upgrade (with and against the direction of water table flow) at 1.30 and 1.20 m year-1, respectively. Fronts in low-lying areas spread significantly faster than those on upper slopes. Excavations to 2 m depth of the root systems of 21 dying plants of Banksia attenuata R.Br., an overstorey co-dominant, revealed that 28% (3.9 roots/tree) of all first-order roots were infected. Assessment of the proportion of roots infected revealed a significant (P < 0.01) departure from uniform distribution of disease down the profile in both upper slope and drained flat sites. In 14 trees on dune slopes, 6-40 m above the aquifer, infection rate was higher than expected in roots lying at 21-40 cm depth, but lower than expected in roots below 1 m. Seventy three percent of infected roots lay in the top 40 cm of soil. In seven trees on a drained flat, 2-3 m above the aquifer, infection rate was high in the 21-60 cm horizon and also in roots below 1 m. Even though Phytophthora cinnamomi was active in the vicinity of the water table in trees on drained flats, the slow, steady spread of the disease in all landscape positions suggested that the primary mode of fungal invasion was through roots of susceptible vegetation. No evidence was found of accelerated spread of disease caused by the dispersal of zoospores.

Rapid urbanization rates impact significantly on the nature of Land Cover patterns of the environment, which has been evident in the depletion of vegetal reserves and in general modifying the human climatic systems (Henderson, et al., 2017; Kumar, Masago, Mishra, & Fukushi, 2018; Luo and Lau, 2017). This study explores remote sensing classification technique and other auxiliary data to determine LULCC for a period of 50 years (1967-2016). The LULCC types identified were quantitatively evaluated using the change detection approach from results of maximum likelihood classification algorithm in GIS. Accuracy assessment results were evaluated and found to be between 56 to 98 percent of the LULC classification. The change detection analysis revealed change in the LULC types in Minna from 1976 to 2016. Built-up area increases from 74.82ha in 1976 to 116.58ha in 2016. Farmlands increased from 2.23 ha to 46.45ha and bared surface increases from 120.00ha to 161.31ha between 1976 to 2016 resulting to decline in vegetation, water body, and wetlands. The Decade of rapid urbanization was found to coincide with the period of increased Public Private Partnership Agreement (PPPA). Increase in farmlands was due to the adoption of urban agriculture which has influence on food security and the environmental sustainability. The observed increase in built up areas, farmlands and bare surfaces has substantially led to reduction in vegetation and water bodies. The oscillatory nature of water bodies LULCC which was not particularly consistent with the rates of urbanization also suggests that beyond the urbanization process, other factors may influence the LULCC of water bodies in urban settlements. Keywords: Minna, Niger State, Remote Sensing, Land Surface Characteristics References Akinrinmade, A., Ibrahim, K., & Abdurrahman, A. (2012). Geological Investigation of Tagwai Dams using Remote Sensing Technique, Minna Niger State, Nigeria. Journal of Environment, 1(01), pp. 26-32. Amadi, A., & Olasehinde, P. (2010). Application of remote sensing techniques in hydrogeological mapping of parts of Bosso Area, Minna, North-Central Nigeria. International Journal of Physical Sciences, 5(9), pp. 1465-1474. Aplin, P., & Smith, G. (2008). Advances in object-based image classification. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 37(B7), pp. 725-728. Ayele, G. T., Tebeje, A. K., Demissie, S. S., Belete, M. A., Jemberrie, M. A., Teshome, W. M., . . . Teshale, E. Z. (2018). Time Series Land Cover Mapping and Change Detection Analysis Using Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing, Northern Ethiopia. Air, Soil and Water Research, 11, p 1178622117751603. Azevedo, J. A., Chapman, L., & Muller, C. L. (2016). Quantifying the daytime and night-time urban heat island in Birmingham, UK: a comparison of satellite derived land surface temperature and high resolution air temperature observations. Remote Sensing, 8(2), p 153. Blaschke, T., Hay, G. J., Kelly, M., Lang, S., Hofmann, P., Addink, E., . . . van Coillie, F. (2014). Geographic object-based image analysis–towards a new paradigm. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 87, pp. 180-191. Bukata, R. P., Jerome, J. H., Kondratyev, A. S., & Pozdnyakov, D. V. (2018). Optical properties and remote sensing of inland and coastal waters: CRC press. Camps-Valls, G., Tuia, D., Bruzzone, L., & Benediktsson, J. A. (2014). Advances in hyperspectral image classification: Earth monitoring with statistical learning methods. IEEE signal processing magazine, 31(1), pp. 45-54. Chen, J., Chen, J., Liao, A., Cao, X., Chen, L., Chen, X., . . . Lu, M. (2015). Global land cover mapping at 30 m resolution: A POK-based operational approach. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 103, pp. 7-27. Chen, M., Mao, S., & Liu, Y. (2014). Big data: A survey. Mobile networks and applications, 19(2), pp. 171-209. Cheng, G., Han, J., Guo, L., Liu, Z., Bu, S., & Ren, J. (2015). Effective and efficient midlevel visual elements-oriented land-use classification using VHR remote sensing images. IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing, 53(8), pp. 4238-4249. Cheng, G., Han, J., Zhou, P., & Guo, L. (2014). Multi-class geospatial object detection and geographic image classification based on collection of part detectors. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 98, pp. 119-132. Coale, A. J., & Hoover, E. M. (2015). Population growth and economic development: Princeton University Press. Congalton, R. G., & Green, K. (2008). Assessing the accuracy of remotely sensed data: principles and practices: CRC press. Corner, R. J., Dewan, A. M., & Chakma, S. (2014). Monitoring and prediction of land-use and land-cover (LULC) change Dhaka megacity (pp. 75-97): Springer. Coutts, A. M., Harris, R. J., Phan, T., Livesley, S. J., Williams, N. S., & Tapper, N. J. (2016). Thermal infrared remote sensing of urban heat: Hotspots, vegetation, and an assessment of techniques for use in urban planning. Remote Sensing of Environment, 186, pp. 637-651. Debnath, A., Debnath, J., Ahmed, I., & Pan, N. D. (2017). Change detection in Land use/cover of a hilly area by Remote Sensing and GIS technique: A study on Tropical forest hill range, Baramura, Tripura, Northeast India. International journal of geomatics and geosciences, 7(3), pp. 293-309. Desheng, L., & Xia, F. (2010). Assessing object-based classification: advantages and limitations. Remote Sensing Letters, 1(4), pp. 187-194. Dewan, A. M., & Yamaguchi, Y. (2009). Land use and land cover change in Greater Dhaka, Bangladesh: Using remote sensing to promote sustainable urbanization. Applied Geography, 29(3), pp. 390-401. Dronova, I., Gong, P., Wang, L., & Zhong, L. (2015). Mapping dynamic cover types in a large seasonally flooded wetland using extended principal component analysis and object-based classification. Remote Sensing of Environment, 158, pp. 193-206. Duro, D. C., Franklin, S. E., & Dubé, M. G. (2012). A comparison of pixel-based and object-based image analysis with selected machine learning algorithms for the classification of agricultural landscapes using SPOT-5 HRG imagery. Remote Sensing of Environment, 118, pp. 259-272. Elmhagen, B., Destouni, G., Angerbjörn, A., Borgström, S., Boyd, E., Cousins, S., . . . Hambäck, P. (2015). Interacting effects of change in climate, human population, land use, and water use on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Ecology and Society, 20(1) Farhani, S., & Ozturk, I. (2015). Causal relationship between CO 2 emissions, real GDP, energy consumption, financial development, trade openness, and urbanization in Tunisia. