Journal articles on the topic 'National parks and reserves South Australia Management'

Australia possesses a distinctive national parks and conservation reserves system, in which it is the State Governments rather than the Federal Government which owns, plans, and manages, national parks and other conservation reserves.Most Australian States declared their first national parks in the latter quarter of last century, Australia's first national park being declared in New South Wales in March 1879. These critical declarations were followed by a slow accumulation of parks and reserves through to 1968. The pace of acquisition then quickened dramatically with an eight-fold expansion in the total area of national parks between 1968 and 1990, at an average rate of over 750,000 ha per annum. The present Australian system contains 530 national parks covering 20.18 million hectares or 2.6% of the land-mass. A further 28.3 million hectares is protected in other parks and conservation reserves. In terms of the percentage of their land-mass now in national parks, the leading States are Tasmania (12.8%) and Victoria (10.0%), with Western Australia (1.9%) and Queensland (2.1%) trailing far behind, and New South Wales (3.92%) and South Australia (3.1%) lying between.The Australian system is also compared with the Canadian and USA systems. All three are countries of widely comparable cultures that have national parks covering similar percentage areas, but Canada and the USA have far fewer national parks than Australia and they are in general of much greater size. In addition, Canada and the USA ‘resource’ these parks far better than the Australians do theirs. The paper concludes that Australia needs to rationalize its current system by introducing direct funding, by the Federal Government, of national park management, and duly examining the whole system of reserves from a national rather than States' viewpoint.

Globally, areas of high-quality wildlife habitat of significant environmental value are at risk of permanent damage from climate change. These areas represent social-ecological systems that will require increasing management intervention to maintain their biological and socio-cultural values. Managers of protected areas have begun to recognize the inevitability of ecosystem change and the need to embrace dynamic approaches to intervention. However, significant uncertainty remains about the onset and severity of some impacts, which makes planning difficult. For Indigenous communities, there are intrinsic links between cultural heritage and the conservation of place and biodiversity that need to be better integrated in protected area planning and management. In New South Wales, Australia, management of public conservation reserves and national parks is the responsibility of a State government agency, the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS). This paper describes the outcomes of a participatory planning process with NPWS staff to, firstly, identify the options available, the available ‘tool kit’, to manage biodiversity and cultural heritage in protected areas; secondly, explore how the selection of management actions from the ‘tool kit’ is associated with the level of climate risk to biodiversity or cultural heritage assets; and thirdly, to understand how the form of individual management actions might adapt to changes in climate risk. Combining these three elements into a series of risk-based, adaptive pathways for conservation of biodiversity and cultural heritage is a novel approach that is currently supporting place-based planning for public conservation areas. Incorporation of the trade-offs and synergies in seeking to effectively manage these discrete but related types of values and the implications for conservation practice are discussed.

Abstract ContextFeral cat predation has had a significant impact on native Australian fauna in the past 200 years. In the early 2000s, population monitoring of the western ground parrot showed a dramatic decline from the pre-2000 range, with one of three meta-populations declining to very low levels and a second becoming locally extinct. We review 8 years of integrated introduced predator control, which trialled the incorporation of the feral cat bait Eradicat® into existing fox baiting programs. AimsTo test the efficacy of integrating feral cat control into an existing introduced predator control program in an adaptive management framework conducted in response to the decline of native species. The objective was to protect the remaining western ground parrot populations and other threatened fauna on the south coast of Western Australia. MethodsA landscape-scale feral cat and fox baiting program was delivered across south coast reserves that were occupied by western ground parrots in the early 2000s. Up to 500000ha of national parks and natures reserves were baited per annum. Monitoring was established to evaluate both the efficacy of landscape-scale baiting in management of feral cat populations, and the response of several native fauna species, including the western ground parrot, to an integrated introduced predator control program. Key resultsOn average, 28% of radio-collared feral cats died from Eradicat® baiting each year, over a 5-year period. The results varied from 0% to 62% between years. Changes in site occupancy by feral cats, as measured by detection on camera traps, was also variable, with significant declines detected after baiting in some years and sites. Trends in populations of native fauna, including the western ground parrot and chuditch, showed positive responses to integrated control of foxes and cats. ImplicationsLandscape-scale baiting of feral cats in ecosystems on the south coast of Western Australia had varying success when measured by direct knockdown of cats and site occupancy as determined by camera trapping; however, native species appeared to respond favourably to integrated predator control. For the protection of native species, we recommend ongoing baiting for both foxes and feral cats, complemented by post-bait trapping of feral cats. We advocate monitoring baiting efficacy in a well designed adaptive management framework to deliver long-term recovery of threatened species that have been impacted by cats.

Feral goats are a significant threat to biodiversity in Australia. However, goats are also harvested by some landholders for commercial benefit and this can lead to disagreements regarding control techniques. In the rangelands of New South Wales, feral goat distribution is closely linked to artificial watering points (AWP) such as tanks and bores. Previous surveys indicated that goat activity was rare more than 4 km from water. We hypothesised that constructing sections of goat-proof fencing in areas where goats were feeding on National Parks but watering on neighbouring properties, such that they had to travel more than 4 km from the AWP to access the park, would result in a significant decrease in goat abundance in these areas. We tested this hypothesis in Paroo-Darling National Park, Gundabooka State Conservation Area and Gundabooka National Park using changes in index (fresh goat dung groups per 100-m transect). We also measured kangaroo dung and ground cover index changes. Twelve months after the fences were constructed, goat dung significantly declined compared with non-treatment areas and the relationship between distance to water and goat dung broke down at the treatment sites. Kangaroo indices were not affected by the fences. The results for bare ground were the same as for goat dung, with significantly less bare ground and a breakdown in the relationship with distance to water at the treatment sites after the fences were constructed, but this was due to a corresponding increase in litter rather than live vegetation. This technique can be a significant tool for protecting biodiversity from feral goats, without removing the potential for neighbouring landholders to harvest the goats. If strategically used to create zones free of resident goats around the boundaries of conservation reserves, it should increase the effectiveness of other techniques such as trapping, mustering and shooting, by reducing post-control reinvasion. Recognition of access to water as an important management tool should substantially improve our management of feral goats in the rangelands.

To conserve its wildlife, Botswana has set aside more than 17% of its total land area as game reserves, national parks, and wildlife management areas. Despite this generous allocation to wildlife, the fauna of the country is declining in both absolute numbers and species diversity. Lack of permanent water-sources in some game reserves, obstruction of fauna migration routes by cattle fences, and a poorly-developed tourist industry, are partly responsible for this decline.In a developing country such as Botswana, tourism should yield sufficient funds for the maintenance of game reserves and national parks. But currently the tourist industry accounts for less than 2% of the gross national product. Unless the industry is encouraged to flourish and expand into dormant reserves such as the Gemsbok National Park and Mabuasehube Game Reserve, animals in those sanctuaries are likely to be driven by drought into South Africa.

SummarySouth Africa contains an extensive, well-managed protected area network which generates considerable economic benefits from tourism, but the extensive land and financial resources required by the parks and reserves are difficult to reconcile with the acute social and economic development needs of poor rural people with very limited access to any kind of resources. Local communities have incurred substantial costs from the establishment of these parks while receiving few benefits in return. National and provincial governments, as well as the conservation authorities, have now recognized that the long-term future of parks and reserves depends on taking effective steps to redress the local imbalance of benefits and costs. Integrated conservation-development projects (ICDPs) are beginning to test a range of specific measures to increase local community participation in the benefits from protected areas. Parks have considerable resources and expertise which they can use to support local development through ICDPs, although it would be unrealistic to expect parks to solve widespread rural poverty amongst their neighbours. Instead, park authorities should take the lead in forming partnerships to mobilize the combined resources and expertise of other national and provincial government agencies, NGOs and the private sector, as well as the local communities themselves. Community participation in wildlife tourism may best be achievable through joint ventures with the private sector or park management authorities.

REGARDLESS of the merits and values of individual national parks and nature reserves, Australia's conservation reserves do not ensure the survival of the continent's biota. There are many reasons for this. Reserves, even the largest, are too small and vulnerable to broad area disturbance. Consider that, in January 2003, fires burnt more than two-thirds of Kosciuszko National Park, which at 690 000 ha is the largest park in New South Wales and one of the largest in Australia. This shows how even the largest conservation reserves are at risk of catastrophic disturbance. The much smaller Nadgee Nature Reserve (21 000 ha) in southeastern New South Wales has burnt almost in its entirety twice in the 35 years I have worked there. The Nadgee fires and those in Kosciuszko were started by lightning and were the result of prolonged drought, events common across the continent. When small size is coupled with isolation, the long-term survival of populations and the exchange of propagules within the reserve system becomes problematical. Small size and isolation do not leave much scope for plants and animals to adapt to long-term climate change, either through dispersal or by evolution. Even reserving 10 or 15% of land for nature conservation, as recommended by some international conservation agencies, will be inadequate; a target of 30% would have better ecological credentials, but even this could prove inadequate unless the nature conservation reserve system was designed to allow for long-term evolutionary change, which it is not (see Archer 2002; Recher 2002a,b).

Biodiversity continues to decline in Australia despite significant effort by government, industry and concerned citizens. In this essay the author draws upon his >30 years of experience at the sharp end of natural resource management to consider some factors that may be contributing to the relative lack of progress. While national parks and reserves form a small part of the overall Australian landscape their importance in the battle to retain biodiversity is undeniable. However, rigidity of thinking on the part of park managers has limited the support base for parks and thus their potential in leading integrated landscape management at the all-important local level. The rise of animal libertarianism is further impacting on the ability of parks and wildlife managers to make rational decisions based on the best scientific advice. Animal libertarianism, influential in our western, primarily urban-based society, causes significant problems in wildlife conservation. Anthropomorphic concepts of rights have little application in the animal world and contribute even less to the conservation of species.

Past and present distributions of 0. unguifera were compared using data from museums, explorers' records and field surveys conducted during 1986-88. There is little evidence of a decline in geographical distribution or abundance of this species during the last century, although numbers may have declined locally in parts of the West Kimberley in Western Australia. At present 0. unguifera is moderately common between latitudes 16� and 19�S. in the Northern Territory and western Queensland and in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. It is uncommon towards the northern and southern limits of its range in each State. These limits correspond to latitudes 12�-14�S. and 20�-22�S. respectively. 0. unguifera appears to be under no immediate threat. However, its preferred habitats are poorly represented in National Parks and other conservation reserves throughout northern Australia, and this situation should be remedied.

The distribution of Ornithorhynchus anatinus in the Eden region of south-east New South Wales is defined based on information from two community-based surveys. In 1986-87 a state-wide questionnaire survey was distributed to field staff from various government departments. A search for historical reports was also carried out. Fifty-five reports of platypuses were obtained from the Eden region, including 30 sightings on agricultural land. The second approach was through a joint National Parks and Wildlife Service and State Forests householder postal survey in 1991. The survey returns yielded 273 locations of O. anatinus of which 76% were on freehold rural land, 19% were in State Forests and 5% were in National Parks or Nature Reserves. Records from both surveys, spread from 1930 to the early 1990s, were from all parts of the region. The surveys showed that platypuses have been widespread in the region, but their now fragmented distribution indicates a reduction in the regional population of the species. Management of waterways and catchments are crucial to its long-term survival. The public awareness of the platypus shown by the number of questionnaire returns, is an encouraging sign that local plans to conserve or restore its habitat are likely to be well received if produced through the cooperative approach initiated by community-based surveys.

The objective of the article is to give a comprehensive assessment of the impact that physical geographical factors of the coastal environment have on the South Baltic seaside resorts in the way it is reflected in planning documents (comprehensive plans, regional and tourism development strategies) of South Baltic seaside territorial entities. The seaside resorts and the adjacent coastal protected nature areas, particularly coastal national parks and UNESCO biosphere reserves, are the main focus of this study. The contents of 141 valid documents of spatial planning, management and development has been analysed. The studied comprehensive development plans, tourism strategies and other documents demonstrate that virtually all seaside municipalities in the South Baltic Region express a strong concern in increasing risk of coastal erosion and sea level rise related to the global climate change.

ABSTRACT Australia is among the top five shipping nations of the world based upon cargo and kilometres travelled. Australia also has vast, remote and environmentally sensitive coastlines ranging from tropical to subantarctic. Unfortunately shipping accidents and illegal discharges of oil and chemical pollutants into our marine environment do occur. To support spill response management in Australia, over the past four years the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) has coordinated the development of a uniform and integrated national Oil Spill Response Atlas (OSRA) based upon an ArcView® geographic information system (GIS). The main aims of the OSRA project were to:Develop a mutually agreed national GIS specification for the development of the digital atlas to assure consistency and compatibility Australia wide;Fast track the collation, capture and conversion of all relevant geographical and textual data into a standard digital GIS format for the majority of Australia's marine and coastal environments (particularly for highly sensitive environments such as, world heritage areas, and marine parks and reserves); andCreate a user-friendly series of GIS system tools specially designed for the particular needs of spill response managers, operational staff and environmental agencies. This paper highlights some of the advantages of GIS based systems for spill response management, the OSRA system development and features, as well as the GIS automation tools that assist spill response managers and operational personnel.

Bushfires have been a key concern for countries such as Australia for a long time. These must be mitigated to eradicate the associated harmful effects on the climate and to have a sustainable and healthy environment for wildlife. The current study investigates the 2019–2020 bushfires in New South Wales (NSW) Australia. The bush fires are mapped using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing, the hotpots are monitored, and damage is assessed. Further, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-based bushfire mitigation framework is presented where the bushfires can be mapped and monitored instantly using UAV swarms. For the GIS and remote sensing, datasets of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and VIIRS fire data products are used, whereas the paths of UAVs are optimized using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The mapping results of 2019–2020 NSW bushfires show that 50% of the national parks of NSW were impacted by the fires, resulting in damage to 2.5 million hectares of land. The fires are highly clustered towards the north and southeastern cities of NSW and its border region with Victoria. The hotspots are in the Deua, Kosciu Sako, Wollemi, and Yengo National Parks. The current study is the first step towards addressing a key issue of bushfire disasters, in the Australian context, that can be adopted by its Rural Fire Service (RFS), before the next fire season, to instantly map, assess, and subsequently mitigate the bushfire disasters. This will help move towards a smart and sustainable environment.

Context Since European settlement in 1788, much of the Australian terrestrial mammal fauna has declined or become extinct. The pattern of, and reason for, that decline was little documented, and is now difficult to decipher. Many mammal species are still declining, providing (an unfortunate) opportunity to better document the process, identify the causal factors and attempt to redress the problem. Aim We compare trends in mammal abundance reported in three recent longitudinal studies in conservation reserves in Australia. The studies were not established with the intention of documenting mammal decline, but marked simultaneous decline of co-existing species was the most striking feature of their results. Methods Long-term monitoring in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory (2001–04 and 2007–09), the Upper Warren region of Western Australia (since 1974) and the Great Otway National Park, Victoria (since 1975) principally relied on trapping, but also some spotlighting and sand plots, to document changes and trends in abundance in their respective mammal assemblages. Key results Decline was reported in most mammal species, across taxonomic groups, diets and size classes, but mostly involved species <5500g. The studies differed in their monitoring protocols and varied in the degree to which potential causal factors were monitored, thereby constraining interpretation of the drivers of declines. Inappropriate fire regimes and predation by feral cats are likely contributing factors in at least two study areas, and periods of markedly below-average rainfall are implicated in two areas. Conclusions We conclude the following: (1) conservation reserves in Australia may be failing to maintain at least some elements of the biodiversity that they were established to protect, and substantially enhanced management is required to redress this problem; (2) with current threats, mammal assemblages in Australia may be highly unstable; (3) substantial increase in effective long-term biodiversity monitoring programs in an adaptive management framework is needed; and (4) such monitoring programs will be more insightful if they also monitor factors driving population change. Implications Native mammal species declines and community disassembly may be occurring elsewhere. Long-term monitoring is critical for assessing trends in biodiversity and if done well, it can guide more effective and efficient management to deliver better conservation outcomes.

The mound springs of inland Australia are of outstanding scientific and cultural importance. Natural outlets for the waters of the Great Artesian Basin, they are found mostly on or near its margins. The most numerous and active are in the far north of South Australia. Parts of westem Queensland still have active springs, but almost all in north-westem New South Wales are now extinct, presumably because of aquifer draw-down in the wake of bore sinking. As permanent sources of potable water in a desert environment they have been a focus for human activity over many years. Aboriginal occupation has been documented to at least 5000 years BP and almost all the springs are rich in archaeological material and mythological associations. Since European settlement they have been of strategic importance in exploration and in the location of pastoral stations, the Overland Telegraph and the old Ghan narrow gauge railway from Marree to Oodnadatta. Biologically, they represent unusually specialised aquatic habitats, the discontinuity being analogous to islands and the isolation just as great for species with limited dispersal abilities. The result is an assemblage of plants and animals of evolutionary, biogeographic and ecological interest, with many endemic and relict species. Heavily degraded by aquifer draw-down and over a century of pastoralism, the springs were given little attention until relatively recently. In the past decade two key areas have been acquired for the national parks system and ten important springs on pastoral country outside of the parks have been fenced. Important research has also been carried out, with a particular focus on the endemic elements of the invertebrate fauna. These are positive achievements, but the remoteness of the localities where the springs occur presents a continuing difficulty for on-going conservation and management programs.

The ecological effects of roads on plant and animal populations are well recognized. However, very little is known about the magnitude of the effects created by powerline easements. Like roads, powerline easements are ubiquitous in many landscapes, including reserves such as National Parks, which have restricted human activities. Regular mowing of the easements to manage vegetation regrowth creates a stark discontinuity with adjacent natural vegetation. Abrupt transitions such as these contribute to habitat fragmentation and are associated with movement and dispersal inhibition of fauna. We used GIS to estimate the area of direct and indirect effects of powerline easements in a 5735 km2 area of coastal New South Wales, focusing on the potential reduction of habitat area both within and outside reserves. While the area directly replaced by these features is a small percentage of the total landscape (<1%), the upper estimates of direct and indirect effects combined amounted to a substantial portion of habitat (10 103 ha). Further, roads and powerlines combined may affect up to 33 780 ha (8%) of habitat in the study area. Although the overall ecological impact of powerline easements could be reduced by concentrating them in regions of pre-existing fragmentation, in our study area powerlines rarely occurred adjacent to paved roads. For example, in National Parks, only 3% of the habitat area affected by powerlines overlapped with that affected by roads. This study highlights the potential for powerline easements to make a significant contribution to habitat fragmentation, even in the presence of dense road networks, thus calling for greater attention to their ecological impacts and to improved management strategies.

A community-based postal survey (questionnaire and map) was undertaken in the Eden region of south-eastern New South Wales in 1991–92 to help determine the local distribution of koalas and to obtain information on which to base a regional plan of management for koalas. The 1198 replies from the II 600 households in the region represented all parts of the area surveyed. The survey responses suggest that koalas are rare in the Eden region, and that the number of koalas has been constantly low for the last four decades. The records are scattered both chronologically and geographically. National Parks and Nature Reserves have never been the stronghold of local koala populations, and freehold land, particularly farmland, is not a major reservoir of koalas. Most koalas reported were in, or adjacent to, State Forests, particularly Murrah–Berrnagui and Tantawangalo–Glenbog–Yurammie. These areas appear to contain the core of the surviving koala population of the region. An assessment of the vegetation where koalas were sighted indicated that dry forest is the preferred habitat. The once abundant and widespread local koala population of late last century has been reduced by habitat loss and fragmentation to a few small, isolated populations. This regional survey, which was undertaken by use of a carefully constructed questionnaire, revealed an invaluable source of records and contributed 70% of the records in the database used for this study. This study also laid a basis for assessing koala management options in south-eastern New South Wales.

Sinkholes and coastal caves located in, around and between the Coffin Bay and Lincoln National Parks were surveyed for pre-European fossils, which were collected from or just below the sediment surface. Twenty-four pre-European fossil samples, including eight already in the collections of the South Australian Museum, were analysed and 25 native and five introduced species of non-volant mammal were identified. Native and introduced species were often found together, indicating that the sites have accumulated mammal remains in both pre- and post-European times. Only four of the non-volant native mammals recovered are known to be extant in the study area today: Lasiorhinus latifrons, Macropus fuliginosus, Cercartetus concinnus and Rattus fuscipes. In contrast, 20 native species recorded have been extirpated and one (Potorous platyops) is now extinct. C. concinnus was recorded from only one of the fossil assemblages but is known to be widespread in the study area today. This may indicate recent vegetation change related to European land management practices and have implications for natural resource management in the area.

The Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) has long been a white spot on maps depicting national parks and similar protected areas. This changed dramatically with the official declaration in October 1993 of 18 protected areas covering over 10 per cent of the country's land surface. Among the countries of South East Asia Lao PDR now ranks among those with the highest proportion of land under legal protection. The political climate seems favourable and additional areas may still be added. System planning and, increasingly now, the management of declared areas has been carried out by the Protected Areas and Wildlife Division of the Centre for Protected Areas and Watershed Management (PAWM), Forest Department, with funding by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and technical support from IUCN-The World Conservation Union. Some of the most vulnerable species, such as the Javan rhinoceros Rhinoceros sondaicus, may already be extirpated, but most species and ecosystems have good prospects of survival if management of the reserves and some wider conservation initiatives can be implemented.

The great barred frog (Mixophyes fasciolatus) is a common, ground-dwelling frog from the forests of eastern Australia, with a wide geographic distribution extending from mid-east Queensland to southern New South Wales. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of the distribution and habitat requirements of M. fasciolatus, using data collected during a stratified survey across its geographic and environmental range. I found M. fasciolatus at 55 of 124 sites, and in all areas of forest surveyed except for Girraween National Park in Queensland and the southern highlands of New South Wales. I detected 42 other species of frogs during the survey, including the introduced cane toad (Bufo marinus). Statistical habitat modelling indicated that in forests within its climatic range, M. fasciolatus was most likely to occur in wetter forests (wet sclerophyll forest and rainforest), in areas with lower precipitation and intermediate temperatures in the warmest (summer) quarter of the year. When present at a site, the number of individuals of M. fasciolatus detected during a survey (a measure of relative abundance) was predicted to decrease with increasing summer precipitation. This frog survey represents one of the largest ever undertaken in Australia, with a study area of 125�000 km2, and 124 survey sites in 21 State Forests and nine National Parks. Field data collected during the study and the resulting habitat models provide a baseline against which future changes in the distribution or abundance of M. fasciolatus may be assessed.

Abstract Recreational fishing is popular in Australia and is managed by individual states in consultation with the Commonwealth for those fisheries that they regulate and also for Australian Marine Parks (AMPs). Fishers regularly access both state and offshore Commonwealth waters but this offshore component of the recreational fishery is poorly understood. Our study tested the functionality of existing state-based surveys in Western Australia (WA) and New South Wales (NSW) to better inform Commonwealth fisheries and AMP managers about recreational fishing in their jurisdictions. Catch estimates for nine species of interest to the Commonwealth were developed and two case study AMPs [Ningaloo (WA) and The Hunter (NSW)] were also chosen to test the ability of the state survey data to be disaggregated to the park scale. As each state’s fishery survey designs were contextual to their own management needs, the application of the data to Commonwealth jurisdictions were limited by their statistical power, however aspects of each states surveys still provided useful information. Continued evolution of state-wide survey methods, including collection of precise spatial data, and regional over-sampling would be beneficial, particularly where there are multiple stakeholder and jurisdictional interests. National coordination, to temporally align state surveys, would also add value to the existing approaches.

Threatened forest lichenLobaria pulmonaria- its past, present and future in EstoniaLobaria pulmonariais a conspicuous and widely known epiphytic lichen species which mainly occurs on mature hardwood trees in old forests. The distribution ofL. pulmonariahas become highly fragmented, showing a decline across Europe.Lobaria pulmonariais unevenly distributed among ca. 600 localities in Estonia. Most localities are in north-eastern and south-western Estonia (50% and 21% of records respectively). 86% ofL. pulmonarialocalities are in nature reserves, national parks or woodland key habitats (WKH). In 81% of historical localities known until 1992,L. pulmonariacould be considered extinct. 6% ofL. pulmonarialocalities have become destroyed in the period from 1993 to 2010 due to clear cutting; in 19% of localities the species could be considered endangered, as its neighbourhood is affected by forest management activities. 40% of destroyed localities are located in forests designated as WKHs in north-eastern Estonia, and most of the endangered populations are also within WKHs. In forest management and conservation planning, WKHs should be preserved with surrounding buffer areas in order to avoid abrupt changes in environmental condition and natural disturbance regimes. There is also a necessity to develop specific management methods to recover reforested wooded meadows, to ensure that species of semi-open habitats are retained, e.g. by reducing the density of spruce.

Wildfires in national parks can lead to severe damage to property and infrastructure, and adverse impacts on the environment. This is especially pronounced if wildfires are followed by intense storms, such as the fire in Warrumbungle National Park in New South Wales, Australia, in early 2013. The aims of this study were to develop and validate a methodology to predict erosion risk at near real-time after storm events, and to provide timely information for monitoring of the extent, magnitude and impact of hillslope erosion to assist park management. We integrated weather radar-based estimates of rainfall erosivity with the revised universal soil loss equation (RUSLE) and remote sensing to predict soil loss from individual storm events after the fire. Other RUSLE factors were estimated from high resolution digital elevation models (LS factor), satellite data (C factor) and recent digital soil maps (K factor). The accuracy was assessed against field measurements at twelve soil plots across the Park and regular field survey during the 5-year period after the fire (2013–17). Automated scripts in a geographical information system have been developed to process large quantity spatial data and produce time-series erosion risk maps which show spatial and temporal changes in hillslope erosion and groundcover across the Park at near real time.

Community based natural resource management (CBNRM) programs presently proliferate across the Global South. In Southern Africa, CBNRM overwhelmingly focuses on wildlife conservation in areas adjacent to national parks and game reserves. The objects of these development activities are remote communities that exhibit the highest levels of poverty in the region, the consequences of which are sometimes resource degradation. CBNRM seeks to empower and enrich the lives of these communities through the active co-management of their natural resource base. Almost without exception, however, CBNRM projects have had disappointing results. Common explanations lay blame at the feet of local people who are seen to lack capacity and will, among other things. This paper contests this explanation by subjecting the particular case of Botswana to a deeper, critical political ecology analysis. Drawing on insights from Homer-Dixon regarding resource capture and ecological marginalization, and from Acharya regarding the localization of global norms, the paper argues that CBNRM is better understood as a discursive site wherein diverse actors bring unequal power/knowledge to bear in the pursuit of particular interests. In Botswana this manifests at a local level as an on-going struggle over access to land and related resources. However, given that CBNRM is supported by a wide array of international actors, forming perhaps the thin edge of a wider wedge in support of democratization, good governance and biodiversity preservation, locally empowered actors are forced to adapt their interests to the strictures of emergent structures of global governance. The outcome is a complex interplay of activities whereby CBNRM is realized but not in a form anticipated by its primary supporters.

A survey of conservation reserves, rainforest remnants and agricultural districts in northeastern New South Wales was conducted to determine the abundance, movements and habitat requirements of rainforest pigeons, to evaluate the extent and use of suitable habitat in conservation reserves, and to provide guidelines for the conservation and management of rainforest pigeons. Eight species of rainforest pigeon occur in northeastern New South Wales. Commencing with the clearing of rainforest in the 1860s for agriculture, rainforest pigeons declined in abundance throughout New South Wales and by the 1970s five species were thought to be threatened in the state. Since then, rainforest pigeons have apparently increased in abundance and distribution, but the Wompoo, Rose-crowned and Superb Pigeons continue to be listed by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service as vulnerable and rare. However, populations of all species of rainforest pigeons in New South Wales are relatively small and vulnerable to further loss of habitat. Most rainforest pigeons show a preference for subtropical rainforest habitat, but moist eucalypt forests, gardens and weedy exotic vegetation along roads and on abandoned farmland are also frequented to varying degrees by different species. To investigate recent trends in pigeon abundance we used data collected for up to 12 years from eight sites and during 1988, 1989 and 1990 from 17 rainforest remnants in northeastern New South Wales. The data suggest that rainforest pigeons now occur more frequently in lowland agricultural areas than in the recent past and tend to confirm an increase in abundance since the 1970s. Nesting and foraging habitats for rainforest pigeons are extensive in the conservation reserve system of northeastern New South Wales, but these habitats, which are largely at high elevations, lack winter food resources. Instead, pigeons congregate in remnant rainforest and exotic berry-bearing trees and shrubs in agricultural areas at lower elevations and near the coast. They rely on these habitats for food during winter and it is the restricted extent of this habitat that probably limits their abundance, not the area or quality of habitat at higher elevations. The conservation and management of rainforest pigeons requires the protection of low elevation and coastal rainforest remnants. As development of northeastern New South Wales proceeds, to avoid a decline in the abundances of rainforest pigeons it will be necessary to protect sclerophyll forest with native or exotic fruit bearing trees and shrubs and to extend the area of suitable habitat by the regeneration of rainforest and by the planting of native species used by pigeons as a food source. This will become increasingly important as the control and removal of exotic plants, such as Lantana Lantana camara and Camphor Laurel Cinnamonum camphora, on which some pigeons depend as a winter food source, becomes more successful.

A large proportion of the world’s extinctions have occurred in Australia, and threatened species lists continue to grow, notwithstanding government and philanthropic efforts. Most losses have been on private land, so relying on national parks and reserves is not enough to reverse trends and meet Australia’s responsibilities. This paper proposes a model that could increase abundance and distribution of Australia’s biodiversity, while providing financial incentives to private landholders to do so. It addresses the question, can landholder management of wildlife, and a form of private ownership, remedy shortfalls in government funding for biodiversity conservation and the resulting consequences of vast biodiversity losses? Landholders currently invest in propagating introduced livestock species, but they are prevented by current regulations from investing in a similar manner in threatened Australian native species. Market-based incentives could increase the distribution and abundance of species on private land and help protect the habitat of other biodiversity. The enabling changes would be contentious to some people but are consistent with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Sustainable Use policy. Different versions of wildlife privatisation have been successfully applied internationally: there is urgency for Australia to draw on these experiences and develop its own model to encourage and support wildlife on private freehold land. The model proposed in this paper focuses on: identifying locally overabundant populations or captive-bred populations as sources of supply; finding landholders and philanthropists who would like to have custodianship of species; enabling entrepreneurs to respond to demand; and bringing the two together where there is scope for a market-based sharing economy. Encouraging wildlife custodianship on private freehold land would be mutually beneficial, as it would not only result in an increase in biodiversity, but the economic value of wildlife could provide an income to landholders as well as enhancing Australia’s conservation system.