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, 22(20), pp. 15663-15676. Feng, L., Chen, B., Hayat, T., Alsaedi, A., & Ahmad, B. (2017). The driving force of water footprint under the rapid urbanization process: a structural decomposition analysis for Zhangye city in China. Journal of Cleaner Production, 163, pp. S322-S328. Fensham, R., & Fairfax, R. (2002). Aerial photography for assessing vegetation change: a review of applications and the relevance of findings for Australian vegetation history. Australian Journal of Botany, 50(4), pp. 415-429. Ferreira, N., Lage, M., Doraiswamy, H., Vo, H., Wilson, L., Werner, H., . . . Silva, C. (2015). Urbane: A 3d framework to support data driven decision making in urban development. Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2015 IEEE Conference on. Garschagen, M., & Romero-Lankao, P. (2015). Exploring the relationships between urbanization trends and climate change vulnerability. Climatic Change, 133(1), pp. 37-52. Gokturk, S. B., Sumengen, B., Vu, D., Dalal, N., Yang, D., Lin, X., . . . Torresani, L. (2015). System and method for search portions of objects in images and features thereof: Google Patents. Government, N. S. (2007). Niger state (The Power State). Retrieved from http://nigerstate.blogspot.com.ng/ Green, K., Kempka, D., & Lackey, L. (1994). Using remote sensing to detect and monitor land-cover and land-use change. Photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing, 60(3), pp. 331-337. Gu, W., Lv, Z., & Hao, M. (2017). Change detection method for remote sensing images based on an improved Markov random field. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 76(17), pp. 17719-17734. Guo, Y., & Shen, Y. (2015). Quantifying water and energy budgets and the impacts of climatic and human factors in the Haihe River Basin, China: 2. Trends and implications to water resources. Journal of Hydrology, 527, pp. 251-261. Hadi, F., Thapa, R. B., Helmi, M., Hazarika, M. K., Madawalagama, S., Deshapriya, L. N., & Center, G. (2016). Urban growth and land use/land cover modeling in Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia: Colombo-Srilanka, ACRS2016. Hagolle, O., Huc, M., Villa Pascual, D., & Dedieu, G. (2015). A multi-temporal and multi-spectral method to estimate aerosol optical thickness over land, for the atmospheric correction of FormoSat-2, LandSat, VENμS and Sentinel-2 images. Remote Sensing, 7(3), pp. 2668-2691. Hegazy, I. R., & Kaloop, M. R. (2015). Monitoring urban growth and land use change detection with GIS and remote sensing techniques in Daqahlia governorate Egypt. International Journal of Sustainable Built Environment, 4(1), pp. 117-124. Henderson, J. V., Storeygard, A., & Deichmann, U. (2017). Has climate change driven urbanization in Africa? Journal of development economics, 124, pp. 60-82. Hu, L., & Brunsell, N. A. (2015). A new perspective to assess the urban heat island through remotely sensed atmospheric profiles. Remote Sensing of Environment, 158, pp. 393-406. Hughes, S. J., Cabral, J. A., Bastos, R., Cortes, R., Vicente, J., Eitelberg, D., . . . Santos, M. (2016). A stochastic dynamic model to assess land use change scenarios on the ecological status of fluvial water bodies under the Water Framework Directive. Science of the Total Environment, 565, pp. 427-439. Hussain, M., Chen, D., Cheng, A., Wei, H., & Stanley, D. (2013). Change detection from remotely sensed images: From pixel-based to object-based approaches. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 80, pp. 91-106. Hyyppä, J., Hyyppä, H., Inkinen, M., Engdahl, M., Linko, S., & Zhu, Y.-H. (2000). Accuracy comparison of various remote sensing data sources in the retrieval of forest stand attributes. Forest Ecology and Management, 128(1-2), pp. 109-120. Jiang, L., Wu, F., Liu, Y., & Deng, X. (2014). Modeling the impacts of urbanization and industrial transformation on water resources in China: an integrated hydro-economic CGE analysis. Sustainability, 6(11), pp. 7586-7600. Jin, S., Yang, L., Zhu, Z., & Homer, C. (2017). A land cover change detection and classification protocol for updating Alaska NLCD 2001 to 2011. Remote Sensing of Environment, 195, pp. 44-55. Joshi, N., Baumann, M., Ehammer, A., Fensholt, R., Grogan, K., Hostert, P., . . . Mitchard, E. T. (2016). A review of the application of optical and radar remote sensing data fusion to land use mapping and monitoring. Remote Sensing, 8(1), p 70. Kaliraj, S., Chandrasekar, N., & Magesh, N. (2015). Evaluation of multiple environmental factors for site-specific groundwater recharge structures in the Vaigai River upper basin, Tamil Nadu, India, using GIS-based weighted overlay analysis. Environmental earth sciences, 74(5), pp. 4355-4380. Koop, S. H., & van Leeuwen, C. J. (2015). Assessment of the sustainability of water resources management: A critical review of the City Blueprint approach. Water Resources Management, 29(15), pp. 5649-5670. Kumar, P., Masago, Y., Mishra, B. K., & Fukushi, K. (2018). Evaluating future stress due to combined effect of climate change and rapid urbanization for Pasig-Marikina River, Manila. Groundwater for Sustainable Development, 6, pp. 227-234. Lang, S. (2008). Object-based image analysis for remote sensing applications: modeling reality–dealing with complexity Object-based image analysis (pp. 3-27): Springer. Li, M., Zang, S., Zhang, B., Li, S., & Wu, C. (2014). A review of remote sensing image classification techniques: The role of spatio-contextual information. European Journal of Remote Sensing, 47(1), pp. 389-411. Liddle, B. (2014). Impact of population, age structure, and urbanization on carbon emissions/energy consumption: evidence from macro-level, cross-country analyses. Population and Environment, 35(3), pp. 286-304. Lillesand, T., Kiefer, R. W., & Chipman, J. (2014). Remote sensing and image interpretation: John Wiley & Sons. Liu, Y., Wang, Y., Peng, J., Du, Y., Liu, X., Li, S., & Zhang, D. (2015). Correlations between urbanization and vegetation degradation across the world’s metropolises using DMSP/OLS nighttime light data. Remote Sensing, 7(2), pp. 2067-2088. López, E., Bocco, G., Mendoza, M., & Duhau, E. (2001). Predicting land-cover and land-use change in the urban fringe: a case in Morelia city, Mexico. Landscape and urban planning, 55(4), pp. 271-285. Luo, M., & Lau, N.-C. (2017). Heat waves in southern China: Synoptic behavior, long-term change, and urbanization effects. Journal of Climate, 30(2), pp. 703-720. Mahboob, M. A., Atif, I., & Iqbal, J. (2015). Remote sensing and GIS applications for assessment of urban sprawl in Karachi, Pakistan. Science, Technology and Development, 34(3), pp. 179-188. Mallinis, G., Koutsias, N., Tsakiri-Strati, M., & Karteris, M. (2008). Object-based classification using Quickbird imagery for delineating forest vegetation polygons in a Mediterranean test site. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 63(2), pp. 237-250. Mas, J.-F., Velázquez, A., Díaz-Gallegos, J. R., Mayorga-Saucedo, R., Alcántara, C., Bocco, G., . . . Pérez-Vega, A. (2004). Assessing land use/cover changes: a nationwide multidate spatial database for Mexico. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 5(4), pp. 249-261. Mathew, A., Chaudhary, R., Gupta, N., Khandelwal, S., & Kaul, N. (2015). Study of Urban Heat Island Effect on Ahmedabad City and Its Relationship with Urbanization and Vegetation Parameters. International Journal of Computer & Mathematical Science, 4, pp. 2347-2357. Megahed, Y., Cabral, P., Silva, J., & Caetano, M. (2015). Land cover mapping analysis and urban growth modelling using remote sensing techniques in greater Cairo region—Egypt. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 4(3), pp. 1750-1769. Metternicht, G. (2001). Assessing temporal and spatial changes of salinity using fuzzy logic, remote sensing and GIS. Foundations of an expert system. Ecological modelling, 144(2-3), pp. 163-179. Miller, R. B., & Small, C. (2003). Cities from space: potential applications of remote sensing in urban environmental research and policy. Environmental Science & Policy, 6(2), pp. 129-137. Mirzaei, P. A. (2015). Recent challenges in modeling of urban heat island. Sustainable Cities and Society, 19, pp. 200-206. Mohammed, I., Aboh, H., & Emenike, E. (2007). A regional geoelectric investigation for groundwater exploration in Minna area, north west Nigeria. Science World Journal, 2(4) Morenikeji, G., Umaru, E., Liman, S., & Ajagbe, M. (2015). Application of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System in Monitoring the Dynamics of Landuse in Minna, Nigeria. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 5(6), pp. 320-337. Mukherjee, A. B., Krishna, A. P., & Patel, N. (2018). Application of Remote Sensing Technology, GIS and AHP-TOPSIS Model to Quantify Urban Landscape Vulnerability to Land Use Transformation Information and Communication Technology for Sustainable Development (pp. 31-40): Springer. Myint, S. W., Gober, P., Brazel, A., Grossman-Clarke, S., & Weng, Q. (2011). Per-pixel vs. object-based classification of urban land cover extraction using high spatial resolution imagery. Remote Sensing of Environment, 115(5), pp. 1145-1161. Nemmour, H., & Chibani, Y. (2006). Multiple support vector machines for land cover change detection: An application for mapping urban extensions. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 61(2), pp. 125-133. Niu, X., & Ban, Y. (2013). Multi-temporal RADARSAT-2 polarimetric SAR data for urban land-cover classification using an object-based support vector machine and a rule-based approach. International journal of remote sensing, 34(1), pp. 1-26. Nogueira, K., Penatti, O. A., & dos Santos, J. A. (2017). Towards better exploiting convolutional neural networks for remote sensing scene classification. Pattern Recognition, 61, pp. 539-556. Oguz, H., & Zengin, M. (2011). Analyzing land use/land cover change using remote sensing data and landscape structure metrics: a case study of Erzurum, Turkey. Fresenius Environmental Bulletin, 20(12), pp. 3258-3269. Pohl, C., & Van Genderen, J. L. (1998). Review article multisensor image fusion in remote sensing: concepts, methods and applications. International journal of remote sensing, 19(5), pp. 823-854. Price, O., & Bradstock, R. (2014). Countervailing effects of urbanization and vegetation extent on fire frequency on the Wildland Urban Interface: Disentangling fuel and ignition effects. Landscape and urban planning, 130, pp. 81-88. Prosdocimi, I., Kjeldsen, T., & Miller, J. (2015). Detection and attribution of urbanization effect on flood extremes using nonstationary flood‐frequency models. Water resources research, 51(6), pp. 4244-4262. Rawat, J., & Kumar, M. (2015). Monitoring land use/cover change using remote sensing and GIS techniques: A case study of Hawalbagh block, district Almora, Uttarakhand, India. The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Science, 18(1), pp. 77-84. Rokni, K., Ahmad, A., Solaimani, K., & Hazini, S. (2015). A new approach for surface water change detection: Integration of pixel level image fusion and image classification techniques. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 34, pp. 226-234. Sakieh, Y., Amiri, B. J., Danekar, A., Feghhi, J., & Dezhkam, S. (2015). Simulating urban expansion and scenario prediction using a cellular automata urban growth model, SLEUTH, through a case study of Karaj City, Iran. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 30(4), pp. 591-611. Santra, A. (2016). Land Surface Temperature Estimation and Urban Heat Island Detection: A Remote Sensing Perspective. Remote Sensing Techniques and GIS Applications in Earth and Environmental Studies, p 16. Shrivastava, L., & Nag, S. (2017). MONITORING OF LAND USE/LAND COVER CHANGE USING GIS AND REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUES: A CASE STUDY OF SAGAR RIVER WATERSHED, TRIBUTARY OF WAINGANGA RIVER OF MADHYA PRADESH, INDIA. Shuaibu, M., & Sulaiman, I. (2012). Application of remote sensing and GIS in land cover change detection in Mubi, Adamawa State, Nigeria. J Technol Educ Res, 5, pp. 43-55. Song, B., Li, J., Dalla Mura, M., Li, P., Plaza, A., Bioucas-Dias, J. M., . . . Chanussot, J. (2014). Remotely sensed image classification using sparse representations of morphological attribute profiles. IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing, 52(8), pp. 5122-5136. Song, X.-P., Sexton, J. O., Huang, C., Channan, S., & Townshend, J. R. (2016). Characterizing the magnitude, timing and duration of urban growth from time series of Landsat-based estimates of impervious cover. Remote Sensing of Environment, 175, pp. 1-13. Tayyebi, A., Shafizadeh-Moghadam, H., & Tayyebi, A. H. (2018). Analyzing long-term spatio-temporal patterns of land surface temperature in response to rapid urbanization in the mega-city of Tehran. Land Use Policy, 71, pp. 459-469. Teodoro, A. C., Gutierres, F., Gomes, P., & Rocha, J. (2018). Remote Sensing Data and Image Classification Algorithms in the Identification of Beach Patterns Beach Management Tools-Concepts, Methodologies and Case Studies (pp. 579-587): Springer. Toth, C., & Jóźków, G. (2016). Remote sensing platforms and sensors: A survey. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 115, pp. 22-36. Tuholske, C., Tane, Z., López-Carr, D., Roberts, D., & Cassels, S. (2017). Thirty years of land use/cover change in the Caribbean: Assessing the relationship between urbanization and mangrove loss in Roatán, Honduras. Applied Geography, 88, pp. 84-93. Tuia, D., Flamary, R., & Courty, N. (2015). Multiclass feature learning for hyperspectral image classification: Sparse and hierarchical solutions. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 105, pp. 272-285. Tzotsos, A., & Argialas, D. (2008). Support vector machine classification for object-based image analysis Object-Based Image Analysis (pp. 663-677): Springer. Wang, L., Sousa, W., & Gong, P. (2004). Integration of object-based and pixel-based classification for mapping mangroves with IKONOS imagery. International journal of remote sensing, 25(24), pp. 5655-5668. Wang, Q., Zeng, Y.-e., & Wu, B.-w. (2016). Exploring the relationship between urbanization, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions in different provinces of China. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 54, pp. 1563-1579. Wang, S., Ma, H., & Zhao, Y. (2014). Exploring the relationship between urbanization and the eco-environment—A case study of Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region. Ecological Indicators, 45, pp. 171-183. Weitkamp, C. (2006). Lidar: range-resolved optical remote sensing of the atmosphere: Springer Science & Business. Wellmann, T., Haase, D., Knapp, S., Salbach, C., Selsam, P., & Lausch, A. (2018). Urban land use intensity assessment: The potential of spatio-temporal spectral traits with remote sensing. Ecological Indicators, 85, pp. 190-203. Whiteside, T. G., Boggs, G. S., & Maier, S. W. (2011). Comparing object-based and pixel-based classifications for mapping savannas. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 13(6), pp. 884-893. Willhauck, G., Schneider, T., De Kok, R., & Ammer, U. (2000). Comparison of object oriented classification techniques and standard image analysis for the use of change detection between SPOT multispectral satellite images and aerial photos. Proceedings of XIX ISPRS congress. Winker, D. M., Vaughan, M. A., Omar, A., Hu, Y., Powell, K. A., Liu, Z., . . . Young, S. A. (2009). Overview of the CALIPSO mission and CALIOP data processing algorithms. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 26(11), pp. 2310-2323. Yengoh, G. T., Dent, D., Olsson, L., Tengberg, A. E., & Tucker III, C. J. (2015). Use of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to Assess Land Degradation at Multiple Scales: Current Status, Future Trends, and Practical Considerations: Springer. Yu, Q., Gong, P., Clinton, N., Biging, G., Kelly, M., & Schirokauer, D. (2006). Object-based detailed vegetation classification with airborne high spatial resolution remote sensing imagery. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, 72(7), pp. 799-811. Zhou, D., Zhao, S., Zhang, L., & Liu, S. (2016). Remotely sensed assessment of urbanization effects on vegetation phenology in China's 32 major cities. Remote Sensing of Environment, 176, pp. 272-281. Zhu, Z., Fu, Y., Woodcock, C. E., Olofsson, P., Vogelmann, J. E., Holden, C., . . . Yu, Y. (2016). Including land cover change in analysis of greenness trends using all available Landsat 5, 7, and 8 images: A case study from Guangzhou, China (2000–2014). Remote Sensing of Environment, 185, pp. 243-257.