SCOPE, the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, analyses such problems by means of programmes leading to published reports on the state of knowledge. The meeting reported here was the major British contribution to the SCOPE Programme on the Ecology of Biological Invasions. It is a slightly unusual programme for SCOPE in that the subject is an entirely biological one, and also in that, although most of the problems are caused by invasions induced by man, some can arise as a result of natural extensions of range. Such effects are often acute in ecosystems with a mediterranean climate away from the Mediterranean itself, that is to say in California, South Africa and Australia. These mediterranean zones are in different biogeographical regions, so the organisms native and introduced to them have, in general, no evolutionary experience of each other. Species introduced from one such region to another have frequently spread in semi-natural and natural ecosystems. The SCOPE programme arises from concern about the impact and management of such pests in particular. The preamble to the programme (Anon. 1985) therefore talks about ‘ the introduction of plants, animals and micro-organisms to regions remote from their centres of origin. ’ It goes on to say that the ‘ areas include a wide variety of non-agricultural, non-urban land such as native forests and rangelands, and protected areas like National Parks and Ecological Reserves.’

User fees charged by Tanzania’s Game Reserves (GR) and Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs) have not changed since 2008. Although previous research has been done on visitors’ willingness-to-pay to enter national parks in Tanzania, none has been conducted on GRs and WMAs. This article assesses the entrance fees in GRs and WMAs, by comparing them with equivalent fees charged in Tanzania (at national parks and the Ngorongoro Crater) and also with regional protected areas in Botswana, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Based on 28 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholder institutions working on tourism and conservation and more than 50 online survey responses from Tanzanian tourism operators, the research reviews local opinion and issues relating to adjusting current entrance fees. The article considers that while one objective for generating revenue from entrance fees is for conservation management, it is difficult to establish appropriate fees where there are gaps in knowledge about existing levels of visitation, tourism revenue and associated management costs.Conservation implications: This article has implications for protected area management practices, as it provides information on processes by which managers can review and revise entrance fee values.

Arising from public debate held in Midrand on 4 May 1995, the South African National Parks undertook to review its policy for the management of elephant in the Kruger National Park. The new policy focuses on the extent and intensity of elephant impacts on biodiversity rather than on numbers of elephants per se, and is based on four fundamental principles: a) That ecosystems are not static; fluctuations of conditions and population responses are an inherent attribute of ecosystems and contribute to biodiversity. A range of elephant impacts in different areas at different times, is thus also natural and desirable; b) That elephants are important agents of habitat modification and thus contribute to biodiversity (intermediate disturbance hypothesis); c) That elephant populations which are confined will increase in number until negative impacts on the system's biodiversity will ultimately result; d) That elephants should not be viewed in isolation, but as one component of a broader, integrated system, and their impacts should be managed in conjunction with other ecosystem process (such as fire) to promote biodiversity in its broadest sense. The new policy proposes that the Kruger National Park be divided into six zones@two botanical reserves, two high-elephant-impact zones (no population reduction) and two low-elephant-impact zones (where numbers will be actively reduced). A history of the elephant population is given, and a resume of previous poli-cies.

A significant part of the Sochi resort region is included into the unique natural protected areas, such as the Caucasus biosphere reserve and Sochi National Park. Development of the regional economy is largely dependent on the natural geo/bio/cenoses management effectiveness on the protected territories. Monitoring of the water resources status and their management is of the particular importance, since the biodiversity of the aquatic environment and the terrestrial flora and fauna of the area dependent on these factors, as well as ensuring the citizen’s requirements and rights. However, presently no one of the existing water environment state assessment methods is able to account various and complex natural communities’ responses to different stress factors and their combined impact.The article presents the world experience on concept of the Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) application and development of the some aspect of the comprehensive natural resources regulation methodology. The authors believe that some elements of environmental management practiced in national parks and reserves of the republic of South Africa can be applicable in development of a system that provides consistent monitoring of environmental quality, the mastering of a sufficient and user-friendly database, based on a set of measures for the conservation and restoration of natural resources One of the most significant watercourses of the protected nature territories of the South of Russia, the Mzymta River has been used as a study case

The relevance and integration of scientific knowledge to conservation management of the locally popular and highly endemic butterfly genus Chrysoritis are investigated within the research fields of taxonomy and biogeography. The butterfly genus Chrysoritis contains at least 41 species endemic to South Africa. The taxonomy of Chrysoritis has reached a state where revisions could easily result in a plethora of names between “lumping and splitting”. In practice, the state of the taxonomy of these butterflies on species level may alter their conservation priority. The two most species rich species groups in Chrysoritis have different centres of endemism, however, a butterfly atlas becomes a necessity to reveal more about their biogeography. There is an absence of butterfly species lists in many of our National Parks and Nature Reserves. Legislation should facilitate rather than limit the valuable role of the amateur lepidopterist to add distribution records. In turn, the amateur lepidopterists should adapt and make an effort to explore unknown localities, apart from monitoring butterflies at their well-known localities. The red listing of localised butterflies in South Africa, including a number of Chrysoritis species, is in need of an urgent review in the light of the most recent IUCN categories. A species such as Chrysoritis dicksoni should be protected by law - but at its known localities. The scenario that real conservation action is only needed if the last known locality of a butterfly is threatened, should be abolished. A paradigm shift to conserve the metapopulations of the highly endemic Chrysoritis genus and not merely a few of its species as items that appear on lists, seems necessary.

IntroductionRegional identity is a constant construction, in which landscape, human activity and cultural imaginary build a narrative of place. For the Tasmanian Midlands, the interactions between history, ecology and agriculture both define place and present problems in how to recognise, communicate and balance these interactions. In this sense, regionality is defined not so much as a relation of margin to centre, but as a specific accretion of environmental and cultural histories. According weight to more-than-human perspectives, a region can be seen as a constellation of plant, animal and human interactions and demands, where creative art and design can make space and give voice to the dynamics of exchange between the landscape and its inhabitants. Consideration of three recent art and design projects based in the Midlands reveal the potential for cross-disciplinary research, embedded in both environment and community, to create distinctive and specific forms of connectivity that articulate a regional identify.The Tasmanian Midlands have been identified as a biodiversity hotspot (Australian Government), with a long history of Aboriginal cultural management disrupted by colonial invasion. Recent archaeological work in the Midlands, including the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project, has focused on the use of convict labour during the nineteenth century in opening up the Midlands for settler agriculture and transport. Now, the Midlands are placed under increasing pressure by changing agricultural practices such as large-scale irrigation. At the same time as this intensification of agricultural activity, significant progress has been made in protecting, preserving and restoring endemic ecologies. This progress has come through non-government conservation organisations, especially Greening Australia and their program Tasmanian Island Ark, and private landowners placing land under conservation covenants. These pressures and conservation activities give rise to research opportunities in the biological sciences, but also pose challenges in communicating the value of conservation and research outcomes to a wider public. The Species Hotel project, beginning in 2016, engaged with the aims of restoration ecology through speculative design while The Marathon Project, a multi-year curatorial art project based on a single property that contains both conservation and commercially farmed zones.This article questions the role of regionality in these three interconnected projects—Kerry Lodge, Species Hotel, and Marathon—sited in the Tasmanian Midlands: the three projects share a concern with the specificities of the region through engagement with specifics sites and their histories and ecologies, while also acknowledging the forces that shape these sites as far more mobile and global in scope. It also considers the interdisciplinary nature of these projects, in the crossover of art and design with ecological, archaeological and agricultural practices of measuring and intervening in the land, where communication and interpretation may be in tension with functionality. These projects suggest ways of working that connect the ecological and the cultural spheres; importantly, they see rural locations as sites of knowledge production; they test the value of small-scale and ephemeral interventions to explore the place of art and design as intervention within colonised landscape.Regions are also defined by overlapping circles of control, interest, and authority. We test the claim that these projects, which operate through cross-disciplinary collaboration and network with a range of stakeholders and community groups, successfully benefit the region in which they are placed. We are particularly interested in the challenges of working across institutions which both claim and enact connections to the region without being centred there. These projects are initiatives resulting from, or in collaboration with, University of Tasmania, an institution that has taken a recent turn towards explicitly identifying as place-based yet the placement of the Midlands as the gap between campuses risks attenuating the institution’s claim to be of this place. Paul Carter, in his discussion of a regional, site-specific collaboration in Alice Springs, flags how processes of creative place-making—operating through mythopoetic and story-based strategies—requires a concrete rather than imagined community that actively engages a plurality of voices on the ground. We identify similar concerns in these art and design projects and argue that iterative and long-term creative projects enable a deeper grappling with the complexities of shared regional place-making. The Midlands is aptly named: as a region, it is defined by its geographical constraints and relationships to urban centres. Heading south from the northern city of Launceston, travellers on the Midland Highway see scores of farming properties networking continuously for around 175 kilometres south to the outskirts of Brighton, the last major township before the Tasmanian capital city of Hobart. The town of Ross straddles latitude 42 degrees south—a line that has historically divided Tasmania into the divisions of North and South. The region is characterised by extensive agricultural usage and small remnant patches of relatively open dry sclerophyll forest and lowland grassland enabled by its lower attitude and relatively flatter terrain. The Midlands sit between the mountainous central highlands of the Great Western Tiers and the Eastern Tiers, a continuous range of dolerite hills lying south of Ben Lomond that slope coastward to the Tasman Sea. This area stretches far beyond the view of the main highway, reaching east in the Deddington and Fingal valleys. Campbell Town is the primary stopping point for travellers, superseding the bypassed towns, which have faced problems with lowering population and resulting loss of facilities.Image 1: Southern Midland Landscape, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.Predominantly under private ownership, the Tasmanian Midlands are a contested and fractured landscape existing in a state of ecological tension that has occurred with the dominance of western agriculture. For over 200 years, farmers have continually shaped the land and carved it up into small fragments for different agricultural agendas, and this has resulted in significant endemic species decline (Mitchell et al.). The open vegetation was the product of cultural management of land by Tasmanian Aboriginal communities (Gammage), attractive to settlers during their distribution of land grants prior to the 1830s and a focus for settler violence. As documented cartographically in the Centre for 21st Century Humanities’ Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930, the period 1820–1835, and particularly during the Black War, saw the Midlands as central to the violent dispossession of Aboriginal landowners. Clements argues that the culture of violence during this period also reflected the brutalisation that the penal system imposed upon its subjects. The cultivation of agricultural land throughout the Midlands was enabled by the provision of unfree convict labour (Dillon). Many of the properties granted and established during the colonial period have been held in multi-generational family ownership through to the present.Within this patchwork of private ownership, the tension between visibility and privacy of the Midlands pastures and farmlands challenges the capacity for people to understand what role the Midlands plays in the greater Tasmanian ecology. Although half of Tasmania’s land areas are protected as national parks and reserves, the Midlands remains largely unprotected due to private ownership. When measured against Tasmania’s wilderness values and reputation, the dry pasturelands of the Midland region fail to capture an equivalent level of visual and experiential imagination. Jamie Kirkpatrick describes misconceptions of the Midlands when he writes of “[f]latness, dead and dying eucalypts, gorse, brown pastures, salt—environmental devastation […]—these are the common impression of those who first travel between Spring Hill and Launceston on the Midland Highway” (45). However, Kirkpatrick also emphasises the unique intimate and intricate qualities of this landscape, and its underlying resilience. In the face of the loss of paddock trees and remnants to irrigation, change in species due to pasture enrichment and introduction of new plant species, conservation initiatives that not only protect but also restore habitat are vital. The Tasmanian Midlands, then, are pastoral landscapes whose seeming monotonous continuity glosses over the radical changes experienced in the processes of colonisation and intensification of agriculture.Underlying the Present: Archaeology and Landscape in the Kerry Lodge ProjectThe major marker of the Midlands is the highway that bisects it. Running from Hobart to Launceston, the construction of a “great macadamised highway” (Department of Main Roads 10) between 1820–1850, and its ongoing maintenance, was a significant colonial project. The macadam technique, a nineteenth century innovation in road building which involved the laying of small pieces of stone to create a surface that was relatively water and frost resistant, required considerable but unskilled labour. The construction of the bridge at Kerry Lodge, in 1834–35, was simultaneous with significant bridge buildings at other major water crossings on the highway, (Department of Main Roads 16) and, as the first water crossing south of Launceston, was a pinch-point through which travel of prisoners could be monitored and controlled. Following the completion of the bridge, the site was used to house up to 60 male convicts in a road gang undergoing secondary punishment (1835–44) and then in a labour camp and hiring depot until 1847. At the time of the La Trobe report (1847), the buildings were noted as being in bad condition (Brand 142–43). After the station was disbanded, the use of the buildings reverted to the landowners for use in accommodation and agricultural storage.Archaeological research at Kerry Lodge, directed by Eleanor Casella, investigated the spatial and disciplinary structures of smaller probation and hiring depots and the living and working conditions of supervisory staff. Across three seasons (2015, 2016, 2018), the emerging themes of discipline and control and as well as labour were borne out by excavations across the site, focusing on remnants of buildings close to the bridge. This first season also piloted the co-presence of a curatorial art project, which grew across the season to include eleven practitioners in visual art, theatre and poetry, and three exhibition outcomes. As a crucial process for the curatorial art project, creative practitioners spent time on site as participants and observers, which enabled the development of responses that interrogated the research processes of archaeological fieldwork as well as making connections to the wider historical and cultural context of the site. Immersed in the mundane tasks of archaeological fieldwork, the practitioners involved became simultaneously focused on repetitive actions while contemplating the deep time contained within earth. This experience then informed the development of creative works interrogating embodied processes as a language of site.The outcome from the first fieldwork season was earthspoke, an exhibition shown at Sawtooth, an artist-run initiative in Launceston in 2015, and later re-installed in Franklin House, a National Trust property in the southern suburbs of Launceston.Images 2 and 3: earthspoke, 2015, Installation View at Sawtooth ARI (top) and Franklin House (bottom). Image Credits: Melanie de Ruyter.This recontextualisation of the work, from contemporary ARI (artist run initiative) gallery to National Trust property enabled the project to reach different audiences but also raised questions about the emphases that these exhibition contexts placed on the work. Within the white cube space of the contemporary gallery, connections to site became more abstracted while the educational and heritage functions of the National Trust property added further context and unintended connotations to the art works.Image 4: Strata, 2017, Installation View. Image Credit: Karen Hall.The two subsequent exhibitions, Lines of Site (2016) and Strata (2017), continued to test the relationship between site and gallery, through works that rematerialised the absences on site and connected embodied experiences of convict and archaeological labour. The most recent iteration of the project, Strata, part of the Ten Days on the Island art festival in 2017, involved installing works at the site, marking with their presence the traces, fragments and voids that had been reburied when the landscape returned to agricultural use following the excavations. Here, the interpretive function of the works directly addressed the layered histories of the landscape and underscored the scope of the human interventions and changes over time within the pastoral landscape. The interpretative role of the artworks formed part of a wider, multidisciplinary approach to research and communication within the project. University of Manchester archaeology staff and postgraduate students directed the excavations, using volunteers from the Launceston Historical Society. Staff from Launceston’s Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery brought their archival and collection-based expertise to the site rather than simply receiving stored finds as a repository, supporting immediate interpretation and contextualisation of objects. In 2018, participation from the University of Tasmania School of Education enabled a larger number of on-site educational activities than afforded by previous open days. These multi-disciplinary and multi-organisational networks, drawn together provisionally in a shared time and place, provided rich opportunities for dialogue. However, the challenges of sustaining these exchanges have meant ongoing collaborations have become more sporadic, reflecting different institutional priorities and competing demands on participants. Even within long-term projects, continued engagement with stakeholders can be a challenge: while enabling an emerging and concrete sense of community, the time span gives greater vulnerability to external pressures. Making Home: Ecological Restoration and Community Engagement in the Species Hotel ProjectImages 5 and 6: Selected Species Hotels, Ross, Tasmania, 2018. Image Credits: Patrick Sutczak. The Species Hotels stand sentinel over a river of saplings, providing shelter for animal communities within close range of a small town. At the township of Ross in the Southern Midlands, work was initiated by restoration ecologists to address the lack of substantial animal shelter belts on a number of major properties in the area. The Tasmania Island Ark is a major Greening Australia restoration ecology initiative, connecting 6000 hectares of habitat across the Midlands. Linking larger forest areas in the Eastern Tiers and Central Highlands as well as isolated patches of remnant native vegetation, the Ark project is vital to the ongoing survival of local plant and animal species under pressure from human interventions and climate change. With fragmentation of bush and native grasslands in the Midland landscape resulting in vast open plains, the ability for animals to adapt to pasturelands without shelter has resulted in significant decline as animals such as the critically endangered Eastern Barred Bandicoot struggle to feed, move, and avoid predators (Cranney). In 2014 mass plantings of native vegetation were undertaken along 16km of the serpentine Macquarie River as part of two habitat corridors designed to bring connectivity back to the region. While the plantings were being established a public art project was conceived that would merge design with practical application to assist animals in the area, and draw community and public attention to the work that was being done in re-establishing native forests. The Species Hotel project, which began in 2016, emerged from a collaboration between Greening Australia and the University of Tasmania’s School of Architecture and Design, the School of Land and Food, the Tasmanian College of the Arts and the ARC Centre for Forest Value, with funding from the Ian Potter Foundation. The initial focus of the project was the development of interventions in the landscape that could address the specific habitat needs of the insect, small mammal, and bird species that are under threat. First-year Architecture students were invited to design a series of structures with the brief that they would act as ‘Species Hotels’, and once created would be installed among the plantings as structures that could be inhabited or act as protection. After installation, the privately-owned land would be reconfigured so to allow public access and observation of the hotels, by residents and visitors alike. Early in the project’s development, a concern was raised during a Ross community communication and consultation event that the surrounding landscape and its vistas would be dramatically altered with the re-introduced forest. While momentary and resolved, a subtle yet obvious tension surfaced that questioned the re-writing of an established community’s visual landscape literacy by non-residents. Compact and picturesque, the architectural, historical and cultural qualities of Ross and its location were not only admired by residents, but established a regional identity. During the six-week intensive project, the community reach was expanded beyond the institution and involved over 100 people including landowners, artists, scientists and school children from the region (Wright), attempting to address and channel the concerns of residents about the changing landscape. The multiple timescales of this iterative project—from intensive moments of collaboration between stakeholders to the more-than-human time of tree growth—open spaces for regional identity to shift as both as place and community. Part of the design brief was the use of fully biodegradable materials: the Species Hotels are not expected to last forever. The actual installation of the Species Hotelson site took longer than planned due to weather conditions, but once on site they were weathering in, showing signs of insect and bird habitation. This animal activity created an opportunity for ongoing engagement. Further activities generated from the initial iteration of Species Hotel were the Species Hotel Day in 2017, held at the Ross Community Hall where presentations by scientists and designers provided feedback to the local community and presented opportunities for further design engagement in the production of ephemeral ‘species seed pies’ placed out in and around Ross. Architecture and Design students have gone on to develop more examples of ‘ecological furniture’ with a current focus on insect housing as well as extrapolating from the installation of the Species Hotels to generate a VR visualisation of the surrounding landscape, game design and participatory movement work that was presented as part of the Junction Arts Festival program in Launceston, 2017. The intersections of technologies and activities amplified the lived in and living qualities of the Species Hotels, not only adding to the connectivity of social and environmental actions on site and beyond, but also making a statement about the shared ownership this project enabled.Working Property: Collaboration and Dialogues in The Marathon Project The potential of iterative projects that engage with environmental concerns amid questions of access, stewardship and dialogue is also demonstrated in The Marathon Project, a collaborative art project that took place between 2015 and 2017. Situated in the Northern Midland region of Deddington alongside the banks of the Nile River the property of Marathon became the focal point for a small group of artists, ecologists and theorists to converge and engage with a pastoral landscape over time that was unfamiliar to many of them. Through a series of weekend camps and day trips, the participants were able to explore and follow their own creative and investigative agendas. The project was conceived by the landowners who share a passion for the history of the area, their land, and ideas of custodianship and ecological responsibility. The intentions of the project initially were to inspire creative work alongside access, engagement and dialogue about land, agriculture and Deddington itself. As a very small town on the Northern Midland fringe, Deddington is located toward the Eastern Tiers at the foothills of the Ben Lomond mountain ranges. Historically, Deddington is best known as the location of renowned 19th century landscape painter John Glover’s residence, Patterdale. After Glover’s death in 1849, the property steadily fell into disrepair and a recent private restoration effort of the home, studio and grounds has seen renewed interest in the cultural significance of the region. With that in mind, and with Marathon a neighbouring property, participants in the project were able to experience the area and research its past and present as a part of a network of working properties, but also encouraging conversation around the region as a contested and documented place of settlement and subsequent violence toward the Aboriginal people. Marathon is a working property, yet also a vital and fragile ecosystem. Marathon consists of 1430 hectares, of which around 300 lowland hectares are currently used for sheep grazing. The paddocks retain their productivity, function and potential to return to native grassland, while thickets of gorse are plentiful, an example of an invasive species difficult to control. The rest of the property comprises eucalypt woodlands and native grasslands that have been protected under a conservation covenant by the landowners since 2003. The Marathon creek and the Nile River mark the boundary between the functional paddocks and the uncultivated hills and are actively managed in the interface between native and introduced species of flora and fauna. This covenant aimed to preserve these landscapes, linking in with a wider pattern of organisations and landowners attempting to address significant ecological degradation and isolation of remnant bushland patches through restoration ecology. Measured against the visibility of Tasmania’s wilderness identity on the national and global stage, many of the ecological concerns affecting the Midlands go largely unnoticed. The Marathon Project was as much a project about visibility and communication as it was about art and landscape. Over the three years and with its 17 participants, The Marathon Project yielded three major exhibitions along with numerous public presentations and research outputs. The length of the project and the autonomy and perspectives of its participants allowed for connections to be formed, conversations initiated, and greater exposure to the productivity and sustainability complexities playing out on rural Midland properties. Like Kerry Lodge, the 2015 first year exhibition took place at Sawtooth ARI. The exhibition was a testing ground for artists, and a platform for audiences, to witness the cross-disciplinary outputs of work inspired by a single sheep grazing farm. The interest generated led to the rethinking of the 2016 exhibition and the need to broaden the scope of what the landowners and participants were trying to achieve. Image 7: Panel Discussion at Open Weekend, 2016. Image Credit: Ron Malor.In November 2016, The Marathon Project hosted an Open Weekend on the property encouraging audiences to visit, meet the artists, the landowners, and other invited guests from a number of restoration, conservation, and rehabilitation organisations. Titled Encounter, the event and accompanying exhibition displayed in the shearing shed, provided an opportunity for a rhizomatic effect with the public which was designed to inform and disseminate historical and contemporary perspectives of land and agriculture, access, ownership, visitation and interpretation. Concluding with a final exhibition in 2017 at the University of Tasmania’s Academy Gallery, The Marathon Project had built enough momentum to shape and inform the practice of its participants, the knowledge and imagination of the public who engaged with it, and make visible the precarity of the cultural and rural Midland identity.Image 8. Installation View of The Marathon Project Exhibition, 2017. Image Credit: Patrick Sutczak.ConclusionThe Marathon Project, Species Hotel and the Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project all demonstrate the potential of site-based projects to articulate and address concerns that arise from the environmental and cultural conditions and histories of a region. Beyond the Midland fence line is a complex environment that needed to be experienced to be understood. Returning creative work to site, and opening up these intensified experiences of place to a public forms a key stage in all these projects. Beyond a commitment to site-specific practice and valuing the affective and didactic potential of on-site installation, these returns grapple with issues of access, visibility and absence that characterise the Midlands. Paul Carter describes his role in the convening of a “concretely self-realising creative community” in an initiative to construct a meeting-place in Alice Springs, a community defined and united in “its capacity to imagine change as a negotiation between past, present and future” (17). Within that regional context, storytelling, as an encounter between histories and cultures, became crucial in assembling a community that could in turn materialise story into place. In these Midlands projects, a looser assembly of participants with shared interests seek to engage with the intersections of plant, human and animal activities that constitute and negotiate the changing environment. The projects enabled moments of connection, of access, and of intervention: always informed by the complexities of belonging within regional locations.These projects also suggest the need to recognise the granularity of regionalism: the need to be attentive to the relations of site to bioregion, of private land to small town to regional centre. The numerous partnerships that allow such interconnect projects to flourish can be seen as a strength of regional areas, where proximity and scale can draw together sets of related institutions, organisations and individuals. However, the tensions and gaps within these projects reveal differing priorities, senses of ownership and even regional belonging. Questions of who will live with these project outcomes, who will access them, and on what terms, reveal inequalities of power. Negotiations of this uneven and uneasy terrain require a more nuanced account of projects that do not rely on the geographical labelling of regions to paper over the complexities and fractures within the social environment.These projects also share a commitment to the intersection of the social and natural environment. They recognise the inextricable entanglement of human and more than human agencies in shaping the landscape, and material consequences of colonialism and agricultural intensification. Through iteration and duration, the projects mobilise processes that are responsive and reflective while being anchored to the materiality of site. Warwick Mules suggests that “regions are a mixture of data and earth, historically made through the accumulation and condensation of material and informational configurations”. Cross-disciplinary exchanges enable all three projects to actively participate in data production, not interpretation or illustration afterwards. Mules’ call for ‘accumulation’ and ‘configuration’ as productive regional modes speaks directly to the practice-led methodologies employed by these projects. The Kerry Lodge and Marathon projects collect, arrange and transform material taken from each site to provisionally construct a regional material language, extended further in the dual presentation of the projects as off-site exhibitions and as interventions returning to site. The Species Hotel project shares that dual identity, where materials are chosen for their ability over time, habitation and decay to become incorporated into the site yet, through other iterations of the project, become digital presences that nonetheless invite an embodied engagement.These projects centre the Midlands as fertile ground for the production of knowledge and experiences that are distinctive and place-based, arising from the unique qualities of this place, its history and its ongoing challenges. Art and design practice enables connectivity to plant, animal and human communities, utilising cross-disciplinary collaborations to bring together further accumulations of the region’s intertwined cultural and ecological landscape.ReferencesAustralian Government Department of the Environment and Energy. Biodiversity Conservation. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2018. 1 Apr. 2019 <http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/conservation>.Brand, Ian. The Convict Probation System: Van Diemen’s Land 1839–1854. Sandy Bay: Blubber Head Press, 1990.Carter, Paul. “Common Patterns: Narratives of ‘Mere Coincidence’ and the Production of Regions.” Creative Communities: Regional Inclusion & the Arts. Eds. Janet McDonald and Robert Mason. Bristol: Intellect, 2015. 13–30.Centre for 21st Century Humanities. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930. Newcastle: Centre for 21st Century Humanitie, n.d. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/>.Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2014. Cranney, Kate. Ecological Science in the Tasmanian Midlands. Melbourne: Bush Heritage Australia, 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://www.bushheritage.org.au/blog/ecological-science-in-the-tasmanian-midlands>.Davidson N. “Tasmanian Northern Midlands Restoration Project.” EMR Summaries, Journal of Ecological Management & Restoration, 2016. 10 Apr. 2019 <https://site.emrprojectsummaries.org/2016/03/07/tasmanian-northern-midlands-restoration-project/>.Department of Main Roads, Tasmania. Convicts & Carriageways: Tasmanian Road Development until 1880. Hobart: Tasmanian Government Printer, 1988.Dillon, Margaret. “Convict Labour and Colonial Society in the Campbell Town Police District: 1820–1839.” PhD Thesis. U of Tasmania, 2008. <https://eprints.utas.edu.au/7777/>.Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012.Greening Australia. Building Species Hotels, 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://www.greeningaustralia.org.au/projects/building-species-hotels/>.Kerry Lodge Archaeology and Art Project. Kerry Lodge Convict Site. 10 Mar. 2019 <http://kerrylodge.squarespace.com/>.Kirkpatrick, James. “Natural History.” Midlands Bushweb, The Nature of the Midlands. Ed. Jo Dean. Longford: Midlands Bushweb, 2003. 45–57.Mitchell, Michael, Michael Lockwood, Susan Moore, and Sarah Clement. “Building Systems-Based Scenario Narratives for Novel Biodiversity Futures in an Agricultural Landscape.” Landscape and Urban Planning 145 (2016): 45–56.Mules, Warwick. “The Edges of the Earth: Critical Regionalism as an Aesthetics of the Singular.” Transformations 12 (2005). 1 Mar. 2019 <http://transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_12/article_03.shtml>.The Marathon Project. <http://themarathonproject.virb.com/home>.University of Tasmania. Strategic Directions, Nov. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.utas.edu.au/vc/strategic-direction>.Wright L. “University of Tasmania Students Design ‘Species Hotels’ for Tasmania’s Wildlife.” Architecture AU 24 Oct. 2016. 1 Apr. 2019 <https://architectureau.com/articles/university-of-tasmania-students-design-species-hotels-for-tasmanias-wildlife/>.