IntroductionI spent five days on the Arizona Utah border, photographing Monument Valley and the surrounding areas as part of a group of eight undertaking a landscape photography workshop under the direction of a Navajo guide. Observing where our guide was taking us, and watching and talking to other tourist photographers, I was reminded of John Urry’s concept of the “tourist gaze” and the idea that tourists see destinations in terms of the promotional images they are familiar with (Urry 1). It seemed that tourists re-created images drawn from the popular imaginary, inserting themselves into familiar narratives of place. The goal of the research was to look specifically at the tourist gaze, that is, the way that tourists see view destinations and then represent that vision in their images. Circle of Representation Urry explained the tourist gaze as a particular way of seeing the world as a series of images created by the tourism industry; images which were then consumed or collected through tourist photography. He saw this as constituting a “closed circle of representation” where the images employed by the tourism industry to attract tourists to particular destinations were reproduced in tourists’ own holiday snaps, and as more tourists sought out these locations, they were increasingly used to represent the destination. Susan Sontag saw travel employed as “a strategy for accumulating photographs” (9) suggesting that the images were the culmination of the journey. Urry also saw the end point of tourism as travellers to a destination “demonstrating that they have really been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen originally before they set off” (140).Talking to the guide, my group, and other tourists about the images we were recording, and reviewing images tagged Monument Valley on Instagram revealed that digital and network technologies had altered tourists’ photographic practices. Tourist impressions of destinations come from a wide range of popular culture sources. They have, even on smartphones, fairly sophisticated tools for creating images; and they have diverse networks for distributing their images. Increasingly, the images that tourists see as representative of Monument Valley came from popular culture and social media, and not simply from tourism promotions. People are posting their travel images online, and are in turn looking to posts from others in their search for travel information (Akehurst 55). The current circle of representation in tourist photography is not simply a process of capturing promotional imagery, but an interaction between tourists that draws upon films, television, and other popular culture forms. Tourist photographs are less a matter of “consuming places” (Urry 259) and more an identity performance through which they create ongoing personal narratives of place by inserting themselves into pre-existing stories about the destination and circulating the new narratives.Jenkins analysed brochures on Australia available to potential tourists in Vancouver, Canada, and determined that the key photographic images used to promote Australia were Uluru and the Sydney Opera House, followed by sandy beaches alongside tropical blue waters. Interviews with Canadian backpackers travelling around Australia, and an examination of the images these backpackers took with the disposable cameras they were given, found a correlation between the brochure images and the personal photographs. Jenkins concluded that the results supported Urry’s theory of a closed circle of representation, in that the images from the brochures were “tracked down and recaptured, and the resulting photographs displayed upon return home by the backpackers as evidence of the trip” (Jenkins 324).Garrod randomly selected 25 tourists along the seafront of Aberystwyth, Wales, and gave them a single-use camera, a brief socio-demographic questionnaire, a photo log, and a reply-paid envelope in which they could return these items. The tourists were asked to take 12 photos and log the reason they took each photograph and what they tried to capture in terms of their visit to Aberystwyth. Nine females and four males returned their cameras, providing 164 photographs, which were compared with 70 postcards depicting Aberystwyth. While an initial comparison revealed similarities in the content of tourist photographs and the picture postcards of the town, Garrod’s analysis revealed two main differences: postcards featured wide angle or panoramic views, while tourist photos tended to be close up or detail shots and postcards included natural features, particularly bodies of water, while tourist photographs were more often of buildings and man-made structures. Garrod concluded that the relationship between tourism industry images and tourist photographs “might be more subtle and complex than simply for the two protagonists in the relationship to mimic one other” (356).MethodIdentifying a tourist’s motivation for taking a particular photograph, the source of inspiration for the image, and the details of what the photographer was attempting to capture involves the consideration of a range of variables, many of which cannot be controlled. The ability of the photographer and the sophistication of their equipment will have an impact on the type of images captured; for example this may explain the absence of panoramas in Aberystwyth tourist photos. The length of the stay and the level of familiarity with the location may also have an impact; on a first visit a tourist may look for the major landmarks and on subsequent visits photograph the smaller details. The personal history of the tourist, the meaning the location has for them, their reasons for visiting and their mood at the time, will all influence their selection of photo subjects. Giving tourists a camera and then asking them to photograph the destination may influence the choice of subject and the care taken with composition, however this does ensure a direct link between the tourist opinions gathered and the images analysed. An approach that depends on seeing the images taken independently by the tourists who were interviewed has logistical problems that significantly reduce sample size.Fourteen randomly selected tourists at the visitors centre in Monument Valley, a random sampling of 500 Instagram images hash tagged Monument Valley, and photographs taken by seven photographers in the author’s group were studied by the author. The tourists were asked what they wanted to take photographs of while in Monument Valley, and why of those particular subjects. The images taken by these tourists were not available for analysis for logistical reasons, and 500 Instagram images tagged #MonumentValley were collected as generally representative of tourist images. Members of the photography workshop group were all serious amateur photographers with digital SLR cameras, interchangeable lenses, and tripods. Motivations, decisions and the evaluation of images were discussed with this group, and their images reviewed in terms of the extent to which the image was felt to be representative of the location.Monument ValleyMonument Valley can be considered a mythic space in that it is a real place that has taken on mythic meanings that go beyond physical characteristics and lived experiences (Slotkin 11). Located on the Navajo Tribal Park on the Arizona Utah border, it is known by the Navajo as Tse'Bii'Ndzisgaii or “Valley of the Rocks.” Monument Valley is emblematic of the Wild West, the frontier beyond which civilization vanishes, a mythology originally derived from the Western Films of director John Ford. Ford's film, Stagecoach, was shot in Monument Valley and Ford returned nine times to shoot Westerns here, even when films (such as The Searchers, set in Texas) were not set in Arizona or Utah. The spectacular desert scenery with its towering rock formations combine epic grandeur with brutal conditions, providing an appropriate backdrop for dramatic oppositions: civilization versus barbarity, community versus wilderness, freedom versus domestication. The mythological meanings attached to Monument Valley were extended in the films, novels, television programs, and advertising that followed. Footage of Monument Valley is used to represent a blend of freedom and danger in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise, Marlborough and Chevrolet advertising, the television series Airwolf and episodes of Doctor Who. Monument Valley was the culmination of Forrest Gump's exhaustive run, and the setting for music videos by Kanye West, Madonna and Michael Jackson, each drawing on the themes of alienation and the displacement of the hero. While Westerns are on one level uniquely American, they are consistent with widely known romantic myths and stories, and the universal narratives evoked by Monument Valley have appeal far outside the USA. The iconic images of Monument Valley have been circulated well beyond tourist informational material, permeating a breadth of popular culture forms.Photographing the ValleyPhotography is intrinsically linked with tourism, fulfilling a number of roles. Travel can have as its purpose the collection of images, and as such, photography can function to structure the travel experience, and to evaluate its success (Schroeder; Sontag). Recognisable images of the location provide evidence that travel was undertaken, places were visited, and the traveller has experienced some form of authentic or exotic experience (Chalfen 435). Sharing images is an essential part of the process. The various roles of photography are to an extent dependent on having a shared mental image of what photographs from the travel location would look like. This mental image is derived, in part, from tourism sources such as postcards, brochures, and websites, but also from popular culture, and increasingly from photographs taken by other tourists. Travel images are shared online on sites such as Trip Advisor and Virtual Tourist, as well as travel blogs and photo sharing sites like Flickr and Instagram. People who post images online are likely to look to the same sites to search for travel information from others (Akehurst 55), reinforcing specific images as representative of the place and the experience.At the beginning of our photography-based tour we were asked which locations we wanted to photograph. There was a general consensus, with people looking for vistas and panoramas, “golden hour” light on the rock formations of buttes and mesas, sunrises and sunsets with silhouetted landscape forms, and close-ups of shadow patterns