Introduction The academic area known as food studies—incorporating elements from disciplines including anthropology, folklore, history, sociology, gastronomy, and cultural studies as well as a range of multi-disciplinary approaches—asserts that cooking and eating practices are less a matter of nutrition (maintaining life by absorbing nutrients from food) and more a personal or group expression of various social and/or cultural actions, values or positions. The French philosopher, Michel de Certeau agrees, arguing, moreover, that there is an urgency to name and unpick (what he identifies as) the “minor” practices, the “multifarious and silent reserve of procedures” of everyday life. Such practices are of crucial importance to all of us, as although seemingly ordinary, and even banal, they have the ability to “organise” our lives (48). Within such a context, the following aims to consider the influence and significance of an important (although largely unstudied) professional figure in rural and regional economic life: the country food preparer variously known as the local chef or cook. Such an approach is obviously framed by the concept of “cultural economy”. This term recognises the convergence, and interdependence, of the spheres of the cultural and the economic (see Scott 335, for an influential discussion on how “the cultural geography of space and the economic geography of production are intertwined”). Utilising this concept in relation to chefs and cooks seeks to highlight how the ways these figures organise (to use de Certeau’s term) the social and cultural lives of those in their communities are embedded in economic practices and also how, in turn, their economic contributions are dependent upon social and cultural practices. This initial mapping of the influence and significance of the rural and regional chef in one rural and regional area, therefore, although necessarily different in approach and content, continues the application of such converged conceptualisations of the cultural and economic as Teema Tairu’s discussion of the social, recreational and spiritual importance of food preparation and consumption by the unemployed in Finland, Guy Redden’s exploration of how supermarket products reflect shared values, and a series of analyses of the cultural significance of individual food products, such as Richard White’s study of vegemite. While Australians, both urban and rural, currently enjoy access to an internationally renowned food culture, it is remarkable to consider that it has only been during the years following the Second World War that these sophisticated and now much emulated ways of eating and cooking have developed. It is, indeed, only during the last half century that Australian eating habits have shifted from largely Anglo-Saxon influenced foods and meals that were prepared and eaten in the home, to the consumption of a wider range of more international and sophisticated foods and meals that are, increasingly, prepared by others and eaten outside the consumer’s residence. While a range of commonly cited influences has prompted this relatively recent revolution in culinary practice—including post-war migration, increasing levels of prosperity, widespread international travel, and the forces of globalisation—some of this change owes a debt to a series of influential individual figures. These tastemakers have included food writers and celebrity chefs; with early exponents including Margaret Fulton, Graham Kerr and Charmaine Solomon (see Brien). The findings of this study suggests that many restaurant chefs, and other cooks, have similarly played, and continue to take, a key role in the lives of not only the, necessarily, limited numbers of individuals who dine in a particular eatery or the other chefs and/or cooks trained in that establishment (Ruhlman, Reach), but also the communities in which they work on a much broader scale. Considering Chefs In his groundbreaking study, A History of Cooks and Cooking, Australian food historian Michael Symons proposes that those who prepare food are worthy of serious consideration because “if ‘we are what we eat’, cooks have not just made our meals, but have also made us. They have shaped our social networks, our technologies, arts and religions” (xi). Writing that cooks “deserve to have their stories told often and well,” and that, moreover, there is a “need to invent ways to think about them, and to revise our views about ourselves in their light” (xi), Symons’s is a clarion call to investigate the role and influence of cooks. Charles-Allen Baker-Clark has explicitly begun to address this lacunae in his Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks Have Taught Us About Ourselves and Our Food (2006), positing not only how these figures have shaped our relationships with food and eating, but also how these relationships impact on identities, culture and a range of social issues including those of social justice, spirituality and environmental sustainability. With the growing public interest in celebrities, it is perhaps not surprising that, while such research on chefs and/or cooks is still in its infancy, most of the existing detailed studies on individuals focus on famed international figures such as Marie-Antoine Carême (Bernier; Kelly), Escoffier (James; Rachleff; Sanger), and Alexis Soyer (Brandon; Morris; Ray). Despite an increasing number of tabloid “tell-all” surveys of contemporary celebrity chefs, which are largely based on mass media sources and which display little concern for historical or biographical accuracy (Bowyer; Hildred and Ewbank; Simpson; Smith), there have been to date only a handful of “serious” researched biographies of contemporary international chefs such as Julia Child, Alice Waters (Reardon; Riley), and Bernard Loiseux (Chelminski)—the last perhaps precipitated by an increased interest in this chef following his suicide after his restaurant lost one of its Michelin stars. Despite a handful of collective biographical studies of Australian chefs from the later-1980s on (Jenkins; O’Donnell and Knox; Brien), there are even fewer sustained biographical studies of Australian chefs or cooks (Clifford-Smith’s 2004 study of “the supermarket chef,” Bernard King, is a notable exception). Throughout such investigations, as well as in other popular food writing in magazines and cookbooks, there is some recognition that influential chefs and cooks have worked, and continue to work, outside such renowned urban culinary centres as Paris, London, New York, and Sydney. The Michelin starred restaurants of rural France, the so-called “gastropubs” of rural Britain and the advent of the “star-chef”-led country bed and breakfast establishment in Australia and New Zealand, together with the proliferation of farmer’s markets and a public desire to consume locally sourced, and ecologically sustainable, produce (Nabhan), has focused fresh attention on what could be called “the rural/regional chef”. However, despite the above, little attention has focused on the Australian non-urban chef/cook outside of the pages of a small number of key food writing magazines such as Australian Gourmet Traveller and Vogue Entertaining + Travel. Setting the Scene with an Australian Country Example: Armidale and Guyra In 2004, the Armidale-Dumaresq Council (of the New England region, New South Wales, Australia) adopted the slogan “Foodies thrive in Armidale” to market its main city for the next three years. With a population of some 20,000, Armidale’s main industry (in economic terms) is actually education and related services, but the latest Tourist Information Centre’s Dining Out in Armidale (c. 2006) brochure lists some 25 restaurants, 9 bistros and brasseries, 19 cafés and 5 fast food outlets featuring Australian, French, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, Thai, Indian and “international” cuisines. The local Yellow Pages telephone listings swell the estimation of the total number of food-providing businesses in the city to 60. Alongside the range of cuisines cited above, a large number of these eateries foreground the use of fresh, local foods with such phrases as “local and regional produce,” “fresh locally grown produce,” “the finest New England ingredients” and locally sourced “New England steaks, lamb and fresh seafood” repeatedly utilised in advertising and other promotional material. Some thirty kilometres to the north along the New England highway, the country town of Guyra, proclaimed a town in 1885, is the administrative and retail centre for a shire of some 2,200 people. Situated at 1,325 metres above sea level, the town is one of the highest in Australia with its main industries those of fine wool and lamb, beef cattle, potatoes and tomatoes. Until 1996, Guyra had been home to a large regional abattoir that employed some 400 staff at the height of its productivity, but rationalisation of the meat processing industry closed the facility, together with its associated pet food processor, causing a downturn in employment, local retail business, and real estate values. Since 2004, Guyra’s economy has, however, begun to recover after the town was identified by the Costa Group as the perfect site for glasshouse grown tomatoes. Perfect, due to its rare combination of cool summers (with an average of less than two days per year with temperatures over 30 degrees celsius), high winter light levels and proximity to transport routes. The result: 3.3 million kilograms of truss, vine harvested, hydroponic “Top of the Range” tomatoes currently produced per annum, all year round, in Guyra’s 5-hectare glasshouse: Australia’s largest, opened in December 2005. What residents (of whom I am one) call the “tomato-led recovery” has generated some 60 new local jobs directly related to the business, and significant flow on effects in terms of the demand for local services and retail business. This has led to substantial rates of renovation and building of new residential and retail properties, and a noticeably higher level of trade flowing into the town. Guyra’s main street retail sector is currently burgeoning and stories of its renewal have appeared in the national press. Unlike many similar sized inland towns, there are only a handful of empty shops (and most of these are in the process of being renovated), and new commercial premises have recently been constructed and opened for business. Although a small town, even in Australian country town terms, Guyra now has 10 restaurants, hotel bistros and cafés. A number of these feature local foods, with one pub’s bistro regularly featuring the trout that is farmed just kilometres away. Assessing the Contribution of Local Chefs and Cooks In mid-2007, a pilot survey to begin to explore the contribution of the regional chef in these two close, but quite distinct, rural and regional areas was sent to the chefs/cooks of the 70 food-serving businesses in Armidale and Guyra that I could identify. Taking into account the 6 returns that revealed a business had closed, moved or changed its name, the 42 replies received represented a response rate of 65.5per cent (or two thirds), representatively spread across the two towns. Answers indicated that the businesses comprised 18 restaurants, 13 cafés, 6 bistro/brasseries, 1 roadhouse, 1 takeaway/fast food and 3 bed and breakfast establishments. These businesses employed 394 staff, of whom 102 were chefs and/cooks, or 25.9 per cent of the total number of staff then employed by these establishments. In answer to a series of questions designed to ascertain the roles played by these chefs/cooks in their local communities, as well as more widely, I found a wide range of inputs. These chefs had, for instance, made a considerable contribution to their local economies in the area of fostering local jobs and a work culture: 40 (95 per cent) had worked with/for another local business including but not exclusively food businesses; 30 (71.4 per cent) had provided work experience opportunities for those aspiring to work in the culinary field; and 22 (more than half) had provided at least one apprenticeship position. A large number had brought outside expertise and knowledge with them to these local areas, with 29 (69 per cent) having worked in another food business outside Armidale or Guyra. In terms of community building and sustainability, 10 (or almost a quarter) had assisted or advised the local Council; 20 (or almost half) had worked with local school children in a food-related way; 28 (two thirds) had helped at least one charity or other local fundraising group. An extra 7 (bringing the cumulative total to 83.3 per cent) specifically mentioned that they had worked with/for the local gallery, museum and/or local history group. 23 (more than half) had been involved with and/or contributed to a local festival. The question of whether they had “contributed anything else important, helpful or interesting to the community” elicited the following responses: writing a food or wine column for the local paper (3 respondents), delivering TAFE teacher workshops (2 respondents), holding food demonstrations for Rotary and Lions Clubs and school fetes (5 respondents), informing the public about healthy food (3 respondents), educating the public about environmental issues (2 respondents) and working regularly with Meals on Wheels or a similar organisation (6 respondents, or 14.3 per cent). One respondent added his/her work as a volunteer driver for the local ambulance transport service, the only non-food related response to this question. Interestingly, in line with the activity of well-known celebrity chefs, in addition to the 3 chefs/cooks who had written a food or wine column for the local newspaper, 11 respondents (more than a quarter of the sample) had written or contributed to a cookbook or recipe collection. One of these chefs/cooks, moreover, reported that he/she produced a weblog that was “widely read”, and also contributed to international food-related weblogs and websites. In turn, the responses indicated that the (local) communities—including their governing bodies—also offer some support of these chefs and cooks. Many respondents reported they had been featured in, or interviewed and/or photographed for, a range of media. This media comprised the following: the local newspapers (22 respondents, 52.4 per cent), local radio stations (19 respondents, 45.2 per cent), regional television stations (11 respondents, 26.2 per cent) and local websites (8 respondents, 19 per cent). A number had also attracted other media exposure. This was in the local, regional area, especially through local Council publications (31 respondents, 75 per cent), as well as state-wide (2 respondents, 4.8 per cent) and nationally (6 respondents, 14.3 per cent). Two of these local chefs/cooks (or 4.8 per cent) had attracted international media coverage of their activities. It is clear from the above that, in the small area surveyed, rural and regional chefs/cooks make a considerable contribution to their local communities, with all the chefs/cooks who replied making some, and a number a major, contribution to those communities, well beyond the requirements of their paid positions in the field of food preparation and service. The responses tendered indicate that these chefs and cooks contributed regularly to local public events, institutions and charities (with a high rate of contribution to local festivals, school programs and local charitable activities), and were also making an input into public education programs, local cultural institutions, political and social debates of local importance, as well as the profitability of other local businesses. They were also actively supporting not only the future of the food industry as a whole, but also the viability of their local communities, by providing work experience opportunities and taking on local apprentices for training and mentorship. Much more than merely food providers, as a group, these chefs and cooks were, it appears, also operating as food historians, public intellectuals, teachers, activists and environmentalists. They were, moreover, operating as content producers for local media while, at the same time, acting as media producers and publishers. Conclusion The terms “chef” and “cook” can be diversely defined. All definitions, however, commonly involve a sense of professionalism in food preparation reflecting some specialist knowledge and skill in the culinary arts, as well as various levels of creativity, experience and responsibility. In terms of the specific duties that chefs and professional cooks undertake every day, almost all publications on the subject deal specifically with workplace related activities such as food and other supply ordering, staff management, menu planning and food preparation and serving. This is constant across culinary textbooks (see, for instance, Culinary Institute of America 2002) and more discursive narratives about the professional chef such as the bestselling autobiographical musings of Anthony Bourdain, and Michael Ruhlman’s journalistic/biographical investigations of US chefs (Soul; Reach). An alternative preliminary examination, and categorisation, of the roles these professionals play outside their kitchens reveals, however, a much wider range of community based activities and inputs than such texts suggest. It is without doubt that the chefs and cooks who responded to the survey discussed above have made, and are making, a considerable contribution to their local New England communities. It is also without doubt that these contributions are of considerable value, and valued by, those country communities. Further research will have to consider to what extent these contributions, and the significance and influence of these chefs and cooks in those communities are mirrored, or not, by other country (as well as urban) chefs and cooks, and their communities. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engaging Histories: Australian Historical Association Regional Conference, at the University of New England, September 2007. I would like to thank the session’s participants for their insightful comments on that presentation. A sincere thank you, too, to the reviewers of this article, whose suggestions assisted my thinking on this piece. Research to complete this article was carried out whilst a Visiting Fellow with the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. References Armidale Tourist Information Centre. Dining Out in Armidale [brochure]. Armidale: Armidale-Dumaresq Council, c. 2006. Baker-Clark, C. A. Profiles from the Kitchen: What Great Cooks have Taught us about Ourselves and our Food. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006. Bernier, G. Antoine Carême 1783-1833: La Sensualité Gourmande en Europe. Paris: Grasset, 1989. Bourdain, A. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Bowyer, A. Delia Smith: The Biography. London: André Deutsch, 1999. Brandon, R. The People’s Chef: Alexis Soyer, A Life in Seven Courses. Chichester: Wiley, 2005. Brien, D. L. “Australian Celebrity Chefs 1950-1980: A Preliminary Study.” Australian Folklore 21 (2006): 201–18. Chelminski, R. The Perfectionist: Life and Death In Haute Cuisine. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. Clifford-Smith, S. A Marvellous Party: The Life of Bernard King. Milson’s Point: Random House Australia, 2004. Culinary Institute of America. The Professional Chef. 7th ed. New York: Wiley, 2002. de Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Hildred, S., and T. Ewbank. Jamie Oliver: The Biography. London: Blake, 2001. Jenkins, S. 21 Great Chefs of Australia: The Coming of Age of Australian Cuisine. East Roseville: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Kelly, I. Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antoine Carême, The First Celebrity Chef. New York: Walker and Company, 2003. James, K. Escoffier: The King of Chefs. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002. Morris, H. Portrait of a Chef: The Life of Alexis Soyer, Sometime Chef to the Reform Club. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1938. Nabhan, G. P. Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. O’Donnell, M., and T. Knox. Great Australian Chefs. Melbourne: Bookman Press, 1999. Rachleff, O. S. Escoffier: King of Chefs. New York: Broadway Play Pub., 1983. Ray, E. Alexis Soyer: Cook Extraordinary. Lewes: Southover, 1991. Reardon, J. M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table. New York: Harmony Books, 1994. Redden, G. “Packaging the Gifts of Nation.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/gifts.php. Riley, N. Appetite For Life: The Biography of Julia Child. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Ruhlman, M. The Soul of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2001. Ruhlman, M. The Reach of a Chef. New York: Viking, 2006. Sanger, M. B. Escoffier: Master Chef. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976. Scott, A. J. “The Cultural Economy of Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 212 (1997) 323–39. Simpson, N. Gordon Ramsay: The Biography. London: John Blake, 2006. Smith, G. Nigella Lawson: A Biography. London: Andre Deutsch, 2005. Symons, M. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004. Tairu, T. “Material Food, Spiritual Quest: When Pleasure Does Not Follow Purchase.” M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999) accessed 10 September 2008 http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/pleasure.php. White, R. S. “Popular Culture as the Everyday: A Brief Cultural History of Vegemite.” Australian Popular Culture. Ed. I. Craven. Cambridge UP, 1994. 15–21.