and textures. Our guide added that one day had been set aside for the iconic images, which were described as the “Forest Gump” shot from Highway 163, the Mittens at sunrise, John Ford Point (as most recently seen in The Lone Ranger movie posters), and the vista from Artist’s Point or North Window. When I asked tourists at the visitor information centre the same question about the images they wanted to capture, the responses were uniform with all of them saying the view of The Mittens, which was immediately before them. Seventy-eight percent (N=11) said that they were after a general panorama with the distinctive landforms, and Highway 163 was named by 57 percent (N=8). Few gave more than these three sites. Forty-two percent (N=6) described the John Ford Point image with the Navajo rider as a goal, and the same number said they would like to take some sunrise or sunset images. Twenty-eight percent (N=4) were looking to take images of themselves or their friends and family, with the distinctive landscape as a backdrop. There was a high level of consistency between the images described by the guide as “iconic” and the photographs that tourists wished to capture.Categorising five hundred Instagram images with the hashtag Monument Valley revealed 195 pictures (39 percent) of the Mittens, 58 of which were taken at sunrise or sunset. There were 88 images (18 percent) taken of Highway 163. John Ford Point featured in 26 images (five percent) of images and Artist’s Point was the location in 20 (four percent). Seventy-nine photographs (16 percent) were of other landmarks such as the Three Sisters, Elephant Butte, and Rain God Mesa, all visible from the self-drive circuit. Landmarks which could only be visited accompanied by a Navajo guide, accounted for 48 (nine percent) of the Instagram images. There were 16 images (three percent) of people, meals, and cars without any recognisable landmarks in the frame. The remaining 28 images (five percent) were of landmarks in the Southwest, but not in Monument Valley, although they were tagged as such.As expected, the photography tour group had a fairly wide range of images, which included close-ups of rocks, images of juniper trees, and images taken in places that were accessible only with a high clearance vehicle and a Navajo guide, such as the Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei, the Valley of the Gods, and the slickrock formations of Mystery Valley. However, in the images selected at the end of the workshop as representative of their experience of Monument Valley, all participants included the iconic images of Highway 163, the Mittens, and the Artist’s Point vista.Very few images were of the Navajo people. Tourists are requested not to photograph the Navajo unless they were at a sign-posted location where a mechanism was available for paying for the privilege. Here the Navajo posed in traditional dress, engaged in customary activities, or as foreground interest in the desert landscape. The few tourists availing themselves of these opportunities seemed self-conscious, hurriedly taking the snap and paying the fee. Gillespie explains this as the effect of the “reverse gaze” where the photographed positions the photographer “as an ignorant and superficial tourist” (349). At the time, only one of the iconic images was featured on one of the official tourist sites, with the Mittens forming the banner image on the Visit Utah Monument Valley page. The Visit Arizona Monument Valley page had a single image (of the Ear of the Wind natural arch), and the Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation Monument Valley page also had a single image, that of the Three Sisters formation.Image and MeaningThe dominant subject in both tourist and tourism industry images is the Mittens. This image is also prominent in popular culture beginning with John Ford's film Stagecoach, through to Kanye West’s Bound 2 music video. This suggests that there is a closed circle of representation in tourist photography, with visitors capturing the images they have previously seen as representative of the destination. However, there may be an additional, more prosaic, explanation. The Mittens can be photographed from the terrace at the visitors centre, from the rooms at the View Hotel, or they can be captured from the car park, meaning that tourists do not have to leave their cars to attach this image to their travel narrative. The second most photographed landscape was that of Highway 163, an image that can be taken without even having to pay the fee and enter the Navajo Park.Garrod’s study of tourist and professional images of Aberystwyth noted that tourists did not have photographs taken from the top of the hill, and while no explanation for this was given, it could be that ease of access was a consideration. While the number of visitors to America’s national parks and recreation areas is increasing each year, the amount of time each visitor spends at the attraction is in decline. The average visit to Yosemite lasts just under five hours, visitors stay for just under two hours in Saguaro National Park in Arizona, and at the Grand Canyon National Park, most visitors spend just 17 minutes looking at the magnificent landscape (Bernstein; de Graaf). In Yosemite National Park many visitors “simply rolled by slowly in their cars, taking photos out the windows” (de Graaf np). So, ease of access to locations familiar from popular culture images is a factor in tourist representations of their destinations.Our photography tour group stayed five days in Monument Valley and travelled further afield to locations only accessible with a Navajo guide, however the images selected as representative of Monument Valley were of the same easily reached landmarks. This suggests that the process around the perpetuation of iconic tourist images is more complex than simple ease of access, or first impressions.What is apparent in looking at both the Instagram images and those photographs selected as representative by the tour group, is that what is depicted is not necessarily contemporary tourist experience, but rather a way of seeing the experience in terms of personal and cultural stories. Photography involves the selection, structuring and shaping of what is to be captured (Urry 260), so that the image is as much the representation of a perception, as a snapshot of experienced reality. In a guide to photographing the southwest of the USA, Matrés regrets the greater restrictions on movement and the increased commercialisation in Monument Valley (170), which reduce the possibility of photographing under good light conditions, and of capturing images without tourist buses, sales booths, and consequent crowds. However, almost all of the photographs studied avoided these. Photographers seemed to have expended considerable effort to produce an idealised image of a Western landscape that would have been familiar to John Ford, as the photographs were not of a commercialised, crowded tourist destination. When someone paid the horseman to ride out to the end of John Ford Point, groups of tourists would walk out too, fussing over the horse, however having people in the image led to those on the photography tour rejecting the image as representative of Monument Valley. For the most part, the landscape images highlighted the isolation and remoteness, depicting the frontier beyond which civilization ceases to exist.ConclusionPhotography is one of the performances through which people establish personal realities (Crang 245), and the reality for Monument Valley tourists is that it is still a remote destination. It is in the driest and least populated part of the US, and receives only 350,000 visitors a year compared, with the five million people who visit the nearby Grand Canyon. On a prosaic level, tourist photographs verify that the location was visited (Sontag 9), so the images must be able to be readily associated with the destination. They are evidence that the tourist has experienced some form of authentic, exotic, place (Chalfen 435), and so must depict scenes that differ from the everyday landscape. They also play a role in constructing an identity based in being a particular type of tourist, so they need to contribute to the narrative constructed from a blend of mythologies, memories and experiences. The circle of representation in tourist images is still closed, though it has broadened to constitute a narrative derived from a range of sources. By capturing the iconic landmarks of Monument Valley framed to emphasise the grandeur and isolation, tourists insert themselves into a narrative that includes John Wayne and Kanye West at the edge of civilization.References2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.Airwolf. Dir. Donald P. Bellisario, CBS, 1984–1986.Akehurst, Gary. “User Generated Content: The Use of Blogs for Tourism Organisations and Tourism Consumers.” Service Business 3.1 (2009): 51-61.Bernstein, Danny. “The Numbers behind National Park Visitation.” National Parks Traveller, 2010. 5 Aug. 2016 <http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2010/04/numbers-behind-national-park-visitation/>.Kanye West. Bound 2. Nick Knight Good Music, 2013.Chalfen, Richard M. “Photography’s Role in Tourism: Some Unexplored Relationships.” Annals of Tourism Research 6.4 (1979): 435–447Crang, Mike. “Knowing, Tourism and Practices of Vision.” Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge. Ed. David Crouch. London: Routledge, 1999. 238–56.De Graaf, John. “Finding Time for Our Parks.” Earth Island Journal, 2016. 5 Aug. 2016 <http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/finding_time_for_our_parks/>.Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber, Donald Wilson. BBC One, 1963–present.Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969.Garrod, Brian. “Understanding the Relationship between Tourism Destination Imagery and Tourist Photography.” Journal of Travel Research 47.3 (2009): 346-358Gillespie, Alex. "Tourist Photography and the Reverse Gaze." Ethos 34.3 (2006): 343-366.Jenkins, Olivia. “Photography and Travel Brochures: The Circle of Representation.” Tourism Geographies 5.3 (2003): 305-328.Matrés, Laurent. Photographing the Southwest. Alta Loma, CA: Graphie Publishers, 2006.Schroeder, Jonathan E. Visual Consumption. London: Routledge, 2002.Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 1977 Stagecoach. Dir. John Ford. United Artists, 1937.The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Warner Bros, 1956.Thelma & Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage, 1992.

Our thesis is that the city’s ambience is now an unstable dialectic in which we are watchers and watched, mirrored and refracted in a landscape of iPhone auteurs, eTags, CCTV and sousveillance. Embrace ambience! Invoking Benjamin’s spirit, this article does not seek to limit understanding through restriction to a particular theme or theoretical construct (Buck-Morss 253). Instead, it offers snapshots of interactions at the dawn of the postmodern city. That bricolage also engages how people appropriate, manipulate, disrupt and divert urban spaces and strategies of power in their everyday life. Ambient information can both liberate and disenfranchise the individual. This article asks whether our era’s dialectics result in a new personhood or merely restate the traditional spectacle of ‘bright lights, big city’. Does the virtualized city result in ambient anomie and satiation or in surprise, autonomy and serendipity? (Gumpert 36) Since the steam age, ambience has been characterised in terms of urban sound, particularly the alienation attributable to the individual’s experience as a passive receptor of a cacophony of sounds – now soft, now loud, random and recurrent–from the hubbub of crowds, the crash and grind of traffic, the noise of industrial processes and domestic activity, factory whistles, fire alarms, radio, television and gramophones (Merchant 111; Thompson 6). In the age of the internet, personal devices such as digital cameras and iPhones, and urban informatics such as CCTV networks and e-Tags, ambience is interactivity, monitoring and signalling across multiple media, rather than just sound. It is an interactivity in which watchers observe the watched observing them and the watched reshape the fabric of virtualized cities merely by traversing urban precincts (Hillier 295; De Certeau 163). It is also about pervasive although unevenly distributed monitoring of individuals, using sensors that are remote to the individual (for example cameras or tag-readers mounted above highways) or are borne by the individual (for example mobile phones or badges that systematically report the location to a parent, employer or sex offender register) (Holmes 176; Savitch 130). That monitoring reflects what Doel and Clark characterized as a pervasive sense of ambient fear in the postmodern city, albeit fear that like much contemporary anxiety is misplaced–you are more at risk from intimates than from strangers, from car accidents than terrorists or stalkers–and that is ahistorical (Doel 13; Scheingold 33). Finally, it is about cooption, with individuals signalling their identity through ambient advertising: wearing tshirts, sweatshirts, caps and other apparel that display iconic faces such as Obama and Monroe or that embody corporate imagery such as the Nike ‘Swoosh’, Coca-Cola ‘Ribbon’, Linux Penguin and Hello Kitty feline (Sayre 82; Maynard 97). In the postmodern global village much advertising is ambient, rather than merely delivered to a device or fixed on a billboard. Australian cities are now seas of information, phantasmagoric environments in which the ambient noise encountered by residents and visitors comprises corporate signage, intelligent traffic signs, displays at public transport nodes, shop-window video screens displaying us watching them, and a plethora of personal devices showing everything from the weather to snaps of people in the street or neighborhood satellite maps. They are environments through which people traverse both as persons and abstractions, virtual presences on volatile digital maps and in online social networks. Spectacle, Anomie or Personhood The spectacular city of modernity is a meme of communication, cultural and urban development theory. It is spectacular in the sense that of large, artificial, even sublime. It is also spectacular because it is built around the gaze, whether the vistas of Hausmann’s boulevards, the towers of Manhattan and Chicago, the shopfront ‘sea of light’ and advertising pillars noted by visitors to Weimar Berlin or the neon ‘neo-baroque’ of Las Vegas (Schivelbusch 114; Fritzsche 164; Ndalianis 535). In the year 2010 it aspires to 2020 vision, a panoptic and panspectric gaze on the part of governors and governed alike (Kullenberg 38). In contrast to the timelessness of Heidegger’s hut and the ‘fixity’ of rural backwaters, spectacular cities are volatile domains where all that is solid continues to melt into air with the aid of jackhammers and the latest ‘new media’ potentially result in a hypereality that make it difficult to determine what is real and what is not (Wark 22; Berman 19). The spectacular city embodies a dialectic. It is anomic because it induces an alienation in the spectator, a fatigue attributable to media satiation and to a sense of being a mere cog in a wheel, a disempowered and readily-replaceable entity that is denied personhood–recognition as an autonomous individual–through subjection to a Fordist and post-Fordist industrial discipline or the more insidious imprisonment of being ‘a housewife’, one ant in a very large ant hill (Dyer-Witheford 58). People, however, are not automatons: they experience media, modernity and urbanism in different ways. The same attributes that erode the selfhood of some people enhance the autonomy and personhood of others. The spectacular city, now a matrix of digits, information flows and opportunities, is a realm in which people can subvert expectations and find scope for self-fulfillment, whether by wearing a hoodie that defeats CCTV or by using digital technologies to find and associate with other members of stigmatized affinity groups. One person’s anomie is another’s opportunity. Ambience and Virtualisation Eighty years after Fritz Lang’s Metropolis forecast a cyber-sociality, digital technologies are resulting in a ‘virtualisation’ of social interactions and cities. In post-modern cityscapes, the space of flows comprises an increasing number of electronic exchanges through physically disjointed places (Castells 2002). Virtualisation involves supplementation or replacement of face-to-face contact with hypersocial communication via new media, including SMS, email, blogging and Facebook. In 2010 your friends (or your boss or a bully) may always be just a few keystrokes away, irrespective of whether it is raining outside, there is a public transport strike or the car is in for repairs (Hassan 69; Baron 215). Virtualisation also involves an abstraction of bodies and physical movements, with the information that represents individual identities or vehicles traversing the virtual spaces comprised of CCTV networks (where viewers never encounter the person or crowd face to face), rail ticketing systems and road management systems (x e-Tag passed by this tag reader, y camera logged a specific vehicle onto a database using automated number-plate recognition software) (Wood 93; Lyon 253). Surveillant Cities Pervasive anxiety is a permanent and recurrent feature of urban experience. Often navigated by an urgency to control perceived disorder, both physically and through cultivated dominant theory (early twentieth century gendered discourses to push women back into the private sphere; ethno-racial closure and control in the Black Metropolis of 1940s Chicago), history is punctuated by attempts to dissolve public debate and infringe minority freedoms (Wilson 1991). In the Post-modern city unprecedented technological capacity generates a totalizing media vector whose plausible by-product is the perception of an ambient menace (Wark 3). Concurrent faith in technology as a cost-effective mechanism for public management (policing, traffic, planning, revenue generation) has resulted in emergence of the surveillant city. It is both a social and architectural fabric whose infrastructure is dotted with sensors and whose people assume that they will be monitored by private/public sector entities and directed by interactive traffic management systems – from electronic speed signs and congestion indicators through to rail schedule displays –leveraging data collected through those sensors. The fabric embodies tensions between governance (at its crudest, enforcement of law by police and their surrogates in private security services) and the soft cage of digital governmentality, with people being disciplined through knowledge that they are being watched and that the observation may be shared with others in an official or non-official shaming (Parenti 51; Staples 41). Encounters with a railway station CCTV might thus result in exhibition of the individual in court or on broadcast television, whether in nightly news or in a ‘reality tv’ crime expose built around ‘most wanted’ footage (Jermyn 109). Misbehaviour by a partner might merely result in scrutiny of mobile phone bills or web browser histories (which illicit content has the partner consumed, which parts of cyberspace has been visited), followed by a visit to the family court. It might instead result in digital viligilantism, with private offences being named and shamed on electronic walls across the global village, such as Facebook. iPhone