Hidden away at the ends of streets, behind suburban parks and community assets, there remain remnants of the coastal wallum heathlands that once stretched from Caloundra to Noosa, in Queensland, Australia. From late July to September, these areas explode with colour, a springtime wonderland of white wedding bush, delicate ground orchids, the pastels and brilliance of pink boronias, purple irises, and the diverse profusion of yellow bush peas. These gifts of nature are still relatively unknown and unappreciated, with most locals, and Australians at large, having little knowledge of the remarkable nature of the wallum, the nutrient-poor sandy soil that can be almost as acidic as battery acid, but which sustains a finely tuned ecosystem that, once cleared, cannot be regrown. These heathlands and woodlands, previously commonplace beyond the beach dunes of the coastal region, are now only found in a number of national parks and reserves, and suburban remnants.Image 1: The author wildflowering and making art (Photo: Judy Barrass)I too was one of those who had no idea of the joys of the wallum and heathland wildflowers, but it was the creative works of Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright that helped initiate my education, my own wanderings, wildflowering, and love. Learning country has been a multi-faceted experience, extended and tested as walking becomes an embodied encounter, bodies and landscapes entwined (Lund), an imaginative reimagining, creative act and source of inspiration, a form of pilgrimage (Morrison), forging an intimate relationship (Somerville).Image 2: Women wildflowering next to Rainbow Beach (Photo: Susan Davis)Wandering—the experience shares some similar characteristics to walking, but may have less of a sense of direction and destination. It may become an experience that is relational, contemplative, connected to place. Wandering may be transitory but with impact that resonates across years. Such is the case of wandering for McArthur and Wright; the experience became deeply relational but also led to a destabilisation of values, where the walking body became “entangled in monumental historical and social structures” (Heddon and Turner). They called their walking and wandering “wildflowering”. Somerville said of the term: “Wildflowering was a word they created to describe their passion for Australian wildflower and their love of the places where they found them” (Somerville 2). However, wildflowering was also very much about the experience of wandering within nature, of the “art of seeing”, of learning and communing, but also of “doing”.Image 3: Kathleen McArthur and Judith Wright “wildflowering” north of Lake Currimundi. (Photo: Alex Jelinek, courtesy Alexandra Moreno)McArthur defined and described going wildflowering as meaningdifferent things to different people. There are those who, with magnifying glass before their eyes, looking every inch the scientist, count stamens, measure hairs, pigeon-hole all the definitive features neatly in order and scoff at common names. Others bring with them an artistic inclination, noting the colours and shapes and shadows in the intimate and in the general landscape. Then there are those precious few who find poetry in a Helmut Orchid “leaning its ear to the ground”; see “the trigger-flower striking the bee”; find secrets in Sun Orchids; see Irises as “lilac butterflies” and a fox in a Yellow Doubletail…There are as many different ways to approach the “art of seeing” as there are people who think and feel and one way is as worthy as any other to make of it an enjoyably sensuous experience… (McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 52-53)Wildflowering thus extends far beyond the scientific collector and cataloguer of nature; it is about walking and wandering within nature and interacting with it; it is a richly layered experience, an “art”, “a sensuous experience”, “an artistic inclination” where perception may be framed by the poetic.Their wildflowering drove McArthur and Wright to embark on monumental struggles. They became the voice for the voiceless lifeforms within the environment—they typed letters, organised meetings, lobbied politicians, and led community groups. In fact, they often had to leave behind the environments and places that brought them joy to use the tools of culture to protest and protect—to ensure we might be able to appreciate them today. Importantly, both their creativity and the activism were fuelled by the same wellspring: walking, wandering, and wildflowering.Women Wandering and WildfloweringWhen McArthur and Wright met in the early 1950s, they shared some similarities in terms of relatively privileged social backgrounds, their year of birth (1915), and a love of nature. They both had houses named after native plants (“Calanthe” for Wright’s house at Tambourine, “Midyim” for McArthur’s house at Caloundra), and were focussed on their creative endeavours—Wright with her poetry, McArthur with her wildflower painting and writing. Wright was by then well established as a highly regarded literary figure on the Australian scene. Her book of poetry The Moving Image (1946) had been well received, and later publications further consolidated her substance and presence on the national literary landscape. McArthur had been raised as the middle daughter of a prominent Queensland family; her father was Daniel Evans, of Evans Deakin Industries, and her mother “Kit” was a daughter of one of the pastoral Durack clan. Kathleen had married and given birth to three children, but by the 1950s was exploring new futures and identities, having divorced her husband and made a home for her family at Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. She had time and space in her life to devote to her own pursuits and some financial means provided through her inheritance to finance such endeavours.Wright and McArthur met in 1951 after McArthur sent Wright a children’s book for Judith and Jack McKinney’s daughter Meredith. The book was by McArthur’s cousins, Mary Durack (of Kings in Grass Castles fame) and Elizabeth Durack. Wright subsequently invited McArthur to visit her at Tambourine and from that visit their friendship quickly blossomed. While both women were to become known as high-profile nature lovers and conservationists, Wright acknowledges that it was McArthur who helped “train her eye” and cultivated her appreciation of the wildflowers of south-east Queensland:There are times in one’s past which remain warm and vivid, and can be taken out and looked at, so to speak, with renewed pleasure. Such, for me, were my first meetings in the early 1950s with Kathleen McArthur, and our continuing friendship. They brought me joys of discovery, new knowledge, and shared appreciation. Those “wild-flowering days” at Tamborine Mountain, Caloundra, Noosa or Lake Cootharaba, when I was able to wander with her, helped train my own eye a little to her ways of seeing and her devotion to the flowers of the coast, the mountains, and the wallum plains and swamps. (Wright quoted in McArthur, Australian Wildflowers 7)It was through this wandering and wildflowering that their friendship was forged, their knowledge of the plants and landscape grew and their passion was ignited. These acts of wandering were ones where feelings and the senses were engaged and celebrated. McArthur was to document her experiences of these environments through her wildflower paintings, cards, prints, weekly articles in the local newspapers, and books featuring Queensland and Australian Wildflowers (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers; Living; Bush; Australian Wildflowers). Wright wrote a range of poems featuring landscapes and flora from the coastal experiences and doubtless influenced by their wildflowering experiences. These included, for example, Judith Wright’s poems “Wildflower Plain”, “Wonga Vine”, “Nameless Flower”, and “Sandy Swamp” (Collected Works).Through these acts of wildflowering, walking, and wandering, McArthur and Wright were drawn into activism and became what I call “wild/flower” women: women who cared for country, who formed a deep connection and intimate relationship with nature, with the more-than-human world; women who saw themselves not separate from nature but part of the great cycles of life, growth, death, and renewal; women whose relationship to the country, to the wildflowers and other living things was expressed through drawing, painting, poetry, stories, and performances—but that love driving them also to actions—actions to nurture and protect those wildflowers, places, and living things. This intimate relationship with nature was such that it inspired them to become “wild”, at times branded difficult, prompted to speak out, and step up to assume high profile roles on the public stage—and all because of their love of the small, humble, and often unseen.Wandering into Activism A direct link between “wildflowering” and activism can be identified in key experiences from 1953. That was the year McArthur devoted to “wildflowering”, visiting locations across the Sunshine Coast and South-East Queensland, documenting all that was flowering at different times of the year (McArthur, Living 15). She kept a monthly journal and also engaged in extensive drawing and painting. She was joined by Wright and her family for some of these trips, including one that would become a “monumental” expedition. They explored the area around Noosa and happened to climb to the top of Mt Tinbeerwah. Unlike many of the other volcanic plugs of the Sunshine Coast that would not be an easy climb for a family with young children, Tinbeerwah is a small volcanic peak, close to the road that runs between Cooroy and Tewantin, and one that is a relatively easy walk. From the car park, the trail takes you over volcanic lava flows, a pathway appearing, disappearing, winding through native grasses, modest height trees and to the edge of a dramatic cliff (one now popular with abseilers and adventurers). The final stretch brings you out above the trees to stunning 360-degree views, other volcanic peaks, a string of lakes and waterways, the patchwork greens of farmlands, distant blue oceans, and an expanse of bushland curving north for miles. Both women wrote about the experience and its subsequent significance: When Meredith was four years old, Kathleen McArthur, who was a great wildflower enthusiast and had become a good friend, invited us to join her on a wildflower expedition to the sand-plains north of Noosa. There the Noosa River spread itself out into sand-bottomed lakes between which the river meandered so slowly that everywhere the sky was serenely mirrored in it, trees hung low over it, birds haunted them.Kathleen took her little car, we took our converted van, and drove up the narrow unsealed road beyond Noosa. Once through the dunes—where the low bush-cover was white with wedding-bush and yellow with guinea-flower vines—the plains began, with many and mingled colours and scents. It was spring, and it welcomed us joyfully. (Wright, Half 279-280)McArthur also wrote about this event and its importance, as they both realised that this was territory that was worth protecting for posterity: ‘it was obvious that this was great wildflower country in addition to having a fascinating system of sand mass with related river and lakes. It would make a unique national park’ (McArthur, Living 53). After this experience, Kathleen and Judith began initial inquiries to find out about how to progress ideas for forming a national park (McArthur, Living). Brady affirms that it was Kathleen who first “broached the idea of agitating to have the area around Cooloola declared a National Park” (Brady 182), and it was Judith who then made inquiries in Brisbane on their way back to Mount Tambourine:Judith took the idea to Romeo Lahey of the National Parks Association who told her it was not threatened in any way whereas there were important areas of rainforest that were, and his association gave priority to those. If he had but known, it was threatened. The minerals sands prospectors were about to arrive, if not already in there. (McArthur, Living 53)These initial investigations were put on hold as the pair pursued their “private lives” and raised their children (McArthur, Living), but reignited throughout the 1960s. In 1962, McArthur and Wright were to become founding members of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (along with David Fleay and Brian Clouston), and Cooloola was to become one of one of their major campaigns (McArthur, Living 32). This came to the fore when they discovered there were multiple sand mining leases pending across the Cooloola region. It was at McArthur’s suggestion that a national postcard campaign was launched in 1969, with their organisation sending over 100,000 postcards across Australia to then be sent back to Joh Bjelke Peterson, the notoriously pro-development, conservative Queensland Premier. This is acknowledged as Australia’s first postcard campaign and was reported in national newspapers; The Australian called the Caloundra branch of WPSQ one of the “most militant cells” in Australia (25 May 1970). This was likely because of the extent of the WPSQ communications across media channels and persistence in taking on high profile critics, including the mining companies.It was to be another five years of campaigning before the national park was declared in 1975 (then named Cooloola National Park, now part of the Great Sandy). Wright was to then leave Queensland to live on a property near Braidwood (on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales) and in a different political climate. However, McArthur stayed in Caloundra, maintaining her deep commitment to place and country, keeping on walking and wandering, painting, and writing. She campaigned to protect beach dunes, lobbied to have Pumicestone Passage added to the national heritage register (McArthur, Pumicestone), and fought to prevent the creation of canal estates on the Pumicestone passage. Following the pattern of previous campaigns, she engaged in detailed research, drawing on expertise nationally and internationally, and writing many submissions, newspaper columns, and letters.McArthur also advocated for the plants, the places, and forms of knowing that she loved, calling for “clear thinking and deep feeling” that would enable people to see, value, and care as she did, notably saying:Because our flowers have never settled into our consciousness they are not seen. People can drive through square miles of colourful, massed display of bloom and simply not see it. It is only when the mind opens that the flowers bloom. (McArthur, Bush 2)Her belief was that once you walked the country and could “see”, become familiar with, and fall in love with the wildflowers and their environment, you could not then stand by and see what you love destroyed. Her conservation activities and activism arose and was fed through her wildflowering and the deep knowledge and connections that were formed.Wildflowering and Wanderings of My OwnSo, what we can learn from McArthur and Wright, from our wild/flower women, their wanderings, and wildflowering?Over the past few years, I have walked the wallum country that they loved, recited their poetry, shared their work with others, walked with women in the present accompanied by resonances of the past. I have shared these experiences with friends, artists, and nature lovers. While wandering with one group of women one day, we discovered that a patch of wallum behind Sunshine Beach was due to be cleared for an aged care development. It is full of casuarina food trees visited by the endangered Glossy Black Cockatoos, but it is also full of old wallum banksias, a tree I have come to love, influenced in part by writing and art by McArthur, and my experiences of “wildflowering”.Banksia aemula—the wallum banksia—stands tall, often one of the tallest trees of our coastal heathlands and after which the wallum was named. A range of sources, including McArthur herself, identify the source of the tree’s name as an Aboriginal word:It is an Aboriginal word some say applied to all species of Banksia, and others say to Banksia aemula. The wallum, being up to the present practically useless for commercial purposes provides our best wildflower shows… (McArthur, Queensland Wildflowers 2)Gnarled, textured bark—soft grey and warm red browns, in parts almost fur—the flower heads, when young, feed the small birds and honeyeaters; the bees collect nectar to make honey. And the older heads—remnants on the ground left by glorious black cockatoos, whose beaks, the perfect pliers, crack pods open to recover the hidden seeds. In summer, as the new flowers burst open, every stage of the flower stem cycle is on show. The trees often stand together like familiar friends gossiping, providing shelter; they are protective, nurturing. Banksia aemula is a tree that, according to Thomas Petrie’s reminiscence of “early” Queensland, was significant to Aboriginal women, and might be “owned” by certain women:but certain men and women owned different fruit or flower-trees and shrubs. For instance, a man could own a bon-yi (Auaurcaria Bidwilli) tree, and a woman a minti (Banksia aemula)… (Petrie, Reminiscences 148)Banksia, wallum, women… the connection has existed for millennia. Women walking country, talking, observing, collecting, communing—and this tree was special to them as it has become for me. Who knows how old those trees are in that patch of forest and who may have been their custodians.Do I care about this? Yes, I do. How did I come to care? Through walking, through “wildflowering”, through stories, art, and experience. My connections have been forged by nature and culture, seeing McArthur’s art and reading Wright’s words, through walking the country with women, learning to know, and sharing a wildflowering culture. But knowing isn’t enough: wandering and wondering, has led to something more because now I care; now we must act. Along with some of the women I walked with, we have investigated council records; written to, and called, politicians and the developer; formed a Facebook group; met with various experts; and proposed alternatives. However, our efforts have not met with success as the history of the development application and approval was old and complex. Through wandering and “wildflowering”, we have had the opportunity to both lose ourselves and find ourselves, to escape, to learn, to discover. However, such acts are not necessarily aimless or lacking direction. As connections are forged, care and concern grows, and acts can shift from the humble and mundane, into the intentional and deliberate. The art of seeing and poetic perceptions may even transform into ecological action, with ramifications that can be both significant monumental. Such may be the power of “wildflowering”.ReferencesBrady, Veronica. South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998.Heddon, Deirdre and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review 22.2 (2012): 224–236.Lund, Katrín. “Landscapes and Narratives: Compositions and the Walking Body.” Landscape Research 37.2 (2012): 225–237.McArthur, Kathleen. Queensland Wildflowers: A Selection. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1959.———. The Bush in Bloom: A Wildflower Artist’s Year in Paintings and Words. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1982.———. Pumicestone Passage: A Living Waterway. Caloundra: Kathleen McArthur, 1978.———. Looking at Australian Wildflowers. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1986.———. Living on the Coast. Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1989.Morrison, Susan Signe. “Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past.” M/C Journal 21.4 (2018). 12 Aug. 2019 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1437>.Petrie, Constance Campbell, and Tom Petrie. Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland. 4th ed. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992. Somerville, Margaret. Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942 to 1985. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2016.———. Half a Lifetime. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999.

This article makes a case for the everyday while on tour and argues that the ability to continue with everyday routines and social relationships, while at the same time moving through and staying in liminal or atypical zones of tourist locales, is a key part of some kinds of tourist experience. Based on ethnographic field research with grey nomads (retirees who take extended tours of Australia in caravans and motorhomes) everyday life while on tour is examined, specifically the overlap and intersection between the out-of-the-ordinary “tourist zone” and the ordinariness of the “everyday zone.” The “everyday zone” and “tourist zone” can be readily differentiated by their obvious geospatial boundaries (being at home or being away on holiday). More specifically, the “everyday zone” refers to the routines of quotidian life, or the mundane practices which make up our daily, at-home lives. These practices are closely connected with the domestic realm and include consumption practices (clothing, cooking, mass media) and everyday social interactions. The “tourist zone” is similarly concerned with consumption. In this zone, however, tourists are seen to consume places; the culture, landscape, and peoples of exotic or out-of-the-ordinary tourist locales. Needless to say this consumption of place also includes the consumption of services and objects available in the tourist destinations (Urry, “The Consuming of Place” 220). The notion of tourists being away from home has often been contrasted with constructions of home—with the dull routines of everyday life—by social scientists and tourist marketers alike in an effort to illuminate the difference between being “away” and being at “home.” Scott McCabe and Elizabeth Stokoe suggest that peoples’ notion of “home” takes into account the meaning of being away (602). That is to say that when people are away from home, as tourists for example, they often compare and contrast this with the fundamental aspects of living at home. Others, however, argue that with the widespread use of mobile communication technologies, the distinction between the notion of being at “home” and being “away” becomes less clear (White and White 91). In this sense, the notion of home or the everyday is viewed with an eye towards social relationships, rather than any specific geographical location (Jamal and Hill 77–107; Massey 59–69; Urry, “The Tourist Gaze” 2–14; White and White 88–104). It can be argued, therefore, that tourism entails a fusion of the routines and relationships associated with the everyday, as well as the liminal or atypical world of difference. This article is based on semi-structured interviews with 40 grey nomads, as well as four months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in rural and remote Australia—in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and South Australia. Grey nomads have been part of Australian senior culture for at least four decades. They are a relatively heterogeneous group of tourists encompassing a range of socio-economic backgrounds, preferred activities, health status, and favoured destinations (Davies et al. 40–1; Economic Development Committee 4; Holloway 117–47), as well age cohorts—including the frugal generation (1910–1932), the silent generation (1931–1946), and the baby boomer generation (1946–65). Grey nomads usually tour as spousal couples (Tourism Research Australia 26; Onyx and Leonard 387). Some of these couples live solely on government pensions while others are obviously well-resourced—touring in luxury motorhomes costing well over half a million dollars. Some prefer to bush camp in national parks and other isolated locations, and some choose to stay long term in caravan parks socialising with other grey nomads and the local community. All grey nomads, nonetheless, maintain a particularly close link with the everyday while touring. Mobile communication technologies anchor grey nomads (and other tourists) to the everyday—allowing for ready contact with existing family and friends while on tour. Grey nomads’ mobile dwellings, their caravans and motorhomes, integrate familiar domestic spaces with a touring life. The interior and exterior spaces of these mobile dwellings allow for easy enactment of everyday, domestic routines and the privatised world of adult spousal relationships. This peripatetic form of dwelling, where the dwelling itself accommodates both travel and an everyday domestic life further blurs the distinctions between the “everyday zone” and the “tourist zone”. In this sense grey nomads carry out a lifestyle that is both anchored and mobile; anchored in the everyday domestic life while at the same time being nomadic or geographically unstable. This blurring of the boundaries between the “everyday zone” and “tourist zone” is attractive to senior tourists, offering them a relatively safe and comfortable incursion into tourist locales, where established routines and patterns of everyday life can be maintained. Other homes-away-from-homes such as serviced apartments, holiday homes and house swaps also offer greater connection to the everyday, but are geographically anchored to specific tourism spaces. The caravan or motorhome allows this at-home connection for the peripatetic tourist offsets the relative rigours of outback touring in remote and rural Australia. Everyday Social Relationships in the “Tourist Zone” When tourists go away from home, they are usually thought of as being away from both place (home) and relationships (family and friends). Nowadays, however, being away from home does not necessarily mean being away from family and friends. This is because the ease and speed of today’s telecommunication technologies allows for instantaneous contact with family and friends back home—or the virtual co-presence of family and friends while being away on tour. In the past, those friends and relations who were geographically isolated from each other still enjoyed social contact via letters and telegrams. Such contacts, however, occurred less frequently and message delivery took time. Long distance telephone calls were also costly and therefore used sparingly. These days, telecommunication technologies such as mobile phones and the Internet, as well as the lower cost of landline phone calls, mean that everyday social contact does not need to be put on hold. Keeping in contact is now a comparatively fast, inexpensive, and effortless activity and socialising with distant friends and relatives is now a routine activity (Larsen 24). All grey nomads travel with a mobile phone device, either a digital mobile, Next G or satellite phone (Obst, Brayley and King 8). These phones are used to routinely keep in contact with family and friends, bringing with them everyday familial relationships while on tour. “We ring the girls. We’ve got two daughters. We ring them once a week, although if something happens Debbie [daughter] will ring us” (Teresa). Grey nomads also take advantage of special deals or free minutes when they scheduled weekly calls to family or friends. “I mainly [use] mobile, then I ring, because I’ve got that hour, free hour” (Helen). E-mail is also a favoured way of keeping in contact with family and friends for some grey nomads. This is because the asynchronicity of e-mail interaction is very convenient as they can choose the times when they pick up and send messages. “Oh, thank goodness for the e-mail” (Pat). Maintaining social contact with family and friends at a distance is not necessarily as straightforward as when grey nomads and other tourists are at home. According to discussants in this study and the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee, mobile phone coverage within Australia is still rather patchy when outside major metropolitan areas. Consequently, the everyday task of kin keeping via the phone can be somewhat intermittent, especially for those grey nomads who spend a great deal of time outside major towns in rural and remote Australia. “You can never get much [reception] but [...] they can just ring the mobile and just leave a message and we will get that message [later]” (Rena). Similarly, using the Internet to e-mail family and friends and catch up with online banking can only be carried out when passing through larger towns. “I do it [using the Internet] like every major town we went through. I’d stop and do a set of e-mails and I used to do my banking” (Maureen). The intermittent phone coverage in remote and rural Australia was not always viewed as an inconvenience by discussants in this study. This is because continuing engagement with family and friends while on tour may leave little respite from the ongoing obligations or any difficulties associated with family and friends back home, and encroach on the leisure and relaxation associated with grey nomad touring. “I don’t want the phone to ring […] That’s one thing I can do without, the phone ringing, especially at 4:00 in the morning” (Rena). In this way, too much co-presence, in the form of mobile phone calls from family and friends, can be just as much a nuisance when away from home as when at home—and impinge on the feeling of “being away from it all.” Naomi White and Peter White also suggest that “being simultaneously home and away is not always experienced in a positive light” (98) and at times, continued contact (via the phone) with friends and family while touring is not satisfying or enjoyable because these calls reiterate the “dynamics evident in those that are [usually] geographically proximate” (100). Thus, while mobile communication technologies are convenient tools for grey nomads and other tourists which blur the boundaries between the “everyday zone” and “tourist zones” in useful and pleasurable ways, their overuse may also encroach on tourists’ away time, thus interfering with their sense of solitude and quiescence when touring in remote or rural Australia. The “Everyday Zone” of the Caravan or Motorhome Being a tourist involves “everyday practices, ordinary places and significant others, such as family members and friends, but co-residing and at-a-distance” (Larsen 26). While tourism involves some sense of liminality, in reality, it is interspersed with the actuality of the everyday routines and sociabilities enacted while touring. Tim Edensor notes that; Rather than transcending the mundane, most forms of tourism are fashioned by culturally coded escape attempts. Moreover, although suffused with notions of escape from normativity, tourists carry quotidian habits and responses with them: they are part of the baggage. (61) Grey nomads go further than this by bringing on tour with them a domestic space in which everyday routines and sociabilities are sustained. Travelling in this manner “makes possible, and probably encourages, greater continuity with everyday routine than many other kinds of holiday making” (Southerton et al. 6). To be able to sleep in your own bed with your own pillow and linen, or perhaps travel with your dogs, makes caravanning and motorhoming an attractive touring option for many people. Thus, the use of caravans or motorhomes when travelling brings with it a great deal of mobile domesticity while on tour. The caravan or motorhome is furnished with most of the essentially-domestic objects and technologies to enable grey nomads to sleep, eat, relax, and be entertained in a manner similar to that which they enjoy in the family home, albeit within smaller dimensions. Lorna: We have shower, toilet. We had microwave, stereo. We have air conditioning and heating.Eric: Yeah, reverse cycle air conditioning.Lorna: Reverse cycle. What else do we have?Eric: Hot water service. Gas or 240 volt. 12 volt converter in that, which is real good, it runs your lights, runs everything like that. You just hook it into the main power and it converts it to 12 volt. Roll out awning plus the full annex.Lorna: Full annex. What else do we have? There’s a good size stove in it. The size of caravans and motorhomes means that many domestic tasks often take less time or are simplified. Cleaning the van takes a lot less time and cooking often becomes simplified, due to lack of bench and storage space. Women in particular like this aspect of grey nomad travel. “It is great. Absolutely. You don’t have toilets to clean, you don’t have bathrooms to clean. Cooking your meals are easier because everything is all […] Yeah. It’s more casual” (Sonya). This touring lifestyle also introduces new domestic routines, such as emptying chemical toilets, filling water tanks, towing and parking the van and refilling gas tanks, for example. Nonetheless grey nomads, spend significantly less time on these domestic tasks when they are touring. In this sense, the caravan or motorhome brings with it the comforts and familiarity of home, while at the same time minimising the routine chores involved in domestic life. With the core accoutrements of everyday life available, everyday activities such as doing the dishes, watching television, preparing and eating a meal—as well as individual hobbies and pastimes—weave themselves into a daily life that is simultaneously home and away. This daily life, at home in the caravan or motorhome, brings with it possibilities of a domestic routinised lifestyle—one that provides welcome comfort and familiarity when travelling and a retreat from the demands of sightseeing. On the farm I used to make jam and cakes, so I do it again [in the caravan]. I make jam, I made marmalade a couple of weeks ago. We’d often stay home [in the caravan], I’d just clean or do a bit of painting. (Jenny) Touring in a caravan or motorhome allows for some sense of predictability: that you own and control the private spaces of your own mobile dwelling, and can readily carry out everyday domestic routines and sociabilities. “We go for a long walk. We come back and we see friends and we stop and have a coffee with them, and then you come home in the caravan at 2.30 and you can still have lunch” (Yvonne). Touring in a caravan or motorhome also frees grey nomads from dependence on prearranged tourist experiences such as organised tours or hotel meal times where much of the tourist experience can be regimented. We always went in hotels and you always had to dress up, and you had to eat before a certain time, and you had your breakfast before a certain time. And after 2.30 you can’t have lunch anymore and sometimes we have lunch at 2 o’clock. I like the caravan park [better]. (Donald) Despite the caravan or motorhome having close links with everyday life and the domestic realm, its ready mobility offers a greater sense of autonomy while touring: that you are unfettered, not bound to any specific place or timetable, and can move on at whim. Grey nomads often cross paths with other tourists dependent on guided bus tours. “They go in [to Kakadu] on a bus trip. All they do is go in on the main road, they’re in there for the day and there’re back. That’s absolutely ridiculous” (Vance). This autonomy, or freedom to structure their own tourist experiences, allows grey nomads the opportunity to travel at a leisurely pace. Even those grey nomads who travel to the same northern destination every year take their time and enjoy other tourist locations along the way. We take our time. This time, last time, we did three weeks before we got in [to] Broome. We spent a lot [of time] in Karratha but also in Geraldton. And when we came back, in Kalbarri, [we had] a week in Kalbarri. But it’s nice going up, you know. You go all through the coast, along the coast. (John) Caravan or motorhome use, therefore, provides for a routinised everyday life while at the same time allowing a level of autonomy not evident in other forms of tourism—which rely more heavily on pre-booking accommodation and transport options. These contradictory aspects of grey nomad travel, an everyday life of living in a caravan or motorhome coupled with freedom to move on in an independent manner, melds the “everyday zone” and the “tourist zone” in a manner appealing to many grey nomads. Conclusion Theories of tourism tend to pay little attention to the aspects of tourism that involve recurrent activities and an ongoing connectedness with everyday life. Tourism is often defined: by contrasting it to home geographies and everydayness: tourism is what they are not. [...] The main focus in such research is on the extraordinary, on places elsewhere. Tourism is an escape from home, a quest for more desirable and fulfilling places. (Larsen 21) Nonetheless, tourism involves everyday routines, everyday spaces and an everyday social life. Grey nomads find that mobile phones and the Internet make possible the virtual co-presence of family and friends allowing everyday relationships to continue while touring. Nonetheless, the pleasure of ongoing contact with distant family and friends while touring may at times encroach on the quietude or solitude grey nomads experienced when touring remote and rural Australia. In addition to this, grey nomads’ caravans and motorhomes are equipped with the many comforts and domestic technologies of home, making for the continuance of everyday domiciliary life while on tour, further obfuscating the boundaries between the “tourist zone” and the “everyday zone.” In this sense grey nomads lead a lifestyle that is both anchored and mobile. This anchoring involves dwelling in everyday spaces, carrying out everyday domestic and social routines, as well as maintaining contact with friends and family via mobile communication technologies. This anchoring allows for some sense of predictability: that you own and control the private spaces of your own mobile dwelling, and can readily carry out everyday domestic routines and sociabilities. Conversely, the ready mobility of the caravan or motorhome offers a sense of autonomy: that you are unfettered, not bound to any specific place and can move on at whim. This peripatetic form of dwelling, where the dwelling itself is the catalyst for both travel and an everyday domestic life, is an under researched area. Mobile dwellings such as caravans, motorhomes, and yachts, constitute dwellings that are anchored in the everyday yet unfixed to any one locale. References Davies, Amanda, Matthew Tonts, and Julie Cammell. Coastal Camping in the Rangelands: Emerging Opportunities for Natural Resource Management. Perth: Rangelands WA, 2009. 24 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.rangelandswa.com.au/pages/178/publications›. Economic Development Committee. Inquiry into Developing Queensland’s Rural and Regional Communities through Grey Nomad Tourism. Brisbane: Queensland Parliament, 2011. 23 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Documents/TableOffice/TabledPapers/2011/5311T3954.pdf›. Edensor, Tim. “Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism: (Re)Producing Tourist Space and Practice.” Tourist Studies 1 (2001): 59–81. Holloway, Donell. Grey Nomads: Retirement, Leisure and Travel in the Australian Context. PhD diss. Edith Cowan University: Perth, 2010. Jamal, Tanzin, and Steve Hill. “The Home and the World: (Post) Touristic Spaces of (in) Authenticity.” The Tourist as a Metaphor of The Social World. Ed. Graham Dann. Wallingford: CAB International, 2002. 77–107. Larsen, Jonas. “De-Exoticizing Tourist Travel: Everyday Life and Sociality on the Move.” Leisure Studies 27 (2008): 21–34. Massey, Doreen. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Eds. Jon Bird et al. London: Routeledge, 1993. 59–69. McCabe, Scott, and Elizabeth Stokoe. “Place and Identity in Tourists’ Accounts.” Annals of Tourism Research 31 (2004): 601–22. Obst, Patricia L., Nadine Brayley, and Mark J. King. “Grey Nomads: Road Safety Impacts and Risk Management.” 2008 Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference. Adelaide: Engineers Australia, 2008. Onyx, Jenny, and Rosemary Leonard. “The Grey Nomad Phenomenon: Changing the Script of Aging.” The International Journal of Aging and Human Development 64 (2007): 381–98. Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee. Regional Telecommunications Review Report: Framework for the Future. Canberra: RTIRC, 2008. Southerton, Dale, Elizabeth Shove, Alan Warde, and Rosemary Dean. “Home from Home? A Research Note on Recreational Caravanning.” Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. 1998. 10 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/southerton-et-al-home-from-home.pdf›. Tourism Research Australia. Understanding the Caravan industry in WA: Grey Nomads—Fast Facts. Perth, Australia: Tourism WA (n.d.). Urry, John. “The Consuming of Place.” Discourse, Communication, and Tourism. Eds. Adam Jaworski and Annette Pritchard. Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2005. 19–27. ———. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage, 2002. White, Naomi, and Peter White. “Home and Away: Tourists in a Connected World.” Annals of Tourism Research 34 (2006): 88–104.