Auteurism Activists have responded to pervasive surveillance by turning the cameras on ‘the watchers’ in an exercise of ‘sousveillance’ (Bennett 13; Huey 158). That mirroring might involve the meticulous documentation, often using the same geospatial tools deployed by public/private security agents, of the location of closed circuit television cameras and other surveillance devices. One outcome is the production of maps identifying who is watching and where that watching is taking place. As a corollary, people with anxieties about being surveilled, with a taste for street theatre or a receptiveness to a new form of urban adventure have used those maps to traverse cities via routes along which they cannot be identified by cameras, tags and other tools of the panoptic sort, or to simply adopt masks at particular locations. In 2020 can anyone aspire to be a protagonist in V for Vendetta? (iSee) Mirroring might take more visceral forms, with protestors for example increasingly making a practice of capturing images of police and private security services dealing with marches, riots and pickets. The advent of 3G mobile phones with a still/video image capability and ongoing ‘dematerialisation’ of traditional video cameras (ie progressively cheaper, lighter, more robust, less visible) means that those engaged in political action can document interaction with authority. So can passers-by. That ambient imaging, turning the public gaze on power and thereby potentially redefining the ‘public’ (given that in Australia the community has been embodied by the state and discourse has been mediated by state-sanctioned media), poses challenges for media scholars and exponents of an invigorated civil society in which we are looking together – and looking at each other – rather than bowling alone. One challenge for consumers in construing ambient media is trust. Can we believe what we see, particularly when few audiences have forensic skills and intermediaries such as commercial broadcasters may privilege immediacy (the ‘breaking news’ snippet from participants) over context and verification. Social critics such as Baudelaire and Benjamin exalt the flaneur, the free spirit who gazed on the street, a street that was as much a spectacle as the theatre and as vibrant as the circus. In 2010 the same technologies that empower citizen journalism and foster a succession of velvet revolutions feed flaneurs whose streetwalking doesn’t extend beyond a keyboard and a modem. The US and UK have thus seen emergence of gawker services, with new media entrepreneurs attempting to build sustainable businesses by encouraging fans to report the location of celebrities (and ideally provide images of those encounters) for the delectation of people who are web surfing or receiving a tweet (Burns 24). In the age of ambient cameras, where the media are everywhere and nowhere (and micro-stock photoservices challenge agencies such as Magnum), everyone can join the paparazzi. Anyone can deploy that ambient surveillance to become a stalker. The enthusiasm with which fans publish sightings of celebrities will presumably facilitate attacks on bodies rather than images. Information may want to be free but so, inconveniently, do iconoclasts and practitioners of participatory panopticism (Dodge 431; Dennis 348). Rhetoric about ‘citizen journalism’ has been co-opted by ‘old media’, with national broadcasters and commercial enterprises soliciting still images and video from non-professionals, whether for free or on a commercial basis. It is a world where ‘journalists’ are everywhere and where responsibility resides uncertainly at the editorial desk, able to reject or accept offerings from people with cameras but without the industrial discipline formerly exercised through professional training and adherence to formal codes of practice. It is thus unsurprising that South Australia’s Government, echoed by some peers, has mooted anti-gawker legislation aimed at would-be auteurs who impede emergency services by stopping their cars to take photos of bushfires, road accidents or other disasters. The flipside of that iPhone auteurism is anxiety about the public gaze, expressed through moral panics regarding street photography and sexting. Apart from a handful of exceptions (notably photography in the Sydney Opera House precinct, in the immediate vicinity of defence facilities and in some national parks), Australian law does not prohibit ‘street photography’ which includes photographs or videos of streetscapes or public places. Despite periodic assertions that it is a criminal offence to take photographs of people–particularly minors–without permission from an official, parent/guardian or individual there is no general restriction on ambient photography in public spaces. Moral panics about photographs of children (or adults) on beaches or in the street reflect an ambient anxiety in which danger is associated with strangers and strangers are everywhere (Marr 7; Bauman 93). That conceptualisation is one that would delight people who are wholly innocent of Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin, in which the gaze (ever pervasive, ever powerful) is tantamount to a violation. The reality is more prosaic: most child sex offences involve intimates, rather than the ‘monstrous other’ with the telephoto lens or collection of nastiness on his iPod (Cossins 435; Ingebretsen 190). Recognition of that reality is important in considering moves that would egregiously restrict legitimate photography in public spaces or happy snaps made by doting relatives. An ambient image–unposed, unpremeditated, uncoerced–of an intimate may empower both authors and subjects when little is solid and memory is fleeting. The same caution might usefully be applied in considering alarms about sexting, ie creation using mobile phones (and access by phone or computer monitor) of intimate images of teenagers by teenagers. Australian governments have moved to emulate their US peers, treating such photography as a criminal offence that can be conceptualized as child pornography and addressed through permanent inclusion in sex offender registers. Lifelong stigmatisation is inappropriate in dealing with naïve or brash 12 and 16 year olds who have been exchanging intimate images without an awareness of legal frameworks or an understanding of consequences (Shafron-Perez 432). Cameras may be everywhere among the e-generation but legal knowledge, like the future, is unevenly distributed. Digital Handcuffs Generations prior to 2008 lost themselves in the streets, gaining individuality or personhood by escaping the surveillance inherent in living at home, being observed by neighbours or simply surrounded by colleagues. Streets offered anonymity and autonomy (Simmel 1903), one reason why heterodox sexuality has traditionally been negotiated in parks and other beats and on kerbs where sex workers ply their trade (Dalton 375). Recent decades have seen a privatisation of those public spaces, with urban planning and digital technologies imposing a new governmentality on hitherto ambient ‘deviance’ and on voyeuristic-exhibitionist practice such as heterosexual ‘dogging’ (Bell 387). That governmentality has been enforced through mechanisms such as replacement of traditional public toilets with ‘pods’ that are conveniently maintained by global service providers such as Veolia (the unromantic but profitable rump of former media & sewers conglomerate Vivendi) and function as billboards for advertising groups such as JC Decaux. Faces encountered in the vicinity of the twenty-first century pissoir are thus likely to be those of supermodels selling yoghurt, low interest loans or sportsgear – the same faces sighted at other venues across the nation and across the globe. Visiting ‘the mens’ gives new meaning to the word ambience when you are more likely to encounter Louis Vuitton and a CCTV camera than George Michael. George’s face, or that of Madonna, Barack Obama, Kevin 07 or Homer Simpson, might instead be sighted on the tshirts or hoodies mentioned above. George’s music might also be borne on the bodies of people you see in the park, on the street, or in the bus. This is the age of ambient performance, taken out of concert halls and virtualised on iPods, Walkmen and other personal devices, music at the demand of the consumer rather than as rationed by concert managers (Bull 85). The cost of that ambience, liberation of performance from time and space constraints, may be a Weberian disenchantment (Steiner 434). Technology has also removed anonymity by offering digital handcuffs to employees, partners, friends and children. The same mobile phones used in the past to offer excuses or otherwise disguise the bearer’s movement may now be tied to an observer through location services that plot the person’s movement across Google Maps or the geospatial information of similar services. That tracking is an extension into the private realm of the identification we now take for granted when using taxis or logistics services, with corporate Australia for example investing in systems that allow accurate determination of where a shipment is located (on Sydney Harbour Bridge? the loading dock? accompanying the truck driver on unauthorized visits to the pub?) and a forecast of when it will arrive (Monmonier 76). Such technologies are being used on a smaller scale to enforce digital Fordism among the binary proletariat in corporate buildings and campuses, with ‘smart badges’ and biometric gateways logging an individual’s movement across institutional terrain (so many minutes in the conference room, so many minutes in the bathroom or lingering among the faux rainforest near the Vice Chancellery) (Bolt). Bright Lights, Blog City It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by right-thinking Foucauldians, that modernity is a matter of coercion and anomie as all that is solid melts into air. If we are living in an age of hypersocialisation and hypercapitalism – movies and friends on tap, along with the panoptic sorting by marketers and pervasive scrutiny by both the ‘information state’ and public audiences (the million people or one person reading your blog) that is an inevitable accompaniment of the digital cornucopia–we might ask whether everyone is or should be unhappy. This article began by highlighting traditional responses to the bright lights, brashness and excitement of the big city. One conclusion might be that in 2010 not much has changed. Some people experience ambient information as liberating; others as threatening, productive of physical danger or of a more insidious anomie in which personal identity is blurred by an ineluctable electro-smog. There is disagreement about the professionalism (for which read ethics and inhibitions) of ‘citizen media’ and about a culture in which, as in the 1920s, audiences believe that they ‘own the image’ embodying the celebrity or public malefactor. Digital technologies allow you to navigate through the urban maze and allow officials, marketers or the hostile to track you. Those same technologies allow you to subvert both the governmentality and governance. You are free: Be ambient! References Baron, Naomi. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Oxford: Polity Press, 2000. Bell, David. “Bodies, Technologies, Spaces: On ‘Dogging’.” Sexualities 9.4 (2006): 387-408. Bennett, Colin. The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 2001. Bolt, Nate. “The Binary Proletariat.” First Monday 5.5 (2000). 25 Feb 2010 ‹http://131.193.153.231/www/issues/issue5_5/bolt/index.html›. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Bull, Michael. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and the Urban Experience. London: Routledge, 2008 Burns, Kelli. Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster Our Fascination with Popular Culture. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Castells, Manuel. “The Urban Ideology.” The Castells Reader on Cities and Social Theory. Ed. Ida Susser. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. 34-70. Cossins, Anne, Jane Goodman-Delahunty, and Kate O’Brien. “Uncertainty and Misconceptions about Child Sexual Abuse: Implications for the Criminal Justice System.” Psychiatry, Psychology and the Law 16.4 (2009): 435-452. Dalton, David. “Policing Outlawed Desire: ‘Homocriminality’ in Beat Spaces in Australia.” Law & Critique 18.3 (2007): 375-405. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California P, 1984. Dennis, Kingsley. “Keeping a Close Watch: The Rise of Self-Surveillance and the Threat of Digital Exposure.” The Sociological Review 56.3 (2008): 347-357. Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. “Outlines of a World Coming into Existence: Pervasive Computing and the Ethics of Forgetting.” Environment & Planning B: Planning & Design 34.3 (2007): 431-445. Doel, Marcus, and David Clarke. “Transpolitical Urbanism: Suburban Anomaly and Ambient Fear.” Space & Culture 1.2 (1998): 13-36. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1999. Fritzsche, Peter. Reading Berlin 1900. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Gumpert, Gary, and Susan Drucker. “Privacy, Predictability or Serendipity and Digital Cities.” Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches. Berlin: Springer, 2002. 26-40. Hassan, Robert. The Information Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Hillier, Bill. “Cities as Movement Economies.” Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution. Ed. Peter Drioege. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1997. 295-342. Holmes, David. “Cybercommuting on an Information Superhighway: The Case of Melbourne’s CityLink.” The Cybercities Reader. Ed. Stephen Graham. London: Routledge, 2004. 173-178. Huey, Laura, Kevin Walby, and Aaron Doyle. “Cop Watching in the Downtown Eastside: Exploring the Use of CounterSurveillance as a Tool of Resistance.” Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. Ed. Torin Monahan. London: Routledge, 2006. 149-166. Ingebretsen, Edward. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. iSee. “Now More Than Ever”. 20 Feb 2010 ‹http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee/info.html›. Jackson, Margaret, and Julian Ligertwood. "Identity Management: Is an Identity Card the Solution for Australia?” Prometheus 24.4 (2006): 379-387. Jermyn, Deborah. Crime Watching: Investigating Real Crime TV. London: IB Tauris, 2007. Kullenberg, Christopher. “The Social Impact of IT: Surveillance and Resistance in Present-Day Conflicts.” FlfF-Kommunikation 1 (2009): 37-40. Lyon, David. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. London: Routledge, 2003. Marr, David. The Henson Case. Melbourne: Text, 2008. Maynard, Margaret. Dress and Globalisation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. Merchant, Carolyn. The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Monmonier, Mark. “Geolocation and Locational Privacy: The ‘Inside’ Story on Geospatial Tracking’.” Privacy and Technologies of Identity: A Cross-disciplinary Conversation. Ed. Katherine Strandburg and Daniela Raicu. Berlin: Springer, 2006. 75-92. Ndalianis, Angela. “Architecture of the Senses: Neo-Baroque Entertainment Spectacles.” Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Tradition. Ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. 355-374. Parenti, Christian. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Sayre, Shay. “T-shirt Messages: Fortune or Folly for Advertisers.” Advertising and Popular Culture: Studies in Variety and Versatility. Ed. Sammy Danna. New York: Popular Press, 1992. 73-82. Savitch, Henry. Cities in a Time of Terror: Space, Territory and Local Resilience. Armonk: Sharpe, 2008. Scheingold, Stuart. The Politics of Street Crime: Criminal Process and Cultural Obsession. Philadephia: Temple UP, 1992. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1995. Shafron-Perez, Sharon. “Average Teenager or Sex Offender: Solutions to the Legal Dilemma Caused by Sexting.” John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law 26.3 (2009): 431-487. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Individuality and Social Forms. Ed. Donald Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1971. Staples, William. Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Steiner, George. George Steiner: A Reader. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. Wark, Mackenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women. Berkeley: University of California P, 1991. Wood, David. “Towards Spatial Protocol: The Topologies of the Pervasive Surveillance Society.” Augmenting Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City. Eds. Allesandro Aurigi and Fiorella de Cindio. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 93-106.

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

AbstractOngoing European suppression of Aboriginal cultural land management since early-nineteenth century colonisation is widely thought to have caused major transformations across all Australian landscapes, including vegetation thickening, severe fires and biodiversity declines. However, these effects are often confounded in the densely settled southern Australia due to European land transformation. Landscapes currently under conservation and national park management in Tasmania are generally less disturbed, providing an opportunity to track ecosystem changes caused by the removal of Aboriginal peoples following colonisation in southern Australia. We use a multi-proxy palaeoecological technique and the analysis of historical aerial photography to investigate these changes in Cape Pillar, southeast Tasmania. Results reveal a major ecological shift following European colonisation, with the replacement of stable, open wet heathland characterised by minor fires (active cultural land use) with dense dry scrub characterised by major fires (cessation of cultural land use). We also discuss potential background role of regional climatic shifts in the observed ecological changes. Management programmes designed to restore open heathland pre-colonial cultural ecosystem would help reduce the risk of large fires in Cape Pillar.