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. 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“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

The digital revolution has been characterized by the overlapping of different media technologies and platforms which reshaped both traditional forms of audiovisual consumption and older conceptions of place and space. John Agnew claims that, traditionally, the notion of place has been associated with two different meanings: ‘the first is a geometric conception of place as a mere part of space and the second is a phenomenological understanding of a place as a distinctive coming together in space’ (317). Both of the dominant meanings have been challenged by the idea that the world itself is increasingly “placeless” as space-spanning connections and flows of information, things, and people undermine the rootedness of a wide range of processes anywhere in particular (Friedman). On the one hand, by obliterating physical distance, new technologies such as the Internet and the cell phone are making places obsolete, on the other hand, the proliferation of media representations favoured by these technologies are making places more relevant than ever. These increasing mediatisation processes, in fact, generate what Urry and Larsen call ‘imaginative geographies’, namely the conflation of representational spaces and physical spaces that substitute and enhance each other in contingent ways (116). The smartphone as a new hybrid media platform that combines different technological features such as digital screens, complex software applications, cameras, tools for online communication and GPS devices, has played a crucial role in the construction of new notions of place. This article examines a specific type of phone applications: mobile, digital mapping tools that allow users to identify film-locations. In doing so it will assess how new media platforms can potentially reconfigure notions of both media consumption, and (physical and imagined) mobility. Furthermore, the analysis of digital movie maps and their mediation of film locations will shed light on the way in which contemporary leisure activities reshape the cultural, social and geographic meaning of place. Digital, Mobile Movie MapsDigital movie maps can be defined as software applications, conceived for smart phones or other mobile devices, which enable users to identify the geographical position of film locations. These applications rely on geotagging which is the process of adding geospatial metadata (usually latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates) to texts or images. From this point of view these phone apps belong to a broader category of media that Tristan Thielmann calls geomedia: converging applications of interactive, digital, mapping tools and mobile and networked media technologies. According to Hjorth, recent studies on mobile media practices show a trend toward “re-enacting the importance of place and home as both a geo-imaginary and socio-cultural precept” (Hjorth 371). In 2008 Google announced that Google Maps and Google Earth will become the basic platform for any information search. Similarly, in 2010 Flickr started georeferencing their complete image stock (Thielmann 8). Based on these current developments media scholars such as Thielmann claim that geomedia will emerge in the future as one of the most pervasive forms of digital technology (8).In my research I identified 44 phone geomedia apps that offered content variously related to film locations. In every case the main functionality of the apps consisted in matching geographic data concerning the locations with visual and written information about the corresponding film production. ‘Scene Seekers’, the first app able to match the title of a film with the GPS map of its locations, was released in 2009. Gradually, subsequent film-location apps incorporated a number of other functions including:Trivia and background information about films and locationsSubmission forms which allow users to share information about their favourite film locatiosLocation photosLinks to film downloadFilm-themed itinerariesAudio guidesOnline discussion groupsCamera/video function which allow users to take photos of the locations and share them on social mediaFilm stills and film clipsAfter identifying the movie map apps, I focused on the examination of the secondary functions they offered and categorized the applications based on both their main purpose and their main target users (as explicitly described in the app store). Four different categories of smart phone applications emerged. Apps conceived for:Business (for location scouts and producers)Entertainment (for trivia and quiz buffs)Education (for students and film history lovers)Travel (for tourists)‘Screen New South Wales Film Location Scout’, an app designed for location scouts requiring location contact information across the state of New South Wales, is an example of the first category. The app provides lists, maps and images of locations used in films shot in the region as well as contact details for local government offices. Most of these types of apps are available for free download and are commissioned by local authorities in the hope of attracting major film productions, which in turn might bring social and economic benefits to the region.A small number of the apps examined target movie fans and quiz buffs. ‘James Bond and Friends’, for example, focuses on real life locations where spy/thriller movies have been shot in London. Interactive maps and photos of the locations show their geographical position. The app also offers a wealth of trivia on spy/thriller movies and tests users’ knowledge of James Bond films with quizzes about the locations. While some of these apps provide information on how to reach particular film locations, the emphasis is on trivia and quizzes rather than travel itself.Some of the apps are explicitly conceived for educational purposes and target film students, film scholars and users interested in the history of film more broadly. The Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs, for example, developed a number of smartphone apps designed to promote knowledge about Italian Cinema. Each application focuses on one Italian city, and was designed for users wishing to acquire more information about the movie industry in that urban area. The ‘Cinema Roma’ app, for example, contains a selection of geo-referenced film sets from a number of famous films shot in Rome. The film spots are presented via a rich collection of historical images and texts from the Italian National Photographic Archive.Finally, the majority of the apps analysed (around 60%) explicitly targets tourists. One of the most popular film-tourist applications is the ‘British Film Locations’ app with over 100,000 downloads since its launch in 2011. ‘British Film Locations’ was commissioned by VisitBritain, the British tourism agency. Visit Britain has attempted to capitalize on tourists’ enthusiasm around film blockbusters since the early 2000s as their research indicated that 40% of potential visitors would be very likely to visit the place they had seen in films or on TV (VisitBritain). British Film Locations enables users to discover and photograph the most iconic British film locations in cinematic history. Film tourists can search by film title, each film is accompanied by a detailed synopsis and list of locations so users can plan an entire British film tour. The app also allows users to take photos of the location and automatically share them on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.Movie Maps and Film-TourismAs already mentioned, the majority of the film-location phone apps are designed for travel purposes and include functionalities that cater for the needs of the so called ‘post-tourists’. Maxine Feifer employed this term to describe the new type of tourist arising out of the shift from mass to post-Fordist consumption. The post-tourist crosses physical and virtual boundaries and shifts between experiences of everyday life, either through the actual or the simulated mobility allowed by the omnipresence of signs and electronic images in the contemporary age (Leotta). According to Campbell the post-tourist constructs his or her own tourist experience and destination, combining these into a package of overlapping and disjunctive elements: the imagined (dreams and screen cultures), the real (actual travels and guides) and the virtual (myths and internet) (203). More recently a number of scholars (Guttentag, Huang et al., Neuhofer et al.) have engaged with the application and implications of virtual reality on the planning, management and marketing of post-tourist experiences. Film-induced tourism is an expression of post-tourism. Since the mid-1990s a growing number of scholars (Riley and Van Doren, Tooke and Baker, Hudson and Ritchie, Leotta) have engaged with the study of this phenomenon, which Sue Beeton defined as “visitation to sites where movies and TV programmes have been filmed as well as to tours to production studios, including film-related theme parks” (11). Tourists’ fascination with film sets and locations is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality. Such places are simulacra which embody the blurred boundaries between reality and representation in a world in which unmediated access to reality is impossible (Baudrillard).Some scholars have focused on the role of mediated discourse in preparing both the site and the traveller for the process of tourist consumption (Friedberg, Crouch et al.). In particular, John Urry highlights the interdependence between tourism and the media with the concept of the ‘tourist gaze’. Urry argues that the gaze dominates tourism, which is primarily concerned with the commodification of images and visual consumption. According to Urry, movies and television play a crucial role in shaping the tourist gaze as the tourist compares what is gazed at with the familiar image of the object of the gaze. The tourist tries to reproduce his or her own expectations, which have been “constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices, such as film, TV, literature, records, and videos” (Urry 3). The inclusion of the camera functionality in digital movie maps such as ‘British Film Locations’ fulfils the need to actually reproduce the film images that the tourist has seen at home.Film and MapsThe convergence between film and (virtual) travel is also apparent in the prominent role that cartography plays in movies. Films often allude to maps in their opening sequences to situate their stories in time and space. In turn, the presence of detailed geographical descriptions of space at the narrative level often contributes to establish a stronger connection between film and viewers (Conley). Tom Conley notes that a number of British novels and their cinematic adaptations including Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and Stevenson’s Treasure Island belong to the so called ‘cartographic fiction’ genre. In these stories, maps are deployed to undo the narrative thread and inspire alternative itineraries to the extent of legitimising an interactive relation between text and reader or viewer (Conley 225).The popularity of LOTR locations as film-tourist destinations within New Zealand may be, in part, explained by the prominence of maps as both aesthetic and narrative devices (Leotta). The authenticity of the LOTR geography (both the novel and the film trilogy) is reinforced, in fact, by the reoccurring presence of the map. Tolkien designed very detailed maps of Middle Earth that were usually published in the first pages of the books. These maps play a crucial role in the immersion into the imaginary geography of Middle Earth, which represents one of the most important pleasures of reading LOTR (Simmons). The map also features extensively in the cinematic versions of both LOTR and The Hobbit. The Fellowship of the Ring opens with several shots of a map of Middle Earth, anticipating the narrative of displacement that characterizes LOTR. Throughout the trilogy the physical dimensions of the protagonists’ journey are emphasized by the foregrounding of the landscape as a map.The prominence of maps and geographical exploration as a narrative trope in ‘cartographic fiction’ such as LOTR may be responsible for activating the ‘tourist imagination’ of film viewers (Crouch et al.). The ‘tourist imagination’ is a construct that explains the sense of global mobility engendered by the daily consumption of the media, as well as actual travel. As Crouch, Jackson and Thompson put it, “the activity of tourism itself makes sense only as an imaginative process which involves a certain comprehension of the world and enthuses a distinctive emotional engagement with it” (Crouch et al. 1).The use of movie maps, the quest for film locations in real life may reproduce some of the cognitive and emotional pleasures that were activated while watching the movie, particularly if maps, travel and geographic exploration are prominent narrative elements. Several scholars (Couldry, Hills, Beeton) consider film-induced tourism as a contemporary form of pilgrimage and movie maps are becoming an inextricable part of this media ritual. Hudson and Ritchie note that maps produced by local stakeholders to promote the locations of films such as Sideways and LOTR proved to be extremely popular among tourists (391-392). In their study about the impact of paper movie maps on tourist behaviour in the UK, O’Connor and Pratt found that movie maps are an essential component in the marketing mix of a film location. For example, the map of Pride and Prejudice Country developed by the Derbyshire and Lincolnshire tourist boards significantly helped converting potential visitors into tourists as almost two in five visitors stated it ‘definitely’ turned a possible visit into a certainty (O’Connor and Pratt).Media Consumption and PlaceDigital movie maps have the potential to further reconfigure traditional understandings of media consumption and place. According to Nana Verhoeff digital mapping tools encourage a performative cartographic practice in the sense that the dynamic map emerges and changes during the users’ journey. The various functionalities of digital movie maps favour the hybridization between film reception and space navigation as by clicking on the movie map the user could potentially watch a clip of the film, read about both the film and the location, produce his/her own images and comments of the location and share it with other fans online.Furthermore, digital movie maps facilitate and enhance what Nick Couldry, drawing upon Claude Levi Strauss, calls “parcelling out”: the marking out as significant of differences in ritual space (83). According to Couldry, media pilgrimages, the visitation of TV or film locations are rituals that are based from the outset on an act of comparison between the cinematic depiction of place and its physical counterpart. Digital movie maps have the potential to facilitate this comparison by immediately retrieving images of the location as portrayed in the film. Media locations are rife with the marking of differences between the media world and the real locations as according to Couldry some film tourists seek precisely these differences (83).The development of smart phone movie maps, may also contribute to redefine the notion of audiovisual consumption. According to Nanna Verhoeff, mobile screens of navigation fundamentally revise the spatial coordinates of previously dominant, fixed and distancing cinematic screens. One of the main differences between mobile digital screens and larger, cinematic screens is that rather than being surfaces of projection or transmission, they are interfaces of software applications that combine different technological properties of the hybrid screen device: a camera, an interface for online communication, a GPS device (Verhoeff). Because of these characteristics of hybridity and intimate closeness, mobile screens involve practices of mobile and haptic engagement that turn the classical screen as distanced window on the world, into an interactive, hybrid navigation device that repositions the viewer as central within the media world (Verhoeff).In their discussion of the relocation of cinema into the iPhone, Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro reached similar conclusions as they define the iPhone as both a visual device and an interactive interface that mobilizes the eye as well as the hand (Casetti and Sampietro 23). The iPhone constructs an ‘existential bubble’ in which the spectator can find refuge while remaining exposed to the surrounding environment. When the surrounding environment is the real life film location, the consumption or re-consumption of the film text allowed by the digital movie map is informed by multi-sensorial and cognitive stimuli that are drastically different from traditional viewing experiences.The increasing popularity of digital movie maps is a phenomenon that could be read in conjunction with the emergence of innovative locative media such as the Google glasses and other applications of Augmented Reality (A.R.). Current smart phones available in the market are already capable to support A.R. applications and it appears likely that this will become a standard feature of movie apps within the next few years (Sakr). Augmented reality refers to the use of data overlays on real-time camera view of a location which make possible to show virtual objects within their spatial context. The camera eye on the device registers physical objects on location, and transmits these images in real time on the screen. On-screen this image is combined with different layers of data: still image, text and moving image.In a film-tourism application of augmented reality tourists would be able to point their phone camera at the location. As the camera identifies the location images from the film will overlay the image of the ‘real location’. The user, therefore, will be able to simultaneously see and walk in both the real location and the virtual film set. The notion of A.R. is related to the haptic aspect of engagement which in turn brings together the doing, the seeing and the feeling (Verhoeff). In film theory the idea of the haptic has come to stand for an engaged look that involves, and is aware of, the body – primarily that of the viewer (Marx, Sobchack). The future convergence between cinematic and mobile technologies is likely to redefine both perspectives on haptic perception of cinema and theories of film spectatorship.The application of A.R. to digital, mobile maps of film-locations will, in part, fulfill the prophecies of René Barjavel. In 1944, before Bazin’s seminal essay on the myth of total cinema, French critic Barjavel, asserted in his book Le Cinema Total that the technological evolution of the cinematic apparatus will eventually result in the total enveloppement (envelopment or immersion) of the film-viewer. This enveloppement will be characterised by the multi-sensorial experience and the full interactivity of the spectator within the movie itself. More recently, Thielmann has claimed that geomedia such as movie maps constitute a first step toward the vision that one day it might be possible to establish 3-D spaces as a medial interface (Thielmann).Film-Tourism, Augmented Reality and digital movie maps will produce a complex immersive and inter-textual media system which is at odds with Walter Benjamin’s famous thesis on the loss of ‘aura’ in the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin), as one of the pleasures of film-tourism is precisely the interaction with the auratic place, the actual film location or movie set. According to Nick Couldry, film tourists are interested in the aura of the place and filming itself. The notion of aura is associated here with both the material history of the location and the authentic experience of it (104).Film locations, as mediated by digital movie maps, are places in which people have a complex sensorial, emotional, cognitive and imaginative involvement. The intricate process of remediation of the film-locations can be understood as a symptom of what Lash and Urry have called the ‘re-subjectification of space’ in which ‘locality’ is re-weighted with a more subjective and affective charge of place (56). According to Lash and Urry the aesthetic-expressive dimensions of the experience of place have become as important as the cognitive ones. By providing new layers of cultural meaning and alternative modes of affective engagement, digital movie maps will contribute to redefine both the notion of tourist destination and the construction of place identity. These processes can potentially be highly problematic as within this context the identity and meanings of place are shaped and controlled by the capital forces that finance and distribute the digital movie maps. Future critical investigations of digital cartography will need to address the way in which issues of power and control are deeply enmeshed within new tourist practices. 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